Activating History through Praxis: The Role of Practitioner-Historians in Mediating Past and Present Concerns within Design

Design history has struggled with its disciplinary positioning. Grace Lees-Maffei and Danniel Huppatz critique its legacy as a service subject supporting design education, while Kjetil Fallan has argued for its recognition as a legitimate sub-field within history. By contrast, Guy Julier and Viviana Narotzky describe it as increasingly redundant, an autonomous academic discipline severed from design practice. For them, design historians became ‘dangerously out of touch’ with the profession they aimed to analyse.

These contrasting perspectives reflect tensions within the discipline, often unacknowledged yet influential in shaping how scholars engage with the field. Some academics have responded by shifting their work into adjacent domains, such as design studies or design methods, where history plays only a peripheral role. But what is lost when historically engaged design research is relocated outside the domain of design history, and is there still space for practitioner-historians to contribute meaningfully to the field?

Dedicated design historians have typically been against attempts to prove the relevance of history, with efforts to link the past and present understood as instrumentalisation. Meanwhile, from within design, scholars like Andrew Blauvelt have argued for the need to develop more reciprocity between past and present to enable historical enquiry to inform practice. This paper explores how such reciprocity might be enacted meaningfully, without distorting history for presentist ends.

I examine strategies for activating history through practice, drawing on Maria Göransdotter’s concept of ‘Present-ing history’, Durepos and Mills’ ‘ANTi-History’, and Davide Nicolini’s ‘strong approach to practice’. These frameworks highlight how design practice can not only serve as a lens through which to study the past, but also generate new forms of situated, embodied historical knowledge. I argue that practitioner-historians are uniquely positioned to construct alternate, invested histories written from within design, offering valuable contributions to both historical scholarship and contemporary practice.