The Routledge Companion to Design Studies

Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design – a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of subdisciplines – has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more.

The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design – theoretical, practice-related and historical – that has emerged over the past four decades. Comprising forty-three newly commissioned chapters, the Companion is organized into the following six sections:



Defining design: discipline, process

Defining design: objects, spaces

Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation

Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday

Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation

Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation. Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the chapters offer an international scope, covering work emanating from, and relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia and Africa.

This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Design Studies.