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doi:10.1093/jdh/epx017
Journal of Design History Environmental Histories of Design:
Vol. 30 No. 2
Towards a New Research Agenda

Kjetil Fallan and Finn Arne Jørgensen

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Design and designers hold an ambiguous place in contemporary environmental
discourse. They can easily be blamed for causing environmental problems but may
also be said to possess some of the competences that could help solve those problems.
Design is a fundamental part of the world, where rapidly emerging concepts such as
the Anthropocene challenge the distinction between the human-made (or artificial) on
the one side and what is not made by human hands (or natural), on the other. Despite
the long-standing centrality of design to environmental discourse, and vice versa,
deep and systematic ‘environmental histories of design’ are few and far between.
While environmental historians have increasingly explored technology, consumption,
and material culture as active agents in discourses of environmental change, they
seldom explicitly incorporate design or designers into their studies. At the same time,
design history faces a major challenge in accounting for environmental concerns in the
history of design discourse. This special issue explores the common ground emerging
at the intersection of these two fields of inquiry, with the aim of establishing mutually
beneficial understandings upon which to build a new interdisciplinary research agenda.

Keywords: environmental history—ecology—historiography—sustainability

Introduction
Both environmental history and design history have become established research fields
over the last few decades, with journals, professional societies, PhD programmes, pro-
fessorships, and all that follows. As in most emerging disciplines, participating scholars
tend to devote much attention to field-internal discussions early on, but as the fields
mature, they begin connecting with broader historiographical traditions. There have
been mutual research interests and themes in environmental history and design his-
tory for a long time, yet there has been little direct exchange. Few scholars are active
in both communities, though neighbouring fields like the history of technology have
functioned as a trading zone for exchange between the fields. While the individual arti-
cles in this special issue explore the historical intersections of design and environment
from different angles, this introduction seeks to trace the historiographical exchanges
between environmental history and design history.

What can environmental history contribute to, and gain from, knowledge of design’s
environmental impacts? How can design history engage with issues of environmental
controversies and sustainable development and thereby move beyond its conventional
societal significance? Can engagement with the environmental histories of design ena-
ble more resilient futures?

© The Author [2017]. Published by Touched by human hands: grappling with design in
Oxford University Press on behalf
of The Design History Society. All environmental history
rights reserved.
Advance Access publication 20 While environmental history can be said to study the human interaction with the natu-
April 2017 ral world over time, the field has struggled with—and resisted—fully incorporating the

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human-made and designed within its scope. We can roughly divide the approaches of
environmental historians to design into two main categories. The first sees design as a
matter of ideology and construction of meaning, where a designed object is something
that makes people act or think in different ways. The second sees design as a matter
of materiality, as something that has material consequences upstream or downstream
of the actual designed object.

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Environmental history has its main origins as an academic field in the counter-culture
and activist movements of the 1960s. One could argue that the defining events and
discourses of the field were similar to those that prompted designers and design schol-
ars to turn a critical gaze towards their own profession’s activities. But for environmen-
tal historians, the focus was predominantly on preserving nature from the incursion of
the artificial, the technological, and the human touch that seemed to destroy every-
thing it came in contact with. In the pioneering works of Samuel P. Hays and Roderick
Nash, wilderness and nature conservation were key themes.1 Often, the human-made
becomes conflated with the production systems that made them, capitalism in par-
ticular. This approach is particularly visible in Donald Worster’s influential Dust Bowl,
which attacked the commodification of nature and the resulting environmental crises
on the American Great Plains in the 1930s.2 Here, as in many other works of envi-
ronmental history, the concept of design can only be said to apply at an abstract and
systemic level.

If the early works of environmental history erected—or reinforced—barriers between

nature and culture through their focus on wilderness and conservation, the genera-
tions of scholars that followed have increasingly worked to tear down such barriers.3
Environmental history has expanded into a field of remarkable breadth and depth, chal-
lenging the neat divide between nature and culture as a false dichotomy. In this process,
environmental history borrowed from and interacted with other disciplines, in particular
geography and the history of technology, but also ecology and the natural sciences.

Bringing environmental history and design history into dialogue aligns well with this
expansion of concerns within both disciplines, and there are several studies within
environmental history that can serve as inspiration and as starting points for further
inquiries. These studies engage deeply and directly with individual artefacts and gen-
erally raise the question: does design connect us to nature or to what nature means?
We should note the importance of this distinction. In Flight Maps: Encounters with
Nature in Modern America, Jennifer Price points out that for Americans, ‘most every-
day encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture.’4
Nature is, for her, something we consume, as both materiality and ideology. Yet, Flight
Maps is mainly concerned at the ideological level and with the connections between
people and nature. Price emphasizes that consumers encounter nature ‘commodified,
transformed, already dead, and way out of ecological context.’ The resulting connec-
tions to nature—for they are connections—‘are highly mediated.’5 This makes it critical
to study how designers create, reveal, or obscure such connections.

This is precisely what Price does in her study of the pink plastic flamingo and its shifting
cultural connotations over time. It helps us unravel the ways in which environmental
historians can think about design. Outnumbering real flamingos in the US at a ratio of
700 to 1, the pink plastic flamingo was once an object of modernity, when the emerg-
ing plastics industry explored possible uses for a new material. As we know from the
works of Jeffrey Meikle and Thomas Hine, in the 1950s plastic became a marker of
something that was not only not nature but also better than nature.6 With the rise of

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 the environmental movement in the 1960s, the plastic flamingo, and the artifice that
it represented, rapidly lost its lustre. As plastic changed its connotation, the artificial
became unreal, fake, and less than natural. The pink plastic flamingo became a marker
of bad taste and of being disconnected from nature. Later, however, the flamingo
changed meaning yet again, as it was finally embraced as an ironic postmodern acces-
sory by a generation of environmentalists—including Price. In tracing the life cycle of
the pink plastic flamingo, she demonstrates how nature is not something apart from

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us—nature and artifice are two sides of the same coin.

Similarly, environmental historian William Rollins reflects on what the SUV can tell us
about postmodern environmental consciousness.7 In his view, the SUV is a deeply para-
doxical object—a gas-guzzling traffic behemoth that is dangerous to others, yet often
marketed with nature imagery and as a means of getting away from the city and
into nature. ‘Viewed pessimistically, this postmodernism means “no boundaries” in
people’s exploitation of the environment’, he writes. ‘[M]ore optimistically it means
seamlessly integrated concern’ for nature (684). Here, as with Price, the focus is on
cultural messages and the construction of meaning around material objects. Yet Rollins
explicitly criticizes modern consumerism for being more concerned with the matter of
ideology than the matter of materiality.

In the consumerist world, our lives are filled with things. Both Price and Rollins ask what
it means to be an environmentalist and live in a world of things? It is hard, if not impos-
sible, for an environmentalist to fully place his or herself outside of consumer society.
In both these studies, we see how consumerism is a transformative process, converting
matter and energy into meaning and waste, in ways that have implications for both the
physical environment and people’s cultural ideas about nature. Ideological relationships
to nature mediated through consumer culture can be found anywhere, from stuffed
animal toys to online pictures of cabins.8 All interactions with nature shape values and
cultural understandings of nature.

