Edited by Chiara Barbieri, Pier Paolo Peruccio and Dora Souza Dias

 

Issue #23 of AIS/Design: Storia e Ricerche calls for historical and critical investigations into national, transnational and international Design Organizations, their networks, politics and policies.

For more than a century, designers have gathered across the globe in professional and promotional associations at both local, national and international levels. These associations have frequently been formed by the need individual practitioners encountered to promote design and clarify its importance as a field of practice to wider audiences but also in an effort to establish it as distinct professional practice, with its own rules and codes of conduct. They have worked as gatekeepers thereby establishing who to include or otherwise exclude from the design discourse, with memberships encompassing individuals practitioners, associations and stakeholders in adjacent fields such as education, culture and commerce.

Proposals must be submitted in the form of a long abstract, to be sent by May 4, 2025.

Below are links to the materials:

– Full call

– Guidelines

– Template

Read More Read more about CfP #23: National and international design organizations: networks, politics and policies

Edited by Rosa Chiesa, Pier Paolo Peruccio e Carlo Vinti

Design culture and practice have been affected by the digitisation of design, production, mediation and consumption processes for several decades. On the other hand, the use of digital technologies, tools, sources, and archiving spaces has introduced radical changes in the professionalism of historians.

There has long been a critical and theoretical debate on these two major issues, but much remains to be done in the field of historical research and historiographical discourse.

Issue 22 of “AIS/Design. History and Research” invites to reconstruct and investigate from a historical perspective the different manifestations of digital design and at the same time solicits reflection on the most recent orientations of digital design history.

Proposals must be submitted in the form of a long abstract, to be sent by January 7, 2025.

Download the full Call for Proposals and the Guide Lines

Read More Read more about CfP #22: History of Digital Design and Digital Design History

Edited by Derrick de Kerckhove and Gabriele Neri

From the remote control to the city, television has represented and continues to represent, even in its recent digital hybridizations, a “symbolic form” with which twentieth-century design culture has experimented multiple and complex paths, still little investigated by international historiography.

Against the background of classic and contemporary studies on television, this issue of “AisDesign Journal” aims to collect original and in-depth perspectives, providing a historiographical contribution on a topic that is still largely unexplored.

Download the full Call for Proposals

Read More Read more about CfP #21: From the remote control to the city: design and television from its origin to the present day

Edited by Dario Mangano and Ilaria Ventura Bordenca

The issue aims to explore the relationships that have emerged, historically, between design and semiotics. The approaches of the contributions can be twofold: on the one hand, the exploration of the Structuralist perspective in its connections with the field of design, the debate on design, its use in didactics and the resulting outcomes, and on the other hand the use of semiotics as a key to interpreting design in different design traditions. The aim is to question how the science of signs (and their meanings) has influenced the work of designers and historians in Italy and elsewhere, and which paths can still be followed.

Download the full Call for Proposals

Read More Read more about CfP #20: Semiotics and design. Stories, ideas, perspectives

** deadline extended: 7 January 2023 **

Number 19 of “AIS/Design. Storia e ricerche” aims to explore the ways in which the culture of design over the 20th century has addressed – through theories, proposals, and projects – the topic of environmental sustainability and, more generally, the limits to the use of resources.

Since the initial phases of technological development in the 19th century, the discipline of design has been both an operational tool in the industrial production model, and a field of mediation between industrialisation and the imbalances it produced in the man-made environment. According to Vanni Pasca, this has created a dual identity in the culture of design: one consumerist, oriented towards development and competitive improvement; and the other critical, committed to speaking out about its limits and contradictions. The former has tried to solve problems from within the industrial system, while the latter has openly declared itself as anti-establishment.

In his dual role as designer-entrepreneur in the design world and lecturer-critic of industrialisation, William Morris certainly contributed to preempting some of the themes related to both the role of design in improving the quality of the environment (objects, the home, the city, and even the organisation of the countryside), and the duty of intellectuals and artists to fight against the harmful effects of industrialisation. (Morris, 1883). While Fabian socialism and Marxism in Europe were focused on themes of the living conditions of the working class (“The Housing Question” by Engels is from 1872) and the first environmentalist movements in America were primarily advocates for conservation of natural areas, opposing the systemic destruction of resources with the philosophy of the wilderness (Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman), Morris shifted attention to the relationship between industrialisation and the environment: thanks to him and other intellectuals of the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford, a more holistic culture made headway, considering the environment as part of an ecosystem to be protected.

Download the full Call for Proposals

Read More Read more about CfP #19: Design and the Limits of Development

2022 marks the 50^th anniversary of the most ambitious—even in the quantitative sense—exhibition on Italian design ever organized: Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. Curated by the Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz, the show was held at New York’s MoMA between May and September 1972.
The details of the show are well documented both in the press coverage and collective memory. 160 objects and fourteen environments (eleven commissioned; the other three the outcome of a competition for young designers). The objects were selected by Ambasz and the other MoMA curators with economic and organizational support provided by the Italian Institute for Foreign Commerce and by numerous technical sponsors to the tune of $1.5 million U.S. dollars: at that time, the largest sum ever dedicated to a MoMA show.
The response to the exhibition was uniformly favorable among audience members or critics, drawing headlines like MoMa Mia, That’s Some Show.

Over the past half century, scholarship on the exhibition has focused on the environments (where the radical ambitions of the period are palpable), exceptional works by major figures (Sottsass, Aulenti, Bellini, Rosselli…), and on the exploration of the critical and political dimensions of projects openly engaged in a critique of the consumer economy.

The special issue of AIS/design Journal invites scholars in the fields of design, architecture, communications, and production history to approach this epochal exhibition from less familiar vantage points such as:

• critical writings published in accompanying publications, the Italian and international press (both general and specialized), and, naturally, the exhibition catalog itself.
• the role of the companies involved in the realization and support of the show.
• the juxtaposition of exhibition sections and taxonomies, read from the standpoint of the show’s protagonists.
• the show’s articulation of a structured approach to design practice, examined against the backdrop of period debates in Italy.

Ambasz’s ambitions were immodest. He sought not only to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of design’s “Italian Job” but to strategically position Italian design with rigor and originality within a broader global context.

Download the full Call for Proposals

Read More Read more about CfP #18: Italy: the New Domestic Landscape. The first half century