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Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences––to interrogate the intersections of design and displacement. The contributors foreground objects, spaces, visual, and material practices and consider design’s role in the empire, the state, and various colonizing regimes in controlling the mass movement of people, things, and ideas across borders, as well as in social acts that resist forced mobility and immobility, or enact new possibilities. By consciously surfacing echoes, rhymes, and dissonances among ...
A new approach to theory development for practice-driven research, proposing that theory is something made in and through design. Tendencies toward “academization” of traditionally practice-based fields have forced design to articulate itself as an academic discipline, in theoretical terms. In this book, Johan Redström offers a new approach to theory development in design research–one that is driven by practice, experimentation, and making. Redström does not theorize from the outside, but explores the idea that, just as design research engages in the making of many different kinds of things, theory might well be one of those things it is making. Redström proposes that we consider th...
Covering the 1960s and 1970s, this volume explores new ways of investigating, comparing and interpreting the different domains of design culture across the Nordic countries. Challenging the traditional narrative, this volume argues that the roots of the most prominent features of Nordic design’s contemporary significance are not to be found amongst the objects for the home collectively branded as ‘Scandinavian Design’ to great acclaim in the 1950s, but in the discourses, institutions and practices formed in the aftermath of that oft-told success story, during the turbulent period between 1960 and 1980. This is achieved by employing multidisciplinary approaches to connect the domains of industrial production, marketing, consumption, public institutions, design educations, trade journals as well as public debates and civic initiatives forming a design culture. This book makes a significant contribution to current, international agendas of historiographical critique focusing on transnational relations and the deconstruction of national design histories. This book will be of interest to scholars in design, design history and Scandinavian studies.
From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.
How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement. Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between ...
Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ide...
This volume offers spatial theories of the emergent based on a careful close reading of the complete works of nineteenth-century writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll—from his nonsense fiction, to his work on logic and geometry, including his two short pamphlets on architecture. Drawing on selected key moments in our philosophical tradition, including phenomenology and sociospatial theories, Caroline Dionne interrogates the relationship between words and spaces, highlighting the crucial role of language in processes of placemaking. Through an interdisciplinary method that relates literary and language theories to theories of space and placemaking, with emphasis on the social and political experience of architectural spaces, Dionne investigates Carroll’s most famous children’s books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in relation to his lesser-known publications on geometry and architecture. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design theory, design history, architecture, and literary theory and criticism.
What is design in modern China? And what are the ecological stakes in understanding how modern Chinese design encourages us to see? This book takes up these questions though exploration into the work of three famous designers who were actively engaged with the natural sciences in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Canton, and Beijing. The designed objects asking for heightened vision into interior and exterior worlds make their way across temporal and cultural boundaries. This book, then, is also about that movement, and the emotions of the eye which support it. Porcelain dishes, textiles, magazine covers, and paintings moved the people who lived with them a century ago in China to an awareness of their edges, rims, borders as boundary lines, and to see things through those in-between forms from a new point of view; to share pleasure in colour and pattern, perhaps, but also to connect to other deeply transformative feelings at the boundary. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, art history, and Chinese studies.
Using interdisciplinary research and critical analysis, this book examines experiences through (or with) kimonos in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Bringing new perspectives to challenge the existing model of ‘Japonisme in fashion’ and introducing overlooked contacts between kimonos and people, this book explores not only fine arts and department stores but also a variety of theatres and cheap postcards. Putting a particular focus on the responses and reactions elicited by kimonos in visual, textual and material forms, this book initiates an entirely new discussion on the British adoption of Japanese kimonos beyond the monolithic view of the relationship between the East and West. This book will be of interest to scholars working in fashion studies, British studies, Japanese studies, design history and art history.
Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse is an intellectual history of design and its role in configuring the modern Norwegian nation state. Rather than a conventional national design history survey that focuses on designers and objects, this is an in-depth study of the ideologies, organizations, strategies and politics that combined might be said to have "designed" the modern nation's material and visual culture. The book analyses main tropes and threads in the design discourse generated around key institutions such as museums, organisations and magazines. Beginning with how British and continental design reform ideas were mediated in Norway and merged with a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century, Designing Modern Norway traces the tireless and wide-ranging work undertaken by enthusiastic and highly committed design professionals throughout the twentieth century to simultaneously modernise the nation by design and to nationalise modern design. Bringing the discussion up towards the present, the book concludes with an examination of how Norway's new-found wealth has profoundly changed the production, mediation and consumption of design.