Other environmental historians have paid closer attention to material flows and the
choices that are made about materials in product and system design. For instance Carl
Zimring uses the process of ‘upcycling’ to deepen the historical analysis of recycling as
an environmental process. He is particularly interested in evaluating the possibilities
and limitations of circular material flows and waste streams. Should designers design
to keep their products outside the waste stream through durability, or should they
make products that can be easily or safely recycled?9 Finn Arne Jørgensen’s study of
the mutual evolution of beverage containers and recycling systems to handle them has
a similar focus on waste streams and material choices.10 What these studies have in
common is thinking about objects as parts of systems, as a combination of meaning
and materiality.

Still, scholars are more interested in the upstream and downstream implications of
designed objects—the raw materials they are made of and the waste they become
after their productive life is over—while the actual design and life of these objects is
less relevant. Taking design seriously remains a challenge. Design can make these pro-
cesses visible and it can obscure them. It is at the heart of the transformation processes
environmental historians are so concerned about, yet they seldom study the design
process itself.

While environmental historians should think more carefully about and pay more atten-
tion to the design of objects, they can also serve as an inspiration to design historians
in broadening the scope of their study. For instance, in recent years environmental

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historians have turned their attention to the evolution of animals, and then in particular
the purposeful shaping—the design—of other species. Such studies of a wide range
of animals that have taken on new shapes, characteristics, and abilities thanks to their
close interaction with humans over shorter and longer time periods demonstrate that
what we think of as nature is touched and shaped by human hands to a considerable
degree.11 This should encourage us to pay close attention to design as a process and
to stimulate methodological and historiographical exchanges between environmental

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history and design history.

Design history as if nature mattered

The boundary between nature and culture, environment and technology, is get-
ting harder and harder to maintain. As the public and scientific discourse about the
Anthropocene gains momentum, we can no longer talk about design (and) culture
without also talking about design (and) nature.12 This acknowledgement has signifi-
cant ramifications for design history as well. This special issue makes a case for a new
type of discourse in design history that takes seriously design’s complex interrelations
with nature. The cultural turn and the material turn have resulted in rich accounts
of how design mediates the human condition and our material world. What is still
missing, though, is an environmental turn, taking us from focusing on ‘Man-Machine
Interactions’ to a better understanding of ‘Man-Machine-Nature Interactions’: in short,
to paraphrase E. F. Schumacher, studies of design history as if nature mattered.13 Our
call for environmental histories of design can be seen as part of a broader move to
expand the field of design history, alongside, for example, the recent and ongoing
efforts to write global histories of design.14 The two are of course distinct initiatives but
in terms of historiographic developments they share the ambition to radically expand
the field’s approaches, scope, and subject matter. So, much like global histories of
design, environmental histories of design would aim to highlight areas, actors, prac-
tices, and impacts of design that have been neglected in more conventional studies and
to foster new ways of investigating design’s operations in the world.

At times, design history has been criticized for insufficient relevance to contemporary
design challenges. One of the most persistent critics has been Tony Fry, following his
transition from design historian to design futurist. For historians of design (rather than
‘design historians’, as stalely stereotyped by Fry) it is difficult to discern any credibility in
claims such as ‘design history . . . has unwittingly acted to conceal the historical signifi-
cance and agency of the designed world’, and that ‘it constituted a history outside the
epistemological issues, arguments, politics and debates over, in and about history.’15
In the same vein, Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson have claimed that ‘the increasing
breakdown of disciplinary boundaries’ between design history and other fields con-
cerned with the study of visual and material culture ‘is a barrier to perceiving and
investigating design’s historical role in ecological degradation’, because, they argue,
this type of interdisciplinary scholarship perpetuates an alleged ‘emphasis on symbolic
communication in the analysis of past design works [that] hides their material impact
in the world’.16 Again, it is difficult to agree that the ‘material turn’ has passed design
history by, or that the interdisciplinarity of the field is to blame—if anything, design his-
tory has been at the forefront of this important development in recent general histori-
ography.17 Furthermore, as argued elsewhere, the interdisciplinary nature and capacity
of design history (albeit a different strand of it, gleaning from science and technology
studies and environmental history) is exactly what holds the potential for the forging
of environmental histories of design.18 When, back in 1993, this journal made an early

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 attempt at bringing ecological perspectives to bear on design history, with a special
issue edited by Pauline Madge, ‘the multi- or interdisciplinary nature of the subject’ was
emphasized as being key to the endeavour.19

Madge’s timely surveys of the literature and politics of environmentalism and design,20
however, remain disturbingly singular. Despite the obvious topicality, design-historical
scholarship that systematically integrates and explicitly emphasizes sustainability, ecol-

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ogy or environmentalism has yet to gain any significant presence in the field. This is
where Fry makes an interesting point, when arguing that design history has to rise to
the challenge posed by the growing awareness that design practice is integral to the
environmental problems of our time:

A great deal of what has been brought into being by design, from coal-fired power
stations to asbestos, from herbicides to jet-skis, from cigarettes to cluster bombs,
all combine to take the future away. They ‘defuture.’ . . . [W]e find ourselves
at the currently comfortable epicenter of the condition of unsustainability that
defuturing animates. To know this is to realize that design has had much more
significant historical agency than has been realized. To know this can, and should,
be seen to have huge implications for how its history is constructed, understood
and viewed.21

Expanding the argument on the centrality of design, Ramia Mazé elaborates just how
profoundly enmeshed design is in all aspects of sustainability and unsustainability, not
merely by way of bringing forth products, but by conditioning life practices and shap-
ing society: ‘Embedded in the intimate spaces and embodied routines of everyday life,
design mediates access to and control over resources, and it shapes how people identify
and comply with particular ways of living’. As a consequence, she concludes, ‘Design is
thus complicit in how sustainability is formulated, by, and for whom it becomes prac-
ticed, normalized, and institutionalized.’22

When design is so fundamental to any conception of sustainable development, it fol-

lows that the question of sustainability should form a core concern for design history.
As Clive Dilnot has reasoned, our current environmental problems are not simply a
product of design—they are also a product of history:

[N]o-one thinks of sustainment in terms of history. Yet just here is the real tension
revealed. For it is hard to think of another threat to our being that is more rooted
in history, more a product of our particular history. Unsustainment is our history;
it is our historical product. It follows, though this goes against the grain, that sus-
tainment . . . whether thought as an axiom of practice or as a realized condition
to which we are required to aspire, is a project of history.23

Despite its bias towards a modern, Western outlook, this line of reasoning opens up a
new way of thinking about both the societal relevance of design history and the scope
of the field. First, it places design history at the heart of the environmental humanities
as a key contributor to the knowledge base required to design a sustainable future.
Secondly, it ensures that environmental histories of design are not restricted to studies
of design’s relations to the environmentalist movement or of the development of sus-
tainable design. The remit of such an approach is potentially infinite, since understand-
ing the role of design in the quest for sustainment also requires a reassessment of the
history of the unsustainable.24

Environmental histories of design, then, can also entail asking new questions of familiar
material. In the field of literary studies, Scott Slovic has boldly claimed that ‘there is not

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a single literary work anywhere that utterly defies ecocritical interpretation’.25 It might
be wise to be less categorical but there should be no doubt that a ‘green reading’ of the
‘canon’ can be equally productive in design history. In their response to Fry’s criticism
that design history has become outmoded and irrelevant to contemporary concerns
over sustainability, Anne Massey and Paul Micklethwaite argue that a reappraisal of
the merits of the field may be in order. They briefly point out that the ideas of key pro-
ponents of sustainable design, such as Richard Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek,

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have featured in mainstream design history since the 1970s,26 before developing a
richer argument that design historians have long examined topics and phenomena of
immediate relevance to the current sustainability discourse. For instance, the Arts and
Craft Movement’s profound devotion to nature and the environment and persistent
attention of Britain’s World War II Utility Scheme to resource economy serve as exam-
ples ripe for re-examination through the lens of environmental histories of design.27
Massey and Micklethwaite’s call provides a useful point of departure for an attempt at
reconceptualizing the field. Through three case studies we aim to show that environ-
mental histories of design are not just about breaking new empirical ground but can
also renew our understanding of well-known episodes in design history—even those
that might not seem obvious candidates for such an approach and those significantly
predating the more mainstream turn towards environmental issues in design discourse.

