I am an industrial designer, design historian and design educator. I trained initially as a mechanical and production engineer before studying Industrial Design at The University of Teesside. I have since worked as an in-house designer, a design manager and as a director of a design consultancy. When I became a design educator I studied the History of Design at Middlesex University. My work on the social history of computing technology eventually led to a PhD from the University of Huddersfield. I am currently Professor of Design and Design History at Sheffield Hallam University. I have spoken at a number of international conferences around the world and have had articles published in a number of international design journals.
My academic research covers a wide variety of subjects, all concerned in one way or another with the relationship between society and technology. The relationship between people and technological artefacts is explored through my writings on the design history of computers. The impact of the society-technology relationship on the design profession is explored through my writings on professional versus amateur design, including work on Open Design and the history of DIY. The future impact of emerging technologies on the nature of design is explored through my practice-based research into Post Industrial Manufacturing.
I have an ongoing interest in the design history of personal computing and our relationship with computing technology. I am not so concerned with the actual technology of computing, but more about the changing physical design of computers over time, and how this relates to the way we perceive and relate to computers as social and cultural artefacts.
The computer that most people relate to the typical office computer or PC is so pervasive in our everyday lives that we barely give it a second thought. Yet, as this artefact has changed from a room-sized behemoth to a desktop companion, it has been instrumental in changing the way we work and live our everyday lives.
As computers have now become commonplace in the home, and become more portable and even hand-sized, the relationship we have with computing technology continues to develop. My articles on the history of computing are an attempt to trace this relationship.
Click here for books and articles
P. Atkinson, Computer
Reaktion Books (Objekt series), 2010.
256 pages, 143 illustrations, 52 in colour
ISBN 978-1-86189-664-3
Reviews of Computer:
This is a gem of a book. Atkinson, a reader in design at Sheffield Hallam University, has written a highly readable yet authoritative survey of computing history and its connections to the larger cultural forces that often invisibly guide how technology emerges from and propagates through a society. The images come with incisive captions that reveal Atkinsons skill at cultural decoding of imagery. In summary, what emerges from Computer is a fascinating story of the progress in computer product design. I think students of both design and computer history will benefit from the thoughtfulness of Atkinson's work, especially the connections he makes between design and use, and I heartily recommend it.
Dag Spicer, Journal of Design History , July 2011
Atkinson tells the story of the computer as a designed object, from fearsome room-sized mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA to smartphone and iPad. He presents some tempting cultural hypotheses such as that, for example, the mouse enabled male executives to use computers in the office without embarassment (because the previous keyboard-only input method was associated with typists, and therefore women), or that "pen computing", the doomed next big thing of the 1990s, failed because writing with a stylus on a tablet computer looked as though you were using a clipboard.
Steven Poole, The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010
Paul Atkinson's Computer is an elegant history of the computers journey from its initial form as a forbidding room-sized construction to an innocuous box sitting on top of an office desk. Computer offers dozens of great photographs of and vintage advertisements for boxy old computers, and Atkinson analyzes these images as a means of exploring how our attitudes toward computers have changed over the years. It's an oddly fascinating history. Each design innovation is tied to a particular cultural moment; at various points, computers figure into gender politics, popular culture, and our most fervent hopes for the future. Technological progress and social history are inextricably linked.
Eileen Reynolds, The New Yorker , December 1, 2010
Historians and sociologists of technology, long fearful of the spectre of technological determinism, have recently begun to confront the issue of technologys materiality. Paul Atkinson's Computer, part of the Objekt series published by Reaktion Books, is a timely contribution to the material turn. Peppered with images and pithy analysis it offers a design history perspective on the material and visual in the social construction of computing. Each chapter successfully conveys the nonlinear nature of technological development, highlighting the computers multiple contemporaneous forms before specific uses were fixed. The book is at its best when exploring the design process: the precursor to the laptop is revealed to be a secret agent-inspired computer in a briefcase; the Palm Pilot PDA began life as a Post-it note on a wooden block prototype; and IBM has the Bauhaus movement to thank for its large-scale computer design. Computer remains a lively and highly readable book with broad appeal and one that is a welcome addition to the historiography of computing.
