Design in an Age of Uncertainty

1A Session
Working Tactically: Navigating the Patriarchy in Architecture and Design
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

1A.1 "The House that Grace Built": Psychology, Domesticity, and Grace Cope's Affective Architecture in Interwar Britain (Alborz Dianat)

1A.2 "Without the Intervention of Women": Lilly Reich's Spatial Practice at the Tugendhat House (Paula Arning)

1A.3 "Office Pin-up of the Month": Misogyny and Power Play in the Work of Betty Reese at Raymond Loewy Associates, c. 1940–1950 (Leah Armstrong)


1B Session
Education in an Age of Uncertainty
Chair: Harriet Atkinson

1B.1 Cut, Paste, Restart: Historical Cut-up Techniques in Typography Pedagogy (Juliana F. Duque & Ana Luísa Marques)

1B.2 From Blackboard to Dashboard: How School Interiors Adapt to Digital Education (Vendula Hnídková)

1B.3 Redressing the Rupture: Thirty Years of Teaching Typography at the American University of Beirut (Lara Balaa)


1C Session
Designing Possible Futures
Chair: Anna Kallen Talley

1C.1 Speculative Futurebuilding (Avsar Gurpinar & Cansu Cürgen)

1C.2 Speculative Fulgurology: Imagining Design with Earth Energies in the Age of Climatic Uncertainty (Dimitrios Moutafidis)

1C.3 Strategic Design for Planetary Viability: Navigating Uncertainty Through Trees As Infrastructure (Klára Peloušková)


1D Session
Politics of Design and Craft
Chair: Deepika Srivastava

1D.1 From Street Torches to Internet Memes: A Genealogical and Typological Analysis of Design Activism in Taiwan (Ju-Joan Wong & Erik I-Heng Chu)

1D.2 Designing for Interdependence: Convivial Infrastructures and the Politics of the Ordinary (Seojoo Han)

1D.3 Carrying on Craft: The Role of Prison Industries in Sustaining Local Japanese Artisanry (Yasuko Suga)

2A Session
Revising Modernism
Chair: Alex J. Todd

2A.1 Architecture in the Age of Post-Certainty: From Modernist Utopia to Strategies of Survival (Alicja Skruszewicz)

2A.2 Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives: Reconstructing Lost Interiors through Artistic Research (Ladislav Jackson)

2A.3 Design and Uncertainty in the Projecting Age: The Idea of Contingent Future in Early-Modern Britain and Postwar Design Theory (Felipe Kaizer Santos)


2B Session
Postwar Experimental Design in North America
Chair: Sarah Lichtman

2B.1 Advertising Space: How Imagined Futures Sold Cold War Consumer Goods (Monica Penick)

2B.2 Designing the Future with Lucy in Sky with Diamonds (Kerry Meakin)

2B.3 Liquid Interiors: Revisiting Frances Gabe's Self-Cleaning House (Evan Pavka)


2C Session
Practicing Uncertainty in Urban Design
Chair: Ahmed Tanveer

2C.1 Identity Flows: Teaching in an Age of Uncertainty (Sarah Cheang & Josie Kane)

2C.2 Designing Publics through Urban Dioramas (Ana Rolim)

2C.3 Collage in an Age of Uncertainty: Imagined Cities and Dialogical Spaces for Speculative Design Activism (Ceren Cekmez)


2D Session
Craft in Context: Tradition and Innovation
Chair: Sally-Anne Huxtable

2D.1 Korean Objects in Context: Ecological Exhibition Design and Traditional Craft in an Age of Uncertainty (Lina Shinhwa Koo)

2D.2 Double Meanings on Palace Walls: Wallpapers, Material Hybridity, and Fragmented Flows in Korean Palatial Interiors (Ji-Young Lee)

2D.3 Beyond the Reminiscence of the Past: Examining the Preservation of Taiwanese Rush Weaving Craft and Innovative Approaches to the Craftsmanship Certification System Design (Fang-Ching Liu & Shyh-Huei Hwang)

3A Session
Reimagining Domestic Spaces
Chair: Marta Filipová

3A.1 Imagined Futures of the Home: Domestic Technologies, Gender, and Modernity in Turkey (Bahar Emgin, Leyla Bektaş Ata & Defne Karaosmanoğlu)

3A.2 New Domestic Landscape, Same Domestic Labor: The Gender Division of Labor in the Habitats of Joe Colombo (Peter Grace)

3A.3 Worry Work: Housing Activism and Making Space for Mothering (Cathy Hawley)


