Reframing Design History in the Ecological Crisis: On Material Design Systems and Research Methods

In the face of an intensifying environmental crisis, design’s technical and material dimensions demand rigorous critical scrutiny, necessitating not just a revision but a fundamental reconfiguration of design history. This paper advances a speculative critique of prevailing historiographical narratives, arguing for a History of Material Design grounded in a post-disciplinary epistemology. By mobilising cross-disciplinary intersections with the histories of technology, political economy, and social systems, alongside emergent trajectories from Earth System Science, this approach positions systemic analysis as a historiographical imperative. The methodology integrates Actor-Network Theory (ANT), socio-technical analysis, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to interrogate the entanglements of materials, processes, and technologies within complex ecological and sociopolitical assemblages. The aim is to articulate a more robust and critical historiographical model – one that reorients the History of Material Design toward systemic practices and their material, methodological, and discursive consequences across design’s expanded field.