Learning from Nowhere?

The Arts and Crafts Movement has been embraced by the environmentalist movement
as something of a pioneering endeavour. The reason for this, of course, is that these
Victorian design reformers, and especially their most prominent figure, William Morris,
were highly critical of industrialization and deeply infatuated with nature.28 Design-
historical readings of Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, though, have tended
to view these ideological concerns more as social critique and aesthetic inspiration
rather than as some sort of proto-environmentalism.29 The emphasis in Arts and Crafts
reform writing and practice on natural materials, organic dyestuffs and ‘slow’, small-
scale manufacturing processes go some way in explaining its appeal to environmental-
ists today. But to fully appreciate this enchantment and grasp how nature matters in
the design history of the Arts and Crafts Movement, we need to look beyond their
exquisite designs and workshop romanticism to the realm of fiction.

Morris found his fame in literary circles with the epic narrative poem The Earthly
Paradise, published in three volumes between 1868 and 1870. This ecologically evoca-
tive title could have worked just as well for the work that more than anything has
earned him the reputation as a proto-environmentalist; the novel News from Nowhere,
first published in 1890. Recognized as an early example of science fiction—or, rather,
in our context, design fiction, or eco-fiction—the book chronicles the dream-like
experiences of a man not unlike Morris himself who awakens one morning in his
Hammersmith, London home to find the world distinctly familiar and highly unfamiliar
at the same time. He goes for a morning swim in the Thames and is startled by the
remarkable transformations in his immediate environment: ‘The soap-works with their
smoke-vomiting chimneys were all gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works
gone; and no sound of rivetting and hammering came down the west wind from
Thorneycroft’s.’30 Slowly he discovers that he has woken up in a twenty-first century
utopian society resulting from a Luddite and communist revolution in the twentieth
century. His guide to this new ‘earthly paradise’ describes the changes precisely in
terms of an environmental history of design:

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 England was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes, with a
few towns interspersed, which were fortresses for the feudal army, markets for
the folk, gathering places for the craftsmen. It then became a country of huge
and foul workshops and fouler gambling-dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-
stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops. It is now a garden, where
nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and
workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty. For,

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indeed, we should be too ashamed of ourselves if we allowed the making of
goods, even on a large scale, to carry with it the appearance, even, of desolation
and misery.31

The genuinely post-industrial society described in this account is completely non-com-

mercial; all manufacture is done con amore by craftsmen deeply satisfied by their work
and the resulting products distributed freely according to need. But this is no ordinary
socialist utopia: the water is pure; the air is clean; the soil is rich; the forests are bristling
with life; the fields are lush; the gardens are bountiful. People consider themselves to
be an integral part of nature. The importance of this acknowledgment is emphasized
when Clara, the protagonist’s muse, ventures to explain why her distant Victorian pre-
decessors had committed that heinous crime against the environment known as the
industrial revolution:

‘Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been
living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, ani-
mate and inanimate—“nature”, as people used to call it—as one thing, and man-
kind as another. It was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try
to make “nature” their slave, since they thought “nature” was something outside
them.’32

This is where ‘Morris the red’ meets ‘Morris the green’.33 Crucially, though, Morris’ envi-
ronmentalist visions move beyond the pastoral utopias of many of his fellow Victorians
in their emphasis on socialist egalitarianism and their harsh critique of commercialism
and imperialism.34 Florence Boos has argued that in News from Nowhere Morris not
only anticipated the basic principles of the Garden City movement, and pre-empted
the contemporary concept of the ‘tree hugger’, but also elaborated an ideology with
remarkable similarities to key late twentieth-century developments such as socialist
environmentalism and deep ecology philosophy, as developed by Arne Næss.35

This recent ‘greening of William Morris’ has also been criticized as a retrospective ideo-
logical extrapolation of contemporary concerns onto the past.36 There are good rea-
sons to be cautious, of course, because Morris did not have access to the ontological
and epistemological underpinnings of our current understanding of ecology and sus-
tainability—but this does not render his ideas incompatible with or irrelevant to more
recent historical developments.37 An example that might both qualify the casting of
Morris as a proto-environmentalist and historicize his ideas and practice is the recent
discovery by scientists that one of his key products—the Trellis wallpaper—contained
arsenic. Trellis, manufactured from 1864, was Morris’s first foray into the mass market
(which he, paradoxically, so despised), and features a characteristic motif of branches,
leaves, flowers and birds—apparently inspired by the rose-trellis in his own garden. The
dominant colour is green, and it is precisely the green pigments that have been found
to contain the toxic substance. This carries a poignant irony today, given the colour’s
current connotations as the visual shorthand for all things sustainable and ecological—
but at the time, green symbolized poison and sickness as much as anything else. To
add insult to injury, Morris’ design practice was bankrolled by his shares in his father’s

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mining company, Devon Great Consols (DGC), who also happened to be the largest
producer of arsenic in the world. That wallpapers containing arsenic pigments could in
damp conditions release toxic fumes causing deadly lung diseases was known at the
time, and DGC workers were heavily affected by arsenic-related illnesses and resulting
fatalities. Despite this knowledge, Morris himself blatantly dismissed the possible envi-
ronmental damage caused by his products, responding to an enquiry from a concerned
customer by bluntly claiming that ‘As to the arsenic scare, a greater folly is hardly pos-

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sible to imagine: the doctors were being bitten by witch fever’.38 Just how important it
is to study design history ‘as if nature mattered’ becomes glaringly apparent when the
above is compared to a more conventional reading of Trellis as portraying ‘an ethic of
natural stewardship’39—a description that now rings rather hollow.

Even if celebratory accounts of ‘Morris the green’ must be offset against critical assess-
ments of how his ideas and practices were products of his own time rather than
illustrious prophecies, it is appropriate in our context to recall Sara Wills’ cautious
acknowledgement that ‘Morris developed a culture of nature which allowed space for
both culture and nature’.40 The case of Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement thus
provides an apt illustration of the reciprocal rapprochement we seek to foster with this
special issue: that design history has much to gain from engaging the natural environ-
ment, just as environmental history can be enriched by closer attention to how the
designed environment matters.

