AIS/Design: Storia e Ricerche #7 (Dec 2015)

Theme: Design at work: the history of design between the profession and industry
Editors: Fiorella Bulegato and Dario Scodeller
Contact: editors@aisdesign.org
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 8 June 2015

“AIS/Design. Storia e ricerche” is the peer-reviewed online journal of the Italian Association of Design Historians, dedicated to the advancement of research into every aspect of design history and to the publication of higher scientific research.
Issue number 7, coordinated by Fiorella Bulegato and Dario Scodeller, is dedicated to the work of designers in the many different forms in which it has been expressed and developed since the 1930s, in the fields of product, visual and exhibition design. The intent is to examine, taking a point of view from within the profession, the relationship between design autonomy, and the constraints or opportunities represented by the context of organization, production and distribution – intrinsic to manufacturing companies and institutions – within which the designer must operate.

Unfrozen – 1st SDN Design Research Winter Summit (Jan 2016, Switzerland)

Dates: 28-31 January 2016
Location: Swiss Alps, details TBA
Website: http://www.swissdesignnetwork.ch/
Deadline for submission of abstracts & workshop proposals: UPDATED: 4 May 2015

Unfrozen – First SDN Design Research Winter Summit January 28-31 2016

After three years in hibernation, the Swiss Design Network invites you to Unfrozen, the 9th SDN Symposium and the 1st SDN Design Research Winter Summit – January, 28-31 2016. Whether you are uncovering gems from the glaciers of design history, exploring the melting snowcaps of design’s changing climate, or riding the fresh powder of emerging trends, we welcome submissions exploring this metaphor. You are free to submit your work for the platform of your choice : as a classical lecture, a workshop, a fireside talk, or to suggest an alternative form.

1st Intl Conf on ANTICIPATION (Nov 2015, Trento Italy)

Dates: 5-7 November 2015
Location: Trento, Italy
Website: http://www.projectanticipation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=582
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 April 2015

Invited Speakers: Arjun Appaduray, Jens Beckert, Julian Bleecker, Riel Miller, Martin Seligman, and Olin Wright.
Program Committee: Roberto Poli (chair), Flaviano Celaschi, Keri Facer, Garry Jacobs, John Kineman, and Giuseppe Sciortino.

Please consider submitting a proposal for the track Design Cultures and Anticipation: When Design Shapes Possible Futures (http://www.projectanticipation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=550)

Algorithmic Practices: Emergent interoperability in the everyday (Sep 2015, Exeter UK)

Dates: 2-4 September 2015
Location: University of Exeter, UK
Website: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm
Deadline for submissions: 6 Feb 2015

Sponsored by: The History and Philosophy of Geography Study Group

An ever-increasing proportion of the interactions that we have with digital platforms, apps and devices are mediated according to complex algorithms. Whether it be the real time analytics that draw us into playing a game on our phone, or tailored recommendations built from our historical searching and buying habits, we structure our daily lives in response to ‘performative infrastructures’ (Thrift, 2005: 224), most of them hidden deliberately by their makers.

Annual Design History Society Conf: How we live, and How we might live: Design and the Spirit of Critical Utopianism (Sep 2015, San Francisco USA)

Dates: 11-13 September 2015
Location: California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, USA
Website: http://www.cca.edu/dhs2015
Deadline for submissions: 28 February 2015

California College of the Arts, which is at once the westernmost outpost of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the gateway to Silicon Valley, is pleased to host the 2015 conference of the Design History Society. Inspired by the spirit of critical utopianism that connects the 19th century reformers to the 21st century techno-visionaries, this multidisciplinary conference will explore the diverse ways in which designers have sought to balance critical realism with utopian idealism.

COLOR/FORMS: The 24th Annual Parsons/Cooper Hewitt Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Design (April 2015, New York)

Dates: 23-24 April 2015
Location: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, USA
Contact: Ethan Robey, robeye@newschool.edu
Deadline for proposals: 26 January 2015

Coloration is intrinsic to the social meanings of objects. Colors shape our interaction with things and other people in fundamental ways; they can appeal to our most visceral senses of pleasure or desire. Colors affect behaviors, and we use colors metaphorically to describe attitudes, feelings and moods. In the world of consumer goods, the need to produce certain colors has driven innovations in mechanical processes, and markets can rise and fall based on color trends.

