VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Design history has struggled with its disciplinary positioning. Grace Lees-Maffei and Daniel Huppatz critique its legacy as a service subject supporting design education, while Kjetil Fallan has argued for its recognition as a legitimate sub-field within history. By contrast, Guy Julier and Viviana Narotzky describe it as increasingly redundant, an autonomous academic discipline severed from design practice. These contrasting perspectives reflect tensions, often unacknowledged yet influential in shaping how scholars engage with the discipline. Some academics have responded by shifting their work into adjacent domains, such as Design Studies or Design Methods, where history plays a peripheral role. But what is lost when historically engaged design research is relocated outside design history and is there still space for practitioner-historians to contribute? Dedicated design historians have typically been against attempts to prove history’s relevance, with efforts to link past and present understood as instrumentalization. Meanwhile, from within design, scholars like Andrew Blauvelt have argued for more reciprocity between past and present to enable historical enquiry to inform practice. This paper explores how such reciprocity might be enacted meaningfully, without distorting history for presentist ends. Strategies for activating history through practice are compared and analysed, drawing on Maria Göransdotter’s concept of ‘Present-ing history’, Durepos and Mills’ ‘ANTi-History’, and Davide Nicolini’s ‘strong approach to practice’. These frameworks highlight how design practice can generate new forms of situated, embodied historical knowledge. I argue that practitioner-historians are uniquely positioned to construct alternate histories written from within design, offering valuable contributions to the scholarship of practice.