The war machine in the garden

It might seem a long way from Morris’s well-crafted pastoral utopias to the dismal,
industrialized slaughter on the battlefields of World War I—but environmental histories
of design connect the dots. The recent centennial of the outbreak of the Great War
provided an occasion to review its historiography, and stimulated new research on the
many entanglements of armed conflict across the range of specializations in historical
scholarship. Design history is no exception, exemplified by the 2014 Design History
Society Annual Conference on the theme of ‘Design for War and Peace’.41 Beyond this
field, though, one of the most intriguing contributions has been the elaboration of
an environmental approach to the history of war.42 After all, it is difficult to imagine a
machine more destructive of Leo Marx’s proverbial garden than the war machine.43 By
combining these two strands, we could imagine something like ‘environmental histo-
ries of design for war’ which would explore the impact on the ecosystem of the war
machine’s countless designed elements. Few, if any, anthropogenic agents of change
have a capacity comparable to that of modern warfare to cause massive environmental
destruction over vast areas in short period of time.44

World War I is a particularly interesting case in this respect, as it is widely considered

the first fully industrialized war, giving rise to the massively influential military-industrial
complex.45 Also, this conflict stands out because the notion of nature as one of its
major casualties is already vividly present in the public imagination. Photographs and
stories of endless battlefields marred by charred woodlands, torn-up fields and toxic air
have contributed to a broader understanding of how modern, industrialized warfare
ravages nature. Environmental historians have detailed, explored and, in some cases,
qualified these popular perceptions of nature as a casualty of war. What design histori-
ans can contribute is a deeper appreciation of how these ruined landscapes and wider
ecological destructions are not just unintended consequences and matters of fact but
are produced by objects, technologies and systems embodying the careful planning,

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110
 premeditation and intent stemming from a vast array of professional design practices.
In short, the environmental devastations of modern warfare were caused by the same
ideological frameworks and manufacturing infrastructures that brought us the mod
cons, technological marvels and totemic ‘eye candy’ that usually populate histories of
design. In the scholarly literature, design is largely portrayed as a benevolent force—
but the designed destructions (environmental and otherwise) of war provide a useful
reminder that the ethics of design are far more complicated than that.46

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The immediate and most spectacular impact on nature was of course on the battle-
fields in continental Europe, especially in Belgium and France. The ravaged landscape
and massive depletion of both flora and fauna was caused by a series of new, ingen-
ious designs. World War I saw the introduction of such icons of modern warfare as
the submarine and both the fighter and the bomber airplane, but with respect to the
environmental destruction of battlefields, other types of new designs were more sig-
nificant. Tanks bulldozed fields into mud and quagmire; heavy artillery transformed rich
agricultural land into barren, moon-like landscapes; machine guns mowed down trees
as well as men, ingraining the soil with lead; gas projectors suffocated both people and
plants with poisonous and toxic chemicals.

The visual and written accounts of these dystopian scenes have made them a staple
of the public perception of the Great War and of the environmental consequences of
modern ‘total war’ in general. However, the wounds inflicted on the flora and fauna
in France healed remarkably quickly after the war. In fact, the gravest, most compre-
hensive and long-lasting environmental destructions of World War I were of a different
kind and spread across the globe. It was the industrial nature of the conflict that made
it modern, total and global, and that necessitated a supply of resources on an immense
scale. The global, industrialized war catalysed, if not created, the global, industrial-
ized depletion of natural recourses. The insatiable need for timber caused massive
deforestation the world over, and the ensuing desire for rapid regrowth resulted in
new, unsustainable forestry practices. Extensive tin mining caused substantial dam-
age to local ecosystems in East Asia and Europe alike, as the new mechanized extrac-
tion methods polluted rivers with sand and clay runoff. The motorized military effort
made oil an indispensable commodity, but drilling, storing, refining and transport came
at considerable environmental cost—the messy oil extraction along the Mexican Gulf
Cost, for instance, caused ecological damage and degradation that is still discernible.
Feeding the hordes of soldiers—vast groups of people gathered in limited areas and
removed from regular systems of food provision—required an infrastructure for food
production and distribution of an unprecedented scale. This in turn paved the way for
a modern industrial agriculture based on monocultures and expanded exploitation,
which in turn resulted in soil erosion, reduced biodiversity and ecological imbalances.47

These are just a few examples, but suffice to illustrate how industrialized warfare
exploits and damages natural resources in a manner that only intensifies the environ-
mental effects of civilian industrialized society. More broadly, what the example of
World War I demonstrates is that environmental histories of design need to address
not only the (destructive) agency of designed artefacts, but must also consider the
extensive ecological entanglements of the vast and complex networks of resources,
processes and knowledge that underpin the world of objects. Following the com-
modity chains from natural resources to manufactured goods and beyond, and con-
sidering the ‘enviromateriality’ of design culture, can be rewarding strategies for
exploring the ecological footprint of design, both in historical and contemporary
perspectives.48

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Design as life science
A rare example of existing environmental histories of design can be found in the work
of Peder Anker on the little-known relations between modernist design ideology, epito-
mized by the legacy from Bauhaus, and epistemological developments in the life sci-
ences—more specifically, biology and ecology. Focusing on the London interlude of key
Bauhaus émigrés, including Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer,

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Anker paints a very different and highly intriguing picture of the theoretical and ideo-
logical underpinnings of interwar modernism. What is normally treated as little more
than a passage point in the afterlife of the Bauhaus becomes an unexpected nexus of
design and nature when examined from the perspectives of environmental history and
the history of science.

It is hardly surprising that the Bauhaus émigrés in London sought out the local architec-
tural avant-garde, centred on Welles Coates, Maxwell Fry, and the Modern Architecture
Research Group (MARS), as well as fellow émigrés such as the Russian architects Serge
Chermayeff and Berthold Lubetkin and the Danish engineer Ove Arup. Most of them
lived in the Lawn Road Flats, London’s first modernist residential building, designed
by Coates. Those who did not live there were frequent visitors, as the building was as
much an experiment in the social functions of architecture as in its formal expressions.
Less obvious is the close connections the former Bauhaus teachers formed with leading
biologists, ecologists, and zoologist including Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, Julian Huxley,
and Solly Zuckermann—all affiliated with the Zoological Society and the London Zoo.
Together these experts on the built environment and the natural environment dis-
cussed ‘the role of biology in reshaping society. The MARS group became advocates
of environmental sensitivity’, reflecting the views of contemporary environmentalists
such as Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘who thought modernist design could save Britain from
ecological destruction.’49

And the infatuation was mutual. Huxley, as secretary of the Zoological Society, had
a spacious flat at the London Zoo which doubled as a showroom for modernist fur-
niture and an eco-design salon. The zoologists believed that ‘traditional architecture
and design reinforced an unfortunate dualism between people and nature, whereas
the Bauhaus approach promised a harmonious reunion’.50 Huxley and his colleagues
turned the zoo into a laboratory for these ideas. These simplified and controlled ecosys-
tems provided an optimal opportunity for testing their theories on the role of design in
making animals—considered to differ from humans by degree only—thrive in unnatu-
ral environments.51 To this effect, a series of new buildings were commissioned in the
early 1930s, including a gorilla house and a penguin pool—all designed according to
modernist principles; the latter two by Lubetkin’s radical, newly established architec-
tural company, Tecton, with Arup as consulting engineer.

