Programme

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6

10.00 Registration opens

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10.15 Pre-programme for early arrivals: introduction to the exhibits at Bildmuseet venue for contemporary art (no fee, registration needed)

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12.30 Welcome and initial address

13.00-14.00 Keynote – Gunvor Guttorm

"External conditions create specific needs" – What can the coat of the late Iver Jåks mean in contemporary duddjon and for relations to landscapes and places?

Gunvor Guttorm, Professor in duodji (Sámi arts and crafts, traditional art, applied art) at Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino in Norway.

Iver Jåks wrote in the 1960s about what a duojár (craftsperson) had to take into consideration when making. Since then, the conditions for duddjon (creative process) has changed, but is it still possible to see a connection to the landscape?  In my presentation, I will address some elements of duddjon in relation to landscapes. I will base it on practices related to the use of the landscape. I elaborate on the relationship between duddjon (the creative process) and the landscape. I use Sami concepts as an approach to the discussion. To illustrate the duddjon, gulahallan (deep listening and acting) is one such concept. I will illustrate it by using some examples of how duojárat and artists are present, interacting and communicating with the landscape in the duddjon process.

14.30-15.30 Expanding Nordic design histories

Sámi duodji and silk – Material dialogues

Heidi Pietarinen, professor, textile design, University of Lapland, Finland
Maarit Magga, associate professor, duodji, Sámi craft, Sámi Allaskuvla/ Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Norway
Satu Miettinen, dean, professor, service design, University of Lapland, Finland

Keywords: transnational textiles, Sámi duodji, 18th century silk skirt, material dialogue, material-driven design

During the Middle Ages, barter trade along the Arctic Ocean coast introduced new materials to duodji, as broadcloth, silk, tin, and silver were acquired from European merchants. In turn, an 18th‑century silk quilted skirt from a Tornio (est. 1621) merchant family illustrates the region’s role as a hub of economic and cultural exchange, where trade routes from Arkhangelsk to western and northern Europe positioned local textile practices within broad international networks.

How can material‑driven design and dialogue between artist‑researchers and duojár contribute to the study of duodji and textile history? Rather than treating textiles as static artifacts or illustrations of cultural narratives, this study approaches them as active cultural agents.  The field of visual and material methodologies is broad, yet essential for understanding how textiles function as active participants in social, cultural, and transnational processes. The transnational nature of textiles has taken shape and entered use across many layers of time and space.

Within this framework, the study examines how eighteenth‑century textiles in Tornio participated in wider international trade networks, revealing how materials themselves carry evidence of mobility, exchange, and interconnected histories. In this broader context, the Sámi have always been international actors. As seasonally migrating (jutaava) people, they moved across what are now state borders, and internationality remains a foundation of Sámi existence, with communities today living within the territories of four states. Alongside their self‑sufficient use of leather materials, Sámi artisans have long incorporated culturally foreign materials that arrived through transnational exchanges. Duodji has continuously adopted and adapted external materials and forms, while dress culture has evolved according to each community’s internal sense of aesthetics.

The quilted skirt is especially intriguing because garment thickness and layering were not determined solely by climate; they were also shaped by ritual, adornment, available materials, and the aesthetic ideals of the time. People in tropical regions, for example, sometimes wore multiple layers despite the heat, and in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries European fashion favoured voluminous skirts created by stacking several layers.

A comparable interplay of environment, mobility, and textile practice appears in Sápmi. During the seasonally migrating jutaava period, coastal Sea Sámi wove woolen rátnu textiles for inland reindeer‑herding Sámi, who used them as bedding and to furnish their goahti dwellings. In Sámi duodji, materiality is expressed through embodied and tacit knowledge, as animal‑derived materials are processed using skills passed down through generations. Duodji continually adapts to changing times and shifting ideas of beauty; it is a living practice, always in motion.

A material‑driven perspective opens new methodological possibilities by viewing textiles as living cultural practices shaped by transnational histories. These textiles show how such an approach, together with dialogue, reveals them as active participants in historical and cultural processes. Yet when textile materiality, and the ways fabrics transform across time, place, and trade or migration routes, is overlooked, the traditions, techniques, and embodied knowledge that move across borders are obscured. These elements are central to both textile history and duodji research.

Biographies:

Heidi Pietarinen (PhD in Art) works as a professor of textiles in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland, Finland. She holds a PhD degree in textile art and design, and her research has emphasis on knowledge and methods of textile art, textile history, posthuman design and creative research methods (arts-based research).

Maarit Magga (PhD in Art) is an associate professor, duodji, Sámi craft, Sámi Allaskuvla/ Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Magga is a Finnish-Sámi artist, designer, and researcher specializing in duodji, traditional Sámi craft. She explores materiality, ritual, and cultural knowledge in Sámi textiles, bridging historical and contemporary practices. Based in Enontekiö, she also engages in cultural education and community initiatives.

Satu Miettinen (PhD in Art) is a Professor of Service Design and the Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland, Finland. Her research focuses on service design methods, participatory development, and socially responsible art and design. She has led several international research projects and is an active artist in ecofeminist photography and socially engaged art.

Everyday objects and ritual food – in Lule and Pite Sami Religion 1670–1750

Anna Westman Kuhmunen, Stockholm University / Ájtte, Swedish Mountain and Sami Museum.

Keywords: Sami religion, material culture, ritual objects, ritual

This paper explores the intersection between material culture, food, and early modern Sámi religiosity, conveying a history that alters colonial understandings of not just religious practices but also how gender roles are defined. The paper is also about how this research could influence how museums & archives can categorize & display the everyday objects. From the perspective of everyday religion and lived religion as introduced by sociologists of religion like Nancy T, Ammerman 2007 and Meridith McGuire 2008, I will not just focus on practices and objects that are described as religious and sacred by non-indigenous priests and clergymen in late 17th century and early 18th century. Instead, I will direct attention to everyday objects, such as crafted household utensils and food. Through these, I will discuss objects that are constituted by context and are utilized both in daily routines and rituals. Thereby, they belong to a category of fluid objects that are not solely defined as sacred. I will discuss examples where the everyday objects are neither illustrations of religion nor religious symbols; instead, material culture is viewed as an integral part of religion and a prerequisite for how religion is practiced in Sami daily life. It is an understanding of religion, religious practice and objects that Nordic design history only to a little extent has been engaged in writing about. Among the exceptions are writings about applied arts such as textiles found in churches. It is a history about decorative and liturgical objects that were crafted for the church with an understanding of religious practices as tied to an institution rather than a practice that is intertwined with everyday material cultures.

Biography: Anna Westman Kuhmunen is a PhD student in the History of Religions at Stockholm University and a curator at Ájtte, Swedish Mountain and Sami Museum in Jokkmokk, Sweden. Her forthcoming doctoral thesis deals with Sami foodways and ritual practices from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. As a museum curator she has been the project manager and coordinator of the Arctic indigenous Design Archives, an international collaboration between Sámi museums and the Sámi University and part of the project Design History in Other Geographies.

Design across the iron curtain: Jyväskylä as a site of Cold War design negotiation

Sini Rinne-Kanto, Paris 8 University.

Keywords: Cold War, propaganda, decolonisation, social design, soft power

The competing ideas and ideals of the Cold War created a complex social, political, and artistic landscape in Finland. The ideological tensions between opposing regimes increasingly influenced the fields of design, industrial arts, and crafts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This paper addresses the discourses that emerged across the porous Iron Curtain, with particular attention to the Jyväskylä Festival. Founded in 1956 and held in Jyväskylä, the hometown of Alvar Aalto and known as the 'Athens of Finland', the festival became an important platform for cultural exchange in non-aligned post-war Finland.

