This five–week sophomore project was very broadly defined as a guide to design movements, designers, and designed objects and environments made in Texas (both by Texans and others working in Texas) during the 20th–century. Our goal was not to be “objective” and cover “everything;” our criteria for selection are based on the idea of forming an evolving ensemble of topics that represent our understanding of “design in Texas” to an eloquent, multi-disciplinary design audience. The historical approach taken here is interpretative in nature, and it is based in the belief that material forms are products of historically determined subjects (both producers and viewers/consumers) and as such acquire meanings in relations to the historical conditions within which they emerge. The emphasis in students’ projects here is on personal experience of the place, the product, an environment. The genre proposed for this writing project was in-between that of a tourist guide and that of an academic, historical survey book. By engaging ourselves in such a research project we had hoped to address both academic and market needs, because the resources on the subject matter in question are very limited.

Many research groups found out that they had to relay on oral history sources, gossip, anecdotal narratives, fragmented evidence, because there are simply no written (published) sources of information related to a number of our topics. For instance, music posters for Austin’s vibrant music scene is a subject matter as ephemeral as a subject matter can get; the work and influence of Texas Rangers (a group of architectural educators working at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid 1950’s) has hardly left documented traces; the toddler stage of Austin’s industrial design scene is virtually undocumented; in other words, many students have done a pioneering work in the field of design history by mapping out to this point in time non-existing subjects.

Studio instructors for this project were Tuan Phan (Visual Syntax) and Miodrag Mitrasinovic.