Ian Martin, Public Understanding of Science , September 2011
A fascinating account that deals with image as well as reality, science fiction as well as functionality. An impressive addition to Reaktion's thought-provoking Objekt series.
Jeremy Black, The Historical Association , 6th December 2010
Computer is an extraordinary historical account of the electronic computer. Atkinson (Sheffield Hallam Univ., UK) takes the reader on a tortuous journey through the technological time line of these amazing machines, from the days of Colossus to the modern notebook computer. Starting with an early history and a tribute, of course, to Charles Babbage, the book quickly jumps to the 20th century and cleverly addresses the question of who built the first computer. The author presents notable contributions from Turing, von Neumann, and Mauchly in great and wonderful detail. Computer addresses aspects of the devices that many historical accounts of the electronic age do not cover. The book is imbued with priceless photographs of everything from the ICT 1301 to the quirky but beautiful iPad. It will be truly appreciated by all who have an interest in the history of our favorite machine. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.
M. Connell, Choice , April 2011
Computer is available from Reaktion Books
P. Atkinson, 'The Ghost in the Machine'
Paperweight 2: 2011: 7
In April 1991, almost 20 years before the launch of Apple's iPad, the cover of the popular magazine Personal Computer World proudly displayed a photograph of a completely new category of computing product - a tablet computer called the 'GO PC'. It was a breakthrough in the emerging field of 'PenPoint Computing' and, as the cover stated, had 'The first natural user interface'. The photograph showed the product in use, being held by one hand in the manner of a clipboard, and being written on with the other hand using a stylus. This was no April Fool's joke - typing commands into a computer, that anachronistic hangover from the typewriter, was soon to be a thing of the past. The accompanying article excitedly explored the ins and out of the unique pen-based user interface, concluding that 'The men behind GO .... believe they've got something special. We should all take note'. This was to be the future of computing.
There is only one problem with this story. GO was a ghost, a piece of vapourware; it was a fleeting, tantalising glimpse of a machine that never materialised. The GO PC never existed. Well, never as anything other than a prototype. A couple of well-connected journalists got to try one out, but the general public certainly never saw one. Does this matter? Is it of any importance to design history that a particular product never got past the prototype stage? To be of any relevance, does a product actually have to have been made in quantity to 'count' in some way?
Paperweight Iss. 2 is available from here
P. Atkinson, 'The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer: Products and Non-Products in Design History'
Journal of Design History 23(2): 2010: 163-179.
Abstract
The Honeywell Kitchen Computer is described in a number of places, particularly on the World Wide Web, as a curiosity - a futuristic computer product that never sold. In fact, the Kitchen Computer was merely a publicity stunt, a spoof, continuing a long line of fantasy gifts offered by the up-market American department store Neiman Marcus. But this fantasy status is by no means the whole story. In reality, what was advertised as the Kitchen Computer was actually designed as a serious mini computer, the H316, produced by Honeywell as a part of its Series 16 family of machines - although, even as a commercial product, it was never really intended to sell.
This case raises a number of questions for design historians. What is the definition of a product for design historical purposes? The status of products that actually existed as production items and of products that are 'vapourware' - product proposals that did not materialize - is sometimes difficult to ascertain. This study explores the notion of products and non-products as subjects of design analyses and argues that even non-products can have significant agency as well as provide valuable insights into a period's zeitgeist.
The full article with images can be accessed from the Journal of Design History website.
A link to this article appears on the Computer History Museum's ' Revolution ' exhibition website.
P. Atkinson, 'A Bitter Pill to Swallow: The Rise and Fall of the Tablet Computer'
Design Issues 24(4): 2008: 3-25
The first tablet computers appeared at the tail end of the 1980s, and they generated a huge amount of interest in the computer industry and serious amounts of investment money from venture capitalists. Pen operated computing was seen as the next wave of the silicon revolution and the tablet computer was seen to be the device everyone would want to use. It was reported in 1991 that 'Nearly every major maker of computers has some type of pen-based machine in the works'.
