Display Design:
History, Criticism, and Curatorial Discourses

Design and History Society Annual Conference 2023

September 7–9

ESAD · College of Art and Design

In the introduction to The Power of Display, Mary Anne Staniszewski notes that her research intends to analyse one of the dimensions most neglected by cultural history: exhibition design seen both as an aesthetic medium and as a historical category. While recognising a growing interest in exhibition and installation design since the 1980s, Staniszewski also noted that the way artefacts “are actually seen and displayed remains a relatively overlooked consideration” (Staniszewski, 1998).

Exhibitions, regardless of the impact they cause, are ephemeral events due to their specified duration. A historical and documentary analysis (Myers, 2011) enables us to examine the role of certain historical exhibitions, to reconstruct their context, to compare exhibitions from different moments, to retrace discourses, thus contributing to the construction of design’s discipline. Also curatorship and the different formats of immaterial production (conversation pieces, relational and participatory processes, among others) have a relevant place both as an object of historical interpretation and ways of making design history. However, they belong to a relatively peripheral dimension, which summons other peripheries.

Call for Papers

For this conference we are calling for papers that, surprise, relearn and rethink design history and design stories, considering four stands:

Stand 1

Designing the Design’s Field: From Division of Labour and Division of Taste towards the New as Modern Value

Before 1920

Stand 2

Social Dreaming and Social Utopia; Avant-Garde or Stand Guard; Good Design and Totally Design

1920s–1945

Stand 3

Media and Messages; Individual or Corporation; Production and Consumption; Retro-Culture and Counterculture

1946–1960s

Stand 4

Landscapes and Languages; Radical or Rhizomatic; Formal or Informal; Semantic or Pragmatic

1970s–1990s

Stand 5

Post-Media and Social Media; Just-in-Time or Post-production; Fluid and Trans

2000s–2020s

Guidelines for paper/panel/poster submission

To submit a proposal you need to create an account on EasyChair first.

  • Sign up with EasyChair
  • Go to DHS2023 Submission Page
  • New Submission
  1. Sign up go to the conference page on EasyChair and click on the “create an account” link at the log in page. EasyChair will send you instructions after you fill in the sign up form. If you already have an EasyChair account, you can use it for DHS2023 conference.
  2. Go to the DHS2023 submission page. Log in by entering your username and password.
  3. Click on the “new submission” button.

To submit paper proposals

  1. Fill out the author information form for each author. Please make sure that you select at least one corresponding author for papers with two or more authors. Corresponding author(s ) will receive emails from the system about the submission.
  2. Enter the title and 300 words abstract of the paper/poster.
  3. Enter at least three keywords specifying your submission.
  4. Select the topic relevant to your submission and identify your presentation format.
  5. Indicate the planned format of participation. Please do not upload any files for paper/poster submissions.

To submit panel proposals

The panel chair will act as the corresponding author for panel proposals and will fill in the Author 1 entry form.

  1. Add author information for each paper in the panel.
  2. Enter the title and the 300-word abstract of the panel in the title and abstract form.
  3. Enter at least three keywords specifying the panel.
  4. Select the relevant topic for the panel.
  5. Indicate the planned format for the panel.
  6. Upload a pdf file at the bottom of the page containing titles and 300 words abstracts of all three papers.

Please make sure that the pdf file is anonymous (it should not include any author information.)

Keynote Speakers

Jane Pavitt

United Kingdom

Head of Research and Learning at Zaha Hadid Foundation

Professor Jane Pavitt is Head of Research and Learning for the Zaha Hadid Foundation, London, with responsibility for academic partnerships, curatorial projects, and public programmes. She is a curator, writer, and historian of architecture and design, and has curated and co-curated several major international exhibitions of 20th-century design and culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has held teaching, research, and management roles at the University of Brighton, V&A, Royal College of Art, and Kingston University. She is on the exhibitions advisory committee of the London Design Museum and is a Visiting Professor at Kingston School of Art.

Maria Helena Souto

Portugal

Researcher at UNIDCOM/IADE

Maria Helena Souto, Associate professor at IADE-Universidade Europeia, holds a PhD in Art Sciences (Universidade de Lisboa) and a master’s degree in Art History (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). Her research field is the Design History, with a focus on the relationship between Portuguese Design and Gender Studies. On these topics, she has published several articles and books, curated exhibitions and coordinated national and international research projects, namely she was one of the Scientific Responsible at the European cooperation project “MoMoWo - Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement” and currently, she is a member of the research project funded by FCT “Women Architects in Portugal, 1942-1986”.

Saki Mafundikwa

Zimbabwe

Founder and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA)

Saki Mafundikwa is the recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from Design and Art Direction (D&AD), the UK’s premier design and advertising organization. He is the founder and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) a design and new media training college in Harare. He has an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. He has been published widely on design and cultural issues and is currently working on a revised edition of Afrikan Alphabets: the Story of Writing in Afrika. His award-winning first film, Shungu: The Resilience of a People had its world premiere at 2009’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). In July 2023, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University of the Arts London (UAL).

Venue

ESAD

College of Art and Design

Located in Matosinhos, ESAD is close to Porto city-center, accessible by car, bus or underground and only a few minutes from various amenities and points of interest. ESAD offers degrees in design and arts, master's in design, several postgraduate courses, an open training programme, workshops and summer labs. It annually grants scholarships to candidates for undergraduate and master's degrees.