The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm

Abstract

This article elaborates a production-consumption-mediation paradigm in design history, to examine both the development of design history over the past three decades and the current and future practice of design history, specifically within the UK. While John A. Walker made the case in 1989 for increased design historical attention to be paid to issues of consumption, this article identifies mediation as a third stream in design history, with three prongs: first, the mediation emphasis continues the consumption turn within design history by exploring the role of channels such as television, magazines, corporate literature, advice literature and so on in mediating between producers and consumers and forming consumption practices and ideas about design; second, the mediation emphasis examines the extent to which mediating channels are themselves designed and therefore open to design historical analysisindeed, these channels have increasingly constituted the design historian"s object of study; third, the mediation emphasis investigates the role of designed goods themselves as mediating devices. The identification of the PCM paradigm, and the discussion of the methodological and interdisciplinary issues arising provided here, including the relationship of design history to neighbouring fields, have implications for conceptions of the field of design history, in both content and approach.

The Systime iBog: Analysing digital textbooks as designed artefacts

“…Focus on the materialities of design and designerly contributions indicates a more active role played by non-communicative elements and events, e.g. use, production and artefactual materiality, involved as agents or mediators in the production and consumption of digital textbooks, or indeed books in general (see also Lees-Maffei, 2009).…”

Design EducationinHigher Education

“…This includes decisions that do not obviously appear in final products, a point stressed by writer and curator Monika Parrinder and designer-maker Maiko Tsutsumi (Teasley 2014b). Doing so as part of attending to production, mediation, and consumption, as the temporal elements of design's "social life" (Appadurai 1986;Lees-Maffei 2009), might also enhance history-telling's ability to indicate the produced, mediated nature of history itself.…”

Transition of a Western dream into an evidence of Guilt: The case of Mekap shoes in Turkey

“…Artefacts are to present some hidden but valuable and also reliable knowledge derived from their social lives, their production-consumption-mediation cycles, the environments and contexts they appeared, and the actors they had interacted with. According to Lees-Maffei (2009), the world is mediated through objects, whereas studying mediation means studying the phenomena that exist between production and consumption, that is to inscribe and illuminate meanings for objects (Lees-Maffei, 2009). In this sense, some everyday objects that used to be perceived as fameless, vain or ordinary, had begun to gain scholarly interest by their potential of revealing hidden knowledge upon their social, economic, cultural and political testimonies.…”