The most remarkable feature of the Penguin Pool, inaugurated in 1934, was a dou-
ble helix-shaped ramp or walkway for dramatic display of the animals. Following the
famed discovery two decades later of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule,
the image of Tecton’s and Arup’s ramp was cemented as the perfect symbiosis of mod-
ernist design and progressive life science. Both contemporary critics and later historians
have interpreted the ramp as a theatrical trait turning the penguins into a circus act.
Even if this perception may have been widespread amongst critics and the public,
Anker argues that this interpretation does not reflect the intentions behind the design,
because the building was commissioned, not by circus directors but by scientists deeply
committed to their research and to the welfare of the animals. The explanation for

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 their promotion of modernist design, he claims, is instead to be found in their view of
it as the ideal exponent of public health and hygiene. Drawing on their work in ecology
and evolutionary biology they believed that ‘a healthy environment at the Zoo was to
be a model for healthy human living in tomorrow’s society.’52 Furthermore, the design-
ers and the biologists shared the conviction that mathematically-described geometric
figures were the basic building blocks of nature, and thus should also form the basis of
the built environment.53

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Part of what makes Anker’s study of the ‘London Bauhaus’ such an interesting example
of environmental histories of design is the way he charts how intricately entangled
understandings of design and nature can be across epistemological and professional
domains not normally considered within the same purview. Adding to his documenta-
tion of the mutual infatuation of modernist design and life sciences, briefly synopsized
above, Anker also traces the intellectual entanglements of design and nature in the
London avant-garde of the 1930s into the realms of literature and filmmaking. As a
socialist intellectual, H.G. Wells was a well-known figure in the Russian community in
London, where he got to know both Chermayeff and Lubetkin. He was also a frequent
visitor to the zoo and a close friend of Huxley’s, and the two even co-authored the
hugely successful book The Science of Life (1930), a comprehensive popular introduc-
tion to the biological sciences. Here, Wells and Huxley developed their ‘ecological out-
look’ and argued that a shift from free market to planned economy as well as a much
more efficient and sensitive use of energy and natural resources was required to avoid
future environmental destruction.54

Wells’ deep fascination with ecology and with modernist design came together in his
science-fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933), where he envisions a future
society rising from the ashes of war and environmental problems by means of bion-
ics, scientific management of natural resources, and radical architecture. These vision-
ary ideas became visually even more striking when the book was adapted as the film
Things to Come (1936), directed by Huxley’s and Wells’ mutual acquaintance Alexander
Korda (who had previously collaborated with Huxley on a documentary nature film).
Bringing the story full circle back to the Bauhaus émigrés, Anker shows how Gropius
acted as a consultant to the project and that the set for a key sequence in the film
was designed by Moholy-Nagy.55 Moholy-Nagy, who moved with ease across design,
photography and film, was heavily invested in the emerging science of bionics and
consistently argued that designers should look to nature for inspiration in pursuit of
true functionalism. It was during his London sojourn he developed his keen eye for
photographing life in motion, and also made a documentary film about the lobster
where he described the lobster shell as an object lesson in how form follows function
with immediate relevance to the design of, say, Bakelite products.56

Moholy-Nagy’s designs for the gleaming cave city in Things to Come can thus be said to
represent a new ecological order and the epitome of the ‘eco-Bauhaus’ that fleetingly
but vibrantly came into being in London. When Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy left
London in 1937 to bring the Bauhaus ideology to ‘the new world’, they were sent off
by their new circle of friends who included ecologists, environmentalist, and zoologists
as much as designers, architects, and town planners—Gropius’s farewell party was
even hosted by Huxley.57 The ‘London Bauhaus’ also exemplifies Alison Clarke’s obser-
vation that ‘[h]istorically émigrés have played a crucial role within design, not just as
accomplished individual design figures, but in forging a vision of alternative lives, quick-
ened by interdisciplinary networks and a dual status as “outsider-insiders”‘.58 Following
these visionaries of modernist design across the Atlantic, Anker has also shown how

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the later Bauhaus legacy in the US has been more coloured by the ecological outlook
they developed during the London period than has been readily acknowledged.59 Not
only can Moholy-Nagy’s influential book Vision in Motion, published posthumously in
1947, be read as a plea for people to live in harmony with nature,60 but Herbert Bayer’s
long US career was highly influential in shaping the visual profile of environmental
debates.61 As such, this case demonstrates that environmental histories of design are
not limited to studies of topics and materials beyond the pale of the design history

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canon but can just as easily generate important, new insights pertaining to even the
‘usual suspects’ of the survey curriculum.

In this issue
As the above examples have demonstrated, environmental histories of design are not
bound by any given time frame. If they can encompass late Victorian anxieties over
the ramifications of industrialization and high-modernist infatuations with life science,
they can also venture far beyond these examples into virtually any historical setting.
Befittingly, then, we start off with a study taking us even further back in time, to the
1860s. Still, the majority of the articles included in this special issue converge on a
rather narrow chronological bandwidth, spanning approximately a decade from the
mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This convergence is by no means given, but it does reflect
a significant interest today in that period from both design historians and environ-
mental historians—a moment in time when concerns over environmental destruction
went mainstream and the crisis of modernity prompted comprehensive soul-searching
by design professionals of all kinds. The centrality of this specific period is thus also
evidence of how we are historicizing our contemporary concerns—as every society
does—at a time when the environmental crisis seems more urgent than ever before.
As such, this special issue is testament to a focal vision at the outset of a new research
agenda where a broader ambient vision will evolve with future contributions.

Writing environmental histories of design presupposes certain understandings of both

‘environment’ and ‘design’. In the first article, Livia Rezende demonstrates that the
complex relationships between nature and culture have a long and rich history that is
of great significance to how we perceive and practice design history. Her examination
of the designed nature of tropical natural materials, as mediated at the 1867 Exposition
Universelle, reveals the importance of moving our investigations beyond the factory
gates, not only ‘downstream’ to make sense of mediation and consumption, but also
‘upstream’ to better understand how natural materials are turned into ‘raw materials’
or ‘natural resources’ as ‘things’ in their own right before becoming the manufactured,
designed objects that normally populate design history. With a nod to Karl Marx’s
notion of the gendering of nature and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary categories of the
raw and the cooked, Rezende questions how values are ascribed to nature through
design. Her contribution thus provokes much-needed reflections on what constitutes
design as well as how design relates to the environment.

In the second article, Larry Busbea drills to the very core of a similar conceptual and
epistemological challenge played out in the United States a century later. Homing in on
a specific contribution to pioneering research in the emerging field of cybernetics, he
examines the development of a highly experimental and elusive project/product called
Soft Control Material—an attempt at devising a material/object/environment that
would be responsive to user input and thus genuinely interactive. Although it remained
entirely conceptual, and its potential applications were only tentatively articulated, this

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 deeply fascinating case study efficiently probes the essence of what constitutes both
‘design’ and ‘environment’. Here, the commonsensical notion of ‘environment’ as the
background or surroundings for design interventions and the equally endemic concep-
tion of ‘design’ as product planning are thrown into sharp relief by questioning con-
ventional dichotomies such as subject/object; inside/outside; product/system; material/
informational. In so doing, Busbea’s study of Soft Control Material shows that design
and environment are historically and ideologically co-dependent—an acknowledge-

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ment with significant implications both for contemporary strategies for sustainable
design and for our approaches to environmental histories of design.

