Guest Lecture

Reconstrained Design

Online Event
June 9 2022, 15.00
James Auger

Registration

James Auger is director of the design department at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS) and co-director of the Centre de Recherche en Design (ENS / ENSCI Les Ateliers). His work explores ways through which practice-based design research can lead to more considered and democratic technological futures. This presentation will explore the existence of oblique constraints in design and the ways in which they negatively influence the role and purpose of design.

Book Launch

International Design Organizations: Histories, Legacies, Values

Online Event
May 26 2022, 13.30 BST

Alison J. Clarke

Registration

We welcome you to join us in celebrating the publication of International Design Organizations: histories, legacies, values (Bloomsbury, 2022). During the event, an international group of authors will join the editors in a shared discussion to reflect on the histories and contemporary significance of international design organizations across a wide global spread.

Read More

Symposium

Masculinities in Design: Objects, Identities and Practices

Design History and Theory,
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Online Event
May 24–25 2022

Leah Armstrong

Symposium Website

The objects, identities and practices of design are profoundly shaped by their relationship to cultures of masculinity, but there is a surprising scarcity of historical and theoretical analysis on the subject. This two day symposium (organised with Luca Csepely-Knorr, Pınar Kaygan, Zoë Thomas) will bring together interdisciplinary and international scholars to think critically about masculinities in design.

Guest Lecture

Intertwining AI & Architecture: A History

Online Event
May 19 2022, 15.00
Molly Wright Steenson

Registration

Molly Wright Steenson is the Vice Provost for Faculty and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA). As a historian of architecture and technology, her talk will focus on the intertwining of AI and architecture from a historical perspective. Wright Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017)

Lecture Series

AI, Design, and Inequality

Online Event
May 12 2022, 15.00
Mona Sloane

Registration

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. This talk will examine the intersection of design, inequality, and artificial intelligence (AI). It will map out the infrastructural nature of AI systems and examine where and how they mediate the ways in which we organize society – positioning systemic AI harm as an issue of design inequality.

Lecture

The Anxiety of the Normative: Style Biographies of the Home
Spatial Anthropologies

Royal Danish Academy,
Copenhagen, DK
6 May 2022

Alison J. Clarke

Read More

In this talk Clarke considers the starting point for the analysis of the spatial anthropology of the home as a social process that is anxiety provoking as much as it is expressive. The obvious precedent within anthropology for such an argument is the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the evidence that matters of aesthetics, taste and style, clearly transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual agency, instead operating as manifestations of socialisation and power relations in the form of ‘cultural capital’. Using ethnographic method, this talk argues for a closer look at the intertwining and immediacy of social relations and style in the making of biographies beyond the Bourdieusian model.

Lecture

Design Anthropology: Industrial Design and the Project of Post-War Development

Online Event
Bard Graduate Center, NYC, USA
5 April 2022, 6pm EDT

Alison J. Clarke

Registration

In the 1950s Cold War United States, a mode of transdisciplinary design that sought to meld anthropological method and aesthetic styling with the overt objective of implementing design as a political force. As part of her latest MIT book project, Clarke focuses on the mid-century origins of this phenomenon, acknowledging the legacy of early design anthropology as a part of post-war development policy whose legacy resides in aspects of design practice today.

Lecture Series

Designing for Out-of-reach Contexts

Online Event
March 31 2022, 15.00
John Stevens

Registration

In humanitarian innovation the beneficiaries may be separated geographically and culturally and may have suffered, or be at risk of, horrific abuses. How can we be user-centred? How can we design with, not for? John Stevens, Senior Lecturer on the Royal College of Art’s Global Innovation Design Masters programme, will share some examples of work past and in progress, and discuss the practical and ethical challenges and opportunities in this field from sanitation hardware to digital, AI-driven tools to enable and empower.

Lecture Series

Portals

Online Event
March 24 2022, 15.00
Andrew Mallinson

Registration

How can we use queer and feminist theory to see beyond the technological present? Can inclusive design practices solve inequalities found in technologies? In this talk, Feminist Internet co-founder Andrew Mallinson discusses how we might put queer and feminist theory into practice to envision new models for AI and technology. The lecture looks to understand how bodies, particularly queer and trans bodies, intersect with technology and move politically and socially through space. 

