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Every designer’s toolkit should include the manual “how to use history”. This course is that manual.

Although it is not always thought of this way, history is, or can be, an applied field. Just like ID.

History can be thought of as a dialogue with the past to help inform us about the present with the hope to direct the future. It helps in the crafting of policy, point of view, and plan of action.

RISD: ID History for 2008 is a new prototype inspired by the new presidency of John Maeda and the energy of the call made by Negroponte at the new RISD President’s inauguration:
“Don’t join the bandwagon; make it.”

Further, this curriculum acknowledges the changes wrought by the Internet as an unparalleled source of information. The course is designed to maximize the possibilities of this common resource.

For example, it allows the course content to shift from being a kind of intravenous transfer of factual expertise from professor to student, to an exercise in critical thinking and each individual student’s search for a distinctive, historically-informed, point of view of their own. What is this story about? How should it be told today?

ID History has been moved to the junior year. As you each settle into your final two years at RISD, please be always mindful of what a unique opportunity this brief time in your life affords. You will confront quite different constraints upon graduation. Right now, right here, is the appropriate time to challenge yourself conceptually and critically. Go outside your comfort zone, and risk. “Don’t join the bandwagon. Create it.”

For over twenty years my educational philosophy has emphasized learning by doing. This large enrollment class offers unique challenges for practicing that conviction. For example, it is not possible for me to ask you to write a weekly 3-page essay responding to the reading (as I might like to) because I could not respond in any meaningful, substantive way that would help your development. And besides, my response would be private and not contribute to the shared, public, class-wide discussion we should be having.

My solution is as follows. I have returned to the TimeLine assignment which I developed for this course at RISD in the past with great success. But I have updated it. The large themes of ID History will not be conveyed not through a linear chronological march through history. Rather, we will engage in a common exploration of a series of topics and typologies like sitting, moving, light, gender, humanitarian and ethical design, green design, and the doors between art and design.

Six weekly assignments will ask you to create an illustrated historical essay exploring and connecting 5 objects, materials, processes, etc. You are required to arrive each Monday at the start of class with your personal solution printed out on two connected 8 ½ x 11” sheets of paper. Please tape your work up on the wall; we will begin each class critiquing these applied histories. To push this further, the mid-semester and final project will require you to revise your work, and place these timeline/essays on a blog so that we can better see your evolving point of view, and you can communicate your work to a larger audience. This vehicle can continue after the semester, and indeed after you graduate. It can be the beginning of a RISD-ID resource on history for future students, and for your own current and future colleagues.

Finally, this ID History course will be more than a collage of individual student explorations. One of my most important jobs will be to provide the synthesis, or overarching structure, that will show, in a dynamic way, how all these separate investigations can come together. In this way, we are collectively both forest and trees. It is a method you can take with you, use, and build on. Start here, in this history workshop.