International Symposium

Design Anthropology: Critical Speculation

Online Event
March 16–17 2023
University of Applied Arts Vienna
The New School for Social Research NYC

Further Information

Registration

Design Anthropology: Critical Speculations, a collaborative online symposium organised between the Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the anthropology department of The New School for Social Research, NYC, considers the critical design politics of re-purposing design ‘for the real world’, bringing together cutting-edge designers, social scientists, curators and historians. International speakers include Michelle D. Commander, Bodhi Chattopadhyay, Elizabeth Chin, Jonathan M. Square, Victor Buchli, David Jeevendrampillai, Nicole Cristi, Elaine Gan, and Brandi T. Summers.

Lecture series

Education, Architecture, Policy

Post-war exchanges on educational policy and school building

Holger Zaunstöck, Anna-Sophia Kruscha, Oliver Sukrow, Mitja Zorc, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Sanja Petrović Todosijević, Maja Lorbek, Maren Elfert

Online Event
March 2023 – June 2023

More information

Registration

Within the framework of the research project “Transnational School Construction”, we are organising a series of lectures on post-war education and school architecture. Topics include long-term notions of schooling and educational utopias, post-war educational reforms in GDR, Yugoslavia and Austria, historical and contemporary concepts of school interiors, and educational planning in the 1960s. 

Guest Lecture

Solidarity by Design: OSPAAAL

Lani Hanna

Online Event
May 24, 14:00

Registration

This lecture considers political solidarity and internationalism through print and design culture. Armed by Design was an exhibition, print portfolio, and is a forthcoming book centering the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). OSPAAAL was a Cuban design and publishing organization that emerged after the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. The talk will explore questions about design language, publishing and distribution solidarity, and contemporary internationalism. Lani Hanna is a collective member at Interference Archive, has been involved in organizing Armed by Design since its conception, has written about OSPAAAL for other publications and is one of the editors of the forthcoming book. 

Guest Lecture

Global Design + Image Making from a South Asian Feminist lens

Mira F. Malhotra

Online Event
May 17 14:00

Registration

Mira Felicia Malhotra is the principal designer and founder of Studio Kohl, a boutique design house based in Mumbai. In this talk, Mira will showcase Studio Kohl’s practice championing topics such as gender and mental health issues, that adhere to feminist ideals that inform its practice. The ambition is to present a South Asian perspective authored by South Asians themselves and a rightful taking back of the narratives on global platforms. Through the lecture we explore a landscape fraught with many problems: successfully balancing client expectations, a fluctuating, demanding market, a rapidly growing design landscape, and a fervent dedication to the design problems at hand.

Guest Lecture

Cultures of Connection

Lucy Norris

Online Event
May 3, 14:00

Registration

What are the design challenges to bridging local capacities and building new material ecologies? This talk will explore the potential for young designers to engage with regenerative material systems and develop appropriate technologies of making, with a focus on fibre and regional infrastructures. Prof Dr Lucy Norris teaches Design Research at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, and is affiliated to the DFG Cluster of Excellence ‘Matters of Activity’. Lucy trained as a social anthropologist at University College London, and has researched cultural economies of textile making, use, reuse and recycling in India and the UK, and the global circulation of waste clothing.

Guest Lecture

A Feminist Life

Dina Benbrahim

Online Event
April 26 14:00

Registration

Dina Benbrahim is a Moroccan multidisciplinary creative who uses an intersectional feminist lens to investigate design for visibility, civic action, and social justice for minoritized communities to collectively reimagine equitable futures. She is an Endowed Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at University of Arkansas, and also the founder and director of Hello Departures, an experimental design space at the intersection of pedagogy, strategy, and community. Dina will take us on a journey on how her feminist beliefs have shaped and influenced her unconventional approach to design education. Through her work, she hopes to inspire the next generation of designers to identify and implement, with communities, creative possibilities that can help address our most pressing challenges and bring meaningful change.

Guest Lecture

Design Me Different

Beatrace Angut, Lorika Oola

Online Event
March 29 14:00

Registration

Beatrace Angut Lorika Oola is founder of the digital information platform Fashion Africa Now and is also a guest lecturer at the University for Arts in Bremen. In this lecture she will give an introduction to Fashioning Africa and Afrocentric perspectives. Black aesthetics are increasingly shaping the fashion landscape, from Pyer Moss to Kenneth Ize, Thebe Magugu, Sindiso Khumalo and Loza Malèombho, to name a few. A booming fashion scene from Africa and its diaspora is gaining international attention, breaking stereotypes, dispelling clichés and reclaiming narratives. What role do colonial continuities play in the fashion system? What is it about “wokefishing” in fashion?

Guest Lecture

Reconstrained Design

Online Event
June 9 2022, 15.00
James Auger

Registration

James Auger is director of the design department at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS) and co-director of the Centre de Recherche en Design (ENS / ENSCI Les Ateliers). His work explores ways through which practice-based design research can lead to more considered and democratic technological futures. This presentation will explore the existence of oblique constraints in design and the ways in which they negatively influence the role and purpose of design.

