 |
This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; try the Find link tool for suggestions. (February 2016)
|
John Heskett, (1937- February, 2014) was a writer and lecturer on the economic, political, cultural and human value of industrial design. Heskett was a professor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (1989–2004) and school of design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2004–11) teaching in Design history, Design Thinking, he became the acting dean of the latter (2011–12). He was also a visiting professor at universities in Turkey, Japan, Chile, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Between the late 1970s and 2010, he has published Industrial Design, Toothpicks and logos: design in everyday life, Design: a very short introduction and other books. These were considered as significant contributions to the history of design, to the study of design policy and latterly to the theoretical and applied articulation of the economic value created by design, first in the United Kingdom, then in the United States and, in the last decade of his life, in Hong Kong.[1]
Born in Coventry in 1937, Heskett went to the Humphrey Perkins School in Barrow upon Soar, Leicestershire (1947–54), did national service and gained a degree in economics, politics and history at the London School of Economics.
With his background, Heskett began to write history considering social, economic and political as components of design. In the early 1970s he became part of the emerging first generation of historians of design. A variety of jobs followed before he obtained a design history post at Lanchester Polytechnic (1967–77). Then he taught design history and theory in Sheffield, and at Ravensbourne College, Bromley, in south-east London (1984–89). In the late 1970s, John became a prominent member of a group of academics based in several of Britain's art schools (then part of the polytechnics – he was at Sheffield City) who developed the discipline of design history and theory, later to become subsumed under the broader. His first book, Industrial Design, appeared in 1980 and was instantly successful since it provided one of the first accounts of industrial design as responses to changes in production methods and the organization of capitalism.
Heskett left the United Kingdom for the United States in 1988, first to work on a project with the Design Management Institute in Boston, and then after 1989, to teach in the graduate programmes in the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. By 1990 he was working for a Japanese consultancy and throughout the next decades he was repeatedly invited to speak and advise at institutional and government level in countries as varied(for example) as Mexico, Chile, Finland, Japan, Taiwan and South Africa.
Since 2004, in Hong Kong, Heskett undertook teaching and research on the roles of design in production and more widely in the economy as a whole, examining design policy at national levels in the United States, Europe and, increasingly, Asia.
Heskett is survived by his second wife, Pamela Smith, whom he married in 1992; his daughter, Ingrid, and son, Peter, both from his first marriage, to Irene Alksnis, which ended in divorce; and his grandchildren, Sofia, Alexander, Tibor, Max, Arlo and Bea.
* John Heskett Official Website