3B Session
Gender and Design Challenges
Chair: Alex Banister

3B.1 Designing in Exile: Elisabeth Tomalin, Modernism, and the Search for Inner Landscapes in an Age of Uncertainty (Yasuko Suga)

3B.2 DIY Multilayered Textures: Interlocking Ideologies of Women’s Textile-Based Crafting in Socialist Consumer Culture (Aliaksandra Liakhavets)

3B.3 Dolls Like Us: Designing for Adversity (Freyja Hartzell)


3C Session
Communicating through Design
Chair: Yasmine Nachabe Taan

3C.1 Design Is the Answer (Anne Cohen Kirah)

3C.2 Cartographies of Uncertainty: Google Maps and the Politics of Truth (Ory Bartal)


3D Session
Critical Historiographies, Theories and Methodologies
Chair: Grace Lees-Maffei

3D.1 The Unstoppable Wheel of Design History: A Cycle of Perception and Production (Jorge Fragua Valdivieso)

3D.2 Destablilising Design. Uncertainties, Histories, and Changing Design Practices (Maria Göransdotter)

3D.3 On Making and Knowing: A Critical Historiography of Design Research (Merle Ibach & Harles Lynn)

4A Session
The Certainty of Modernism Distabilised
Chair: Alex J. Todd

4A.1 Recontextualising the Wiener Werkstätte in Japan: Cultural Translation and the Instability of Modern Design Values (Tomoko Kakuyama)

4A.2 Opening Formal Sequences in Time: Riccardo Dalisi's La Napoletana as an Escape from Closed Seriality (Lorenzo Esposito, Fabiana Marotta & Pietro Nunziante)

4A.3 The Way We Were: Curating Nostalgia in Post-War Norwegian Tableware Design (Peder Valle)


4B Session
Revisiting Postmodern Design: Mediation, Complexity, and Sentiment
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

4B.1 Mediating the Unmentionable: How Postmodern Design was Navigated in the Last Decade of Socialist East Germany (Jessica Jenkins)

4B.2 Trust Audiences with Complexity: Postmodern Poster Design at Theater Neumarkt (Miriam Koban & Robert Lzicar)

4B.3 Nostalgia in British Graphic Design after Postmodernism (Trond Klevgaard)


4C Session
Gendering Design Activism
Chair: Livia Lazzaro Rezende

4C.1 Design as Feminist Action: Print Cultures and Political Agency in Portugal after 1974 (Juliana Meira)

4C.2 Materializing Resistance: Feminist Design Practices for Survival and Care (Katie Krcmarik)

4C.3 Design as Public Interface in an Age of Uncertainty: Science Communication Project on Gender and Politics (Aline Kedma Araujo Alves)


4D Session
Designers' Professions and Responsibilities
Chair: Leah Armstrong

4D.1 Design Culture Out of Joints. The Breakdown of Danish Design Organisations in the 1970s (Anders V. Munch)

4D.2 Design as Development? Industrial Transition and the Professionalisation of Design in 1970s Hong Kong (Wing Lam Michelle Chan)

4D.3 Looking into the "Mere": Designers' Legacy of Uncertainty (Mary Anne Beecher)

5A Session
Designing Data
Chair: Anna Kallen Talley

5A.1 Community Memory and Collective Internet Practices. Towards an Expanded Digital Design History (Rebecca Bertero & Serena De Mola)

5A.2 Exploring the Generative Archive – Methods and Productive Counteracts in Design Research (Line Hjorth Christensen)

5A.3 Tracing the History of Data-Driven Objects: The Design and Data Logics of The Scotsman Newspaper (1817–1915) (Anna Kallen Talley)


5B Session
Environmental Design Histories and Futures
Chair: Deepika Srivastava

5B.1 From Memory to Time: A Shift towards Environmental Design History (Eduardo Augusto Costa)

5B.2 Building an Alternative Constituency for Design History: Multispecies Sensory–Affective Practices in More than Human Design (Chenxi Cui)

5B.3 Nice to Meet You, I’m Design: An Allegorical Essay on Visibility, Crisis, and Recongruence in the 21st Century (Denise Dantas)


5C Session
Visualising Counterpublics
Chair: Harriet Atkinson

5C.1 A Complicit Piano. Pia Beck's Mediatized Environments in Málaga, Spain (1965–1969) (Sergio Perdiguer)

5C.2 Behind the Covers: Reassessing Female Influence in Columbia Records' Design Legacy (Elizabeth Resnick)

5C.3 Slow Images, Urgent Times: Mazen Kerbaj's Wartime Blog and the Ethics of Design (Yasmine Nachabe Taan)


