The modern design profession is often considered a product of the Industrial Revolution's division of labor, which separated the ideation of artifacts from their execution. As part of the same legacy, where industrial manufacturing—as a system—was premised on the exploitation of extractive materials and fossil fuels, designers are natural-born miners. Designing entails crucial decisions on which and how much materials to mine, blast, drill, excavate, or fell. This article argues for an expanded view of the subject matter and the methods of design history, as designing with , designing without , and designing out extractive materials are crucial parameters in both the history and the future of the human-built world.

Contemporary design is global. Along with international developments in higher education, the influence of post-colonial theory, and intellectual endeavours like ‘world history’, design historians are now writing Global Design History (to use the title of a 2011 edited collection). While the nation state is no longer the only socio-cultural or political-economic unit forming our identities and experiences—if it ever were—this article examines the value of national frameworks in writing design history and asks whether moves to discard them are premature. Are national histories of design dependent upon outmoded generalisations and stereotypes? Or do they demonstrate cogent frameworks for the discussion of common socio-economic and cultural conditions and shared identities? Globalizing design history involves writing new histories of neglected regions and nations and revisionist histories informed by the findings and methods of new comparative and global histories, of celebrated industrial nations.