A wide range of events, including concerts, exhibitions, talks and lectures on topics as diverse as architecture, visual arts, music, design and literature, were featured at the annual multidisciplinary, international event. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the festival committee addressed pressing social, political and artistic issues, often bringing together opposing views from across the political spectrum, and from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The 1966 and 1968 editions, for example, reflected the ethos and mindset of a progressive intelligentsia navigating the divide between East and West, North and South. 

The programme of the 1966 Jyväskylä Festival dealt with problems common to East and West and their interaction. Supported by UNESCO, the edition featured design lecturers including Sori Janagi (Japan), Kaj Franck (Finland), Antti Nurmesniemi (Finland), Victor Papanek (USA), Horst Michel (GDR), Villem Raam (USSR). In 1968, the festival’s main theme shifted to the Nordic countries and Africa, prompting broader discussions of decolonisation, including debates on Sámi rights, with invited speakers such as Nils-Aslak Valkeapää.

This paper examines the design discourses that emerged during these editions, investigating how topics of African independence movements and Sámi rights were articulated, and how the broader 'communist' and 'capitalist' design debates manifested in this cultural setting. It seeks to understand whether this forgotten episode of Finnish design history reflected the period's general design thinking and, if so, whether these debates remained largely rhetorical or were subsequently materialised in practice.

The paper argues that Jyväskylä was a strategically significant location for negotiating Cold War design ideologies. By analysing the highly ephemeral discursive dimensions of the 1966 and 1968 editions, the paper addresses the broader question of design as politics and the politics of design. By challenging the established centre–periphery narratives in the history of design, it explores the intersection between the local and the global. Ultimately, it draws a parallel between Sámi rights and African independence movements, highlighting the structural, political and societal issues that shaped design debates during the Cold War.

Biography: Sini Rinne-Kanto is a Paris-based curator and researcher who is currently pursuing a PhD in design history at Paris 8 University. She has curated several exhibitions that explore the boundaries of design and contemporary art, most recently Surprise Guest (Fiskars Biennale, 2024) and Nordic Noir (SIC Gallery, 2025).

16.00-17.00 Place-based perspectives

The Ärtemark hat: Braiding local and transnational histories at Halmens Hus

Tom Cubbin, Senior Lecturer in Design Studies, HDK-Valand Campus Steneby

Keywords: craft, straw, exhibitions, Dalsland, rurality

In this paper I examine the challenges of narrating craft and design histories through museum display, using the Ärtemark hat as a case study at Halmens Hus (The House of Straw) in Bengtsfors—the only publicly funded museum dedicated to straw craft in the Nordic countries.

The first part of the paper situates the Ärtemark hat within a set of overlapping local and transnational histories. Emerging from rural straw craft traditions in western Sweden since the 1870s, the hat is also a product of migration, cross-border exchange between Sweden and Norway, imported craft technologies from Panama, and global mobility enabled by steamship routes between Gothenburg and New York. At the same time, the Ärtemark hat functions as a powerful local symbol, bound up with place-based identity, tourism, and the transmission of embodied, immaterial craft knowledge. This tension between rootedness and mobility makes the hat a productive object for micro-historical and world-making approaches to craft history.

The second part of the paper focuses more closely on how these complex histories are mediated through Halmens Hus’s permanent exhibition. Rather than attempting to tell all possible stories, I concentrate on how the exhibition constructs place-specific narratives of straw craft and how these narratives negotiate ideas of heritage, modernity, and the rural. Drawing on exhibition analysis, I ask: how do display strategies shaped by early twentieth-century ideals of handicraft institutionalisation influence what aspects of the Ärtemark hat’s history are made visible? To what extent does the exhibition succeed in conveying the hat’s multiple geographies and temporalities, and where do tensions arise between local heritage narratives and transnational histories of craft and labour?

By focusing on the museum display as a communicative medium, the paper reflects on the possibilities and limitations of craft museums in conveying complex, entangled histories. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on how museums can balance local identity, global connectedness, and the future-oriented aims of preserving and developing craft knowledge in a contemporary context.

Biography: Tom Cubbin is an educator and historian of design and craft based at HDK-Valand Campus Steneby is Dalsland, Sweden. Tom holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield and an MA in History of Design from the Royal Collage of Art in London.  Together with Dr. Karin Peterson, Tom has recently developed Campus Steneby’s new BFA in Crafting Futures which engages innovative pedagogies of craft linking materials, place, ecology and technology.

Conflict of Interest Statement: Tom Cubbin is currently a board member of Halmens Hus.

Attending to the ordinary: Suburban everyday life and situated histories

Maryam Fanni, Independent researcher

Keywords: community archive, suburb, posters, everydayness, ephemera

This paper explores how design histories can be written from suburban everyday life, drawing on experiences from the resident-driven Hökarängen Archive in southern Stockholm. Hosted by the local art space Konsthall C, the archive was founded in the 1980s in response to urban renewal. From its inception, it has sought to document and preserve materials that would otherwise remain invisible within institutional collections, essentially operating as a ”counter-archive” grounded in local knowledge and lived experience.

Supported by the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet), the project The Global in the Local reactivated the archive by forming a new volunteer group and experimenting with new collections documenting contemporary suburban life. Central to the paper is one such collection: discount posters from a long-standing local discount store. Since 1992, these brightly coloured posters have visually defined the neighbourhood square, becoming part of its architectural, social, and affective fabric. Designed to be temporary and disposable, the posters nonetheless endure as spatial sensescape, shaping a sense of place. The collection is not primarily celebratory but rather offers itself for renegotiations of local histories and narratives, and a process of methodological reflections.

Here, design is understood in terms of its everydayness rather than its extraordinary qualities. While mainstream design research often attends to novelty and innovation, this paper aligns with Ben Highmore’s call in the “Sideboard Manifesto” (2008) to attend to the ordinary, the ubiquitous, and the established. By gathering and archiving commercial ephemera such as discount posters – unauthored, disposable and barely recognized as “graphic design” – the Hökarängen Archive shows that a local community archive may be a site for engagement in situated design histories.

The discount posters were not only preserved but also contextualized through an accompanying publication that traces their trajectory into the archive. This publication foregrounds the curatorial and design decisions involved, exposing the archive as an active process rather than a neutral container.

The paper argues for the resident-driven archive as both a methodology and a form of social infrastructure for, not only but also, design history-writing. Beyond collecting and preserving materials, the Hökarängen Archive functions as a space where materials can be collectively reinterpreted through situated practices of care and attention. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader discussions on how situatedness, and attentiveness to taken-for-granted cultures of place, can generate plural design histories.

Biography: Maryam Fanni is a Stockholm-based designer and holds a PhD in Design. In 2025, she defended her doctoral thesis, Reading the Signs – Distinction-Making Nostalgia in Swedish Postwar Suburbs at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her research engages with the intersection of marginalized design histories, spatial justice, and public space. In 2023, she led the reactivation of the resident-driven Hökarängsarkivet.

The Kartan carpentry – Centre, periphery and musealization

Maja Willén, Senior Lecturer in Design History and Theory, Konstfack, Sweden

Keywords: carpentry, design, craft, Östervåla, centre, periphery, musealization

In the northern part of the Swedish region of Uppland lies the small town of Östervåla. Today, Östervåla is a rather quiet community, but it was once renowned for its extensive production of chairs and other wooden crafts.

