The central term of decorative design
At the risk of disappointing you, dear reader, it is impossible to offer a single and authoritative definition of the central term of decorative design. Design’s historical beginnings are complex and the nature of design, what it is and what it isn’t, is the subject of diverse and ongoing arguments as can be seen from the perspectives offered in this dictionary.
Indeed, even in the two languages used in this dictionary there are two related but distinct definitions. In German, design primarily relates to the creation of form while in English the term is more broadly applied to include the conceptionthe mental planof an object, action, or project ( Gestaltung).
It can be assumed then that the general sense of the word exists in most languages and cultures with the exact meaning reflecting specific cultural characteristics and biases.
Therefore, in this text the reader will be offered several, principally “western,” definitions from which to construct a sense of what design has been, is, and might possibly become.
Design comes from the Latin word designare meaning to define, to describe, or to mark out. At a certain point in history, design shifted from a term that generally described a great number of human activities, toward its current status as a defined and professional practice. Not surprisingly, it was Leonardo da Vinci who first founded an academy dedicated to design. At the time, the concept of design was implicitly linked to both art making and the construction of objects and spaces, but it could also be argued that this was the first step toward identifying a particular professional person as a designer. It proved to be something of a false start, however, as this Renaissance understanding of design shifted soon after and, until the Industrial Revolution during the later half of the eighteenth century, the term designer remained wedded to the idea of craftsmanship and the graduated and sequential learning required to master the skills of a craft.
Up until the period of the Industrial Revolution, the designer/ craftsperson was in direct contact with the client. Customers approached a specialized craftsperson to have their needs met directly, and often exclusively, by the specialist’s skill.
The necessity of this direct, individual contact and the reassurance of the master’s “hand” in the final product became the limiting factor for these craft-based designers, even as transport and communication systems in the early colonial period opened new markets, needs, and opportunities. In other words, it was precisely the nature of craftsmanship and the individual craftsperson that became the limiting factor in relation to these new markets with their mediated and anonymous business dealings.
It is a continual design problem that many people over or under decorate their windows. Adding too much to a Western window treatment can significantly detract from the rest of a well decorated room, but using insufficiently interesting curtains can wreck an otherwise perfect design. Picking cowboy curtains for just the right effect is a delicate matter, and the rest of the room should be taken into account.
The growing markets that accompanied colonialism and the attendant rise of the mercantile classes can now be seen as the first significant step toward what we now understand as globalization. New global markets demanded new forms of production and the direct personal service of the crafts became increasingly irrelevant.
The guild organizations established around craft practices were steadily forced to make way for the engineering-based process of industrialization and semimechanized mass production and marketing. The surge of industrial production marginalized craftsmanship together with its interpersonal consulting style.
This early period of mass production developed in response to the invention of new tools, the reorganization of human labor’s relationship to production and by new methods of transport, distribution, and marketing ( Advertisement). The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw mass movements of labor from the agrarian sector to urban manufacturing. This dislocation resulted in a lack of social justice for these new workers and a rapid decline in the quality of products.
The emergence of the labor union movement in England, in particular, as well as in France was in response to these issues, while the new and older wealthy mercantile and ruling classes harbored a deep discontent regarding the decline in the quality of industrial products and the lack of adequate service structures in these now distant and anonymous processes. This historic period of profound change was the context within which the Arts & Crafts movement, initiated by William Morris and John Ruskin, arose in Great Britain. The movement attempted to reinstate the craft-based notions of product quality and personalized service relationships.
The Arts & Crafts movement was influential in the second half of the nineteenth century and was fundamentally driven by a desire to return to the roots of craft-based production and products and, for Ruskin, to restore the importance of pastoral life and architecture and a rejection of machine-made objects as “dishonest” and, for Morris, to reinstate the accompanying medieval structure organizing the craftsman’s direct relation to the clients.