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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
image © Papanek Foundation
In Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison Clarke explores the social design movement through the life of its leading pioneer, the Austrian American designer, theorist, and activist Victor Papanek. Papanek’s 1971 best seller, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change has been translated into twenty-two languages and never fallen out of print. Its politics of social design, anti-corporatism, and environmental sustainability have found renewed pertinence in the twenty-first century and dominate the agendas of design schools today. Drawing extensively on previously unexplored archival sources, Clarke uncovers and contextualizes the movement’s controversial origins and contradictions.
Within the fields of design and environmental studies, Papanek is celebrated as a guru of alternative economics and progressive design. Yet Clarke overturns the notion that socially responsible and sustainable design emerged from the counterculture and alternative politics of the late 1960s and 1970s. Instead, she exposes its roots in the late Cold War technocratic culture and policies of US military and development interventionism. She examines the shift away from industrial design as an expression of industrial rationalism toward flawed attempts at humanitarian intervention through quasi-anthropological approaches and design strategies aimed at the socially and culturally excluded. She also casts a critical light on the current social design movement by revealing the macropolitics and neocolonial history in which it is embedded.
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.
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.
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
Shannon Mattern
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Co-curated by Prof. Alison J. Clarke , a co-operation with Vitra Design Museum, Papanek Foundation and Museu del Disseny Barcelona
Installation view, “Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design,” 2018 © Vitra Design Museum, photo: Norbert Miguletz
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
Organised by Prof. Alison J. Clarke and Francisco Laranjo
The Papanek Symposium 2019 investigates design’s inherent tensions in the context of rising global far-right populism and the asphyxiating manipulation of information in a post-truth era. What potential is there for envisaging alternative political futures, and what role might design, and its politics, have in contributing to those futures? Debating the future of design: The places, ideas and means by which the politics of design, and the design of politics come together.
This event is part of the seminar Material Culture II „Designing Value(s) 2“
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
2019, 10 January
Guest hosted by Anita Posch, organised by Martina Grünewald
Workshop
Digital Currencies and Smart Contracts: Bitcoin, Blockchain & Co.
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Design History and Theory, Seminar Room
2018, 22 November
Prof. Alison J. Clarke
Public Lecture
Design Revolution
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
2018, 8–9 November
Symposium
Freud and the Émigré. Austrian Émigrés and Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s
Concept by Elana Shapira with Daniela Finzi, Research Director of the Sigmund Freud Museum
Freud Museum, Vienna
2018, 15 October
Alison J. Clarke
Keynote Lecture
‘Design Anthropology and Spatial Relations’
Bauhaus Dessau
Dessau, Germany
2018, 5 October
Alison J. Clarke
Keynote Lecture
‘Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology, and Global Activism’
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
Providence, USA
2018, 28 September
Alison J. Clarke
Panel discussion
‘Can Design Save the World?’
Vitra Design Museum
Weil-am-Rhein, Germany
2018, 22 July
Leah Armstrong
Panel discussion
‘Fashion Utopias’
Transfashional network, State of Fashion 2018
Arnhem, Netherlands
2018, 6 July
Leah Armstrong
Book Launch: ‘Fashioning Professionals’
London College of Fashion, UK
2018, 28 May
Dr Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
‘Toolkits for change: American systems furniture and the open plan office’
Seminar room, Design History and Theory
Postgasse 6
2018, 17 May
Elana Shapira
‘Jewish clients and architects, Viennese modernism and the sociology of aesthetics’
Slovak National Library,
Bratislava, Slovakia
2018, 12 April
Alison J. Clarke
Lecture: ‘The Politics of Design’
École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs
EnsadLab, ‘Science of Doubt’ series,
Paris, France