Highways are among the most overt and contested fault lines between the built envi-
ronment and the natural environment. In her article, Margot Lystra examines in great
detail two experimental highway design projects, showing how human-nature rela-
tions were enacted in the studio and how these projects from the mid-1960s United
States are indicative of a shift in how environmental designers represented ecology and
nature in their projects. She details how the designers explored early computer tech-
nologies and plan-based site analysis, tools that would later form the basis for what we
today know as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and drew on rapidly developing
ecological design theories. Her meticulous analysis of the design methods and drawing
techniques used in speaking for nature makes it blatantly clear that the visualization
strategies and practices designers use are anything but neutral mediations. On the
contrary, the minutiae of data selection, interpretation, and its representation through
drawings and models are essential to defining human/nature relationships in design
practice. A broader historiographical ramification of Lystra’s study is her demonstra-
tion that the environmentalism, the new technologies and the design practices of the
period not only reflected existing human-nature relationships but in fact altered them
and thus constructed new naturecultures.

From the inroads made by mainstream automotive culture in American nature we then
move to the epicentre of the counterculture movement and an icon of sublime wilder-
ness: California and Yosemite National Park. This highly evocative setting plays a crucial
role in Michelle Labrague’s close reading of the foundational myths of the active wear
and equipment company Patagonia—an enterprise that to this day portrays itself as a
pioneer of sustainable design. She details how Yvon Chouinard laid the foundations
for the company by designing and making non-intrusive climbing equipment to sustain
his life as a ‘dirtbag’ climber in Yosemite’s notorious Camp 4. This equipment, designed
to not damage the rock face the way conventional climbing gear does, formed the
cornerstone of Chouinard’s ‘clean climbing’ ideology and his broader environmentalist
outlook. Labrague perceptively juxtaposes counterculture’s obsession with tools as an
ideal object category with modernist design theory’s primary dogma of fitness for pur-
pose. In the Patagonia case these ideological trajectories dovetail in the quest for effi-
cient, ‘clean’ design with minimal environmental impact. Recognizing in Chouinard’s
design philosophy and practice many of the values and politics characteristic of the
later Slow Food movement and broader ‘slow’ thinking in general, Labrague positions
the Patagonia case as an early example of what today is gaining recognition as ‘slow
design’—often pitched as one of the most promising strategies of sustainable design.

In the last article in this collection, Elena Maria Formia revisits the second wave of
Italian radical design, examining the convergences between the increasingly political
and activist discourse developing in and around the country’s flourishing design maga-
zines and emerging environmentalist movement. Formia shows that in the early 1970s
there were significant overlaps and interchanges between the two scenes both in terms

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of personnel and publications, resulting in vibrant conversations on ecological design.
This promising cross-pollination would prove short-lived, however, as the focus of both
parties soon drifted elsewhere. On the one hand, the main thrust of the radical design
scene shifted from ecotopian criticism to semiotic musings on the meanings of objects.
On the other hand, from the mid-1970s the anti-nuclear battle virtually engulfed the
environmentalist movement in Italy, leaving little room for more design-centred dis-
cussions. What in retrospect might look like a ‘golden moment’ in the environmental

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history of design thus exemplifies what such an approach can achieve in identifying alli-
ances and discourses which easily would fall by the wayside if disciplinary boundaries
are too strictly maintained.

Finally, this special issue is enriched by the fourth instalment of the Journal of Design
History’s recurring feature publishing in translation key texts hitherto unavailable in
English. Introduced and translated by Fedja Vukić, the article selected for inclusion
here is written by the Croatian art historian and design critic Matko Meštrović and
originally appeared as a chapter in his book Teorija dizajna i problemi okoline (Design
Theory and Environmental Problems) published in 1980. Meštrović was instrumental in
introducing the English-language term ‘design’ as well as western design ideology to
design discourse in socialist Yugoslavia from the 1960s onwards. This article, outlining
distinctions between ecological and environmentalist approaches to design, is particu-
larly interesting because it represents both a deep respect for western design ideol-
ogy—especially the HfG Ulm variety—as well as a profound criticism of its apparent
acceptance of the status quo of the political and economical organization of society.
This perspective from a bygone alternative to western capitalism is of great value today
when the conversation on design and sustainability seems unable to imagine social
structures capable of curbing the rampant consumerism that is at the root of so many
of our environmental problems.

Conclusion
As argued at the outset of this article, environmental history can be said to have
emerged partly from the environmentalist movement, but has subsequently become
less overtly activist in tone. Intriguingly, design history may be said to be heading the
opposite direction—at least in the sense that scholars are taking an increasing interest
in design activism and the socio-political ramifications of design. Environmental histo-
ries of design, then, could take their cues from both of these trajectories. Taking the
activist route may make it easier to argue for the societal significance of the field. There
is great potential in considering the designed elements of environmentalism as well
as the environmentalist forms of design activism, as Michelle Labrague’s article in this
issue does. A more analytical approach, exemplified by Larry Busbea’s contribution to
this issue, may hold less immediate persuasive power in the realm of policy, but allows
for a richer understanding of complex nature of design and/in environmental discourse.
Rather than taking a programmatic stance on the issue of activism, we suggest that
environmental histories of design will benefit from a wide variety of approaches.

We have evoked the pressing weight of the Anthropocene at several points in this
essay, and it is not without reason. Certain types of environmental change happen
slower than the eye can see; yet the consequences make themselves known on plan-
etary scales. This poses a challenge to all of us, and it is one that historians of environ-
ment and design can address. Rob Nixon writes that to ‘give the Anthropocene a public
resonance involves choosing objects, images, and stories that will make visceral those

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 tumultuous geologic processes that now happen on human time scales’.62 In a similar
vein, Ton Otto writes that ‘to “open up” the future for new possibilities, one would
need to “open up” the past as well, searching it for yet undiscovered formations,
assemblages and possibilities that will energize and sustain the wished for transforma-
tion.’63 Such approaches will likely involve moving beyond primarily Anthropocentric
perspectives, taking up the challenge from posthumanities scholars and work in the
sprawling and emerging research field of New Materialism.64 The world that we inhabit

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as humans is shared with a great number of nonhuman agents—organisms and mate-
rials that not only co-inhabit the world, but that also play a key role in making the past,
present, and future of the world. This process of opening up research fields for new
perspectives may thus involve fundamental ontological shifts.

In concluding, we find inspiration in environmental historian Libby Robin, who argues

that what we need is not narratives of blame but narratives of care: ‘the question is how
people can take responsibility for and respond to their changed world. And the answer is
not simply scientific and technological, but also social, cultural, political and ecological’.65

The Anthropocene is the human-made world, yet can we say it is designed? One of
the most prevalent narratives about nature in the Anthropocene is one of unintended
consequences leading to environmental decline—of species extinction, biodiversity
loss, degraded ecosystem services, encroachment on wilderness areas, natural disas-
ters, global climate change, and so on. People have left their fingerprints on everything
and the world is a poorer place for it, or so the story goes. Such narratives of decline
and catastrophe have been important catalysts in the formation of the environmental
movement and continue to be major challenges that we will need to deal with one way
or another in the future. As argued earlier, all of these can also be defined as a wicked
problem or part of a whole wicked tangle of problems that can’t be solved through
simple fixes—they can not be designed away.

