Design in an Age of Uncertainty

Design History Society Annual Conference

3–5 September 2026
Brno, Czech Republic

🏛️ Before we gather in Brno for the conference, join us for a special online event – the Design History Society Virtual Roundtable titled The Promise and Peril of Digitization in Design History Research on August 27!

You can find all the details about the event here! 🏛️

September 2 (Wednesday)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
16:30–18:00	Publishing Workshop Session 1: Developing an Academic Book Proposal	Register here to attend the workshop. The workshop will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
17:00–18:00	Villa Tugendhat Visit	This tour is fully booked. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (19€/12€). Find out more about the villa on their website.

Our Keynote Speakers

No description

Lukáš Likavčan

September 3 (Thursday)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
9:00–10:00	Student Event – Bring Your Research Challenge (Student Meet-Up)	Register here to attend the event. The workshop will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
10:00–11:00	Publishing Workshop Session 2: Explorations: Alternative Approaches to Writing in Design History	Register here to attend the workshop. The workshop will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
10:00–11:00	Villa Jurkovič Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (4€).
10:00–11:00	Villa Tugendhat Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (19€/12€). Find out more about the villa on their website.
10:00–11:00	Walking Tour of Brno City Centre	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts about 60 minutes. Guided tour of Brno's modernist city centre is led by Vendula Hnídková or Matthew Rampley.
11:30–12:30	Student Event – Writing an Abstract in Design History (Student-led Workshop)	Register here to attend the event. The workshop will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
12:30–14:00	Registration & Coffee
13:00–13:45	Screening of the film Designing from Home (2025) by Dr Harriet Atkinson & Dr Sue Breakell (followed by a discussion)	The screening will take place in room C.34 in Building C (Arna Nováka 1).
14:00–14:30	Welcome	The welcome will take place in room B2.13 in Building B2 (Arna Nováka 1).
14:30–16:00	Afternoon Block 1

Afternoon Block 1

1A Session (Room B2.21)
Navigating the Patriarchy in Architecture and Design
Chair: Veronika Rollová

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 (Room B2.23)
Restart, Reform, Remake
Chair: Julia Secklehner

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

1C Session (Room B2.24)
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 (Room B2.32)
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 The Design Culture of South Korea's Impeachment Rallies: From Candlelight Protests to Light Stick Protests (Sang-kyu Kim)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
16:00–16:30	Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
16:00–17:00	Walking Tour of Brno City Centre	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts about 60 minutes. Guided tour of Brno's modernist city centre is led by Vendula Hnídková or Matthew Rampley.
16:30–18:00	Afternoon Block 2

Afternoon Block 2

2A Session (Room B2.21)
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 (Room B2.23)
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 (Room B2.24)
Practicing Uncertainty in Urban Design
Chair: Tanveer Ahmed

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 (Room B2.32)
Craft in Context: Tradition and Innovation
Chair: Denise Hagströmer

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)

2E Session: Fabrics of an Age of Uncertainty (Room B2.33)
Chair: Julia Secklehner

2E.1 Weaving a Vegetal Modernity: The Garden and its Significance for Frida Hansen's Innovative Textile Design (Adine Lexow)

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

2E.3 Reframing the Canon: Imperial Hereke Carpets and Sümerbank's Modernist Experiments (Esra Bici Nasır)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
18:15–19:15	Keynote Lecture 1 – Lukáš Likavčan	The lecture will take place in room B2.13 in Building B2 (Arna Nováka 1).
20:00	Gala dinner at Design Museum (Moravian Gallery)	Official gala dinner hosted by Design Museum of Moravian Gallery. Address: Husova 536 Attendance possible only with a valid ticket bought online.

No description

Zeina Maasri

No description

Romani Design

September 4 (Friday)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
9:00–10:00	Registration & Coffee
9:00–9:45	Student Event – Materialising the "Immaterial": How to Make Design Historical Interventions in Cyberspace (Student Workshop)	Register here to attend the event. The workshop will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
9:30–10:00	Design History Society Annual General Meeting	The meeting will take place in room D2TYM7 in Building D (Arna Nováka 1).
10:00–11:00	Keynote Lecture 2 – Zeina Maasri	The lecture will take place in room B2.13 in Building B2 (Arna Nováka 1).
11:00–12:30	Morning Block 3

Morning Block 3

3A Session (Room B2.21)
Gender and Labour in the Home
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 (Room B2.23)
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 (Room B2.24)
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)

3C.3 The Archive in Action: Reimagining Design History with Gráfica Latina's Poster Archive (Tatiana Gómez Gaggero & José R. Menéndez López)

3D Session (Room B2.32)
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)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
12:30–13:30	Lunch Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
13:30–15:00	Afternoon Block 4

Afternoon Block 4

4A Session (Room B2.21)
The Certainty of Modernism Distabilised
Chair: Valéria Bláha

