Elif Süsler-Rohringer, MA MA

Cut, trace, design, repeat: People and Patterns in Flux 1970–2000

This research project focuses on the creative dimension of labor migration in the textile industries between Turkey, Germany and Austria, highlighting that cultural exchanges between these countries were not linear and one-sided, but entangled. It examines the creative adaptations of design in conjunction with migrants’ transnational fashion experiences from the tailors’ and dressmakers’ perspective. It aims to investigate these sartorial exchanges and transfers of knowledge, as well as gaps and disjunctures from the 1970s to the 2000s. To do that it deals with two kinds of mobilities creating intersections; displacement and globally circulating design models (i.e. commercial paper patterns for clothing). It traces both transfers and the lack thereof through a combination of an actor-centered approach with a socially embedded media analysis.

Detail from a paper pattern, 1990s (Elif Süsler-Rohringer)

Eva Gjessing, MA Architect, Ph.D. Fellow in Edu. Theory and Curriculum Studies, Material Culture
University of Aarhus, Arts.

School Design, Community and Care

The research project focus on welfare architecture and social sustainability. It shares light on how Danish School Design 2015-2020 materialize and produce new practices and everyday life in school. During the last decades the political purpose of school building in Denmark has changed from being an embracement of national pedagogical ideas to being the remedy of promoting a global vision of school. This vision is elaborated by pedagogical consultants in programs for future schools in Denmark relaunching the open-plan school from the 1970s though bigger in size and differently organized. The research applies critical theory to scrutinize the dialectics between school programs, didactical practices in school and the users experiences of community and care with the practices.

Mgr. David Bláha
Theory and History of Modern and Contemporary Art
Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague

Josef Kaplický and the Politics of Bohemian Glass

The research project investigates how the now-familiar term “Bohemian glass” was shaped and promoted by the socialist state administration of Czechoslovakia during the 1940s and 1950s, and what role it played in the context of state propaganda at the Cold War international exhibitions. Josef Kaplický (1899–1962) was a Czech painter, sculptor and designer who became one of the most important figures active in the post-war development of Czechoslovak glass design, which later led to international recognition of the then revolutionary glass sculptures. Because many of Kaplický’s students became world-renowned pioneers of glassmaking, special emphasis is put on the analysis of his pedagogical and theoretical approach and its gradual development in relation to the changes in the Czechoslovak glass industry.

Taavi Hallimäe

MA Cultural Theory and Philosophy, PhD candidate Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts

The research project studies the role of everyday objects – specifically consumer items created by Soviet designers as copies of Western products – and how it shaped Soviet society on the eve of its dissolution, in the late 1980s. It focuses specifically on planning, designing, constructing and the making of mass-produced everyday objects made from plastic in Soviet Estonia, in the factories of Salvo and Estoplast. While Western design was only partly accessible for the general public of the Soviet Union, copying brought it closer, but also determined the distance between what was produced in the West and what was copied in the Soviet Union. This research not only shows how human imagination is influenced by products, technology and economic systems, but how Western design – with the help of Soviet workers, machines and factories – developed the notion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ in late Soviet culture.

Image series on traditional medicine, Lahore, Pakistan (Ufaq Inaam)

Ufaq Inaam, M.Phil, MFA, PhD
Doctoral Scholarship – Higher Education Commission Pakistan
Lecturer, Design Department, College of Art & Design, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan

Informal Economies of Design: Material and Visual Culture of Traditional Medicine in Popular Urban Spaces of Lahore, Pakistan.

From the collage of ephemeral therapeutic posters to the electric visuals of traditional medicine, of Pakistan’s Lahore metropolis are filled with the exuberance of transient and informal graphic design.

This doctoral research project explores how a particular ubiquitous graphic identity is formed through the consumption of modern and traditional simultaneously and how religion is materialized in the commercial construction of objects. Founded on visual ethnography, which is instituted on biographies of advertising graphics in popular urban spaces and aesthetics of domestic spaces, this study reports the relativity of consuming the desired ‘modern-ness’ and how a specific class acts as an agency of consumption of a traditional kind of modernity.

Heng Zhi, Mag.Des.Ind. PhD
Senior Lecturer/ Post-Doc FWF Researcher

Redefining Design – Reflective Design Activities in Contemporary China

Kathrina Dankl, Dr. phil. DI (FH)
Managing Director, Studio Dankl and Ass. Prof. Design School Kolding, Denmark

Very Experienced People: An Ethnography of Design, the Elderly and Style

External Examiner: Prof. Jeremy Myerson, Director Helen Hamlyn Centre RCA, UK

Elisabeth Petermann, Dr. phil.

Unravelling the Culture of Trend Forecasting: An ethnographic study of the legitimising, representing, mediating, and value-generating practices of the European trend industry

External Examiner: Prof. Joanne Entwistle, King’s College London, UK

Martina Grünewald, Dr. phil. BBA, MA
Promotio sub auspiciis, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Doing Design, Practising Thrift – Material Culture and the Social Construction of Value at Auctions in Vienna

External Examiner: Prof. Harvey Molotch, New York University, USA

Özlem Savas, MSc, PhD
Ass. Prof. Design and Communication, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Taste Diaspora: The Aesthetic and Material Practice of Belonging

External Examiner: Prof. John Storey, University of Sunderland, UKDI

Sandra Dittenberger, Mag. Dr. phil.
Univ.-Prof. New Design University, St. Pölten

Lived Mobility – The Experience of Personal Mobility

External Examiner: Prof. Ina Wagner, Technical University Vienna

Anna Weiß, Mag. Dr. phil.
Univ.-Ass. Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

Hyper-Domesticity: Gender and the Contemporary Interior

External Examiner: Edelbert Köb, Former Director MUMOK