Imagine Elsewhere – A Day for Re-Thinking Design Museums

Museums, as well as the design discipline, developed in parallel with Western Modernity with its way of forming knowledge and shaping a world. During the second half of the 19th century, design museums were founded in the metropolis of the global North as a method of teaching the notion of quality to producers and consumers alike.

Here, the foundation for collections and archives that still have a role in how design is understood, and its history is written. It is histories that still live in understandings of design, it is histories that through design practices create futures. To formulate other histories is to make other futures possible.

We would like to invite you to a day where we ask the question how can (design) museums make other histories possible? During the day practitioners and researchers who have been working with how we can re-learn and re-make museum practices will share insights into their approaches. Together we will then discuss how we can make diverse histories, and therefore diverse futures, possible. Or to put in the words of the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe: how we can go awkward.

Program

9:30–9:45
Check in and welcome

9:45–10:15
Lisa Baumgarten
The Leftovers: Digesting Design Education

Lisa Baumgarten is a critical design mediator working in design, research, as writer and as teacher/learner. She is the co-creator of the participatory research platform Teaching Design which focuses on design education from intersectional feminist perspectives. Since Oct 2022 Lisa is a guest professor at Studiengruppe Informationsdesign (Communication design) at Burg Giebichenstein, University of Art and Design Halle. Her current research focuses on design mediation as critical practice and the potentials and shortfalls of institutional critique within design study programs.

10:15–10:45
Michael Law Barrett
An Afropean Museum? Creolization and Care in Ethnography Collections

Michael Barrett is an anthropologist, researcher, and curator of the African collections at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. His research focuses on the history of the collections, as well as the representation of Africa and people of African descent in museums and other popular mediation practices.

10.45-11.00
Break

11:00–11:30
Vanessa Zeissig
The Failure of Literary Museums: Re-thinking Museum Transformation

Vanessa Zeissig holds a PhD at the intersection of scenography, design theory and museology. Her research focuses on the transformation of museums and the political dimension of scenography, space, and design from a feminist perspective. She is a research assistant for cultural education and diversity at the Institute for Cultural Policy at the University of Hildesheim.

11:30–12:00
Anja Neidhardt
Cultivating Metabolic Spaces for Matters of Care at Alternative Design Museums

Anja Neidhardt is a doctoral candidate at Umeå Institute of Design and at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, both at Umeå University, Sweden. Her PhD research project focuses on the question of how design museums can be disentangled from oppressive systems like patriarchy, so that they become able to support change towards more justice. Before starting her PhD in 2019, she worked as a design journalist and educator.

12:00–13:00
Lunch

13:00–13:30
Christina Zetterlund
Learning and Listening with Other Geographies

Christina Zetterlund is craft and design historian active as associate professor at Linneaus University (Växjö, Sweden) and as free-lance curator and writer. She is working with history writing practices where craft and design become a lens for critically analysing social conditions.

13:30–14:00
Setareh Noorani
Collecting Otherwise – The Tool-shed: A Testing Ground for Tools and Methodologies

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher, zinester and is part of various experimental collectives. She uses various media in her projects and artistic contributions to explore ways of publicizing and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time; always moving in the grey space between academic research and art.

14:00–14:15
Fika

14:15–14:45
Anna Westman Kuhmunen
Making Spaces for Indigenous Archives

Anna Westman Kuhmunen is curator at Ájtte, Swedish Mountain and Sami Museum in Jokkmokk Sweden and a PhD candidate at the department of History of Religions at Stockholm University. Her thesis is about Sami religion in 1670 to 1780 with a focus on lived religion and the religious practices of women.

14:45–15:15
Sabrina Rahman
Race and Empire in the Design Museum: Working with Artists and Collections to Reframe the Global Nineteenth Century

Sabrina Rahman is an art and design historian whose research examines issues of diaspora and interior design in Britain, Central Europe, and South Asia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter since 2016.

15:15–15:50
Collective making with the participants in Växjö

15:50–16:00
Thank you and end of day

Further Information

During the day we will serve coffee and tea. Please sign up for the seminar via e-mail to christina.zetterlund@designarkivet.se, and let us know if you like to participate on location or via Zoom as well as if you have any food preferences. There is a limited number of seats for 40 participants on location in Växjö.

The seminar is organized by the research project Design history in other geographies (Linneaus University, financed by The Swedish National Heritage Board), (Re-)Learning archive (Designarkivet, Nybro, financed by Swedish Arts Council and Region Kalmar Län), and by the research project Feminist Tactics as Means to Re-Design Design (at Umeå Institute of Design and the Graduate School of Gender Studies at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies).