Conference Agenda

Design practice is having a moment with history. Industry trends have long demonstrated a formalist engagement with history, even as design history scholarship expanded its body of literature and deepened its inquiries beyond the formalist approaches used in early survey texts. Industry-facing conferences dedicate content to questions about how the past embeds itself in the present and future field. Trade publications are publishing calls for and contributions to histories beyond the canon. Overlooked and underrepresented narratives are becoming more visible, as are efforts to preserve knowledge about historical production methods and technologies. Whether or not practitioners are well-versed in historical methodologies, there seems to be a renewed, practical interest in the content and methods of design history. The question of what practitioners can do with historical knowledge and research methods is a subject of considerable inquiry. This conversation aims to map extant and emerging possibilities in the overlapping space between design history and practice. Because academic institutions increasingly expect design faculty to integrate research and scholarship in applied outputs, we will create a working document that articulates and organizes convergent methods in historical research and studio making in the hopes of identifying trajectories for future practices.