自早期近代以來，中國出口大量的瓷器、紡織品和繪畫等各種物品到英國。這種物質文化的交流對英國的社會文化、設計史的研究以及博物館的展示產生了深刻的影響，而東西二元論的觀念曾深入其中，形塑了西方人對自我與他者的認識。但近年來在物質文化以及其他的研究領域有不少新的論著，清楚呈現出世界各地物質交流及其文化移轉的豐富面貌，不但挑戰了東西二元論的舊典範，也修正了許多文化概念的缺失。我們應該走出東西二元論的框架之外，重視全球不同地域多元互動的歷史背景，並且拓展觀察的視野，從早期近代、延伸到現代、甚至當代，重新反省東方研究與西方史學、西方與他者以及他者與他者之間的關係。

This article provides a brief overview of the progress and shortcomings of the academic discipline of design history, also called material culture studies. One of the most severe shortcomings of design history is that scholars in the past have often used the crude and simplistic East/West binary for analyzing the production and consumption of material culture. This article shows how the East/West binary model has often determined what historians and curators consider as legitimate topics for inclusion into histories and exhibitions of material culture and deign. In fact, the consumptions of artwork is better described with the concept of hybridity--as for example 'Westerners' consume and influence the design of works produced in the 'East"--even while we recognize that "hybridity" rests on a false essentialism that denies the heterogeneity of all cultures. Furthermore, inter-Asian exchanges have long been just as important as any set of "East-West" exchanges. The second part of the articles discusses the generally neglected importance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the development of consumer culture, which must also take into account questions of production. Modern material culture (1800-1950 and beyond) is particularly resistant to categorization as 'eastern' or 'western'. In the final analysis, we must abandon the binary 'East/West' to understand the workings of material culture in the modern world.