5D Session
Design Activism, Protest & Democracy
Chair: Livia Lazzaro Rezende

5D.1 Designing Democratic Affect. From Protest Graphics to Affective Infrastructures of Participation (Felix Kosok)

5D.2 An Unorthodox Reading of Scarcity Aesthetics: Cengiz Bektaş's Etimesgut Mosque in 1960s Turkey (Murat Burak Altınışık & Özlem Erdoğdu Erkarslan)

5D.3 Umbrellas, Bicycles, and the Politics of the Everyday: Counter-crafts for Civic Rights (Margus Tamm)

6A Session
Learning from Uncertainty: Theory, Historiography and Politics of Design in the Postwar and Cold War Periods
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

6A.1 Design Theory for an Age of Uncertainty (Felipe Kaizer Santos)

6A.2 The History of Design as a Means of Overcoming Crises: The Brazilian Case (Eduardo Augusto Costa)

6A.3 (Un)Certainty under Authoritarianism: The Marketization of Cultural Heritage through Design during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (Livia Lazzaro Rezende)


6B Session
Designing Identities in an Age of Uncertainty
Chair: Grace Lees-Maffei

6B.1 "Scandinavia" as Safe Place. Bolia and the Construction of Home and Nature in an Age of Uncertainty (Niels Peter Skou)

6B.2 Conversational Banking: AI Chatbots and the Transformation of Service Encounters in Digital Banking (Hümeyra Tokoğlu)

6B.3 The Certainty of Design in the Age of Pandemic Politics: A Case Study of Rishi Sunak's Grey Hoodie and the Construction of Modern Statesmanship (J. C. Kristensen) 


6C Session
More-than-Human and Sustainable Design
Chair: Kjetil Fallan

6C.1 Natural Fibers and Made in Italy: A Long Tradition (1925–2025) (Ali Filippini)

6C.2 From Utility to Circularity: StateLed Design Governance for a Just Transition (Stuart Lawson)

6C.3 Ecology for Sale: Design Dilemmas at the Interieur Kortrijk Biennial in the 1970s (Floriane Kersters & Benoît Vandevoort)


6D Session
Design Activism, Protest and Democracy
Chair: Jessica Jenkins

6D.1 Resist Standard Settings. Domestic Making, Design Agency, and Everyday Futures (Sweety Taur)

6D.2 Design, Crisis, and the Hypernormal Condition (Adam Flint Taylor)

6D.3 Humour and the Graphic Strategies of Protest (UK 1995–2021) (Teal Triggs)

7A Session
Designing with/out Extractive Materials
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

7A.1 Aluminium: The Schoolbook for the Never-Ending Future (Elín Margot Ármannsdóttir)

7A.2 Taking Stock for Sustainable Design: The World Resources Inventory (Kjetil Fallan)

7A.3 Artifact Metabolisms: The Material Flows of an iPhone (Mark Thomas Young)


7B Session
Domesticity between Unstable Present and Futures
Chair: Sally-Anne Huxtable

7B.1 Triennale di Milano as Actor and Vehicle of Design Culture: Between Entangled Past, Contested Present and Imagined Future (Jasna Galjer)

7B.2 In the Current of Home: Intersectional Feminism and Domesticity in Times of Precarity (Georgina Pantazopoulou & Els De Vos)

7B.3 Oliver Hill at Valewood Farm: Designing a Queer Life in the British Countryside (Vanessa Vanden Berghe)


7C Session
Uncertainty under State Socialism
Chair: Jessica Jenkins

7C.1 Nature as Resource, Nature as Risk, or Nature as Ally: Conceptualising the Environment under State Socialism in Post-War Yugoslavia (Rujana Rebernjak)

7C.2 Between Visions of the Future and Dwelling on the Past. Arts and Crafts Schools Under State Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1940s to 1980s) (Johana Lomová & Veronika Rollová)

7C.3 The Process of Book Design in Flux: From the 1980s to the 1990s in Estonia (Ulla Väljaste)


7D Session
Design Theory in a Neoliberal Present
Chair: Elli Michaela Young

7D.1 Countering Neoliberal Reasoning Through Systemic Design History: School Chapels and Modern Stained Glass in Flanders (Zsuzsanna Böröcz)

7D.2 Impossibility of Design and Contemplative Hope (Sara Velez)


7E Session
Revisiting the Pluriverse: Decolonial Commitments
Chair: Priscila Farias

7E.1 The Archive in Action: Reimagining Design History with Gráfica Latina's Poster Archive (Tatiana Gómez Gaggero & José R. Menéndez López)

