CHAPTER 11 A Special Relationship: The UK–US Transatlantic Domestic Dialogue

Abstract

Globalization behoves us to produce internationally situated investigations in which national design histories are understood within international contexts.Clearly, nations are not isolated entities; rather, they engage in multidirectional dialogues, with neighbours, friends, influencers, trading partners and enemies.Given the importance of intra-national liaisons it is surprising, not to say concerning, that so many academic studies of design are bound by national borders.While the scholarship of globalization and national studies each raise methodological questions of coverage, treatment and representativeness, we need not choose between them.There is a third way: transnational design history, meaning design history which recognizes that design is not bounded by the borders of nation states, and that it is necessary to examine more than one nation and the relationships between nations to better reveal even national histories of design.Is it not the case that to truly understand what, if anything, is distinctive about a nation, we must leave it, perceive it from a distance, appraise it from a conceptual Archimedean point?Italian design, for example, is a myth as much constructed in the design stores, magazines and galleries of London, New York, Paris and Sydney as it is in the designs studios, factories and small-to mediumsized businesses of Milan, Florence, Turin or Rome (Lees-Maffei 2014).Clearly, national studies may not only be written from outside the nation in question, or written by foreigners.But, design historians should more often undertake the greater work involved in transnational studies, supra-national regional studies (studies of more than one nation within a defined region) and/

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