2018, 10 March
Alison J. Clarke
‘Design Anthropology: Agencies, Inclusions and Exigencies’
Conference: The Agents of Design/Design as Agency
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
2017, 17 December
Alison J. Clarke
Symposium: Bauhaus Lab 2017: Between Chairs
Bauhaus Dessau, Germany
2017, 10 December
Elana Shapira
‘Adolf Loos und seine Schneider: Über Mode und Innendekoration in Wien um 1900’
Imperial Furniture Collection, Vienna
2017, 30 November
Elana Shapira
‘People are more important than things: Austrian Émigré designers in Britain’
Conference: Designs on Britain: Jewish Émigré Designers, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
2017, 9–10 November
Alison J. Clarke and Leah Armstrong(Co-Convenors)
‘International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values’
In collaboration with Centre for Design History, University of Brighton
2017, 27 October
Alison J. Clarke
‘Design as Futurism and its Discontents’
Keynote delivered on occasion of award of Honorary Doctorate, University of Southern Denmark, Odense
2017, 21 October 2017
”Chrono-Voyeurism: A Design Anthropology of Retro Food’
Alison J. Clarke
Experiencing Food: International Food Design & Food Studies Conference, University of Lisbon, Portugal
2017, 22 September 2017
Alison J. Clarke (Director and Co-organiser) and Leah Armstrong(Co-Organiser)
‘Papanek Symposium 2017: Design and Ethics’
Austrian Embassy, London
Official partner of London Design Festival 2017
Papanek Symposium 2017
2017, 6 September
Leah Armstrong
‘Working from home’: Representing the Professional Designer in Post-War Britain’
Conference: Mediating Cultural Work
University of Leicester, UK
2017, 28 June
Clemens Winkler
‘Political Clouds’
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2017, 24 May
Burkhard Meltzer
‘Vitamin Water: How Design has become Art’s Critical Agent’
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2017, 10 May
Julijonas Urbonas
‘Thingly Philosophy, Transtextuality and Material Hermeneutics in Art and Design’
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2017, 3 May
Eric Anderson
‘Colour Cure: Freud, Optical Science and Design Theory’
Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna
2017, 26 April
Daisy Ginsberg
‘The Dream of Better’
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2017, 26 January
V&A Design Culture Salon in collaboration with Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Speakers: Alison J. Clarke, Martina Grünewald, Guy Julier, Matthias Tarasiewicz
“Alternative Exchange: How Does Design Create Alternative Economies in Contemporary Design Culture?”
Angewandte Innovation Lab (AIL), Vienna
2017, 26 January
Guy Julier
Guest Lecture: ‘Economies of Design: Materialising Finance’
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2017, 23 January
Leah Armstrong
Invited speaker: ‘Transparency in Design: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Endarkenment’
Technical University, Vienna
2017, 12 January
Dr Stefanie Wuschitz
Guest Lecture: ‘Maker Culture: A Feminist Perspective’
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2016, 24 November
Leanne Wierzba
Guest Lecture: ‘What is Luxury and for whom?’
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2016, 23 November
Leah Armstrong
Work-in-Progress, ‘A new Image for a New Profession: Self-image and Representation in the Professionalisation of Design 1945-1960’
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2016, 20 November
Elana Shapira
Guest Lecture: Annual Zilk Lecture, ‘Un-designed Identities: Jewish Patrons and Viennese Modernism’
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2016, 9 November
Ufaq Inam
‘Bazaar Economy & Traditional Medicine: An Ethnographic investigation in Papad Mandi, Lahore
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2016, 26 October
Leah Armstrong
‘Looking Inwards and Facing Outwards: the Society of Industrial Artists in Britain 1930-1967’
ICDHS Conference, Taipei, Taiwan
2016, 13-14 October
Dr Elana Shapira
‘Design Dialogue: Jewish Contributions to Viennese Modernism’
MAK Design Forum, Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna
2016, 12 October
Elisabeth Peterman, PhD Candidate, Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Work-in-Progress: ‘Ways to Unlock the Trend Industry’
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2016, 23-25 September
Alison J. Clarke
Stamps Design Salon, Detroit Design Festival
2016, 9 September
Leah Armstrong
Chair: ‘Time, Objects and the Experience of the Home’
Design History Society Annual Conference Middlesex UK
2016, 23 June
Onkar Kular, Stanley Picker Fellow in Design and Professor in Design Interventions, HDK, Gothenburg University.