It is not a question of coming up with new and better designs or implementing solu-
tions; it is a never-ending process. We believe that this change in perspective is neces-
sary; rather than thinking about the world as once whole, but now broken, we should
consider it always-already broken. Scholars like Steven Jackson argue that we should
take breakdown, dissolution, and change as our starting point.66 The world is con-
stantly falling apart, but it is also constantly being repaired, reinvented, reconfigured,
and reassembled. In thinking about design and environment, we should embrace such
perspectives. Scott Knowles similarly encourages us to consider the timescales of dis-
aster, drawing special attention to the way slow disasters happen at the rate of which
our technological systems decay.67 Design extends beyond individual objects, in time
and space, entangling both ideology and materials into the Anthropocene. It is up to
us to try to untangle this web.

Kjetil Fallan
Professor of Design History
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas
University of Oslo
E-mail: kjetil.fallan@ifikk.uio.no

Finn Arne Jørgensen

Associate Professor of History of Technology and Environment
Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Umeå University
E-mail: finn.jorgensen@idehist.umu.se

Kjetil Fallan and Finn Arne Jørgensen

117
Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is
the author of Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse (Routledge,
2017) and Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (Berg, 2010); the editor
of Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories (Berg, 2012) and co-editor, with Grace-
Lees Maffei, of Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization
(Berghahn Books, 2016) and Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design
(Bloomsbury, 2013). Currently he is Principal Investigator with the research project Back

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to the Sustainable Future: Visions of Sustainability in the History of Design, funded by
the Research Council of Norway. Professor Fallan also serves as an editor of the Journal
of Design History and on the advisory boards of Design and Culture and AIS/Design:
Storia e Ricerche.

Finn Arne Jørgensen is Associate Professor of History of Technology and Environment,

Umeå University, Sweden. His research includes studies of waste and recycling histories
in Scandinavia and the US, the history of Norwegian leisure cabins, material culture
and consumption studies, and the connections between environmental humanities,
media studies, and digital humanities. He is the author of Making a Green Machine:
The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling (Rutgers University Press, 2011) and
co-editor of New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology
Studies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Dr Jørgensen is also a contributing editor
of Technology and Culture and digital content editor of Environmental History.

If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail
responses to the editorial board and other readers.

Notes 7 William Rollins, ‘Reflections on a Spare Tire: SUVs and

Postmodern Environmental Consciousness’, Environmental
1 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: History 11 (2006): 684–723.
The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920.
8 Jon Mooallem, The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959; Roderick
Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking
Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. (New Haven,
at Animals in America. (London: Penguin Press, 2013); Finn
CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
Arne Jørgensen, ‘Why Look at Cabin Porn?’, Public Culture
2 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 27, no.3 (2015): 557–578.
1930s, 25th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
9 Carl Zimring, ‘Upcycling in History: Is the Past a Prologue
Press, 2004).
to a Zero-Waste Future? The Case of Aluminum’ in ‘A
3 For example, Richard White, ‘From Wilderness to Hybrid Future without Waste? Zero Waste in Theory and Practice,’
Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental ed. Christof Mauch, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in
History’, The Historian, 66, no.3 (2004): 557–564. For Environment and Society 3 (2016): 45–52.
a broader overview of the evolution of the field, see
10 Finn Arne Jørgensen, Making a Green Machine: The
Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling. New
Environmental History. Oxford: (Oxford University Press,
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011; Finn
2014).
Arne Jørgensen, ‘Designing a Hole in the Wall: The
4 Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Reverse Vending Machine as Socio-technical System and
Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xviii. Environmental Infrastructure’, in Scandinavian Design:
5 ibid., 54. Alternative Histories, ed. Kjetil Fallan. (Oxford: Berg
6 Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History. (New Publishers, 2013).
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Thomas 11 Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History. (Cambridge:
Hine, Populuxe. (New York: Knopf, 1986). Cambridge University Press, 2011); Susan R. Schrepfer

Environmental Histories of Design

118
 and Philip Scranton, eds., Industrializing Organisms: History, ed. Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan C. Stewart
Introducing Evolutionary History. (London: Routledge, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 153.
2004). 24 Clive Dilnot, ‘Sustainability and Unsustainability in a World
12 For a good overview of the Anthropocene debate see Become Artificial: Sustainability as a Project of History’,
Noel Castree, ‘The Anthropocene and the Environmental Design Philosophy Papers 9, no. 2 (2011): 103–155. See
Humanities: Extending the Conversation’, Environmental also Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, Steel: A Design,
Humanities 5 (2014): 233–60. Cultural Ecological History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015):

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13 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics 128.
As If People Mattered. (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973). 25 Scott Slovic, ‘Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes,
14 See, for example, Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Practicing Doctrine’, in The Green Studies Reader: From
Sarah Teasley, eds., Global Design History. (London: Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London:
Routledge, 2011); Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, eds., Routledge, 2000), 160.
History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 26 Massey and Micklethwaite point to John Heskett, Industrial
1400‒2000. (New Haven, CT and New York: Yale University Design (London and Mew York: Thames & Hudson, 1980),
Press and Bard Graduate Center, 2013); Victor Margolin, 122; 205–206 as an early example—but see also Sigfried
World History of Design, Vols. 1&2. (London: Bloomsbury Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution
Academic, 2015); Daniel J. Huppatz, ‘Globalizing Design to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press,
History and Global Design History’, Journal of Design 1948), 625, 707–710; Reyner Banham, The Architecture
History 28, no. 2 (2015): 182–202; Kjetil Fallan and Grace of the Well-tempered Environment (London/Chicago, The
Lees-Maffei, eds., Designing Worlds: National Design Architectural Press/University of Chicago Press, 1969),
Histories in an Age of Globalization. (New York and 265ff; Lewis Mumford, Findings and Keepings: Analects for
London: Berghahn Books, 2016). an Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
15 Tony Fry, ‘Whither Design/Whether History’, in Design New York, 1975), 373; Philip Pacey, ‘“Anyone Designing
and the Question of History, ed. Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Anything?” Non-Professional Designers and the History
Susan C. Stewart (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 6–7. of Design’, Journal of Design History 5, no. 3 (1992):
217–225; John A. Walker, Design History and the History
16 Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson, ‘Robin Boyd, Expo of Design (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 31; Peter Dormer,
‘70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment’, Design Since 1945 (London and Mew York: Thames &
Design Philosophy Papers 7, no. 2 (2009): 100. Hudson, 1993), 86, 201
17 Kjetil Fallan, ‘De-tooling Design History: To What Purpose 27 Anne Massey and Paul Micklethwaite, ‘Towards a New
and For Whom Do We Write?’, Design and Culture, 5, Design History with Reference to British Utility’, Design
no. 1 (2013): 17. Philosophy Papers7, no. 2 (2009): 123–136.
18 Kjetil Fallan, ‘Our Common Future: Joining Forces for 28 An early example of this is the cover story of the July
Histories of Sustainable Design’, Tecnoscienza: Italian 1974 issue of The Ecologist: Nicholas Gould, ‘William
Journal of Science & Technology Studies 5, no. 2 Morris’, The Ecologist 6, no. 4 (1974): 210–212. See also
(2014):13–44. Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back
19 Pauline Madge, ‘Editorial’, Journal of Design History 6, to Land, and Socialism in Britain 1880–1900. (Brighton,
no. 3 (1993): i. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1988); Raymond Williams,
‘Socialism and Ecology’, in Resources of Hope: Culture,
20 Pauline Madge, ‘Design, Ecology, Technology:
Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable. (London: Verso,
A Historiographical Review’, Journal of Design History
1989).
6, no. 3 (1993): 149–166; (Madge), ‘Ecological Design:
A New Critique’, Design Issues 13, no. 2 (1997): 44–54. 29 See, for example, Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan,
The Arts and Crafts Movement. (London and New York:
21 Tony Fry, ibid., 9.
Thames & Hudson, 1991); Linda Parry, ed., William Morris.
22 Ramia Mazé, ‘‘Who is Sustainable? Querying the Politics of (London: Philip Wilson Publishers and the Victoria and
Sustainable Design Practices’, in Share This Book: Critical Albert Museum, 1996).
Perspectives and Dialogues about Design and Sustainability,
30 William Morris, News from Nowhere: or An Epoch of Rest,
ed. Ramia Mazé, Lisa Olausson, Matilda Plöjel, Johan
being some chapters from a Utopian Romance ([1890]
Redström and Christina Zetterlund (Stockholm: Axl Books,
London: Routledge, 1970): 5–6.
2013), 108.
31 Ibid., 61.
23 Clive Dilnot, ‘History, Design, Futures: Contending with
What We Have Made’, in Design and the Question of 32 Ibid., 154.