In earlier times, the land surrounding Östervåla was often flooded during the spring, forcing farmers to seek alternative ways of making a living. Many turned to woodworking and people in the area was gradually becoming specialists in chair-making. By the 1880s, around 300 carpenters were producing nearly 50,000 chairs per year, working collaboratively with the aid of standardised design templates. Many of their products were sold through Vålamagasinet, a retailer founded by Östervåla carpenters in the late nineteenth century and today a well-known furniture and design store in Uppsala. The chairs were also exported abroad, particularly to Norway, Finland and Russia.[1]

This presentation focuses on a small carpentry workshop in Kartan, a tiny village just outside Östervåla. The Kartan carpentry began operating in 1917 on the site of a former watermill. Due to its location by the water, it was the first workshop in the region to gain access to electricity, and it played an important role in the wider, coordinated chair production of Östervåla.[2] The workshop was abandoned in 1997 when the last carpenter retired, and it has been more or less preserved in its late 1990s condition.[3]  Today, the old carpentry functions as a small museum managed by the local history society in Östervåla. Since 2023, the site has also been legally protected as part of Uppsala County’s cultural heritage.[4]

The aim of this presentation is to place the Kartan carpentry in broader context, both historically and from a contemporary perspective. Historically I will focus on the centre–periphery relationship between on the one hand the Kartan workshop and the other carpentries in the Östervåla region, and on the other the relationship between Östervåla and the wider fin-de-siècle design and craft culture, specifically Svenska slöjdföreningen. Questions like stylistic choices, use of material, technical execution as well as social working conditions will be discussed. 

The situation today will be highlighted by a discussion on the use of history (Aronsson) through the process of musealisation, focusing on the presentation of objects and stories of the past in the Kartan carpentry museum. My aim is to analyse how the production in Kartan carpentry is understood and mediated in the exhibition in relation to a more theoretical discussion of design versus craft. 

With my presentation I hope I can give the Kartan carpentry, along with the whole Östervåla region, its well-earned place in the Swedish design history writing. 

Biography: Maja Willén holds a PhD in Art History from Stockholm University and is currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Design History and Theory at the University of Arts, Craft and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm. Her main research interest is contemporary housing and dwelling ideals and practices from an everyday life perspective. 

17.15-17.35 Sharing histories: installations and interactive activity

Resistant fibers, fibrous histories: The work of Emiko Tokushige in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark

Amalie Voss, Designmuseum Denmark.

Keywords: Emiko Tokushige, fiber work, materiality, Designmuseum Danmark, museology

Woven, coiled, felted and bound with organic fibers such as palm sheath, tree bark, hemp and animal hair, as well as synthetic fibers like urethane foam, the untitled works of Emiko Tokushige (b. 1939) have prompted various attempts within design and art-critical discourse to decipher their form and nature. From the 1970s onward, her work was described as reminiscent of packaging, handbags, divans, alien life-forms, seed pods, or herds of bristly animals, while circulating in journals, articles and exhibitions dedicated to the various fields of space design, art, eco-installations, architectural culture and zōkei. Often translated conjunctively as ‘art and design’, zōkei is in other accounts understood as a relationship between eyes and hands, referring to everyday elements of (industrial) production, visual culture, and living environments.

Notably, Tokushige herself remarked that her works convey no ‘powerful messages’. Rather, they center on iterative, insistent creative processes, as forms of human-material generative struggle. In a process somewhat akin to contouring a – neither clear-cut, nor stable – stress-strain curve, she questioned material and human strength and flexibility, failure limits and fracture points, alternating external and internal forces and resistance: how to ikasu, this either denoting ‘to bring to life’, ‘to let live’, or ‘to make the best (use of) something’; how to build on materials’ inherent qualities without ‘killing’ them, drawing them closer to herself or nurturing a communicative flow between human and material, moving between states of uncertainty, guilt and joy, asking when to withdraw or persist in creative processes.

Today, twenty-five grouped and untitled works (ca. 1970s) by Tokushige, together with a hanging piece currently catalogued as Medusas hår (ca. 1967–1970), are held in the collection of Designmuseum Danmark. These form part of a substantial body of donations by ceramist Sys Thomsen (b. 1939), an influential figure in shaping the museum’s collections and trajectories. Seemingly, Tokushige’s works within the collection have emerged from various negotiations across geographies, industries and institutional settings, spanning her graphic design studies, her time weaving at Kawashima Weaving Factory and Tatsumura Art Weaving Factory in Kyoto, and later affiliations with Kunsthåndværkerskolen in Copenhagen.

This display, taking the format of a ‘visual weave’, traces the histories of the 26 pieces in their – presently, and within the scope of this research – ‘fibrillar forms’: as smaller components (a place name, a year, a fiber) of larger structures that constitute Tokushige’s practice, museum archives and collections, design and art historical movements, and human-vegetal perspectives. Entering a ‘material struggle’ itself, this project grapples with the re-working of existing catalogued and archived histories in the case of Tokushige, entailing relational and reciprocal considerations akin to those implicit in what has been termed the double movement of ontological design. This involves reflecting on how practices within and beyond Designmuseum Danmark shape (encounters with) Tokushige’s work and how these, in turn, can shape various museological approaches, while making visible histories of transcultural, transdisciplinary (frame)workings and frictions within design, art and fiber-based practices in the global North.

Biography: Amalie Voss MA in Art History and project employee, currently working on a collaborative project between Designmuseum Danmark and the University of Copenhagen, exploring nature-culture relations, materiality, and ecologies in transcultural contexts. 

Ubiquitous aluminium, where are you from? – Interactive map

Elín Margot Ármannsdóttir, University of Oslo. 

Counter-mapping ways of learning: An atlas of art and design schools beyond the centre-periphery relationship 

Katja Klaus & Philipp Sack, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Keywords: (counter-)mapping, design education, history, institutional critique, experiments, radical pedagogies, positionality, interactive atlas, marginalised narratives, curricula, material learning cultures

The Bauhaus has long been framed as a singular point of origin in modern design history—a narrative actively cultivated during the school's brief existence and even more successfully disseminated after its closure in 1933. More than a century later, it continues to be viewed as a powerful cultural export, emblematic of German modernism. However, this dominant narrative obscures a wealth of transnational design histories and pedagogies. Institutions charged with preserving the Bauhaus legacy—particularly across its sites in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin—now face the challenge of complicating this account. One such intervention is the Schools of Departure platform, initiated by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Designed as a non-geographic, interactive atlas, the project foregrounds alternative genealogies of design education across marginalised world regions. Through an evolving digital archive of school portraits, it invites critical engagement with diverse epistemologies and pedagogical models.

Our proposal aims to activate this platform through a brief presentation and a call for contributions that shed light on experiments and experiences in Nordic design education that have hitherto been excluded from the hegemonic historical narrative. Histories of design in the Nordic region remain incomplete, particularly regarding Indigenous practices such as duodji, and the complex interplay between functionalism and nationalism. Our project presentation will consist of two parts: a 10-15-minute introductory session in the framework of the symposium, followed by astanding invitation to potential contributors, taking the shape of a permanent exhibitin the foyer, accessible throughout the symposium and staffed by ourselves. Thisformat creates a space for dialogic, archival intervention—foregrounding pluralhistories, marginalised pedagogies, and transnational design entanglements.

