Displaying Design: History, Criticism, and Curatorial Discourses

Design exhibitions and exhibition design have a central place in the history of design, providing us with significant milestones for understanding how designers, schools, companies, and organisations have publicly displayed work, values, and ideas. In parallel to the exercise of exhibiting design, either by following the vision of a curator or the programme of a museum or gallery, we have encountered different ways of collecting, archiving and musealizing design and its history. Considering, both the importance of design exhibitions and curatorship in the construction of design history over the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, as well as its relative peripheral dimension (within design history studies and outside a perspective dominated by Anglo-Saxon historiography), the DHS 2023 conference unfolds under the motto: Displaying Design: History, Criticism and Curatorial Discourses.

We invite authors to send creative and unpublished proposals that surprise, relearn and rethink design history and design stories.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Before 1920
Designing the Design’s Field: From Division of Labour and Division of Taste towards the New as Modern Value

1920s–1945
Social Dreaming and Social Utopia; Avant-Garde or Stand Guard; Good Design and Totally Design

1946–1960s
Media and Messages; Individual or Corporation; Production and Consumption; Retro-Culture and Counterculture

1970s–1990s
Landscapes and Languages; Radical or Rhizomatic; Formal or Informal; Semantic or Pragmatic

2000s–2020s
Post-Media and Social Media; Just-in-Time or Post-production; Fluid and Trans

We are calling for individual papers or thematic panels.

Panel proposals must gather three different papers and include their abstracts, in addition to a short description of the panel theme.

All the submitted abstracts will be double blind peer-reviewed by the scientific committee and accepted works will have a 15-minute presentation space at the conference.

Please visit the conference website to submit an abstract or register to attend