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My conference paper Design and the Notion of Contemporary Heterotopia presented an original, interdisciplinary research, which joined the field of design history with political theory and philosophy. My research combined the historical method and hermeneutics in order to critically challenge the understanding of how design shapes our world...
Reports
With the support of the Design History Society Student Travel Award, I recently went on a journey in search of surviving jewellery artefacts made in Scotland during the nineteenth century. My PhD research explores the jewellery craft in Scotland from 1780 to 1914, tracing the transformation of raw materials in the landscape to finished objects worn on the body. The study draws on surviving artefacts to understand how Scotland’s jewellery craft evolved during a time of profound economic, social and cultural change, with a focus on the shifting intersections between design and workmanship.
Reports
My project seeks to explore what can be learned by viewing and interpreting the cataclysmic social and political upheavals that have taken place in the American South during the period through a study of rhinestone tailoring, a style of performance dress and design closely associated with country music. The style juxtaposes the construction values of bespoke tailoring with bright colours, pictorial embroidery, sparkling rhinestones and the styling of the American West.
ReportsGoing for a walk can have unexpected consequences. One snow-covered winter’s day in January 2013 I set off with a friend to trace the hidden underground course of the River Fleet in London by walking the streets above. As we approached the end of the walk...
ReportsMy attendance at the Design History Society’s annual conference this year was my first foray into design history. My background is in cultural and social history, but my PhD thesis explores how Arts and Crafts design narratives were absorbed into mainstream educational initiatives in twentieth-century Britain as part of the project of democratization after the First World War...
ReportsAt “‘How We Live, and How we Might Live’: Design and the Spirit of Critical Utopianism,” I presented “Conceiving an Ideal Democratic Neighborhood” as part of “Domestic Bliss,” a panel chaired by Catharine Rossi. This paper investigated how two traveling poster exhibitions—Look at Your Neighborhood (1944) and Planning Your Neighborhood (1945)...
ReportsOn September 10th 2015, the Design History Society hosted a Publishing Workshop in conjunction with the 2015 Annual DHS Conference, “How We Live, and How we Might Live”: Design and the Spirit of Critical Utopianism at California College of the Arts in San Francisco...
Reports
The Design History Society Student Conference Bursary Award gave me the opportunity to attend the 2015 Design History Society Conference held in San Francisco at the California College of the Arts. There, I presented my paper “Revisiting Metabolic Utopia in the discourse of the Asian Sustainable City” under the panel...
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