John Heskett was a British writer and lecturer on the economic, political, cultural and human value of industrial design. Heskett was a professor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology and school of design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University teaching in Design history, Design thinking, he became the acting dean of the latter. He was also a visiting professor at universities in Turkey, Japan, Chile, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Between the late 1970s and 2010, he published Industrial Design, Toothpicks and logos: design in everyday life, Design: a very short introduction and other books. These were considered as significant contributions to the history of design, to the study of design policy and latterly to the theoretical and applied articulation of the economic value created by design, first in the United Kingdom, then in the United States, and, in the last decade of his life, in Hong Kong.
With his background, Heskett began to write history considering social, economic and political as components of design. In the early 1970s, he became part of the emerging first generation of historians of design. A variety of positions followed before he obtained a design-history post at Lanchester Polytechnic. Then he taught design history and theory in Sheffield, and at Ravensbourne College, Bromley, in south-east London. In the late 1970s, John became a prominent member of a group of academics based in several of Britain's art schools, who developed the discipline of design history and theory, later to subsumed under the broader. His first book, Industrial Design, published in 1980 and was instantly successful since it provided one of the first accounts of industrial design as responses to changes in production methods and the organization of capitalism.
In United States
Heskett left the United Kingdom for the United States in 1988, first to work on a project with the Design Management Institute in Boston, and, then after 1989, to teach in the graduate programmes of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. By 1990, he was working for a Japanese consultancy and, throughout the next decades, he was invited to speak and advise at institutional and governmental levels in Mexico, Chile, Finland, Japan, Taiwan and South Africa.
In Hong Kong
Since 2004 in Hong Kong, Heskett undertook teaching and research cerning the roles of design in production and more widely in the economy as a whole, examining design policy at national levels in the United States, Europe and, increasingly, Asia. Heskett was a member of the INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award Jury from 2004 and a board member of CIID from 2007.
Personal life
Heskett is survived by his second wife, Pamela Smith, whom he married in 1992; his daughter, Ingrid, and son, Peter, both from his first marriage, to Irene Alksnis, which ended in divorce.
