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

设计是一门不断发展的学科，与经济息息相关，在创新生态系统中扮演着战略角色。本研究将结合当代产品设计与历史的学术专长，探索历史背景下创新的社会文化驱动因素，为创新的推动因素、创新的应用和影响提供新的见解。它将探讨在工业背景下的创造力的本质，以及技术和商业为创造性过程提供的机会和限制。此外，它将提供一条途径，通过应用研究知识来更好地理解商业发展，并阐明技术的规范使用，以了解国内外的文化和社会群体如何采用产品和过程来满足他们自己的要求——或者为了既定的方法而拒绝它们。设计师、历史学家、人类学家和文化理论家对各种帝国背景下的人们“驯服”技术（驯化）的过程进行了充分的探索，这项研究将揭示这一领域，并吸引广泛的学科。通过构建一系列的历史案例研究，基于当代的技术创新，如蒸汽动力，这项工作将建立一个途径，以更好地理解和暴露英国帝国主义的本质，并通过一个可管理的研究背景和结构对其作出反应。它还将揭示对工业革命和工业经济本质的见解，并有机会将这项研究背后的思想应用于世界发展中经济体的更现代的工业变革。通过在历史背景下绘制这些过程，本研究将揭示全球化经济背景下的当代设计问题。本研究解决的研究问题是：1。在19世纪英国成熟的工业经济中，创新生态系统是由什么组成的？设计对这种经济及其更广泛的帝国背景的影响是什么？这些技术和创新是如何以及以何种方式被殖民地“驯化”的？这能告诉我们这一时期帝国主义的本质是什么？总的来说，这项研究将为新的跨学科方法提供一个模型，将历史和产品设计方法和理论框架结合起来，建立一个关于创新本质和设计影响的新视角。对于设计从业者来说，这项研究也将为当代在全球化市场中接受新技术提供历史先例，并为这些过程的目的和后果提供批判性的审问空间。

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.