The book is unique for its inclusivity, which reaches far beyond Western design research’s usual orbit. Margolin, who has been an editor of MIT’s journal Design Issues since 1985, begins his study with the first users of tools. “What we call design today,” he told me by way of explanation, “is continuous with the basic human need to organize the material environment for survival purposes.”
With that thesis in mind, Margolin defined two kinds of design: design with a small “d"—by his definition, what people have always created to satisfy needs and organize their environment—and Design with a big "D"—his word for the official term associated with mass production and mass communication that may be its closest association today.
Steven Heller in: The Evolution of Design — The Atlantic
Heller notes but doesn’t extend this important point raised by Margolin. The latter, big D Design, has been the set of professional practices working within and reinforcing dominant economic systems. These professions (Heller calls them disciplines, but I’m uncomfortable with some slipperiness that word choice causes) have each produced their own surveys of their histories, and typically from a Western point of view.
Heller populates his review (preview?) for The Atlantic with images within his own professional comfort zone of Graphic Design. Margolin has worked at higher levels of abstraction (I’m borrowing the phrase from Computer Science) than the professional one for most of his writing, attempting to historicize and theorize an encompassing set of human practices — little d design. These analyses have more in common with Anthropology and Material Culture Studies than with catalogs of the beautiful and the economically successful (though they will not exclude these).
I look forward to reading Margolin’s magnum opus.