This talk examines the entangled phenomena of postwar Scandinavian environmental and design histories, and attempts made to undermine the normativity of design aesthetics as a political act.
Dr. Emma C. Wingfield lectures in Art History and Visual Cultures at Texas A&M University in the College of Performance, Visualization, and Fine Arts. She has PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and is the co-founder of Five | Six Textiles a nonprofit textile design collaboration with Master Weavers in Northern Côte d’Ivoire. Her research draws on collaborative fieldwork, ethnographic practices, archival, and material cultures research that engage with the pluriversal relationships embedded within contemporary art, craft, and design. This talk will examine how collaborative design enterprises can shape interdisciplinary research practices, particularly through writing, drawing, and digital humanities pedagogies. It will explore how these practices contribute to understanding embodied creativity.
Drawing on his current book project, Border Situations: Essays on Designing, Anthropologies and Politics in a Confined World, Keshavarz takes a critical look at the current state of design anthropology and ask: what is design anthropology good for, if not to rattle the foundation of the inherently violent and exploitative nature of designing caused by the anthropological project of modernity? Mahmoud Keshavarz is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Keshavarz is author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (2019), co-editor of Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (2022), and was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture between 2019 and 2023.
This talk will offer a design and anthropological analysis of a material in the context of a community of coppersmiths (known in the local language Marathi as tambats) located in the heart of the city of Pune in Western India. As the tambats shape this malleable material into a variety of objects, copper has in turn, shaped the community into what it is today. The presentation will include theoretical perspectives and examples of designed objects. Prasad Boradkar is dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. He is a designer and an anthropologist with experience leading design and research teams in both academia and industry, including his most recent role as UX research and sustainability lead at Google.
When in the late 1960s, a radical pan-Scandinavian design movement initiated a full-blown attack on the ‘architectural damage’ wrought by Modernist welfare architects, their localized grassroot-activism appeared far removed from formal machinations of Cold War geopolitics. Yet, the radical environmental design discourse they helped promulgate, was inextricably linked to earlier US-government sponsored transdisciplinary experiments in design, media and anthropology that had sprung up in engineering and design institutes across the US. Based on original archival research, this talk explores the emergence of transdisciplinary and user-based design practice, its origins and legacies in contemporary contexts.
Joanna Brassett is a pioneering design anthropologist and the Founder and CEO of Studio intO, a global research agency combining cultural insights with strategic design. She has worked with clients like Google, Amazon, and Pinterest in ethical AI and inclusive innovation and has been Lecturer at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London and a Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Anhalt. In her talk, Joanna will share how design anthropology bridges cultural insights with global strategies. Using real-world examples, she will explore the dynamic interplay of globalisation and localisation, demonstrating how a cultural approach unlocks transformative innovation in design, research, and business strategy.
How do we describe, practise and educate for design in a rapidly changing world? What are the consequences of deep time designing? This keynote considers a history of design beyond the conventional paradigm of the 250 years of western Industrial Revolution and the concomitant design theories that have tended to dominated design historical discourse. It brings into question the origins and futures of social and ethical design practice in the context of deeop time thinking.
This keynote lecture argues that the origins of the design anthropology phenomena lie closer to early US decolonising & development policies than contemporary Silicon Valley innovation and grassroots community co-design initiatives. Design & social science emerged as crucial partners in negotiating Cold War geo-political interventions and in so-doing generated an enduring borderless disciplinary alliance that persists today.
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts. She is the authoring editor of the Cyberfeminism Index (2023). Mindy Seu has long been a gatherer. In its material and social forms, as a collection and event, gatherings serve as the intentional aggregation of resources for a specific community. In this lecture, Seu will discuss tools, indexes, and learning trails through five chapters: 1) Cyberfeminism Index, 2) ellipses and citations, 3) asterisks and collective publishing, 4) web-to-print tools, and 5) the Carrier Bag Theory.
image © Babitha George
Babitha George is a director at Quicksand. She has worked on evolving design methods for research with vulnerable communities in India, for participation and co-design. She is also one of the co-founders of UnBox Cultural Futures, a platform bringing together efforts around social change, art & culture, thoughtful design and open research. Babitha is on the Advisory Board of the Victor Papanek Foundation and a member of the Mozilla Foundation’s first cohort of ‘Network50’, for outstanding work in Internet health. George shares reflections on how to build more caring and resilient design practice through actively engaging with the contextual richness, uniqueness and specificity of place-based conditions.
© Beirut’s RiverLESS Forest, Simon Soueid for theOtherDada
Adib Dada is an award-winning environmental activist and architect, founder of theOtherDada Regenerative Consulting and Architecture Practice. Firmly committed to the UN Decade of Action, Adib is engaged in rewilding the city and reclaiming public space by planting native Miyawaki forests in urban landfills through his new initiative: theOtherForest, a nature-based tool for ecological and social regeneration. In this presentation, Adib will share the different components underpinning his work, and how his personal passions, architectural projects, biomimicry training and hands-on forest-making work are interdependent. He will cover his approach from reframing current urban challenges as opportunities to turn cities into shared spaces for humans and other organisms to thrive.
© “The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism [Screenshot]” (2023) Daniel Felstead
Daniel Felstead, an academic and content producer whose practice focuses on the relationship between fashion and technology, will interrogate the fractured realities of our contemporary creative landscape. A landscape of disciplinary boundary collapse. A landscape where the realms of fashion, art and world-building converge. Through this exploration of creative frontiers, he invites us to reconsider the role of cultural production in sculpting our hypermediatised bodies. Course leader of MA Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL), Felstead’s work has been widely and internationally shown.
image © Monika Lovdahl, 2017
Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers, an international working group founded in San Francisco in 1995. They are artists, architects, computer programmers, donkeys, graphic designers, farmers, writers and anthropologists with a common interest in creating work that calls into question the social, political and economic frameworks in the contexts in which they work. A through line of their practices is an interest in the reorganization of agricultural systems. They engage issues of food sovereignty, farmers’ rights and the commons through long term engagements which manifest as temporary workshops, derives and performative processes that have led to policy change and permanent commons. Through an associative lecture Franceschini is connecting the research and actions of Futurefarmers’ work in public space.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Co-curated by
Prof. Alison J. Clarke ,
a co-operation with Vitra Design Museum,
Papanek Foundation
and Museu del Disseny Barcelona
The Papanek Foundation presents the international travelling exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, co-curated and organised with Vitra Design Museum in Weil Am Rhein, Germany. The expansive show presents varied and previously unseen materials from the Papanek Foundation archive pertaining to design activist Victor Papanek’s lifelong career, highlighting the crucial theme of design as a political and social tool. Alongside the exploration of Papanek’s links with key thinkers and design figures, ranging from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, maverick futurist Buckminster Fuller to leading feminist graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the exhibition casts light on the legacy of 1960s and 1970s activism through the presentation of contemporary exhibits dealing with politically pertinent issues ranging from state violence, to climate change, bio-synthetics, and the precariousness of citizenship.
Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design features work from cutting edge practitioners such as: Forensic Architecture; Natsai Audrey Chieza; Flui Colectivo; Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg; Femke Herregraven; NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism/Hypen-Labs; Lucy and Jorge Orta; Tomás Saraceno; Maya Jay Varadaraj.
This exhibition is a cooperation between the Vitra Design Museum and the Barcelona Design Museum, in collaboration with the Victor J. Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
