Danah Abdulla is an Arab-Canadian designer, educator, and researcher – not in any particular order but always all three. She is program director of Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea, and Wimbledon Colleges of Art, University of the Arts London. She has previously held positions at Brunel University London and the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Danah holds a Ph.D. in Design from Goldsmiths, University of London (2018). She is a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform. In 2010, she founded Kalimat Magazine, an independent, nonprofit publication about Arab thought and culture. Danah’s research is particularly focused on decolonizing design, possibilities of design education, design culture(s) with a focus on the Arab region, the politics of design, publishing, and social design.
Tanveer Ahmed, after many frustrating years of learning and teaching dominant capitalist models of fashion design, began a part-time Ph.D. at the Open University, UK, to investigate ways of teaching antiracist and anticapitalist forms of fashion design. Inspired by Black feminist literature and decolonizing education movements, she has drawn on her family histories and identity to offer students ways of disrupting the Eurocentric and neoliberal agendas that dominate fashion design education. The project described in her essay, by centering a garment from the Global South, has helped students question the dominance of European fashion design in their curricula and resources. Her long-term aspiration is to contribute to fashion design educational paradigms by generating new antiracist, postcapital agendas in fashion design. She is currently a visiting lecturer in design at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art, London.
Zoy Anastassakis (b. 1974) is a Brazilian designer and anthropologist. She is associate professor and former director of the Superior School of Industrial Design, State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ), where she coordinates the Design and Anthropology Lab (LaDA). In 2014, she published Triunfos e Impasses: Lina Bo Bardi, Aloisio Magalhães e o design no Brasil. In 2018, she was invited as a visiting researcher in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she took part in the research project “Knowing from the Inside,” coordinated by Tim Ingold. Since 2019, she is an associated researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) at Nova University, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2020, she published the book Refazendo tudo: Confabulações em meio aos cupins na universidade. Together with Marcos Martins, she is preparing a book on the ESDI Aberta movement, to be published in 2021 by Bloomsbury, in the series Designing in Dark Times.
Ahmed Ansari is an assistant professor in NYU Tandon’s Department of Technology, Culture, and Society. He holds a B.Des. in communication design from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, in Karachi, Pakistan (2008); and an M.Des. and Ph.D. in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University (2013 and 2019). His research interests intersect at the junction between design, critical cultural studies, and the history and philosophy of technology, particularly in the contexts of the Indian subcontinent.
Brave New Alps, cofounded by Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz, is a collaborative design practice based in the alpine Lagarina Valley in Italy, whose twelve members are dedicated to the creation of commons and community economies. Since embarking on design studies in 2002, they have been looking for ways in which to activate design skills for eco-social causes. Since 2010, Bianca has been researching the entanglements and worldviews that create the precarious working conditions that make critical design practices so difficult to sustain. Since 2014, Fabio has been researching commons and modes of community organizing in the Italian Alps. As members of the international Community Economies Research Network, they activate empowering readings of the economy in order to create modes of practice and living that can sustain themselves and others engaged in transformative practices. Currently, Bianca also works as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Eurac Research in Italy, where she runs the Alpine Community Economies Lab. Fabio is coordinating a network of civic organizations and informal groups, who are setting up a community academy at the train station of Rovereto in Trentino, Italy.
Johannes Bruder works at the intersection of anthropology, STS, and media studies, and between the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia University in Montreal and FHNW’s Critical Media Lab in Basel. His research revolves around experiments, tests, and demos that link science, design, and the arts – which means that, in his own words, “I am often faced with the question about who I am, where I belong, or what it is that I am doing. Research? For sure! Critique? Probably yes, but hasn’t critique run out of steam? Intervention? I do hope so. Activism? I don’t know. But then, how can activism and research be reliably discerned in our current situation?” His essay “Alexa’s Body” is an attempt to merge intersecting subjectivities, and to think like a researcher, an interventionist, and an activist at the same time – and to avoid succumbing to the pressures of having one, and one subjectivity only.
Cheryl Buckley is professor of fashion and design history at the University of Brighton. A founding member of the journal Visual Culture in Britain in 2000, and chair of the Design History Society from 2006–2009, she also served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Design History from 2011–2016. Questions relating to gender have been continuous throughout her academic work, and her research has explored fashion, ceramics, émigrés, and transnational identities as well as design in everyday lives. Key books include Potters and Paintresses (1991), Fashioning the Feminine (with Hilary Fawcett, 2002), Designing Modern Britain (2007), and, most recently, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (with Hazel Clark, 2017). Her article “Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design” (Design Issues 3, no. 2, Fall 1986) was written as part of her Ph.D. thesis (University of East Anglia, 1990).