Yet, in the space of just a few years, the tablet computer and the notion of pen computing sank almost without trace. Following a series of disastrous product launches and the failure of a number of promising startup companies, the tablet computer was discredited as an unfulfilled promise. It no longer represented the future of mobile computing, but was instead derided as an expensive folly - an irrelevant sideline in the history of the computer.
This article traces the early development of pen computing, the appearance, proliferation and disappearance of the tablet computer, and explores possible reasons for the demise of this particular class of product.
The full article can be accessed and downloaded for free from the Design Issues website.
P. Atkinson, 'The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: the role of the computer mouse in the history of computing'
Design Issues 23(3): 2007: 16-46
There is a well documented technical history of the computer mouse that describes its invention in the early 1960s and its consequent development over time before its 'public' release with the Apple Macintosh in 1984. A number of computer magazine articles, journal articles, book chapters, online archives and web encyclopaedia entries have traced various aspects of the history of the production of the device, although the consumption of the computer mouse does not appear to have been addressed. How did people react to the introduction of the mouse? Why did it take so long to become a mass-produced item? How did it become the single most accepted interface technology? What did the mouse represent, and what does it represent today?
Through a series of interviews with the inventor of the mouse and the designers and engineers who developed it, along with an analysis of the textual and visual promotional material of the time, this article explores the history of the mouse in the context of its original application, its subsequent improvements through work at Xerox and Apple, and its later wholesale acceptance by the personal computer industry. It is argued that this wholesale acceptance cannot be totally explained purely by the 'ease of use' provided by the computer mouse, and that particularly in the context of the workplace, there were other, less obvious but highly significant socio-political factors at play.
A text only version of this article can be downloaded for free from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive .
The full article with images can be accessed or purchased from the Design Issues website.
P. Atkinson, 'Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form'
Journal of Design History 18(2): 2005: 191-205
Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time.
Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the GRiD 'Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.
A text only version of this article can be downloaded for free from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive.
The full article with images can be accessed or purchased from the Journal of Design History website.
P. Atkinson, 'The (In)Difference Engine: explaining the disappearance of diversity in the design of the personal computer'
Journal of Design History 13(1): 2000: 59-72.
At the time of writing there is a clear perception of all office computers as being more or less identical. Discussion with users entails repetitive rhetoric as they describe a landscape of boring beige boxes. The office PC is indeed a 'clone' - an identical, characterless copy of a bland original.
Through the exploration of an archive of computer manufacturer's catalogues, this article shows how previous, innovative forms of the computer, informed by cultural references as diverse as science fiction, accepted gender roles and the discourse of status as displayed through objects, have been systematically replaced by the adoption of a 'universal' design informed only by the nondescript, self-referential world of office equipment.
The acceptance of this lack of innovation in the design of such a truly global, mass-produced, multi-purpose technological artefact has had an enormous effect on the conception, perception and consumption of the computer, and possibly of information technology itself. The very anonymity of the PC has created an attitude of indifference at odds with its potential.
A text only version of this article can be downloaded for free from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive
P. Atkinson, 'Computer Memories: The History of Computer Form'
History and Technology 15(1-2): 1998: 89-120.
This paper looks at the computer as a truly global form. The similar beige boxes found in offices across the world are analysed from the perspective of design history rather than that of the history of science and technology. Through the exploration of an archive of computer manufacturer's catalogues and concurrent design texts, this paper examines the changes that have occurred in the production and consumption of the computer in the context of the workplace, from its inception as a room-sized mainframe operated through a console of flashing lights, to the personal computer as a 'universal' form, reproduced by many manufacturers. It shows how the computer in the past has been as diverse as any other product, and asks how and why it now appears as a standardised, sanitised object. In doing so our relationship with the office computer, past and present is explored, revealing a complex history of vicissitude.
As a departure from the study of the history of computing, I am interested in the tensions between Design as a profession a specialised area of expert activity for industrial manufacture, and design as carried out on a daily basis by a huge number of people across the world in designing and making things for themselves. Where exactly are the boundaries between the two, and what happens at those boundaries?
