On the April issue of “Design Issues”, 2009, Victor Margolin advances new challenges to scholars of the history of design, both in the frame of a wider reflection on the meaning of history in the contemporary age, and with reference to the specific condition of design and design studies: «If design historians are to present themselves as valuable contributors to such collective historical research, they have to make a persuasive case for the relevance of their knowledge to fora outside of their field. This is the challenge I put to the design history community» (Victor Margolin, Design in History, in “Design Issues”, 25, 2009, n. 2, pp. 94-105, free online).
This recommendation should also offer food for thought in Italy – where the history of design (as a field of scholarship) still lacks proper consideration and it consequently finds little credit among other fields and disciplines (if not among the “community of design” itself!).
Not only it suffers a lack of recognition at home, but it even seems that it has very scarce weight on an international level. At least if one considers what Jonathan Woodham wrote in 2005 in his seminal article Local, National and Global: Redrawing the Design Historical Map (“Journal of Design History”, vol. 18, 2005, n. 3, pp. 257-267), where, taking into consideration the nearly 30 years of the Design History Society and the 17 years of the “Journal”, he underlined on the one side the heavy presence of some nations (Great Britain, the United States etc.) and on the other side the scarce presence, if not complete absence, of other countries.
Well, it seems that Italy shares this latter position. According to the author Italian design appeared in 6% of articles from 1998 to 2004, while Italians were not a significant percentage among members of the DHS — in fact they were not mentioned.
Because Woodham’s intention was to indicate the need to redraw the historical world map of design, one might conclude that Italy is to be still considered as part of the periphery, and probably the time has come here as well «for recovering the ‘lost’ histories and making visible through fresh avenues of research those that have for many years been invisible» (Woodham, op. cit., p. 265).