The book Writing Design takes its name from the 2009 annual Design History Society conference.1 Grace Lees-Maffei, the book's editor and conference co-convenor, uses 'writing design' to describe the conjoining of language and design in design criticism, design history and design practice. In addition to models, schemas, objects or buildings, writes Lees-Maffei, we encounter much design through words, whether written or spoken. Words are crucial to how design is perceived but have received scant academic attention methodologically. Subtitled 'Words and Objects', Writing Design redresses this lack, recognizing that some design in fact 'exists outside the category of objects' altogether (p. 4). In those cases, whether the immaterial objects are digital or fragrant, or blueprints never realized, words may be the only way we know the 'object'. Writing also places the object in the world, supplying iconic status beyond physicality. Lees-Maffei illustrates this by citing four different descriptions of the Eames' DAR chair written over the last fifty years, each presenting the object in culturally distinct ways.
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