In trying to frame these questions in order to explore them, I have edited various publications and written various conference papers, and curated public exhibitions, covering subjects from the history of the Do It Yourself movement, to the role of the professional designer.
Click here for articles and exhibitions
Atkinson, P, 'Orchestral Maneouvres in Design' in,
Van Able, B et al (Ed.) Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive , BIS Publishers, Amsterdam,2011, pp 24-31
ISBN 978-90-6369-259-9.
This book chapter looks at how the role of professional designers will have to change in the future, proposing that designers may have to become less like sole authors of work, and more like co-designers of pieces jointly created by a group of people, much like a conductor works with an orchestra to interpret and produce a composer's score.
Introduction - Back to the Future
The concepts of open design - the collaborative creation of artefacts by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals - and of individualised production - the direct digital manufacture of goods at the point of use - at first sound like something from a Utopian science fiction film. And yet here we are. We can now easily download designs from the internet, alter them at will to suit our own needs and then produce perfect products at the push of a button.
Magic.
In many ways though, there are huge similarities here to much older practices of production and consumption. The emergence of Do It Yourself as a necessity for many is lost in the mists of time, but defined as a leisure pursuit, a pastime, it emerged from a perceived need to 'keep idle hands busy' - and in the hours following a long working day, acted only to bring the Victorian work ethic from the factory into the home. DIY = Productive leisure.
Details of Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive are available on the publisher's website , or on the Premsela website .
The full chapter can be accessed openly under the Creative Commons Licence at the book's offical website .
P. Atkinson, 'Ghosts of the Profession: Open Design and Post Industrial Manufacturing', in Trautenberger, G (Ed.) Open Design , Creative Industries Styria, 2010, pp 18,20 ISBN 978-3-902748-03-4
This book section describes the impact of changes to the design profession stemming from the adoption of Open Design principles and the latest direct digital manufacturing techniques.
Introduction
For most of our history, the design and production of goods have been carried out by individuals, without the requirement for any kind of professional framework or system. In fact, only since the onset of the Industrial Revolution has the design of a product become so divorced from its manufacture and a heavily regulated process of production, distribution and consumption been put in place. As manufacturing technology progressed, and world-wide communication developed, the 20th Century saw huge refinements in the mass-production of goods to a fixed, predetermined design and the establishment of complex, global infrastructures to distribute and sell enormous numbers of identical products - a development that significantly changed the world in which we live. Well, the world is changing once more.
The Open Design reader is available from here
P. Atkinson, 'Boundaries? What Boundaries? The Crisis of Design in a Post-Professional Era'
Design Journal 13(2):2010:137-155
There is a developing awareness of the interconnected nature of design, its connections with other disciplines, and the convergence of different design disciplines as boundaries are increasingly contested and transgressed. Yet, to my mind, the most significant boundary currently not only being crossed but being dismantled is the boundary between professional and amateur, or more pertinently, between 'designer' and 'user'. Recent design methodology has stressed the importance of taking a user-centred approach, but has not envisioned a position where designer and user are essentially one and the same. This change in perspective has the potential to transform design education, design practice and the consumption of design.
As design practice became more specialised and the technology involved became more esoteric, amateur creative involvement in many disciplines became unattainable. Yet, emerging technologies today in fact offer the potential to reduce dependence on professional design, and afford access to advanced production techniques.
Describing a recent exhibition in which visitors to the gallery had the opportunity to not only create designs for products on screen, but have them actually manufactured and displayed as a part of the show, this paper describes the choices made by designers and craft makers developing such systems, and explores the tensions between professional and amateur creative activity. An exploration is also made of the issues raised for design education and the potential impact of systems that remove distinctions not only between different design disciplines but also between designer and user.
Available from Ingenta Connect
G. Beegan, P. Atkinson & D. Sugg Ryan,
Ghosts of the Profession: Amateur, Vernacular and Dilettante Practices and Modern Design, Special Issue of the Journal of Design History 21(4), 2008.