Keynote Lecture

Histories in Ecology and Design: Myths of the Circular Economy

9th Bienial Iberoamericana de Diseño (BID), Madrid
November 23 2021

Alison J. Clarke

On the occasion of the 9th Bienial Iberoamericana de diseño, Madrid, under the theme, ‘Design and Design Education after the Pandemic’ , this lecture contributes to debates around the role of circular culture and the legacies of design’s role in educating for alternative economies.

Keynote Lecture

Design Anthropology: Legacies and Futures

Online Event
Chilean Design Week, Santiago
October 28 2021, 10.00 (CLT)

Alison J. Clarke

Read More

Moderated by anthropologist Nicole Cristi (UCL) and organised by the Chilean Ministry of Culture as part of the Chilean Design Week themed ‘Transitions in Design’, this talk explores the legacies and futures of the intersection of design anthropology addressing its role in neo-liberal policy making and start-up design culture.

Guest Lecture

Writing Critical Design Biography

Online Event,
Işık University, School of Industrial Design, Istanbul
June 4 2021, 18.00 (TRT)

Alison J. Clarke

image © Papanek Foundation

On the occasion of the launch of her MIT Press monograph, Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison J. Clarke discusses with Dr. Saltuk Özemir the process of researching and writing critical biography in design. In challenging the tradition of classic hagiographical treatments, that typically cast the designer as an heroic agent of innovation, Clarke offers an alternative insight into the ways in which critical biography can open up more complex ways of understanding the historical, political and societal role of design and designers.

Keynote Lecture

Beyond Interiority: The Design Politics of Normativity

Online Event
Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen
April 16 2021, 15.00

Alison J. Clarke

This keynote lecture on the occasion of the launch of the Centre for Interior Studies, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, argues against a retreat to the notion of the interior as an expression of interiority and subjectivity by exploring the exponential expansion of trans-disciplinary studies of “the complex interior” in both contemporary architectural practice and academic discourse.

Lecture

This Time It’s Personal

Online Event
June 9 2021, 14:00

Carol Tulloch

Registration

This talk will look at the broader concept of making – the home, the self with a focus on one of Professor Carol Tulloch’s main research interests – people of the African diaspora and their rights to be, which often has been claimed through quiet or conscious activism. Tulloch is a writer, curator and Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts London (UAL), based at Chelsea College of Arts. She is also a member of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre, and Chelsea College of Arts/V&A Fellow in Black Visual and Material Culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Guest Lecture

Purity and Security: A Cultural History of Plexiglass

Online Event
May 11 2021, 16.00

Shannon Mattern

Registration

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and The City Is Not a Computer, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Her talk will focus on the contentious cultural history of Plexiglass as a material intervention.

Guest Lecture

Pandemic Objects

Online Event
April 21 2021, 14.00

Brendan Cormier

Registration

This talk will focus on Pandemic Objects, an editorial project initiated by Brendan Cormier, Senior Curator, for the Victoria and Albert Museum which has been running since the first lockdown in Spring 2020. Pandemic Objects compiles and reflects on objects that have taken on new meaning and purpose during the coronavirus outbreak. During times of pandemic, a host of everyday often-overlooked ‘objects’ (in the widest possible sense of the term) are suddenly charged with new urgency. Toilet paper becomes a symbol of public panic, a forehead thermometer a tool for social control, convention centres become hospitals, while parks become contested public commodities. By compiling these objects and reflecting on their changing purpose and meaning, Pandemic Objects aims to paint a unique picture of the pandemic and the pivotal role objects play within it.

Lecture

Design for the Real World?

Design Museum Den Bosch,
the Netherlands,
16 October 2020,
17.00 & 19.00

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

On the occasion of the opening of Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design at Design Museum Den Bosch, the exhibition initiator and co-curator, Alison J. Clarke, overturns the notion that socially responsible and sustainable design emerged from the counterculture and alternative politics of the late 1960s. Casting a critical light on the current social design movement, she reveals the macropolitics and neocolonial history in which it is embedded: the subject of her forthcoming monograph, Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021.)

Lecture

Ecology and the Sociotechnics of Design

C-Mine, Genk, Belgium
6 March 2020, 18.00

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

Further Information

This lecture explores how ”environment” and “ecology” emerged as key drivers of a newly honed politics of design in the 1970s. Clarke argues that the vision of social, environmental and transdisciplinary design, far from being part of a liberal progressive discourse, had its origins in the sociotechnics of Cold War experimentation.

