Victor Margolin was an American design historian, researcher and educator.
15 Facts About Victor Margolin
1.
2.
Victor Margolin was a Professor of design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he taught from 1982 until 2006.
3.
Victor Margolin was born in 1941 in New York City and at a young age the family moved to Washington, DC, where he grew up.
4.
Victor Margolin studied English literature and film at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1963.
5.
Victor Margolin's dissertation was on the graphic design of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
6.
Victor Margolin began teaching art and design history in 1982 at the School of Art and Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago, where he was the first design historian they had hired, and taught there until retiring in 2006.
7.
At the University of Illinois Victor Margolin helped to found the academic design journal, Design Issues, which began publication in 1984.
8.
Victor Margolin became the founding editor and later a member of the editorial board.
9.
Victor Margolin edited or co-edited a series of anthologies of articles from the journal: Design Discourse, The Idea of Design, and The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments.
10.
Victor Margolin co-edited a collection of essays originating in a conference in Chicago in 1990, Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies.
11.
Victor Margolin's work was interdisciplinary, crossing between fields of design history, design studies and design research, and extending into issues of sustainability and globalisation.
12.
Victor Margolin explored and promoted socially responsible design, for example drawing on the literature of social work in an article written with his wife, Sylvia Margolin, proposing a 'social model' of design practice, in contradistinction to the dominant 'market model'.
13.
Victor Margolin had a broad view of art, and in his university office he kept a Museum of Corn-temporary Art, a collection of tourist souvenirs and suchlike popular-art ephemera.
14.
Victor Margolin was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the organizers of the LearnXDesign conference in Chicago in 2015, for his 'exemplary contributions to design history, research, education and practice' and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Design Research Society in 2016.
15.
Victor Margolin died on November 27,2019, in Washington, DC, due to complications from a spinal cord injury and dementia.