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 (Room B2.23)
Postmodern Design: Mediation, Complexity, and Sentiment
Chair: Alex J. Todd

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 (Room B2.24)
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 (Room B2.32)
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)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
15:00–15:30	Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
15:30–17:00	Afternoon Block 5

Afternoon Block 5

5A Session (Room B2.21)
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 (Room B2.23)
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 (Room B2.24)
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 (Room B2.32)
Design Activism, Protest & Democracy (I)
Chair: Livia Lazzaro Rezende

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

5D.2 Architectural Production under Conditions of Scarcity: The Etimesgut Mosque (1965–1967) (Özlem Erdoğdu Erkarslan)

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

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
17:00–17:30	Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
17:30–19:00	Afternoon Block 6

Afternoon Block 6

6A Session (Room B2.21)
Theory, Historiography and Politics of Design in the Postwar and Cold War Periods
Chair: Harriet Atkinson

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 (Room B2.23)
Identities Designed 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 (Room B2.24)
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: State-Led 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 (Room B2.32)
Design Activism, Protest and Democracy (II)
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)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
20:00	Oxford University Press Reception (Villa Löw-Beer)	No registration needed. This event is free. Address: Drobného 297

September 5 (Saturday)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
8:30–10:00	Morning Block 7

Morning Block 7

7A Session (Room B2.21)
Designing with/out Extractive Materials
Chair: Maria Göransdotter

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 (Room B2.23)
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 (Room B2.24)
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 (Room B2.32)
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)

7D.3 Festival of the Pluriverse: Enacting Decolonial Commitments in Institutional Spaces (Elizabeth Kutesko & Christin Yu)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
10:00–10:30	Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
10:30–12:00	Morning Block 8

Morning Block 8

8A Session (Room B2.21)
The Rock, the Fish and the Disaster: Histories of More-than-Human Design
Chair: Matthew Rampley

8A.1 Learning about Water from Fish: Methodology for a More-Than-Human Design History (Malin Graesse)

8A.2 Broken Earth: Disasters and More-than-Human Design Histories (Tania Messell)

8A.3 Thinking like a Rock. Experiments for an Expanded Concept of Design Historiography (Lilo Viehweg)

8B Session (Room B2.23)
Design Cultures between the Local and the Global
Chair: Valéria Bláha

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

8C Session (Room B2.24)
Responsibility, Reconfiguration and Rhetoric
Chair: Elli Michaela Young

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

8C.2 Avoid Democracy Washing – On the Rhetoric, Practice, and Responsible Use of the Term "Democratic" in Design (Henrietta Fiáth)

8D Session (Room B2.32)
Beyond the Market Value of an Object
Chair: Veronika Rollová

8D.1 The Beauty of Strangeness: Understanding the Cadogan Teapot Across Cultures and Time (Juliana F. Duque, Ana Luísa Marques & Beatriz Muñoz Fonseca)

8D.2 The Uncertainties of Lithuanian Designers in the late 1980s and 1990s: Is it Possible that Dinosaurs Could Become Successful Designers? (Karolina Jakaitė)

8D.3 "Anything Was Possible": Reimagining Post-Socialist Design in Estonia in Late 1980s and Early 1990s (Triin Jerlei)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
12:00–13:00	Lunch Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
13:00–14:30	Afternoon Block 9

Afternoon Block 9

9A Session (Room B2.21)
Graphic Design from Right to Left
Chair: Priscila Farias

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

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

9B Session (Room B2.23)
The Many Places of Design
Chair: Sarah Lichtman

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

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

9B.3 Digital Mythologies / Analogue Methodologies: Object-Based Analysis and Post-Physical Design (Sarah-Mary Geissler)

9C Session (Room B2.24)
Design in China: A Localised Modernity
Chair: Matthew Rampley

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

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

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

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
14:30–15:00	Break	The break will take place in room A11 in Building A (Arna Nováka 1).
15:00–16:00	Keynote Lecture 3 – Romani Design	The lecture will take place in room B2.13 in Building B2 (Arna Nováka 1).
16:00–16:30	Close & Big Reveal	The Close & Big Reveal will take place in room B2.13 in Building B2 (Arna Nováka 1).
17:00–18:00	Villa Jurkovič Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (4€).
17:00–18:00	Villa Tugendhat Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (19€/12€). Find out more about the villa on their website.
17:30–18:30	Walking Tour of Brno City Centre	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts about 60 minutes. Guided tour of Brno's modernist city centre is led by Vendula Hnídková or Matthew Rampley.

September 6 (Sunday)

TIME	TITLE	NOTE
10:00–11:00	Villa Jurkovič Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 60 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (4€).
10:00–11:30	Villa Tugendhat Visit	Register here to attend the visits. Please wait for the confirmation email. The tour lasts 90 minutes. The entrance fee will be paid on spot (19€/12€). Find out more about the villa on their website.

The conference program is subject to change.

📍 All sessions will take place at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, located at Arna Nováka 1 (see the map below).

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