7E.2 Festival of the Pluriverse: Enacting Decolonial Commitments in Institutional Spaces (Elizabeth Kutesko & Christin Yu)

8A Session
The Rock, the Fish and the Disaster: Histories of More-than-Human Design
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

8A.1 Thinking like a Rock. Experiments for an Expanded Concept of Design Historiography (Lilo Viehweg)

8A.2 Learning about Water from Fish: Methodology for a More-Than-Human Design History (Malin Graesse)

8A.3 Broken Earth: Disasters and More-than-Human Design Histories (Tania Messell)


8B Session
Design Cultures between the Local and the Global
Chair: Sarah Stafford Turner

8B.1 A Prescribed Utopia: Modern Design and the Politics of "Good Life" in Postwar South Korea (Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung)

8B.2 Reconnecting Kesson International and Knoll International: Reimagining Pasts of Interior Design and Contract Furniture Manufacturing in Post‑War South Korea (Oknim Jo)

8B.3 The Design Culture of South Korea's Impeachment Rallies: From Candlelight Protests to Light Stick Protests (Sang Kyu Kim) 


8C Session
Objects of Uncertainty
Chair: Alex Banister

8C.1 Reframing the Canon: Imperial Hereke Carpets and Sümerbank's Modernist Experiments (Esra Bici)

8C.2 Cultural Heritage and Creative Industries: The Intersection of Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Yaşayan Köy (Living Village) Case (Ayşe Gülce Karakaya & Merve Şahika Erkan)

8C.3 The Beauty of Strangeness: Understanding the Cadogan Teapot Across Cultures and Time (Juliana F. Duque, Ana Luísa Marques & Beatriz Muñoz Fonseca)


8D Session
Responsibility, Reconfiguration and Rhetoric
Chair: Elli Michaela Young

8D.1 For Water Justice in Fashion Design (Tanveer Ahmed)

8D.2 Material Activism and the Reconfiguration of Critical Practice (Raffaella Fagnoni, Clizia Moradei & Alessandra Vaccari)

8D.3 Avoid Democracy Washing – On the Rhetoric, Practice, and Responsible Use of the Term "Democratic" in Design (Henrietta Fiáth)


8E Session
Precarity of Design in Socialist and Post-Socialist Times
Chair: Veronika Rollová

8E.1 The Uncertainties of Lithuanian Designers in the late 1980s and 1990s: Is it Possible that Dinosaurs Could Become Successful Designers? (Karolina Jakaitė)

8E.2 "Anything Was Possible": Reimagining Post-Socialist Design in Estonia in Late 1980s and Early 1990s (Triin Jerlei)

9A Session
According to the Plan? History of Design beyond the Market Economy
Chair: Chair to be announced soon

9A.1 Planned Design in a Planned Economy. Organising Design and Production in 1970s Poland (Agata Szydłowska)

9A.2 How To Be a Designer without Losing One’s Soul? Practicing Design in Eastern Europe in the 1960s (Katarzyna Jeżowska)


9B Session
Graphic Design from Right to Left
Chair: Priscila Farias

9B.1 Designing the Good Life: Visual Politics in German New Left Periodicals (Baldassare Scolari)

9B.2 Counter-Media: New Right Design Strategies and the Responsibilities of Design History (Robert Lzicar)


9C Session
Fabrics of an Age of Uncertainty
Chair: Julia Secklehner

9C.1 Weaving a Vegetal Modernity: The Garden and its Significance for Frida Hansen's Innovative Textile Design (Adine Lexow)

9C.2 Following Leather: Multi‑Sited Ethnography for Activist Design (Rebecca Carrai)


9D Session
Re-Making the Past for the Future
Chair: Sarah Lichtman

9D.1 Designing with the Past: Heritage, Revival, and Uchronian Futures in French Contemporary Fashion (Chiara Mastroianni)

9D.2 Designing Encounters with Heritage at Stevns Klint (Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen)

9D.3 From the Handmade to the Handgrown: Making and Remaking Design in the 21st Century (Catharine Rossi)


9E Session
Making Chinese Design: Localising Modernity
Chair: Matthew Rampley

9E.1 From Tradition to the Future: A Study of Pan Changhou's Design Education Thought (Xiaolian Qi & Xiaomo Wang)

9E.2 Tuanfa (图案法): Knowledge Transfer and Localization in Early Chinese Design Theory (Xiaomo Wang)

9E.3 Design in the Interregnum: The "Gung Ho" Movement as an Alternative Modernity in Wartime China (1938–1945) (Anyuan Pu)