Sria Chatterjee holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and was awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship in 2019. She specializes in the political ecologies of art and design in the Global South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work draws on transnational environmental histories, the history of science (in particular, plant science and agriculture), landscape studies, design, and cybernetics. She is currently a fellow at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media at FHNW in Basel. Her research has been funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art among others. She is a contributing editor at British Art Studies and her writing has been published in journals such as Cultural Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and others.
Alison J. Clarke joined the University of Applied Arts Vienna from the Royal College of Art in London to become chair of the department of Design History and Theory and founding director of the Victor Papanek Foundation: she is the convener of the biennial Papanek Symposium exploring the ethics and futures of contemporary design. As a trained design historian (RCA/V&A, London) and social anthropologist (University College London), her research explores the intersection of design and anthropology. Recipient of major international grants and fellowships, Clarke is a regular media broadcaster and international speaker in the field of design. Her most recent publications include Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition, the coedited volume Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture, and the monograph Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, forthcoming from the MIT Press. She has recently cocurated, with Vitra Design Museum, the international traveling exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design.
Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar, activist, designer, and media-maker, and currently associate professor of civic media at MIT. They are a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, faculty affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement, was published by the MIT Press in 2014. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT Press in February 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a steering committee member of the Design Justice Network (designjusticenetwork.org).
Paola De Martin was born in 1965 in Switzerland as a child of Italian migrant workers. After her formal training as a textile designer at the Zurich School for Applied Arts (SfGZ; today: ZHdK), she was an entrepreneur of interior and fashion design, and a founding member of the fashion label Beige. The exploitation of herself and others in the global fashion industry soon pushed her out of practice. She went on to study socioeconomic and art history at the University of Zurich, where she received a master’s degree in 2011. She currently teaches design history, design sociology, and interculturality in the Department of Design and the Department of Cultural Analysis and Education at ZHdK. De Martin is now completing her dissertation at the ETH Zurich (Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture (gta), Chair Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung), which focusses on the history of aesthetic and social inequality within the field of design. De Martin is a member of the Design History Society, the Swiss Netzwerk Designgeschichte, the NGO Public Eye, and the postmigrant Institut Neue Schweiz INES. She is the leading force behind actual claims for the reparation of human rights violations caused by the denial of family reunion by Swiss immigration law, which many thousands of non-Swiss worker’s families, hers included, endured with traumatic consequences between the 1950s and the early 2000s.
Decolonising Design was founded in 2016 by eight design researchers, artists, and activists, most of whom stem from or have ties to ties to the Global South, as a response to Euro- and Anglocentric socio-technical politics and pedagogies of design as both a field of research and praxis. The group does not aim to offer an alternative perspective on design, but rather questions the very foundations upon which the discipline was established.
depatriarchise design is a nonprofit research platform working across different mediation formats. Their manifold investigative and activist practice is rooted in intersectional feminism. Founded in 2017, depatriarchise design was born out of frustration with a design discipline that is deeply interwoven with discriminating structures. depatriarchise design started as a call for action. The urgent need for change in design practice and its dominant paradigms is their driving force. Through texts, workshops, and exhibitions they examine the complicity of design in the reproduction of oppressive systems but also tell long-silenced stories. Constantly researching feminist pedagogies, they stir alternative modes of teaching design, initiating workshops, bringing like-minded people together to learn from and with each other. They value collaboration and the cocreation of knowledge, and therefore often join forces with people, collectives, and initiatives whose work they admire and with whom they share common political ground. They believe in the transformative potential of design and are constantly looking for ways of creating more socially sustainable futures. depatriarchise design is registered as a nonprofit association in Basel, Switzerland, and works internationally. Anja Neidhardt and Maya Ober run the platform together as a collaborative endeavor.
Arturo Escobar is Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Associate with the Culture, Memory, and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali, and the Cultural Studies groups at Universidad Javeriana, Bogota. He is Member of the Executive Board in the Society of Cultural Anthropology and the Editorial Boards of numerous publications, such as Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: Journal of Socialist Ecology (Santa Cruz, CA), Development (Journal of the Society for International Development, Rome) and Ecología Política (Barcelona). His main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements in the Colombian Pacific, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2nd ed. 2011). His most recent books are Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008; 2010 for the Spanish edition); Sentipensar con la Tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (2014); Autonomía y diseño: La realización de lo comunal (2016; February 2018 for the English edition, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds); and Otro posible es posible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Abya Yala/ Afro/Latino-América (2018).