This symposium is seeking papers on the forms color takes and the roles color plays in the meanings of design and the decorative arts since the Renaissance. We are especially interested in research that touches on moments of change: for example, on transitions from monochrome to full-color production, or when particular colors became available, fashionable or unfashionable.

Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond (July 2015, Philadelphia USA)

Dates: 6-31 July 2015
Location: Drexel University, Philadelphia USA
Website: http://drexel.edu/westphal/undergraduate/ARTH/historyofmoderndesign/
Deadline for application: 2 March 2015

This exciting four–week NEH summer teaching institute will prepare twenty-five college faculty from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to meet the increasing demand for as well as interest in courses on modern design history. In-depth seminars will focus upon three interdependent thematic units:

• taste and popular culture
• political and global interpretations of design after world war II
• women as consumers and producers of design

The director’s and visiting scholars’ complementary approaches to “The Canon and Beyond” will build upon and reinforce participants’ familiarity with standard material, while simultaneously introducing new material and critical perspectives. Field trips to regional museums and collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hagley Museum in Delaware will provide participants direct experience with objects, and suggest ways to use local collections in their own teaching. Group presentations by our participants will take place during the final week of the Institute.

Content is in development, for more information please contact nehmoderndesign@drexel.edu.

AIS/Design Storia e Ricerche #5 (April 2015)

Contact: editors@aisdesign.org and cc: journal@aisdesign.org
Deadline for submission of abstracts: UPDATED 10 October 2014

Designers and Writing in the Twentieth Century
edited by Fiorella Bulegato, Maddalena Dalla Mura and Carlo Vinti

AIS/Design. Storia e Ricerche is a peer-reviewed online journal promoted by the Italian Society of Design Historians and dedicated to the advancement of the history and historiography of design.

Issue No. 5, which inaugurates the editorial programme for the years 2015-2016, coordinated by Fiorella Bulegato, Maddalena Dalla Mura and Carlo Vinti, will be dedicated to the relationship between designers and writing and to investigating the impact it has had on the development of the culture of design in the twentieth century.

AIS/Design Storia e Ricerche #4: Italian Material Design: Learning from History (July 2014)

Website:  journal@aisdesign.org
Deadline for submissions: 7 July 2014

Editors:  G. Bosoni and M. Ferrara

The 4th number of the “Ais/Design. Storia e Ricerche” Journal (expected journal publication November 2014), is proposed as an occasion of confrontation on the theme of the relationship between materials and Italian design. The aim of this call is to collect a series of original contributions with unpublished writings or re-positioning well known stories, that provide documentary evidence of the proposed topic (the particular attention of the Italian Design to materials, technologies and productive processes), with its various stories – product, fashion, interiors, visual, etc. – also focusing on how communication design contributed to build this myth. Even if based on the Italian history, the call also demands a other contributions that could compare foreign episodes and experiences with these Italian realities to better understand the specificities of the Italian case.

12th Intl Conf on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (September 2014, Philadelphia USA)

Dates: 18-21 September 2014
Location: Drexel University, Philadelphia USA
Website: http://www.drexel.edu/mobilities/news/archive/spinoffs-of-mobility-call-for-papers/
Deadline for abstracts & CV: 31 March 2014

Send CV and Abstract, max. 1 page each, to submissions@t2m.org

The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (TM) invites proposals for papers to be presented at the 12th International Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, to be held at Drexel University in Philadelphia on 18-21 September, 2014, co-sponsored in association with Drexel’s Centers for Mobilities Research and Policy and Science, Technology and Society, and the Pan-American Mobilities Network.

Papers may address any social, cultural, economic, technological, ecological and political perspectives on the history, present, and future of transport, traffic and mobility. However, preference will be given to our conference theme: Spinoffs of Mobility: Technology, Risk & Innovation. The conference theme addresses intended and unintended positive, negative, surprising and alarming side effects and collateral damages of mobility in relation to the fields of technology, innovation and risk – especially in situations of war, disaster, terrorism and new modes of securitization which unsettle existing law around human rights, civil rights, political rights, and mobility rights.