Design in an Age of Uncertainty

Format: Student Meet-Up
Date: 3.9.2026 (Thursday, Day 1)
Time: 9:00–10:00
Capacity: 12 people
Registration: YES → Register HERE!

Every research project comes with moments of uncertainty – a theory that suddenly seems less promising, data that raises more questions than answers, or an argument that still feels just out of reach. Many of the challenges we encounter along the academic journey feel highly specific until we start talking to our peers about them and discover just how much they are shared.

Whether it's a methodological question, theoretical query, writing struggle, or concerns about project scope, this informal meet-up invites MA and PhD students in design history and related fields to bring any current research related challenge for peer discussion. The session is designed as a forum where participants can exchange ideas, offer feedback, share experiences, and collectively explore possible solutions, drawing on diverse perspectives and stages of research.

Each participant who wishes to contribute will be invited to give a brief introduction (approximately 2 minutes) to a specific problem, challenge, or question from their research to open the discussion. Presenting is entirely optional, and everyone is welcome to join the conversation.

This event is co-organised with the Student Ambassadors of the Design History Society.

Format: Student-led Workshop
Facilitated by: Aurore Damoiseaux (PhD Candidate, University of Brighton, UK)
Date: 3.9.2026 (Thursday, Day 1)
Time: 11:30–12:30
Capacity: 12 people
Registration: YES → Register HERE!

This student-led workshop will provide guidance on how to write an abstract in design history and related fields. Concise and precise, abstracts need to follow certain guidelines to fit criteria that a reviewer will look for such as the topic at hand, the relevance to a potential theme, methods used, findings and results. Whether they are responding to a call for papers or developing thesis abstracts, publication proposals, or PhD proposals, abstracts are generally comparable in their form.

In this workshop, MA and PhD students will participate in an exercise on abstract review, following the criteria to assess what makes a strong, concise, and comprehensive abstract. We will analyse several abstracts and the call for papers they responded to, looking at ways abstracts can take different shapes and fit various briefs.

Participants will then be invited to work on a potential submission to a call for papers (CFP) and to provide peer feedback. After a brief freewriting session, participants will be tasked to read each other’s abstracts and explain the research back to the original author, to note points of clarity and potential gaps. Participants are also welcome to bring for discussion and feedback their own CFP to which they would like to respond, a draft abstract they are currently developing, or an abstract they have already submitted.

Aurore Damoiseaux is a PhD student at University of Brighton, and she is one of the DHS Student Ambassadors since January 2026. Her AHRC-Techne funded research project focuses on the use of clothing and textile objects as tools to protest at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981–2000). Her thesis analyses clothing and textile objects as political symbols, the power of collective creation in protest, and the temporality of peace camps as sites of collective memory.

Full title: Materialising the "Immaterial": How to Make Design Historical Interventions in Cyberspace
Format: Workshop
Facilitated by: Dr Anna K. Talley (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Edinburgh, UK)
Date: 4.9.2026 (Friday, Day 2)
Time: 9:00–9:45
Capacity: 12 people
Registration: YES → Register HERE!

How do you uncover the materiality of what is commonly understood to be "immaterial"? In this workshop, MA and PhD students are invited to investigate this question by theorising, disassembling and reassembling a case study of an archived website. Through a practical, object-based study and collaborative discussion, we will examine how design historians can incorporate theories, methods and tools from critical data studies and web archiving into their practice to study both live and archived websites. By the end of the session, participants will be able to confidently begin undertaking a design historical study of websites by…

• Enhancing their design historical research methodologies with theories and methods from critical data studies and web archiving.
• Having an awareness of some tools that can be used to study websites, web archives and manage web archives as data.
• Situating the study of websites both within design historical frameworks and the wider context of the ‘digital commons’ in the context of mass AI-scraping. 

This session will be useful for students who are simply interested in or intend to make digital objects a primary object of study. Though we will be focusing on a website in the session, the concepts, tools and methods will be applicable to digital objects other than websites, so anyone with an interest in digital material culture is encouraged to attend. No technical knowledge or previous knowledge on digital objects, critical data studies or web archiving is required for this workshop, though recommended reading is listed below.

Dr Anna K. Talley AFHEA is a researcher of modern and contemporary design history and theory. She holds a PhD in Design from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Design History and Material Culture from the V&A/Royal College of Art. Her research interests include graphic design and communications technologies, digital objects and infrastructures, the relationship between design and political theory, design ethics, and the curation of design. She has published in the Journal of Design History, Visible Language, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.

Recommended Reading
Gabi Arrigoni et al., Preserving and Sharing Born-Digital and Hybrid Objects from and across the National Collection, Towards a National Collection (V&A, Birkbeck University of London, British Film Institute, 2022).

Niels Brügger, "Understanding the Archived Web as a Historical Source," in The SAGE Handbook of Web History, 16–29. London: SAGE Publications, 2019.

Yuk Hui, "What Is a Digital Object?," Metaphilosophy 43, no. 4 (2012).

Jannis Kallinikos et al., "The Ambivalent Ontology of Digital Artifacts," MIS Quarterly (Minneapolis) 37, no. 2 (2013).

Trevor Owens, "All Digital Objects Are Born Digital Objects," The Signal, Library of Congress, 15 May 2012. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/05/all-digital-objects-are-born-digital-objects/.

Anna Kallen Talley, "Digital Design History: State of the Field, Definitions and Possibilities," Journal of Design History, 2026; epag001, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epag001.

Janina Wildfeuer et al., "Special Issue: Analysing Digitized Visual Culture," Visual Communication (London, England) 17, no. 3 (2018).