Introduction - oral histories and design: objects and subjects

This Introductory essay ‘Oral History and Design History: Subjects and Objects’ provides a mapping of some of the key sources, resources, and texts with a discussion of their relevance to debates in the discipline of design history. The essay and the issue as a whole demonstrate how subjective accounts can be situated within the wider cultural and social contexts from which they emerge.

Current research arises from 48 life histories in the arts, architecture, craft, design, and fashion conducted for the National Life Story Collection at The British Library National Sound Archive (2001-5) including Terence Conran, Peter Blake, Rodney Fitch, the founding members of the design group Pentagram, David Queensberry of Queensberry Hunt, and several others]. Summaries of recordings are available on The British Library catalogue. The exhibition Fashion Lives held at the British Library was mostly based on interviews I conducted for the Oral History of British Fashion. [see http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/nlsc.html for article by former Tate curator Richard Morphet about my recording with painter Leon Vilaincour.

This research led to the invitation to edit a Special Issue of Journal of Design History vol.19/4 entitled ‘Oral Histories and Design’, the first to bring together the two disciplines, with contributors from the UK, USA and Canada. This pioneering issue, outlines the current problematics pertinent to the use and practice of oral history in the visual arts, focusing in this issue on design, architecture, and the applied arts. The Introductory essay ‘Oral History and Design History: Subjects and Objects’ provides a mapping of some of the key sources, resources, and texts with a discussion of their relevance to debates in the discipline of design history. The essay and the issue as a whole demonstrate how subjective accounts can be situated within the wider cultural and social contexts from which they emerge.

Recordings continue under the auspices of the VIVA [Voices in the Visual Arts] project based at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Apart from building the collection, the research addresses the role of narrated life stories and identity formation of practitioners in the creative industries; the role of individual agency in the historical process; the relationship between oral and conventional historical accounts.