Kjetil Fallan is professor of design history at the University of Oslo, and cofounder of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. In recent years his research has sought to bring together histories of design and the environment. Key output thus far includes “Environmental Histories of Design,” a special issue of the Journal of Design History (vol. 30, no. 2); the 2017 Design History Society Annual Conference, Making and Unmaking the Environment; and the edited volume The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Routledge, 2019). Previous work has focused chiefly on twentieth-century everyday design culture and professional design discourse in Scandinavia and Italy, including Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse (Routledge, 2017); Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories (Berg, 2012); and, with Grace Lees-Maffei, Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury, 2014). Fallan also has a sustained interest in the theory, methodology, and historiography of design, as explored in, among others, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (Berg, 2010) and, with Grace Lees-Maffei, Designing Worlds: National Histories of Design in an Age of Globalization (Berghahn Books, 2016).
Griselda Flesler is a tenured professor at the Chair of Design and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism; principal researcher at the American Art Institute; and a Ph.D. candidate in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Being raised in a feminist household on the one hand, and having acquired a predominately Eurocentric graphic design education that didn’t relate to the Argentinian reality on the other, Flesler has started researching design as a space for the construction and reproduction of gender relations, applying an intersectional lens. Her research focuses on the symbolic violence of the university space and the queer uses of institutional and public space. Flesler also serves as Head of Gender Office at FADU-UBA, developing and applying the “Protocol of Institutional Intervention in the Case of Complaints of Gender Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Gender Discrimination.”
Corin Gisel is a Swiss writer, researcher, and designer. Gisel holds an MA in cultural publishing from Zurich University of the Arts/Institute for Applied Media Studies. Their writing has been published by Lars Müller Publishers, Diogenes, Spector Books, Occasional Papers, Walker Art Center, and Valiz and has covered topics such as design education, dress culture, the digitalization of the museum, LGBTQIA+ button badges, and money as a medium for political opposition. Gisel has taught and lectured at the School of Visual Arts New York, POST Design Festival, Ésad Valence, FHNW Basel, and Krabbesholm Højskole, among others. With Nina Paim, they conceived the book Taking a Line for a Walk, published by Spector Books, Leipzig, in 2016 and supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In 2018, they coedited the book Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance, published by Lars Müller Publishers. Gisel is a co-founder of the feminist magazine for design politics Futuress. Next to their work, Gisel is also active in LGBTQIA+ community organizing and activism.
Matthew Kiem is a designer, researcher, and educator currently working at the University of New South Wales faculty of Art & Design. He holds degrees in both design and art education from the University of New South Wales (2010) and a Ph.D. in design from Western Sydney University (2018). His research focuses on the application of decolonial theory to the critical study of design history, theory, and practice. He is a founding member of the Decolonising Design group.
Claudia Mareis is a design researcher and cultural scientist with a background in design practice. In 2013 she was appointed professor for design history and theory at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. There she is also the director of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) and the Critical Media Lab. Since 2019 she is one of the deputies of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also a member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation; the vice-president of the Swiss Design Network (SDN); and a board member of the German Association for Design Theory and Research (DGTF). Her research interests comprise the history of design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including epistemologies, ontologies, and politics of design. She is working on a critical cultural history of creativity and is about to complete a comprehensive monograph on the history of creative techniques in the postwar period.
Ramia Mazé is professor in Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, United Kingdom. Previously, in Finland, she was a professor and head of education in the Department of Design at Aalto University and, prior to that, she worked at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the national doctoral school Designfakulteten, and the Interactive Institute in Sweden. A designer and architect by training, her Ph.D. is in interaction design. She has led, published, and exhibited widely through major interdisciplinary and international practice-based design research projects, most recently in social and sustainable design, design activism, and design for policy. She specializes in participatory, critical, and politically engaged design practices, as well as “research through design” and feminist epistemologies.
Tania Messell is a design historian whose research focuses on design professionalization and globalization in the second half of the twentieth century. Her essay derives from her doctoral research on the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (1957–80), conducted at the University of Brighton. Her thesis mapped the early years of the organization, tracing the competing political, economic, and cultural imperatives that shaped the forum in the wider Cold War and decolonial contexts. She is currently researching the rise of humanitarian design with a focus on Western practices, a critical study of the imperatives of “care” in their most extreme articulations. Of multiple origins, Messell grew up close to Switzerland, a background which informed her interest in the value systems and power dynamics pervading international organizations and humanitarian aid. She has published in several international peer-reviewed publications and is a coeditor of International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values, published by Bloomsbury Academic (forthcoming).