Opening Exhibition Talk

Victor Papanek:
The Politics of Design

Barcelona Design Museum, Barcelona
30 October 2019, 6pm

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

Further Information

On the occasion of the opening of Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, the exhibition initiator and co-curator, Alison J. Clarke, considers the phenomenon of social design from a critical and historical perspective. Based on her research for the exhibition, and her forthcoming monograph Victor Papanek: Design for the Real World with M.I.T. Press, Clarke highlights the innovative but often politically contradictory projects of 1970s design activism.

image © Papanek Foundation

Open seminar session with Magdalena Reiter

“Make Design Open”

Seminarraum, Postgassee
June 13 2019, 10:00–12:30

Dr. Martina Grünewald

This event is part of the seminar Material Culture II „Designing Value(s) 2“

Further information

Open commons, open design, open innovation: What does this openness actually mean? What does it do, how can it be achieved and applied? What are the first steps? Who can help? Magdalena Reiter, one of the premier open design experts and educators in Austria, joins us in an open seminar session to discuss these burning questions and to introduce key concepts around open design, bringing with her numerous current examples including her own projects in open work and creative collaboration. Seminar attendance is open and free to everyone who wishes to explore this cutting-edge topic.

image © Magdalena Reiter

Symposium

Design Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism

May 16–17, 2019
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna, New Auditorium

Concept and organizer: Dr. Elana Shapira

The International Symposium “Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism” offers a contemporary scholarly perspective on the role of Jews in shaping and coproducing public and private, as well as commercial and socially oriented architecture and design in Central Europe from the 1920s to 1940s, and after their forced emigration during the 1930s in the respective countries in which they settled. It examines how modern identities evolved in the context of cultural transfers and migrations, commercial and professional networks, and in relation to the conflict between nationalist ideologies and international aspirations in Central Europe and beyond.

Collage by Andrew Sommerfield, c.1961. Courtesy of Paul Sommerfeld.

Keynote Lecture

Politics of Design: Manufacturing the “Undeveloped Peoples”

Design and Authority
4T Design and Design History Conference
May 2–4 2019, İzmir, Turkey

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

Further information

In the early 1960s, leading design schools in the United States embraced for the first time an overt Cold War pedagogic strategy, under the title “design for the undeveloped peoples”. This lecture explores how design took on a new authority during this period, in which urban black Americans, the Global South and the working class rural poor were conflated as one homogenised problem that only industrial design could resolve. As part of the ‘Design And Authority’ Conference, Izmir, 2019, the lecture asks how much this legacy persists in the practices of contemporary social design.

image © University of the Applied Arts, Papanek Foundation

Design as Politics Lecture Series 2019

Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth

“Catalog for the Post Human: Reflections on the Future of Human Enhancement”

Seminarraum, Postgasse
June 19 2019, 10:00–12:00

www.parsonscharlesworth.com

Image: Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth, Catalog For The Post Human (2014)

Working across a variety of media, Parsons & Charlesworth create objects, exhibits, texts and images that encourage reflection upon the current and future state of our designed culture. Considering objects as agents of change, the studio explores new typologies and prototypes alternate ways of living, often using narrative and speculation to propose scenarios that comment on contemporary issues. Founded by designers Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth as a formal art and design studio in 2014 after years of informal collaboration, Parsons & Charlesworth became the grounding place to explore how object design can play a greater cultural role in the exploration of subjects such as climate change, personal survival and happiness.

Design as Politics Lecture Series 2019

Roman Kirschner

“Entangled Environments and Some Questions on Methods”

Seminarraum, Postgasse
June 5 2019, 10:00–12:00

www.romankirschner.net

Image: Roman Kirschner, Roots (2018)

Roman Kirschner is an artist, researcher, writer, teacher and sometimes curator working across disciplines. His current research interests are social metabolisms and ecologies, transformative materials, spatial strategies, research methods and the mutual influence of material, imagination and epistemology. After studies of philosophy, art history and audiovisual art he wrote a PhD on “The Paradigm of Material Activity in the Plastic Arts“ at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (GER). He was the project leader of the arts-based research project ”Liquid Things“ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT). Currently, he is an associated lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (CH). His works were shown in exhibitions in Europe, Asia, North and South America.

