«Design activity since 1945 can be explained by paying attention to the main motors of economic-industrial motivation in this period. However, resistance to “theory” and to concepts brought in from other disciplines or areas is often rooted in the dislike of the idea that the imported concepts are merely background. However, factors such as those described in this article are not background: on the contrary, they are foregrounded in the actual organization of design since 1945, and they appear in the objects and images that result. If circumstances do not coerce form, they are certainly often manifest in form. Conversely, the very fact that forms, including forms of design organization, do manifest circumstances means that they are also evidence. In embodying the complex and diverse circumstances that gave rise to them, often in powerful and frequently unusual patterns or “constellations,” designed objects and images, as well as the forms the design process takes, have an archeological status. For example, the exhibition Design since 1945, held recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, if considered from the point of view of the history of the design professions is archeologically valueless. Such an exhibit misses the point that the significance of designed forms is not given by their empirical classification, but rather by the status of meaning assigned to them or won from them. In other words, designed forms possess no intrinsic value. Their import and significance is not given by their designer status but is achieved because of what can potentially be won from them in terms of evidence and in terms of understanding.* The point then, which leads to the fourth, and in some ways the most crucial, problem that design history faces, is that the significance of design history as an activity depends not on the extrinsic significance of the objects and phenomena we deal with, but on the conception we have of what design history is capable of revealing about design itself in all of its complexity and about the circumstances from which forms of designing emerge.»
* «This explains why exhibitions of design are so often a failure. While one may get pleasure from the contemplation of the “well designed object,” it is wholly illusory of exhibition organizers to assume, like the formalist curators of art museums, that the works on display will somehow self-evidently reveal their import. In most cases they will not.»
Clive Dilnot, The State of Design History, Part II: Problems and Possibilities, in “Design Issues”, vol. 1, 1984, n. 2, Autumn, p. 10 and note

photo: Design Since 1945, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983