The book provides an overview as well as a theoretical critique for all students of this new and thriving field. It includes a specially commissioned essay by Judy Attfield on feminist approaches to writing histories of design. The author uses an interdisciplinary approach derived from a range of related fields to discuss the problems of defining design and writing about its history. In his examination of how design history has been approached in the absence of a theoretical framework, he considers the different methods that leading scholars employ and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.