Conference Agenda

What does it mean to actively rebalance the design canon and how can historical, critical, and pedagogical design research work together to make that rebalancing durable, accountable and transformative?

Despite women now forming largest cohort in graphic design education globally, their professional contributions remain systematically underrepresented within design histories, disciplinary canons and institutional archives. This imbalance reflects deeply embedded historical discourses that have shaped what counts as legitimate design knowledge, whose work is preserved and which narratives are reproduced through research, education and professional culture.

Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon (Resnick, 2025) responds to this absence by foregrounding the work of undervalued and marginalised women designers from diverse global contexts across the twentieth century. The publication operates not only as a recovery project, but as a critical intervention into the discourse of design history itself - challenging the epistemological assumptions, archival practices and methodological conventions that have shaped the field.

Led by contributors and the editor of the volume, whose broader research examines the historical invisibility of women in graphic design across the world, this conversation invites participants to critically examine how design canons are formed and contested. The session will explore how gendered structures of power influence recognition and how alternative historiographic approaches such as recovery work, situated narratives and intersectional analysis, can meaningfully rebalance design history.