ABSTRACT
There are indications showing that materials and making are on the way back into design and design education, but over the last 100 years, the design process has experienced a shift from the hands to the head and from analogue to digital. This has in many places led to an understanding of the design process as primarily immaterial, where matter and form are separated in the process of creating a physical object, and many design educations have moved from a workplace in contact with making things into and a university studio. Materials have been central in the design process before, so in order to understand ways to bring them back and how materials, making and the design process are interrelated in a contemporary context, it is valuable to explore the history of materials within design and design education, and more specifically to study how didactic ideologies and definitions of design may have affected the constituent parts of how we see the design profession today. This is done with a specific focus on the Birmingham School of Art in the UK at the end of the 19th century, the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s and Danish modernism in the 1950s.
