Design and Agency

Who—or what—has the power to effect historical change? Historians have long been interested in agency, questioning the extent to which certain people at certain times—enslaved people, women, other minorities for example—have been able to act rather than simply be acted upon. Design historians, historians of material culture and museum curators have long considered the power of objects to influence our lived experience. This book goes one step further, drawing attention to the ways in which designed objects can be understood to have agency through their power to both facilitate and constitute identities. Designed objects imply an intended use, an imagined performance, and thus to pay attention to them is to consider who is afforded agency through design, and who might not be. The ‘tricky’ and ‘slippery’ nature of agency is acknowledged in the introduction: ‘Agency is not monolithic, unidimensional, or unidirectional…Agency is not equally experienced or expressed precisely because it...