Biographies:

Katja Klaus is a research associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Academy, and has been deputy head of the department since 2018. As a digital curator, she has been responsible for the digital research project ‘Schools of Departure’ since 2021. From 2005 to 2014 Katja trained as a journalist and media, theatre and education scholar (MA), and worked as an advisor to the director of the foundation. klaus@bauhaus-dessau.de

Philipp Sack is a research associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. His academic background spans art history, medieval and modern history, and museum studies from universities in Heidelberg, Lyon, and Paris. Philipp’s research interests include the history of visual cultures, educational formats, and transcultural pedagogies. sack@bauhaus-dessau.de

17.45 Edit-a-thon: Map design historical blind spots

with Katja Klaus & Philipp Sack

Katja Klaus & Philipp Sack, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation invites participants to engage with/contribute to the interactive atlas, which will be open throughout the evening and all Thursday (in the Project studio)

 

19.00 Soup dinner at Bygden

THURSDAY, MAY 7

09.00-10.00 Keynote – Bart Pushaw

For Whom? Relationality and the historicizing of Arctic design

Bart Pushaw, Assistant Professor of art history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA.

What does design history do? Who does it and why? With whom, precisely, are we in relation as researchers? In an age when historians of design and visual culture are summoned time and again to defend the legitimacy of their practice, it may seem tiring to question the fundamental tenets of the discipline. At the same time, the sudden upswing of “decolonization” in the realm of design history poses important questions about the discipline’s priorities, methodological practices, and the efficacy of our research. Our shared location in Sápmi already demands that such thinking is at the forefront. In this keynote, I build on my experiences as an intimate outsider to the Nordic region over fifteen years. As a non-Native scholar reconciling the role of design and visual culture scholarship with the protocols of Native and Indigenous Studies, I emphasize why relationality emerges as critical scaffolding for any such endeavor.

10.30-11.30 Design museums and beyond

Design stories from many angles: Reframing the permanent display at Röhsska Museum

Jessica Sjögerén Exhibition Producer, Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg, Sweden

Josefin Kilner Curator of Collections, Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg, Sweden

Keywords: design history, design museums, permanent exhibitions, thematic curation, audience participation, Nordic design, plural histories

Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a museum for design, craft, and fashion, with a collection of more than 50,000 objects. In 2024, the museum opened Design Stories, a new permanent exhibition that reconsiders how design histories can be narrated and exhibited. Departing from linear and style-based narratives, the exhibition approaches design history as plural, situated, and non-linear.

Thematic exhibition-making Rather than focusing on aesthetic lineage or singular masters, Design Stories adopts a broad definition of design—encompassing craft, fashion, jewellery, urban planning, mobile applications, and architecture—and foregrounds the social, material, and spatial embeddedness of designed things. The exhibition is structured around six thematic concepts: Desire, Innovation, Change, Creativity, Efficiency, and Belonging. These themes juxtapose iconic and lesser-known objects across time and category, highlighting circular rather than linear histories in which ideas, materials, and techniques recur in new contexts.

Audience engagement The curatorial process involved collaboration with reference groups, particularly younger audiences, who emphasised the value of thematic and relational storytelling over chronological progression. Their input shaped both the structure and interpretation of the exhibition, replacing the museum’s previous style-history-based display with thematic groupings that invite new readings of familiar and overlooked objects. Special features include four “Windows to the Collection,” presenting ceramics, glass, furniture, and jewellery, and Super Ö, an experimental gallery functioning as a platform for participation and dialogue.

Challenging design- and art-historical canons As both a regional and national museum, Röhsska’s approach contributes to widening Nordic design histories by challenging dominant urban-centred narratives of “Nordic design” rooted in modernism and industrial innovation. By including perspectives from outside metropolitan centres and engaging underrepresented practices, the exhibition resonates with broader Nordic geographies, including peripheral and indigenous contexts.

One concrete example is the inclusion of the Ugandan fashion brand BUZIGAHILL. Based in Kampala and operating at the intersection of fashion, art, and activism, BUZIGAHILL’s collection

Return to Sender consists of redesigned second-hand garments originally discarded in the Global North and exported to Uganda. Re-circulated back to Northern contexts, the collection exposes asymmetrical global value chains and unsettles Eurocentric notions of authorship, sustainability, and fashion production within a Nordic design museum.

This reframing is further reinforced through the exhibition’s extensive textile works, where artists such as Hannah Ryggen, Agneta Goës, and Emelie Röndahl mobilise textile practices as vehicles for social, political, and economic critique. Positioned alongside craft and design without hierarchical distinction, these works challenge the historically marginalised status of textile practices within Western design- and art-historical canons.

Using cases from the exhibition Design Stories, this paper critically examines thematic exhibition-making as a curatorial method for reframing design history in a permanent museum context. It analyses how thematic structures enable cross-temporal and cross-material comparisons, how audience engagement informed concrete curatorial decisions, and how abandoning chronological narratives generates both new possibilities and tensions concerning historical coherence, curatorial authority, and visitor orientation.

Through this analysis, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on how design museums can work reflexively with plural, situated design histories emerging from multiple Nordic geographies and practices.

Biographies:

Jessica Sjögerén is Exhibition Producer at Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg. She develops and coordinates large-scale exhibitions with a focus on accessibility, thematic storytelling, and audience engagement. Her work explores how curatorial strategies can foster inclusive encounters with design history and open museum collections to diverse publics.

Josefin Kilner is Curator of Collections at Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg. With a background in design history and museum studies, she specializes in collection-based exhibitions that explore contemporary interpretations of historical design. Her curatorial practice emphasizes inclusive, critical approaches and seeks to expand how design histories are written and exhibited.

Metabolic design museums and their active role in re-shaping design

Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena, HumLab, Umeå University.

Keywords: design museum, metabolic museum, onto-cartography, feminist theory

Where do we – design practitioners, design researchers, human beings – look for ways of dealing with today’s many crises? Where do we go to consult histories, envision futures and nurture hope? Design museums can be spaces for gathering around design and urgencies, for critical investigations, but also for redesigning design towards more justice. However, this potential seems currently limited. This paper thinks with onto-cartography combined with a feminist approach and explores design museums as assemblages. Depending on how design museums are assembled, they produce not only certain design exhibitions and representations of design histories, but also design definitions and criteria – as well as possibilities to imagine alternative futures. This paper is based on an analysis of material gathered through visits of design and other museums, inventories, workshops, and consulting secondary literature about community spaces. This analysis finds that currently design museums tend to hardly thematize their Western perspective and relation to power dynamics. Instead, they tend to highlight and celebrate positive historical aspects of their own past and of the designs they present. How could design museums be assembled so that they become able to reflect more diverse and also more critical design historical perspectives, and with and beyond that play an active role in re-shaping design? This paper argues that much can be learnt from museums that are assembled differently or that are currently in the process of transforming themselves, like the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam and other examples. It zooms in on two aspects to explore what exactly can be learnt: (1) How does the museum position itself? (2) And how does the museum deal with problematic aspects? It then builds on the findings to envision metabolic design museums (inspired by Clémentine Deliss’ concept of the process-driven, constantly changing and evolving metabolic museum). Metabolic design museums are (1) situated; they know about their origins and involvement with power structures, and are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, possibilities, but also responsibilities and where they need to be careful to not (unconsciously) reproduce oppressive systems. They are also (2) safe and brave spaces – for marginalised groups to take up space for resting, regaining energy, exchange, and mutual support, and for more privileged groups to learn about their privileges and the responsibilities that come with them. Metabolic design museums with these characteristics could make accessible alternative design histories, and with that enable alternative ways of dealing with the present and of envisioning alternative, more just futures.