Anja Neidhardt is a Ph.D. student at Umeå Institute of Design and Umeå Centre for Gender Studies in Sweden. Previously she worked as an independent design journalist and educator. She has a master’s degree in Design Curating and Writing from Design Academy Eindhoven. Anja is contributing to depatriachise design since 2017, and became co-editor in 2018.
Nan O’Sullivan is an associate dean within the faculty of Architecture and Design, director of the Design for Social Innovation Programme, and founder of the research cluster The Social Lab at the School of Design Innovation, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. Nan investigates the changing faces, languages, values, and processes of design found within the complex social and cultural issues that challenge us as individuals and as a part of larger communities and societies. As an advocate for Transition Design, Nan investigates, identifies, creates, facilitates, and communicates creative pathways that are informed by more equitable, inclusive, and place-based approaches. Inspired by the traditional Māori proverb Hoki whakamuri kia anga whakamua – “look to the past to forge the future” – Nan seeks to illustrate the relevance of indigenous knowledge, specifically that of Māori and Pasifika nations, to design education, thinking, and practice in the twenty-first century.
Maya Ober is a designer, researcher, educator, activist, and the founding editor of depatriarchise design based in Basel, Switzerland. She works as a research associate at the Institute of Industrial Design and as a lecturer at the Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory at the Academy of Arts and Design in Basel. There, together with Laura Pregger she has initiated the educational programme “Imagining Otherwise” exploring intersectional pedagogies of art and design education. Her current research project “Space of Radical Possibilities – towards intersectional feminist pedagogies of design” at the Academy of the Arts in Bern is a multi-sited study situated interdisciplinary between gender studies, social anthropology, and design, exploring how intersectional feminist pedagogies influence design education.
Nina Paim is a Brazilian curator and design researcher. Her work usually involves many others and revolves around notions of directing, supporting, and collaborating. She was born in Nova Friburgo, 168 years after Swiss settler-colonialists displaced the indigenous tribes of the puris, coroados, and guarus. Love and fate brought her to Basel, where she seeks to transmute her daily immigrant exhaustion into care practices for making space. She curated the exhibition Taking a Line for a Walk at the 2014 Brno Design Biennial and co-curated Department of Non-Binaries at the 2018 Fikra Design Biennial, Sharjah. She was a program coordinator for the 2018 Swiss Design Network conference “Beyond Change.” She’s a two-time recipient of the Swiss Design Award, and a co-founder of the feminist magazine for design politics Futuress.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher born in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, 485 years after the Portuguese first invaded the land currently known as Brazil. She holds an MA from Bremen University of the Arts and a Ph.D. from Berlin University of the Arts. Her work investigates how colonial gender difference is inscribed and imposed upon and within bodies through technology. Over the past years, she has been researching practices of herbalism and the management of fertility through performances, installations, and moving image. She is a founding member of the Decolonising Design group, and currently teaches at Berlin University of the Arts.
Mia Charlene White is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the New School, where she is also Associate Director of the Housing Justice Lab @ Parsons School of Design, New York. She has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and political science from the State University of NY at Stonybrook, a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a Ph.D. in urban studies and planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is a Ford Foundation Minority Fellow and a National Science Foundation Fellow. Originally from NYC and a mother of two, Mia identifies as a Black American of African American and Korean descent. She is working on her first book, the basis of which is shared in her remarks here.
Design and Publisher
Lotte Lara Schröder is an artist and graphic designer, interested in ecological and natural phenomena. Her ‘free’ work consists of drawings, paintings, and collages, often combined with sound or objects. Lotte created the overall book and cover design, and the opening chapter images of this publication. These sediments dissect and reveal the remnants of our modern/ contemporary society. Images from Lotte’s personal archive mixed with others sourced online, reveal personal, natural, and sometimes upsetting visuals that represent our current state of being. Each layer freely symbolizes a theme that resides within this book: gender, unsustainable systems, working class, ignorance, epistemology, obstacles, and poetry.
Valiz is an independent international publisher, addressing contemporary developments in art, design, architecture, and urban affairs. Their books provide critical reflection and interdisciplinary inspiration in a broad and imaginative way, often establishing a connection between cultural disciplines and socioeconomic questions. Valiz is headed by Astrid Vorstermans and Pia Pol.