Designing Interventions
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2016, 8 June
Carmen Weisskopf, !Mediengruppe Betnik
Random Darknet Shopping Bots, Mail Art and Surveillance Algorithms
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2016, 2 June
Björn Franke and Alison J. Clarke
Undesign
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
Convened as part of the FWF Research Project “Émigré Design Networks and the Founding of Social Design”
Full Programme
2016, 25 May
Edward Saunders
Negotiating Questions of Method in Biography
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2016, 23 May
Christopher Long
Central European Modernists and the Varieties of Southern California Design
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2016, 18 May
Alison J. Clarke
Keynote Lecture: ‘Design Anthropology: Reassessing Historiography and Critical Methods in Design Studies’
University of Antwerp
2016, 4 May
Heng Zhi
Understanding Shenzai
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2016, 20 April
Tido von Oppeln
Design Exhibited: Versuche zu einer Praxis der Theorie im Design
Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts
2015, 13 November
Alison J. Clarke
‘Designs for the Real World: Cold War “Soft” Diplomacy and the Emergence of Radical Design Anthropology in 1960s Design & Engineering’
Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, UK
2015, 30–31 October
Alison J. Clarke
‘Buckminster Fuller’s Reindeer Abattoir: The Influence of Finland’s North on 1960s Radical Design’
North as Meaning in Design and Art
Kulttuuritalo Korundi, Lapland
2015, 14 October
Book Discussion with John Thackara
‘How to thrive in the next economy’
Café Prückel, Wien
2015, 24–25 September
Alison J. Clarke
‘Work Activity: The Politics of Work and Design in a Neo-Liberal Economy’
Fair Design: International Conference on Design Theory and Criticism
Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Design, Warsaw, Poland
2015, 11–13 September
Alison J. Clarke
‘How we live and how we might live: Design and the Spirit of Critical Utopianism’
Annual Design History Society Conference 2015
California College of Arts, San Francisco, USA
2015, 8 June
Alison J. Clarke
‘Buckminster Fuller’s Reindeer Abattoir and Other Designs for the Real World’
NORDES 2015 Conference, Design Ecologies
University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden
2015, 27-28 May
Alison J. Clarke and Elana Shapira (Co-Organisers)
Emigre Design Culture: Histories of the Social in Design
Papanek Symposium 2015
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2015, 20 February
Alison J. Clarke
How dependent is the design profession on cultures of migration?
Design Culture Salon
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
2014, 26 September – 15 December
Alison J. Clarke (Co-Curator)
Exhibition: ‘How Things Don’t Work: The Dreamspace of Victor Papanek’
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design,
New York, USA
2014, 4 December
Alison J. Clarke (Co-Curator and Panellist)
Panel Discussion, ‘Permanent Garbage: Victor Papanek and Beautiful Visions of Failed Systems’
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design,
New York, USA
2014, 18–19 September
Alison J. Clarke
Keynote: ‘Design Dispersed: The Origins of the Social in Design’
Design Culture: Object, Discipline and Practice
University of Southern Denmark, Kolding
2014, 3 June
Adam Drazin
Setting up a laboratory of material life: Can anthropology and the studio mix?
Lecture Series, Department of Design History and Theory
University of Applied Arts Vienna
2014, 22–23 May
Björn Franke
‘The Future, the Possible and the New’
‘Multiply Futures’: International Design Symposium
Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria
2014, 5 May
Alison J. Clarke
‘Design Activism and the Cultural Cold War’
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture
New York, USA
2014, 13–16 April
Bryleigh Morsink
‘New Zealand’s Pioneering Emigre Architects: An Exceptional Legacy in the South Pacific’
Crossing Boundaries: Rethinking European Architecture Beyond Europe
University of Palermo, Italy
2014, 10 April
Josef Moser
Das Krankenhaus als Designobjekt: Entwicklung, Tendenzen
Lecture Series
Department of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna
2014, 7–10 April
Alison J. Clarke
Public lecture as Robert W. Deutsch Visiting Scholar Social Design
‘Designer for the Real World’
MICA, Baltimore, USA
2014, 24 April
Alison J. Clarke
‘Where Social Science Meets Design’
Configuring Light/Staging the Social: A New Research Agenda
London School of Economics, UK
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.
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’
Over the last decade social design has evolved as a method, as much as an output, of design practice underpinned by the boom in arts-based design research. This talk delivered as part of the PhD Design Festival 2019 examines the origins, and some of the discontents, of this movement asking who the audience for the ‘social’ in design really is, and how far design can go in addressing the micro-politics of everyday life.
The keynote addresses the issues raised in an international symposium celebrating the ways in which transdisciplinary creative practices generate new approaches to sustainable innovation. Tracing debates of the sustainable to their origins in earlier design practice, the lecture asks how a new generation of designers, liberated from the disciplinary conventions of previous generations, might address a future in which socio-environmental have moved from the periphery to the centre of design practice.