Biography: Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena is a researcher and educator in design research and gender studies. In her PhD thesis Feminist Design Strategies for Transforming Design Museums Towards More Just Futures (2024), she investigated the potential and limitations of design museums. She is currently affiliated with Humlab at Umeå University.

Just local? – An invitation to a discussion on how we can write design histories with many places, various practices and diverse communities

Christina Zetterlund, Linnaeus University.

Keywords: design histories, de-centre, listening and learning, place-based

Local is a concept with diverse connotations. For some, it indicates something ‘authentic’, a ‘sustainable alternative’ to large-scale industrial production. In contexts of art and design, ‘local’ is many times not given the same positive reading. Instead, local tends here to have undertones of ‘provincial’ and, therefore, is given less relevance than something that is supposedly not ‘local’, creating a relationship of centre and periphery. Undeniable, some places and spaces have been more influential than others; some forms of the ‘local’ have, for different reasons, travelled further than others. Historically, these have been places located in metropolitan areas of the global North. This paper aims to challenge conventional dichotomies of centre and periphery by inviting discussion of how we can de-centre such conventional hierarchies and invite many different, equal standing ‘local’. 

By sharing the experiences from the speculative curatorial project (Re-)learning the Archive, it aims to open for a discussion on curatorial methods that materialise alternative ways of forming archives and collections. (Re-)learning the Archive was curated by me in collaboration with the small institution, The Design Archive, located in the village of Nybro. The project suggested expanding the understanding of the design archive beyond being a collection confined to a single location. Instead, it proposed the entire Småland, a largely rural region in southern Sweden, as a potential archive. Through an extensive collaboration with local history writing places, listening and learning with organisations such as Hembygdsgårdar (local history farmsteads), many diverse museums set up by local experts, Resande Romani organisations, researchers within and outside the academy, designers, crafters and artists, we formed a map of Småland, with many collections and museums narrating histories of various forms of worldmaking. The map formed a place-based design archive. 

Following influential current formulations, such as Arturo Escobar's Autonomous Design, the project argued for a design that acts situated, in processes and societies, together with the people who live here. This paper will present (Re-)learning the Archive and discuss the method of writing design history alongside communities forming a collection that argues for the importance of place in understanding design and for specific knowledges and agency of local cultures. By sharing the example of (Re-)learning the Archive, this paper invites fellow design historians to a collective reflection on how we can re-learn the archive and write multi-centred design histories through diverse practices and communities. 

Biography: Christina Zetterlund is a craft and design historian active as an educator and researcher at The Department of Design, Linneaus University (Sweden) and as an independent curator within Craft and Design, where she works with local and situated practices, most recently with Luleå Biennial 2022, Craft & Art in Norrbotten and as curator in residence at Norwegian Crafts (2024-2025). 

11.45 Textile traces

Dressing the royal child

Trine Brun Petersen, The Royal Danish Collection Rosenborg Slot.

Keywords: children’s wear, children’s fashion, design history, royal collections

The historical museum The Royal Danish Collection holds an impressive collection of royal garbs, the most well-known of which is the ceremonial dress of the absolute kings of Denmark. In more recent times, the museum has also collected examples of clothing from the royal family, including the queen and the royal children. This part of the collection has rarely been used for either research or exhibitions. 

The specific object of the paper will be a large collection of children’s wear which belonged to the Swedish princess Ingrid (1910-1990), who married Frederik 9. in 1935 and became queen of Denmark in 1947. This part of the collection consists of more than hundred items, most of which are white cotton dresses with lavish decoration such as lace, bobbin lace and ruffles. The collection is unusual both in terms of quantity and quality. Traditionally royal dress has been used in museum exhibitions and interpretation to evoke the image of the royal person and as an indication of his or her taste and personality. Princess Ingrid’s clothing is of exceptionally high quality but in terms of its design and style it is highly conventional.

While the collection may not be a good source of knowledge about the princess or her life at court, it does have potential to shed light on the history of elite children’s clothing as well as the changing cultural status of the child. Children, their clothing, and material culture have led a marginal existence in design history writing. In the 20th century and particularly since the 1930’s the child has increasingly come to the fore as an important cultural figure (Zelizer 1985, Cook, 2004). Approaching the royal collection from a design historical perspective can help us understand how the collection is connected to the development of new systems of production and provision, new models and styles, as well as new family dynamics and cultural norms.

Literature: 

Cook, Daniel Thomas: The Commodification of Childhood. The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Duke University Press, Duke, 2004.

Zelizer, A. Viviana: Pricing the Priceless Child. The Changing Social Value of Children, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985.

Biography: Trine Brun Petersen originally trained as a design historian and has worked with research and teaching in museums, design schools as well as University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests focus on the disciplinary aspects of design, particularly in relation to children, uniforms, work wear as well as fashion and dress more generally. She currently serves as Head of Research at the Royal Danish Collection, where she does research on the visual and material culture of the modern, de-politized, media monarchy. 

Weaving the narrative: Visualizing global iconography, local design practices, and material histories in 16th-century Swedish tapestries

Ida Madsén, Uppsala University.

Keywords: design history, tapestry production, tapestries, materiality, early modern Sweden

Undergoing substantial transformations, design history is expanding beyond urban and industrial frameworks to welcome diverse practices, materials, and theories. Tapestries manufactured in the 16th century offer a captivating perspective to reconsider design history: what constitutes design, who produces it, and where it occurs. Traditionally, early modern tapestry designs have been somewhat marginalized in modern art history, despite carrying interdisciplinary properties. This marginal position has also contributed to their limited inclusion within design-historical narratives, even though their production processes align closely with what today would be understood as complex, collaborative design practice. This paper challenges conventional distinctions between “art,” “craft,” and “design”, exploring tapestries as collaborative objects: designers, weavers, and dyers bringing their expertise across workshops and regions to produce intricate compositions. Materials such as silk, wool, and metallic threads, often acquired through long-distance trade networks, demonstrate the early modern entanglement of European production with global flows of goods and labour. Inspired by European rulers, Gustav I (1496–1560), of the Vasa dynasty, established his own tapestry workshops at the Swedish court, enabling the production of locally designed and woven tapestries. Led by a mix of both Swedish and Netherlandish craftsmen, these workshops combined imported techniques and materials with Swedish ideas, illustrating that design in early modern Sweden was not merely imitative of foreign art, but actively produced within a Nordic context. Tapestries commissioned by the Vasa dynasty, today in the Royal Collections, demonstrate how painters and weavers in Sweden incorporated global materials and iconography into narratives tailored to local political and dynastic agendas. These court-based workshops can therefore be understood as early sites of organized design production, where aesthetic, technical, and material decisions were negotiated collectively. This paper argues that extant Swedish examples such as the King Sveno (1560s) tapestry, woven at Kalmar Castle, illustrate and contribute to a more inclusive understanding of Swedish tapestry design and iconography. Investigating the tapestry through the lens of materiality, narrative, collaboration, and global connections, it challenges the traditional urban–industrial focus and highlights micro narratives, alternative perspectives, and underrepresented geographical locations. Whilst not merely decorative objects, tapestries are documents of history that materialize power while shaping audiences’ perceptions of global hierarchies. Recognizing locally produced tapestries such as King Sveno as design objects illuminates how domestic innovation intersected with global trade and expertise to produce complex, multifaceted, and internationally entangled histories of design. Finally, the paper reflects on how such objects might be more actively mobilized within museum and collection contexts today. Preserved mainly in royal and regional collections, these tapestries are often displayed as historical artworks or illustrations of political history. Interpreting them instead as design objects foregrounds processes of making, systems of production, and material circulation, offering opportunities for museums and archives to connect early modern textile practices with broader discussions of design, labour, and global exchange. In this way, regional collections may function as key sites for uncovering alternative design histories that remain largely absent from canonical museum narratives.

