FWF Symposium

Design and Development:
Histories, Legacies and Futures

Organised by Heng Zhi with Alison J Clarke

June 09 2026, online event

Registration

Design and architecture assumed a critical role in shaping global development policies during the Cold War, responding to competing political ideologies and rapid technological change. Today, amid intensifying geopolitical tensions and profound transformation driven by digitalisation and AI, design once again occupies a central position in the reconfiguration of global development agendas. Set against post-colonial legacies and the rise of South–South networks, both historical and contemporary practices of “design for development” call for more pluralistic debate around diverse power relations and forms of agency.

Challenging reductive frameworks such as universal modernism, neocolonial narratives, and centre-periphery binaries, this symposium examines the networks, platforms, and assemblages shaped, negotiated, and contested by the local and transnational actors involved in designing, constructing, manufacturing, trading, and consumption. What are the enduring legacies of traditional development models? What new dynamics, infrastructures, and power structures are emerging beyond Eurocentric analytical frames? How do designers, users, communities, and institutions contribute to the reconfiguration of global and social hierarchies?

Bringing together leading international researchers in design history, media and cultural studies, fashion studies, and architectural theory, this event explores diverse ways of understanding design’s role in global development politics across the multi-layered conditions of post-colonial worlds. Speakers include: Miao Lu Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Tommy Tse, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Innocent (Ib) Batsani-Ncube, Queen Mary University of London, UK; Alpay Er, Özyegin University Istanbul, Turkey; Vishal Khandelwal, Harvard University, USA; Bahar Emgin, Izmir University of Technology, Turkey; Danielle Charlap, Wolfsonian–Florida International University, USA; Tanishka Kachru, National Institute of Design, India.

Funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund
Grant DOI 10.55776/PAT4411223

Lecture Series

Co-Creating Global South Fashion: Chinese-Made Garments and Textiles in Mozambique

Johanna von Pezold

Online event
6 May 2026, 14:00 CET

Registration

Johanna von Pezold is a postdoctoral researcher at the ERC project “China Africa Fashion Power” based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. She graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of Hong Kong. Based on ethnographic research in Mozambique and China (2017-2024), this talk highlights how Chinese-made garments and textiles become ‘fashion’ through everyday trade in Mozambique. It shows how diverse Global South actors co-create fashion outside Euro-American systems, reshaping markets, dress cultures, and fashion mediation from the South.

Lecture Series

Experimenting with and from Shenzhen: African Tech Markets, Relationality, and Translocal Design

Seyram Avle

Online event
April 29 2026, 15:00 CET

Registration

Seyram Avle is Associate Professor of Global Digital Media in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is also co-founder and director of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech Lab). Her research is on digital technology cultures and innovation in the Global South. This lecture examines ways in which Shenzhen’s ethos of experimentation manifests across African markets via mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Drawing on ethnographic work and artifact analysis through a trans-local lens, it demonstrates how the dynamics of experimentation complicate notions of relationality in south-south formations and reveal imaginaries of technological futures for the Global Majority.

Lecture Series

Screening and Discussion: Made in Ethiopia

Xinyan Yu

Online event
April 15 2026, 14:00 CET

Registration

Xinyan Yu is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She has directed, produced and shot films for PBS, BBC, NHK, and Channel News Asia. Her work has premiered at Tribeca, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and DOCNYC, and received support from Ford Foundation, IDA, and the Danish Film Institute. Made in Ethiopia lifts the curtain on China’s historic but misunderstood impact on Africa, and explores contemporary Ethiopia at a moment of profound crisis. It sheds light on how a dusty farming town finds itself at the new frontier of globalization when a massive Chinese industrial park lands in rural Ethiopia.

Lecture Series

Smart Hardware from the Street

David Li

Online event
18 March 2026, 14:00 CET

Registration

David Li has been contributing to open source since 1990. He is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Innovation Lab, a member of the Free Software Foundation and a committer/contributor to Apache projects, and is associated with Shenzhen’s open innovation ecosystem through Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab. This talk traces how Huaqiangbei evolved into a fast, bottom-up innovation engine—where components, repair culture, copy/modify practices, and dense supplier networks let entrepreneurs prototype and scale quickly. It will look at the street-level mechanics of iteration: sourcing, small-batch runs, ecosystem matchmaking, and the informal knowledge flows that turned Shenzhen into a hardware capital.

Public Lecture

The Tyranny of Norms: Challenges to Scandinavian Modernism

Alison J. Clarke

Royal Danish Academy,
27 November 2025, 16.00 2025

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.

Lecture Series

Motif Pluriverse: design anthropological practices in contemporary craft industries

Emma C. Wingfield

Online event
14 May, 14.00 2025

Registration

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.

Lecture Series

A Design Anthropology of What? Designing and Anthropologies Beyond Academic Experimentation

Mahmoud Keshavarz

Online event
07 May, 14.00 2025

Registration

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.

Lecture Series

Exploring Design Anthropology: Copper(smiths) in India

Prasad Boradkar

Online event
30 April 2025, 14.00

Registration

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.

Lecture

Architectural Damage & Creative Engineering
Legacies of Cold War Design for Development

Alison J. Clarke

MIT Architecture
Morningside Academy of Design & HTC Forum
Cambridge, USA
17 April, 18.00 EDT 2025

Further information and registration

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.

Lecture Series

Cultural Glue: A Design Anthropology Approach to Global and Local Innovation

Joanna Brassett

Online event
2 April 2025, 14.00

Registration

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.

Keynote Lecture

Design & Deep Time: Social & Ethical Futures

Alison J. Clarke

Tsinghua Academy of Arts and Science Innovation Research (TASA)/
International Council of Industrial Design (ICoD) Conference
Tsinghua, China
17 October 2024, 13.00

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.

Keynote Lecture

Design Anthropology: Experiments in Cold War Industrial Design

Alison J. Clarke

Design History Conference
UCA, United Kingdom
7 September 2024

More Information

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.

Guest Lecture

On Gathering in Five Chapters

Mindy Seu

Online Event
24 April 2024, 18:00

Registration

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

Guest Lecture

Crafting Alternate Futures with Design

Babitha George

Online Event
17 April 2024, 10:00

Registration

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

Guest Lecture

theOtherWay: How can designers create conditions conducive to life, building interspecies habitats for humans and other creatures to thrive?

Adib Dada

Online Event
10 April 2024, 14:00

Registration

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

Guest Lecture

Collapsing Bodies

Daniel Felstead

Online Event
20 March 2024, 14:00

Registration

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

Guest Lecture

Presence as Practice

Amy Franceschini

Online Event
13 March 2024, 09:30

Registration

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 2023, 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 2023, 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 2023, 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 2023, 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?

Exhibition

Victor Papanek:
The Politics of Design

Design Museum Den Bosch,
Netherlands
October 17 2020 – March 23 2021

C-Mine,
Genk, Belgium,
10 March – 12 July 2020

Design Museum Barcelona,
Catalonia, Spain
31 October 2019 – 2 February 2020

Vitra Design Museum,
Weil am Rhein, Germany
29 September 2018 – 10 March 2019

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.