Friday, 20 May 2011

Grace Lees-Maffei appointed Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History

Following interviews, The Design History Society and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Design History have appointed Grace Lees-Maffei to the post of Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History for a five year term. Grace will work alongside a newly appointed Chair of the Editorial Board, Prof Cheryl Buckley (Northumbria University).
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/
http://www.designhistorysociety.org/

Sunday, 15 May 2011

Designing Meaning: What Design History Brings to Understanding of Image-Text and Object-Text Relationships

Grace Lees-Maffei
Paper for the American Imagetext Conference 
University of East Anglia, June 18-19 2011

This paper assesses the utility of a growing body of design historical work on image-text, and object-text, relationships. For the past decade or so, design historians have been especially attentive to the ways in which design is mediated to consumers through text and image-based discourses such as advice literature, advertising, magazines, television and film (for example, Lees-Maffei, ‘The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm’, 2009). These discourses demonstrate desirable consumption practices and wider ideas about design, and thereby prescribe what is acceptable, while also themselves being examples of design, from magazine layouts and poster design, to set and costume designs for television programmes.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Paul Stiff Obituary

Professor Paul Stiff sadly passed away in February.  Paul (1949-2011) was a friend of TVAD, having convened a panel for the 2009 Design History Society conference Writing Design: Object, Process, Discourse, Translation, including a paper of his own and papers by two colleagues. Obituaries are as follows:
University of Reading http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/staffportal/news/articles/spsn-356729.aspx
Robin Kinross, the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/06/paul-stiff-obituary
Times Higher Education http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415632
Rick Poyner Design Observer http://observersroom.designobserver.com/rickpoynor/post/paul-stiff-the-readers-champion/26868/