Design and innovation in the British Empire: a historical consideration of the innovation ecosystem

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Design is a constantly evolving discipline, tied to the economy and playing a strategic role in the innovation ecosystem. This research will combine academic expertise in contemporary product design and history to explore the social and cultural drivers of innovation in a historical context to provide new insight into the factors promoting innovation, its application and impact. It will explore the nature of creativity in the industrial context, and the opportunities and restrictions provided by technology and business to the creative process. Additionally, it will provide a pathway to greater understanding of business development through the application of research knowledge and illuminate the prescriptive use of technology to understand how cultural and social groups at home and overseas, adopted products and processes to meet their own requirement - or rejected them in favour of established methods. This process of 'taming' technology (domestication) by peoples in a wide variety of imperial contexts has been underexplored by designers, historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists and this research will both expose this area and appeal to a broad range of disciplines. By constructing a series of historical case studies, based on contemporary technological innovations such as steam power, the work will build a route to the greater understanding of and exposure to the nature of British imperialism and responses to it via a manageable research context and structure. It will also uncover insights into the nature of the Industrial Revolution and the industrial economy, with opportunities to apply the thinking behind this research to more modern industrial change in the developing economies of the world. By mapping these processes in an historical context, this research will shed light on contemporary design issues in a globalised economic context. The research questions addressed by this research are:1. What components constituted the innovation ecosystem in the mature industrial economy of nineteenth century Britain?2. What was the impact of design on this economy and its wider imperial context?3. How, and in what ways, were these technologies and innovations 'domesticated' by the colonised and what can this tell us about the nature of imperialism in this period?Taken together, this research will provide a model for a new interdisciplinary approach, bringing together historical and product design methodologies and theoretical frameworks to build a fresh perspective on the nature of innovation and the impact of design. For design practitioners, this research will also provide historical precedents for the contemporary reception of new technologies across a globalised marketplace, as well as provide space for a critical interrogation of the purpose and consequences of these processes.