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33 Florence S. Boos, ‘An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the France. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Chris
Red and Morris the Green’, in William Morris: Centenary Pearson, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole, eds., Militarized
Essays, ed. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston (Exeter: Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain. (London:
University of Exeter Press, 1999): 21–46. Continuum, 2010); Richard Tucker and Edmund P. Russell,
eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental
34 Patric O’Sullivan, ‘The Ending of the Journey: William
History of War. Corvallis: (Oregon State University Press,
Morris, News from Nowhere and Ecology’, in William
2004).
Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time, ed.

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Stephen Coleman and Patric O’Sullivan (Hartland, Devon: 43 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the
Green Books, 1990): 169–181. See also Patric O’Sullivan, Pastoral Ideal in America. (Oxford University Press, New
‘ “Morris the red, Morris the green”—a partial review’, in York, 1964).
Journal of William Morris Studies 19, no. 3 (2011): 22–38 44 Joseph P. Hupy, ‘The Environmental Footprint of War’,
(part of a special issue on the topic of ‘Morris the Green’). Environment and History 14, no. 3 (2008): 405.
35 Florence S. Boos, op.cit., 32, 40. 45 Richard P. Tucker, ‘War and the Environment’, in A
36 Sara Wills, ‘Woods Beyond Worlds? The Greening of Companion to Global Environmental History, ed. J. R.
William Morris’, Australasian Victorian Studies 7 (2001): McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin (Oxford: Blackwell,
137–149; Sara Wills, ‘Nature, Socialism, Livelihood: The 2012), 328–329.
Greening Of William Morris?’, Melbourne Historical 46 Kjetil Fallan, ‘Nordic Noir: Deadly Design from the
Journal 31, no. 1 (2003): 74–92; Sara Wills, The Greening Peacemongering Periphery’, Design and Culture 7, no. 3
of William Morris (Melbourne: Melbourne Publishing (2015): 377–402.
Group/Circa, 2006).
47 Tait Keller, ‘Destruction of the Ecosystem’, in 1914–1981
37 For a good discussion of the problematic aspects of con- Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War,
structing a genealogical history of ideas that predates ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones,
their full-fledged conceptualization, see Quentin Skinner, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie
‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Universität Berlin). http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.
Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, net/article/destruction_of_the_ecosystem, accessed 8
ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, February 2016.
1988), 29–67. 48 See, for example, Matthew Evenden, ‘Aluminum,
38 Quoted in Andy Meharg, ‘The Arsenic Green’, Nature 423 Commodity Chains, and the Environmental History of the
(2003): 688. See also the accompanying news item: Philip Second World War’, Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011):
Ball, ‘William Morris made poisonous wallpaper’, Nature, 69–93; Jose Martinez-Reyes, ‘Mahogany intertwined:
News section, 12 June 2003, http://www.nature.com/ Enviromateriality between Mexico, Fiji, and the Gibson Les
news/2003/030612/full/news030609-11.html, accessed 5 Paul’, Journal of Material Culture 20, no. 3 (2015): 313–329.
November 2015, doi:10.1038/news030609-11. 49 Peder Anker, ‘The Bauhaus of Nature’, Modernism/
39 Jed Mayer, ‘William Morris and the Greening of Science’, Modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): 231.
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 17, no. 2 (2008): 67. 50 Peder Anker, ‘Bauhaus at the Zoo’, Nature 439, 23 February
40 Sara Wills, ‘Nature, Socialism, Livelihood: The Greening Of (2006): 916.
William Morris?’, 91–92. 51 ibid.
41 See also Jane Tynan, British Army Uniform and the 52 Peder Anker, ‘The Bauhaus of Nature’, 239.
First World War: Men in Khaki. (Basingstoke: Palgrave 53 Ibid.
MacMillan, 2013).
54 Ibid.
42 Key contributions to this body of literature include John
55 Ibid., 241–241.
McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, Environmental histories of
the Cold War. (Washington, D.C. and New York: German 56 Peder Anker, ‘Bauhaus at the Zoo’, 916.
Historical Institute & Cambridge University Press, 2010); 57 Peder Anker, ‘The Bauhaus of Nature’, 229–230.
Lisa M Brady, ‘The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy
in the American Civil War’, Environmental History 10, no. 3 58 Alison Clarke, ‘Émigré Culture and the Origins of Social
(2005): 421–447; Lisa M. Brady, ‘Life in the DMZ: Turning Design’, in Design for the Good Society, ed. Max Bruinsma
a Diplomatic Failure into an Environmental Success’, and Ida van Zijl (Rotterdam: nai010, 2015), 167.
Diplomatic History 32, no. 4 (2008): 585–611; Chris 59 Peder Anker, ‘Graphic Language: Herbert Bayer’s
Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy Environmental Design’, Environmental History 12, no. 2

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 (2007): 254–279; Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: Ecology after the End of the World. (Minneapolis, MN:
A History of Ecological Design. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
State University Press, 2010). 65 Libby Robin, ‘The End of the Environment’, Sydney
60 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion. Chicago: Paul Environment Institute website video, 33:00, published
Theobald, 1947. March 31, 2014, http://sydney.edu.au/environment-insti
61 Peder Anker, ‘Graphic Language: Herbert Bayer’s tute/videos/libby-robin-the-end-of-the-environment/

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Environmental Design’, 254–279. 66 Steven J. Jackson. ‘Rethinking Repair’, in Media
62 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and
Poor. Cambridge, (MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo B. Boczkowski, and
Kirsten A. Foot. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).
63 Ton Otto, ‘History In and For Design’, Journal of Design
History 29, no. 1 (2016): 68. 67 Scott Knowles, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk
64 For example, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political in Modern America. (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Ecology of Things. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
2009); Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and

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