Biography: Ida Madsén is a PhD candidate in Art History at Uppsala University. Her research examines tapestries commissioned by the Vasa dynasty, with a focus on materiality, spatial contexts, and the relationship between visual narratives and political power. 

13.45 Changing practices

Human understanding: 'The user' as a site for socio-technological imaginaries

Dr. Kaisu Savola, independent researcher

Keywords: user-centred design, socio-technological imaginaries, STS

In the twenty-first century, we are all users. In the corporate competition for our time, money and data, design and engineering work in recent decades has been marked by user-centred approaches not only to create functional products and software, but also to gain insight into the wants and needs of everyday people and to harness them for economic profit (Zuboff, 2019). However, despite its strong presence in the contemporary fields of design and technology, the term 'user' remains vague and uncontextualized both academically and colloquially (Hyysalo and Johnson, 2016). 

Through examining the specific case study of user-related design work at Nokia Mobile Phones between 1995 and 2005, this paper aims to build an understanding of 'the user' as a historically specific concept. The paper centres around a set of archival materials, such as sketches, images, objects, memos, publications, correspondence, notes, strategy outlines, concepts and presentations. A critical analysis of these materials reveals how information and ideas about users were created and utilised as part of design work in one of the most powerful technology companies of the time. The goal here is not to see 'the user' as an instrument for more effective, more usable or more sellable products and services, but as a prism through which some of the worldviews behind designed objects and technologies are reflected. The paper suggests that an examination of the concept of ‘the user’ is necessary in order to start unpacking the role that design has played in the creation of our contemporary relationship to technology.

In this paper, 'the user' is explored with two perspectives. On the one hand, a micro-historical approach to design work at Nokia Mobile Phones provides a concentrated investigation of how and for what purposes 'users' have been present in the design process. On the other hand, the concept of socio-technological imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2009) reveals the wider world-making possibilities of 'the user'. By combining design historical methodologies to theoretical concepts from Science and Technology Studies, this paper develops novel, multidisciplinary approaches to enable the critical study of design processes specifically in relation to digital and mobile technologies. The paper argues that ‘the user’ makes visible some of the values and goals with which technologies are designed. Understanding ‘the user’ as a socially, economically and culturally specific concept supports a deeper understanding of technology, which, in turn, can lead to its better future governance.

Biography: Kaisu Savola is a design historian whose research focuses on the social and political dimensions of design and technology. Her previous work includes developing the Nokia Design Archive, curating the Design Museum Helsinki exhibition Design for Every Body, and curating and producing the Finnish Pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano.

Narrating design otherwise: Fiction as method in historical recontextualization

Georgina McDowall, Kystmuseet i Sogn og Fjordane & Kiersten Thamm Navigating.art

Keywords: future traditional knowledge, climate crisis, non-canonical perspectives, material histories, multiple epistemologies 

This contribution presents Bewildering Objects and Material Legacies, a speculative project that explores the material culture of the present through the eyes of a fictional future. Set in the year 2425, the project follows Kit, an "objectologist" living in the mountains of western Sápmi after centuries of climate collapse and sea-level rise. When Kit uncovers a 21st-century shipwreck, she begins cataloguing the objects — from protein bars and life jackets to a menstrual cup and Styrofoam cooler — interpreting them without written records, archives, or inherited knowledge. Themes such as gender, labour, extraction, and global interconnectedness emerge as central to Kit’s interpretations, highlighting how design and material culture reflect and reproduce structures of power.

The narrative reframes these artefacts not as designed objects in the traditional sense, but as bewildering remnants of a lost world marked by extraction, excess, and environmental devastation. Her misreadings reveal both the limits of contemporary design’s material legacies and the cultural blind spots that shaped them. Drawing on climate science and disaster studies, the project situates Kit’s world in a transformed Nordic geography where coastal areas have long since been abandoned and new highland communities have taken root. 

This fictional future does not erase colonial and economic histories but inherits them. The objects Kit encounters bear the imprint of centuries of industrialisation and extractive capitalism — systems that entangle design with racialised labour, environmental harm, and global inequality. As Kit struggles to assess the value of each item, she replicates familiar curatorial dilemmas while deciding what is worth preserving, who gets to decide, and what remains undocumented, unvalued, or discarded.

Bewildering Objects and Material Legacies responds directly to the symposium’s invitation to rethink design history from non-canonical perspectives and multiple epistemologies. Through its playful but critical engagement with geography, colonial history, and ecological crisis, this project invites readers to see the present as a future past. In doing so, it raises urgent questions: what kind of design histories will be legible, meaningful, or mourned in centuries to come? Whose knowledge will be remembered? And what design histories might yet be told from the peripheries?

Biographies: 

Georgina McDowall is conservator at The Coastal Museum in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, where she focuses on undocumented collections and environmental memory. Whether prioritising object collections or deciphering trash from treasure, McDowall invites object-keepers to question the work of preserving material things for future generations. 

Dr Kiersten Thamm, head of education at the nonprofit Navigating.art, is an art historian exploring design politics, materiality, and coloniality. Her PhD is rooted in material culture studies, and she now applies those methods to the development of ethical AI creation and use — if such a thing is possible.

From babysitting to black panthers – Danish students in SDO and the final seminar in Copenhagen 1969

Anders V. Munch, University of Southern Denmark & Vibeke Riisberg, Design School Kolding.

The Student Rebellion at the schools of design in Denmark around 1969 ignited an activism towards changes as well at the schools as critic of the consumer society and discussions about global solidarity. Not only did the students find the teaching too old-fashioned, and out of touch with industry, it was also heavily gendered and new generations of more mature students wanted to have a say and engage in changes. The activist students joined forces with other Nordic students in Skandinaviske Designstuderendes Organisation (SDO), and we have traced Danish activities in this organisation.

This case shows just one initiative across the whole design culture which was in rapid transition away from the heydays of Danish Modern (Fallan, Munch & Zetterlund 2023). The situation in the Danish design schools in Copenhagen and Kolding was not so politically charged as in Finland and Sweden, where the first SDO Seminars found place (Savola 2023), and the Danish students did not make so concrete interventions as in Norway (Lie 2016).

We investigate the agendas, actions and situation of the Danish design students and discuss, if the mix between personal, professional and political interests might explain, why the third SDO Seminar in Copenhagen became the end of the organisation? This was the case despite the later fame of the Copenhagen Chart, made by Victor Papanek at this seminar (Clarke 2021). Both Papanek and representatives of the Black Panther movement were among the speakers at the SDO seminar in Copenhagen in 1969. Despite this rather interesting mix none of the Danish activities have been documented in the design schools’ archives. And only recently have we identified some of the key student representatives of the Danish schools in SDO together with the convenor of the Copenhagen seminar.

This presentation is based on interviews and access to their private archives. As Oral History it represents the voice of young students, mainly female, together with a reading of unofficial documents, ‘grey literature’ (Lie 2017).

