How do we research and write design histories of things with important qualities that we cannot see or touch –- such as an electronic voice assistant, virtual fabric, or a modified gene? This paper is about an experiment in learning and teaching what we call ‘experimental’ design history. ‘Immaterial Design Histories’ was a 2024 RCA/V&A History of Design class that explored narrative, historiography and methodology in design history from the perspective of topics that have received little attention in the field, all of which were bound by their seeming associations with the 'immaterial': the sonic, the digital and the microscopic. As digital and biological technologies and developments in sensory histories push notions of the ‘designed object’ beyond the tangible, how might we rethink the field’s interdisciplinary and ontological borders?

This paper is authored by the class’s tutor and its six students, who present on the live experiments and dialogue that comprised the act of learning and teaching about design history while actively experimenting with how it could be different. Our encounters with so-called ‘immaterial’ artefacts invited interdisciplinary excursions via sound studies, digital anthropology and the history of science. Methodological experiments included testing the uses of ‘soundwalking’ as a design history method of listening, and experimental writing that blurred the boundaries between designed and scientific objects. The ‘immaterial’ thus acted as a provocation to challenge conventional methods and the borders around what ‘counts’ as a design history object of study.

A vision of experimental design history emerged. It enlists the senses as methodological tools to challenge institutional narratives and binaries between objectivity and subjectivity in historical research; it draws on the existing facets of design history that make it particularly well placed to investigate dissolving boundaries between the material and immaterial; and, simultaneously, embraces porosity as a methodology.