Book Launch

International Design Organizations: Histories, Legacies, Values

Online Event
May 26 2022, 13.30 BST

Alison J. Clarke

Registration

We welcome you to join us in celebrating the publication of International Design Organizations: histories, legacies, values (Bloomsbury, 2022). During the event, an international group of authors will join the editors in a shared discussion to reflect on the histories and contemporary significance of international design organizations across a wide global spread.

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Symposium

Masculinities in Design: Objects, Identities and Practices

Design History and Theory,
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Online Event
May 24–25 2022

Leah Armstrong

Symposium Website

The objects, identities and practices of design are profoundly shaped by their relationship to cultures of masculinity, but there is a surprising scarcity of historical and theoretical analysis on the subject. This two day symposium (organised with Luca Csepely-Knorr, Pınar Kaygan, Zoë Thomas) will bring together interdisciplinary and international scholars to think critically about masculinities in design.

Guest Lecture

Intertwining AI & Architecture: A History

Online Event
May 19 2022, 15.00
Molly Wright Steenson

Registration

Molly Wright Steenson is the Vice Provost for Faculty and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA). As a historian of architecture and technology, her talk will focus on the intertwining of AI and architecture from a historical perspective. Wright Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017)

Lecture Series

AI, Design, and Inequality

Online Event
May 12 2022, 15.00
Mona Sloane

Registration

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. This talk will examine the intersection of design, inequality, and artificial intelligence (AI). It will map out the infrastructural nature of AI systems and examine where and how they mediate the ways in which we organize society – positioning systemic AI harm as an issue of design inequality.

Lecture

The Anxiety of the Normative: Style Biographies of the Home
Spatial Anthropologies

Royal Danish Academy,
Copenhagen, DK
6 May 2022

Alison J. Clarke

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In this talk Clarke considers the starting point for the analysis of the spatial anthropology of the home as a social process that is anxiety provoking as much as it is expressive. The obvious precedent within anthropology for such an argument is the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the evidence that matters of aesthetics, taste and style, clearly transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual agency, instead operating as manifestations of socialisation and power relations in the form of ‘cultural capital’. Using ethnographic method, this talk argues for a closer look at the intertwining and immediacy of social relations and style in the making of biographies beyond the Bourdieusian model.

Lecture

Design Anthropology: Industrial Design and the Project of Post-War Development

Online Event
Bard Graduate Center, NYC, USA
5 April 2022, 6pm EDT

Alison J. Clarke

Registration

In the 1950s Cold War United States, a mode of transdisciplinary design that sought to meld anthropological method and aesthetic styling with the overt objective of implementing design as a political force. As part of her latest MIT book project, Clarke focuses on the mid-century origins of this phenomenon, acknowledging the legacy of early design anthropology as a part of post-war development policy whose legacy resides in aspects of design practice today.

Lecture Series

Designing for Out-of-reach Contexts

Online Event
March 31 2022, 15.00
John Stevens

Registration

In humanitarian innovation the beneficiaries may be separated geographically and culturally and may have suffered, or be at risk of, horrific abuses. How can we be user-centred? How can we design with, not for? John Stevens, Senior Lecturer on the Royal College of Art’s Global Innovation Design Masters programme, will share some examples of work past and in progress, and discuss the practical and ethical challenges and opportunities in this field from sanitation hardware to digital, AI-driven tools to enable and empower.

Lecture Series

Portals

Online Event
March 24 2022, 15.00
Andrew Mallinson

Registration

How can we use queer and feminist theory to see beyond the technological present? Can inclusive design practices solve inequalities found in technologies? In this talk, Feminist Internet co-founder Andrew Mallinson discusses how we might put queer and feminist theory into practice to envision new models for AI and technology. The lecture looks to understand how bodies, particularly queer and trans bodies, intersect with technology and move politically and socially through space. 

Keynote Lecture

Histories in Ecology and Design: Myths of the Circular Economy

9th Bienial Iberoamericana de Diseño (BID), Madrid
November 23 2021

Alison J. Clarke

On the occasion of the 9th Bienial Iberoamericana de diseño, Madrid, under the theme, ‘Design and Design Education after the Pandemic’ , this lecture contributes to debates around the role of circular culture and the legacies of design’s role in educating for alternative economies.

Keynote Lecture

Design Anthropology: Legacies and Futures

Online Event
Chilean Design Week, Santiago
October 28 2021, 10.00 (CLT)

Alison J. Clarke

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Moderated by anthropologist Nicole Cristi (UCL) and organised by the Chilean Ministry of Culture as part of the Chilean Design Week themed ‘Transitions in Design’, this talk explores the legacies and futures of the intersection of design anthropology addressing its role in neo-liberal policy making and start-up design culture.

Guest Lecture

Writing Critical Design Biography

Online Event,
Işık University, School of Industrial Design, Istanbul
June 4 2021, 18.00 (TRT)

Alison J. Clarke

image © Papanek Foundation

On the occasion of the launch of her MIT Press monograph, Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison J. Clarke discusses with Dr. Saltuk Özemir the process of researching and writing critical biography in design. In challenging the tradition of classic hagiographical treatments, that typically cast the designer as an heroic agent of innovation, Clarke offers an alternative insight into the ways in which critical biography can open up more complex ways of understanding the historical, political and societal role of design and designers.