Literature:

Alison J. Clarke (2021) Victor Papanek: designer for the real world, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press

Kjetil Fallan, Anders V. Munch and Christina Zetterlund (2023) Nordic Design Cultures in Transformation, 1960-1980: Revolt and Resilience, Abingdon: Routledge 2023

Ida Kamilla Lie (2016) ‘Make Us More Useful to Society!’: The Scandinavian Design Students’ Organization (SDO) and Socially Responsible Design, 1967–1973, Design and Culture, 8/3, 327-361

Ida Kamilla Lie (2017), ‘Ephemeral Voices and Precarious Documents: Fixing Oral History and Grey Literature to the Design Historical Record’, AIS/Design Journal 5/10

Kaisu Savola (2023) Disrespectful Thoughts About Design. Social, political and environmental values in Finnish design, 1960–1980, Helsinki: Aalto University

Biographies:

Anders V. Munch, Professor, University of Southern Denmark. Author of The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture (2021), and co-editor of Design Culture. Objects and Approaches, 2019, and Nordic Design Cultures in Transformation, 1960-1980 (2023). Danish representative in Nordic Forum for Design History. Head of Centre for Design and Production History.

Vibeke Riisberg, has a background in textile design. Currently affiliated as Associate Professor, Emerita at Lab for Sustainable Design at Design School Kolding Denmark. Research includes design for sustainability with focus on textile and fashion, education and changing roles for designers, design history, aesthetics, user experience, and service systems.  

15.15 Material flows

Moving matter: Design history as pathfinding

Ingrid Halland (Aarhus University) and Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo)

Keywords: materials, ecology, flows, methodology

“Despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, [objects] are only momentary aggregations of material, such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel, or canvas.” – Arjun Appadurai (2006)

Design history has over time significantly broadened the spectrum of relevant actors populating our studies. A more recent trend in the field is the emergence of “glocal” studies that recognize the value of multiple geographic perspectives. Moreover, design historians have become increasingly alert to contemporary—and future—societal and ecological challenges. These three seemingly distinct tendencies can, we contend, be fruitfully connected by tracing material flows.

Following the paths created by material flows—upstream and downstream—from extraction sites to waste deposits, we encounter a wide range of historical and contemporary actors, including chemists, materials scientists, environmental activists, and entrepreneurs. The same movements take us to places rarely emphasized in design culture, such as mines, laboratories, processing plants, logistical infrastructure, and waste-handling and recycling facilities. Tracing material flows can also help us connect temporalities, in that the extractive logics of the past have shaped our present and will continue to influence possible futures.

In this paper, we argue that conceptualizing design history as pathfinding—following the traces left behind by material flows—allows us to write histories of design featuring diverse types of actors, positioned in and from unconventional locations and perspectives, and connecting different temporalities. Building on an assessment of recent scholarship on the material ecologies of design, we will demonstrate the importance of moving matter to the forefront through concrete examples. The chemical compound titanium dioxide, for instance, takes us from the extraction site in Sokndal via the factory in Fredrikstad and the surfaces of global consumer culture, to the landfilling of toxic waste products at Langøya. Another example sees Cryolite mined in Ivittuut, Greenland and Bauxite excavated in Var, France, shipped to Høyanger and smelted into aluminium, which was then turned into consumer products such as cookware at Nordisk Aluminiumindustri in Holmestrand—products which, after decades of use in kitchens across Scandinavia and beyond, might end up in scrapyards and recycling facilities to be reverted to its (raw) material state.

What emerges from these examples is that following materials requires expanding the methodological toolkit of the design historian. This involves drawing from anthropology, ethnography, and critical design practices; design histories of material flows demand a more dynamic approach than engaging with the “momentary aggregations of material” that is an object, analyzing images, and contextualizing with discursive archive material. This methodological approach includes visiting extraction sites, walking in waste deposits, touching different states of material production, learning from material scientists, speaking with industry stakeholders (in order to access restricted sites and information), and co-thinking with design practitioners to envision possible futures.

Following materials opens up paths to a multitude of places and helps us write a multitude of design histories.

Biographies:

Ingrid Halland is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and Associate Professor II in Art History at the University of Bergen. She is PI of the research project How Norway Made the World Whiter. Halland is founder and editor-in-chief of Metode, which publishes experimental essays in the fields of art, design and architecture.

Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo. His most recent books are Ecological by Design: A History from Scandinavia (MIT Press, 2022) and Nordic Design Cultures in Transformation, 1960–1980: Revolt and Resilience (Routledge, 2023), co-edited with Christina Zetterlund and Anders V. Munch. Fallan is an editor of the Journal of Design History.

Design as geological force: The making of Norwegian aluminium

Elín Margot Ármannsdóttir, University of Oslo.

Keywords: design history, material flows, aluminium, Norwegian design, digital mapping 

The paper Design as Geological Force: The Making of Norwegian Aluminium traces the material flows of aluminium produced by Norsk Aluminium Company (NACO) from its initial commercial-scale production at the beginning of the twentieth century until its exponential growth in the mid-twentieth century. The paper is accompanied by a digital representation, an interactive map depicting the places of extraction, production, manufacture, use, and discard, as well as the material trajectories and their evolution through the period using the software QGIS.   

In the special Trade & Engineering Supplement of the Times of March 1937, one can find a poster depicting a waterfall at the end of a fjord. The cascade plunges onto a globe; at its point of impact appears the silhouette of a factory, from which the water magically transforms into aeroplanes, ships, skyscrapers, pots, pans and fast cars. Designed by Paul Lorck Eidem, one of Norway’s leading advertisement artists at the time, and commissioned by NACO, the artist makes the industrial process seem effortless and local, almost natural. With powerful waterfalls at the end of deep fjords, Norway was and remains an appealing location for aluminium producers seeking to lower costs of production by exploiting cheap hydroelectricity. At the time, NACO held a monopoly on the Scandinavian market and contributed greatly to defining the metal’s place in everyday objects, promoting it as a local material, as the poster proclaimed: Out of Norway falls aluminium. However, the main raw materials from which the metal is produced are absent from its geology. Like all aluminium smelted in the country, Norway is merely a stop on the metal’s journey.

In the early 20th century, companies driven by the promise of the light metal engaged in international coordination, extracting ore in one place, refining, smelting, manufacturing, and consuming in others. NACO’s smelters were supplied with cryolite from Greenland and aluminium oxide from Høyanger, which itself depended on bauxite imported from the Var region in France. Aluminium travelled and still travels, changing communities, environments and, form at each stop. Where were the raw materials extracted from, where were the refined materials sent to and what impacts did each stop entail? By focusing on material flows, here aluminium, design historians can provide a new understanding of how design shapes consumption and a detailed assessment of its broader socio-ecological impact. The paper traces the circulation of aluminium to and from Norway during the early decades of its production, revealing the intricate transnational effects that designing with the metal involved.  
The paper and map are based on primary and secondary sources, using existing writings in the field of business history combined with corporate archives from NACO and its subsidiaries in Sweden, Denmark, and France. 
 
Biography: Elín Margot is a designer and researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in Design History at the University of Oslo. Her research examines the ideological underpinnings and historical development of non-renewable material consumption in the Nordics, here aluminium, with a focus on the influence of designed narratives.  

Nordic waters: Negotiating hydroscapes by design

Mads Nygaard Folkmann (Dr.philos. Ph.D.), Professor of Design Studies, University of Southern Denmark.

Malin Graesse (Ph.D.), Technical advisor, National Museum Oslo. 