The focus of this special issue is the constantly changing relationships between amateur and professional practice during the last century or so, over the course of the ascent of modernism in design. In Europe and the USA, this period has seen the emergence and growth of the design professions and concurrently the development of design practice as an unpaid undertaking in myriad forms ranging from handicrafts, to DIY, to digital tinkering. Given the porous nature of the boundaries between professional and amateur, this introduction does not attempt to define once and for all these slippery terms. Indeed, this special issue demonstrates that it is impossible to do so. Rather, it examines the themes of influence and alterity that recur in design in diverse locations, periods and practices. As we shall see the terms 'amateur' and 'professional' can have both positive and negative connotations and are often contrasted with each other.
As a whole, the special issue demonstrates that professional and amateur practices are always connected, even when the relationship is one of repudiation. Professional practice defines itself by its distance from the unschooled practitioner yet, as the essays in this collection show, the vernacular is an inescapable part of modern design. At the same time, the professional is often a categorization that amateur designers reject, as a limitation to their creativity or originality. These essays look at the conscious appropriations of vernacular design by professionals and at the rejection by amateurs and working designers alike of professional specialization. They emphasize the complexity of the interchanges between the professional designer and the dilettante and the amateur and the vernacular maker. Professional organizations, educational standards, journals and systems of licensing are instruments through which professions try to define themselves. In the design professions, this self-definition is a continual struggle, in part because everyone engages in design through the quotidian choices we make, from the font and type size in which we set an office notice to the colour we paint our homes.
Contents:
Gerry Beegan and Paul Atkinson: Professionalism, Amateurism and the Boundaries of Design
Anna Winestein: Quiet Revolutionaries: The 'Mir Iskusstva' Movement and Russian Design
Michelangelo Sabatino: Ghosts and Barbarians: The Vernacular in Italian Modern Architecture and Design
Roni Brown: Designing Differently: the Self-Build Home
Gregory Turner-Rahman: Parallel Practices and the Dialectics of Open Creative Production
The Journal of Design History Vol. 21, Iss. 4 is available from here
P. Atkinson, Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design
Special Issue of the Journal of Design History 19(1), 2006.
The theme of this special issue arose from a perceived need to generate a discourse around the interface between 'design' taken as a function of the activity of 'professional' designers and being part of an established cycle of the design, production and consumption of goods; and 'Do It Yourself' taken as its antithesis - a more democratic design process of self-driven, self-directed amateur design and production activity carried out more closely to the end user of the goods created. Historically, productive and creative activities of this kind have allowed consumers to actively engage with design and the design process at a number of levels, and to express a more individual aesthetic unbounded by the strictures of mass-production and passive consumption. The agencies which have mediated this interface between design and DIY - the advice leaflets, manuals and guide books, exposition and retail catalogues, newspaper reports and magazines and later, radio and television programmes are of particular interest here. They are often the only evidence of what for many has been a significant element of the fabric of their everyday life - the results of the activity itself, due to their individual and personal nature, often disappearing without trace with the passing of time.
Do It Yourself acts as a democratising agency allowing people, paradoxically, to react against the principles and edicts of design connoisseurship whilst simultaneously enabling the emulation of those above them in social hierarchies. DIY has also acted as a leveller of class - overcoming the social stigma of manual labour out of sheer necessity, and permitting the working classes to engage in leisure activities from which they were previously excluded. This special issue attempts to broaden the existing work in the area by taking this aspect of design democracy as its unifying theme, and thereby expanding the notion of DIY from the narrow perspective in which it is often held.
Contents
Paul Atkinson: Introduction
Clive Edwards: Home is Where the Art is: Women, Handicrafts and Home Improvements 1750 - 1900
Fiona Hackney: Use Your Hands for Happiness: Home Craft and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women's Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s
Sarah A. Lichtman: Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America
Andrew Jackson: Labour as Leisure - The Mirror Dinghy and DIY Sailors
Teal Triggs: Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic
The Journal of Design History Vol. 19, Iss. 1 is available from here
Short reviews of the Special Issue appeared in the Guardian and even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists!
yorkpostarticle.pdf
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