ARTH300: History of Modern Design
Essay is for the Art History class
Choose an example of contemporary design (an object designed after 1975) from a catalog, advertisement, or exhibition. Describe your example carefully.
Relate it to other similar products from the recent past or from the present in order to demonstrate its distinctive characteristics, whether physical or in terms of technology and interactivity.
You must relate your example to recent perspectives on design, and include one or more of the following themes: Postmodernism, Information Design, Softness, Interactivity, Green, and/or Critical design.
How does the object relate to the experience of contemporary life? How can it be used to gauge or understand an aspect of modern living?
Please follow all the requirements
PAPER should be 1000-1200 words in length, should be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, and should have one-inch margins. Please submit papers as either MS Word documents or PDFs. Refer to the paper guidelines at the end of the syllabus (and posted on Blackboard) for additional details on how to compose a good paper.
Written assignments should reflect improving conceptual, analytical, and writing skills. Students are encouraged to become familiar with and make use of the following basic sources for information pertaining to materials, techniques, movements, and the backgrounds for individual designers. Physical books are on general reserve in the Hagerty Library:
1. Grove Art Online is an excellent resource available through the Hagerty Library Website (link from "Databases")
2. Jonathan Woodham, A Dictionary of Modern Design (Oxford: Oxford Reference, 2004)
3. Lucy Trench, ed., Materials & Techniques in the Decorative Arts: An Illustrated Dictionary (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000)
4. Hugh Honour and John Fleming, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts, 2e. (London and New York: Viking, 1989)
5. Clive Edwards, ed., The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
6. Metropolitan Museum, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, www.metmuseum.org/toah/
Please make use of these resources rather than picking and choosing among hits on Google searches, as these frequently do not provide accurate information. Do not cite Wikipedia as a source, but the references section of Wikipedia articles can sometimes be useful in pointing you to published scholarly sources.