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Histories of Italian fashion have often highlighted the lives and careers of couturiers and individual stilisti, or the relevance of centres of Italian fashion at particular moments; however, the investigation of the actual material that constructs fashion - that is, textiles and their fibres - are overlooked.
Reports
I would like to express my gratitude to the Design History Society for awarding me the 2016 Research Publication Grant. This funding will go towards covering the costs of clearing image rights for my forthcoming book Designing for Socialist Need: Industrial Design Practice in the German Democratic Republic (Routledge, 2017).
Reports
Unmaking Things is a blog run by students of the MA History of Design course, jointly run by the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Established in 2011 as a microsite under the full name 'Unmaking Things: a Design History Studio', it was conceived as 'an online studio within which students of the course could practice their craft'.
Features
Over the last five years there has been a shift within design history away from the preoccupation with national studies in design, towards interrogating the constructedness of culture and national identity as such (eg Engelke & Hochscherf, 2015; Gimeno-Martinez, 2016) and furthermore with rethinking design within a complex set of global or transnational networks and contexts (eg Adamson, Riello & Teasley, 2011; Kirkham & Weber, 2013; Huppatz, 2015; Margolin, 2015; Edwards, 2015; Fallan & Lees-Maffei, 2016; El Maasri, PhD 2016; et al). This scholarly shift is also tangible in the re-cataloguing and re-display of design objects in museums, as was apparent in curatorial presentations at the Taipei-based International Conference on Design History and Design Studies on ‘Building Trans/national Contemporary Design History’ held in October, for example.
Reports
The Design History Society Student Conference Bursary award, granted me the generous opportunity to attend the 2016 Annual Design History Society Conference Design and Time at Middlesex University; where I presented the paper “The emergence of Social Design Through Time and Space”. This paper forms part of my ongoing PhD dissertation: “Designing a Future Practice: A genealogy of the Social Design Discourse in the UK, 1970s-present”, at the University of Brighton. The broader research project traces the inclusion of social responsibility within the design profession in the UK, from the 1970s to present in the context of conferences and exhibitions, as a backdrop from which to analyse discursive shifts.
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The Annual Design History Society conference took place between 8 and 10 September at Middlesex University in London. It was followed by The International Conference on Design History and Design Studies organised in Taipei just a few weeks later. The temporal proximity of both events poses a question about the very nature of design history–its fragmentation into global, national or regional variants. Consequently, it makes us ponder a possibility of having a fruitful conversation between scholars dealing with those different design histories. It echoes an important question raised by Penny Sparke in her review of a recent conference in Paris and published on the blog earlier this year: Where is the History of Design Going?
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