Keywords: water, coast, infrastructure, ecology, natureculture, design aesthetics

In this paper we will explore micro histories of design strategies responding to water – whether as an oceanic space, as freshwater streams or as a rich underground resource – as a defining factor for settlements and urban development. Whereas design strategies and practices for supply and circulation of water in capitals of continental Europe such as Vienna, Paris and Rome have been described as part of the process of modernization (e.g., Linton 2010; Sailer 2022), the effect of water on regional or even peripherical design cultures in the North is understudied.

Our thesis is a) that design for water by enacting a meeting of culture and nature reflects central constituents of human world-making and b) that this kind of world-making dealing with a core resource for all life entails power issues of having or not having access. Taking our starting point in Tromsø (Norway) and Middelfart (Denmark), small coastal towns being peripherical in each its way (Tromsø at the North in Arctic Norway and Middelfart as a transit point at the Small Belt), we will explore design as a means to negotiate hydroscapes, that is, to control the presence of water and integrate it in the townscape, either through direct presence of water or through designed elements signaling the presence and threats of the surrounding or neighboring ocean like, for example, columns for measuring the water level, harbor safety equipment like ladders, and graphics and decorations aimed for information. In the paper, we will draw on sources from the turn of the century to the present, for instance plans and drawings to disseminate technical specificity, historical photographs to track change and a broad reading of ecological reports to map the relationship between design implementations and climatic, ecological and typological specificities. 

Theoretically, we will combine infrastructuralism (Peters 2015; Barua 2021; Easterling 2003; Szerszynski 2022) with design aesthetics (Folkmann 2023). With infrastructuralism we will discuss how design solutions and hydrological processes amplify, interfere or support each other, whereas design aesthetics allows us to discuss how these infrastructural processes are experienced and finally understood as bearers of meaning in the light of an “eco-phenomenology” (Bégout 2020) of experiential effects of water. By analyzing watery objects through a design aesthetic optics, the paper will flash out how these “silent servers” (mundane designed objects) impact issues of experience, understanding and power in relation to water. 

Biographies:

Malin Graesse is a design historian currently working at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Oslo and was a Postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger between 2023 and 2026. Her research focuses on the relationship between design and the environment with an emphasis on water and the more-than-human. malingraesse@gmail.com +47 97184020 

Mads Nygaard Folkmann is professor of Design Studies, University of Southern Denmark. Recent book Design Aesthetics: Theoretical Basics and Studies in Implication (MIT Press, 2023). Research interests in design aesthetics, cultural studies of design, digital technology and design, and design for water.

16.30 Panel: Crafting voices of Norrbotten

Panel members

• Silvia Colombo, Visual Art Consultant, Region Norrbotten, Luleå. 
• Ida Isak Westerberg, textile artist, Luleå and Övertorneå. 
• Linnea Nilsson, Craft and Design Consultant, Region Norrbotten, Luleå. 
• Sofia Öberg, Craft and Design Consultant, Region Norrbotten, Luleå. 
• Anna-Stina Svakko, Sámi designer and duojár, Porjus. 
• Karin Tjernström, Archivist, Norrbottens Museum, Luleå. 

Keywords: exhibitions, design, arts and crafts, textile, duodji

This panel discussion highlights both micro- and macro-histories of craft and design from Norrbotten, Northern Sweden—an area that is also part of Sápmi. The conversation brings together a diverse group of professionals based and working in Sweden’s northernmost region: a textile artist, a duojár, and three representatives from Region Norrbotten (Crafts and Design consultants, a Visual Art consultant and a museum archivist). Together, they will present examples of materials, as well as processes of designing, producing, exhibiting, and writing about both soft and hard crafts beyond the mainstream creative scene.

Topics to be addressed include current activities at the Slöjd- och Formcenter, a public exhibition and workshop space opened in central Luleå in 2024 with support from both municipal and regional actors; the legacy of Gammelstads handväveri, a textile company founded in the 1960s in Gammelstad where weavers collaborated with artists and designers; and recent exhibitions an archives in Norrbotten that have engaged with arts and crafts, such as Luleåbiennalen 2022, and Woven Stories at Havremagasinet (2025).

The panel will also reflect on contemporary artistic practices, including those of Ida Isak Westerberg, whose work explores the intersection of textile art, ecology, and queer identity through site-specific processes deeply rooted in the landscapes of Tornedalen. Westerberg’s practice challenges conventional norms by weaving tactile histories and queer narratives into textiles that reflect the fluid, transformative nature of the bog.

Last but not least, the discussion will also center on duodji, the Sámi traditional craft, as a vital and ongoing practice in Norrbotten. Duodji carries profound cultural significance and embodies Indigenous knowledge systems and sustainable relationships with the land. Through Anna‑Stina Svakko’s practice—rooted in garment-making, material knowledge, and the transmission of inherited crafting methods—duodji emerges as both a living tradition and a contemporary artistic language.
 
Biographies:

Silvia Colombo, Visual Art consultant, Region Norrbotten

Art historian and museum specialist with an MA in contemporary art and a PhD from Politecnico di Milano. Formerly research assistant at the University of Manchester, she is now Visual Art consultant at Region Norrbotten. Her professional interests as a curator and art editor bridge art, politics, memory, and museology.

Ida Isak Westerberg, textile artist

Ida Isak Westerberg, a textile artist based in Luleå and Övertorneå, graduated from Handarbetets Vänner. Their site-specific practice explores material–environment interaction. Collaborating with nature—especially the Sompasenvuoma mire in Tornedalen—they create sculptural weavings addressing history, belonging, and queer identities.

Linnea Nilsson, Craft and Design consultant, Region Norrbotten

Linnea Nilsson is a textile designer and craft consultant trained in handweaving at Väddö Folk High School and the Swedish School of Textiles. Formerly in fashion, she now works at Region Norrbotten, promoting craft through cultural heritage, education, and digital innovation across diverse regional projects supporting creative communities and development.

Sofia Öberg, Craft and Design consultant, Region Norrbotten

Sofia Öberg is a designer and craft consultant with a BA in Furniture and Product Design and an MA in Design for Children and Child Culture. With experience in exhibition production, she now leads the Craft and Design Center at Region Norrbotten together with colleague Linnea Nilsson, supporting regional craft development.

Anna‑Stina Svakko, Sámi designer and duojár 

Anna‑Stina Svakko is a Sámi designer and duojár with a master craftsman’s certificate in duodji. Based in Porjus, she creates Sámi regalia and explores both traditional and conceptual approaches that engage with identity, materiality, and cultural continuity.

Karin Tjernström, Arkivcentrum Norrbotten, Region Norrbotten

Karin Tjernström is an archivist at Norrbottens Museum, with roots in Tornedalen and the area around Piteå. Her academic background includes studies in art history, museology, and archival science at Umeå and Stockholm universities. She is particularly passionate about making visible the history and people of Norrbotten, with a special focus on women's history.

17.30-17.45 Final words 

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19.00 Conference dinner at Tonka Strandgatan 

FRIDAY, MAY 8

09.30-12.00 Visit to Västerbottens Museum, with guided tours of the exhibition Sojvene and of the open air museum Gammlia (no fee, registration needed)

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After lunch More visits and also craft workshop(s) more details to come, and sign-up needed). 

For your travel planning: flights leaving Umeå for Stockholm this afternoon are at 13.15, 16.00 and 19.10/19.40. Being at Umeå airport one hour in advance will suffice (especially if you check in digitally beforehand and use baggage drop). Train departures for the month of May are not yet published.