Design as Politics Lecture Series 2019

Noam Toran

“One Leg Up and a Hole in the Ground”

Seminarraum, Postgasse
May 22 2019, 10:00–12:00

www.noamtoran.com

Image: Noam Toran, A Shining Meteor … (2018)

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico (1975). Lives and works in Rotterdam. Teaches at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam and HEAD, Geneva. Noam Toran’s work involves the creation of intricate narratives developed as a means to disrupt hegemonic historiographies. Drawing from marginalised or neglected histories, Toran reflects upon the interrelations of memory, erasure, mythology, identity, and the essential force of storytelling as embodied in archives, film, literature, and performance. The work is materialised through dramatizations that take the form of installations, educational models, films, performances and scripts. The work is exhibited, screened and published internationally, notably at the CNAC Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Venice Architecture Biennale, Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Witte de With (Rotterdam), MuHKA (Antwerp), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Musée d’Art Contemporain (St Etienne), Baltic Contemporary (Newcastle), Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), Musée D’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Kulturhuset (Stockholm) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin).

Design as Politics Lecture Series 2019

Ruth Sonderegger

“Kritik als Prozess”

Seminarraum, Postgasse
May 8 2019, 10:00–12:00

Further Information

Ruth Sonderegger is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. From 2001 to 2009 she worked as Associate and Full Professor in the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research centers on the history and systematics of the concept of critique in philosophy and other disciplines, and examines art as a possible form of critique. She is the co-editor of, amongst others, Foucaults Gegenwart: Sexualität – Sorge – Revolution (2016); Spaces for Criticism: Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses (2015); Pierre Bourdieu und Jacques Rancière: Emanzipatorische Praxis denken (2014); Art and the Critique of Ideology After 1989 (2013); Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (2012); Golden Years: Queere Subkultur zwischen 1959 und 1974 (2006); and author of Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels: Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktion und der Eigensinn der Kunst (2000). She lives and works in Vienna.

Design as Politics Lecture Series 2019

Daniela Gruber

“EIN-SICHTEN”

Seminarraum, Postgasse
April 10 2019, 10:00–12:00

www.danielagruber.at

Image: Daniela Gruber, “Und du warum bist du immer noch da?” “Naja, weil ich gerade mit dir spreche.” (2016)

Daniela Gruber is a graphic designer from Graz. She studied Visual Communication at the FH Joanneum in Graz (BA) and the University of the Arts Zurich (MA). Her work explores social topics such as illiteracy and autism through ethnographic and explorative design approaches. The resulting investigations often take the form of books that show the investigated phenomena in unusual, engaging and experienceable ways.

Opening Keynote Lecture

Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design and the Role of Design Education

Bauhaus Festival School FUNDAMENTAL,
Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
March 20 2019, 19.00

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

Further information

The émigré trajectories of Bauhaus designers, and the international impact they made on the objects and discourse of modernism forms a prominent theme of design history. This lecture considers another émigré story – that of Austrian-American Victor Papanek, whose work was defined by an ambivalence toward the functional modernism espoused by his fellow émigrés. It examines how his life as an émigré generated an alternative design approach, and the founding of socially responsible design as a pedagogic force. This lecture is delivered as part of the Bauhaus Dessau Centenary celebrations, under the theme School Fundamental.

image © University of the Applied Arts, Papanek Foundation

Workshop

Digital Currencies and Smart Contracts: Bitcoin, Blockchain & Co.

University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Design History and Theory, Seminar Room
10 January 2019, 10:00-12:30

Guest hosted by Anita Posch, organised by Martina Grünewald

A highlight of this semester’s seminar “Material Culture I: Designing Value(s)”, Bitcoin and Blockchain educator Anita Posch guest hosts an open workshop session on digital currencies and smart contracts. We will discuss key questions cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies raise with regard to contemporary as well as future forms of collaborative design practice, open innovation, economic development and the internet as a facilitator and guardian of social democracy. Punctual attendance is critical as Ms. Posch will take us on a short walking tour to the next Bitcoin ATM.

Public Lecture

Design Revolution

Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
22 November 2018, 18:30

Prof. Alison J. Clarke

This open lecture, by Alison J. Clarke, co-curator of the exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, explores the design revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s when Papanek’s book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change emerged as a manifesto for the politics of design and sustainability. Looking beyond the clichéd images of student activism and hippiedom, the lecture frames Papanek’s design, networks and interventions in the context of the late Cold War geo-political historical context; arguing that design’s newly honed political imperative was borne of the U.S. military-industrial complex, as much of idealistic counter cultures.

Interview: ‘Design Is Never Neutral’