Women, Writing, Design (original) (raw)

Design and Women through the Pioneering Magazine "Stile Industria" (1954-1963)

The focus of this paper aims to analyze a pioneering design magazine «Stile Industria» that became a prime arena for debate in the consolidating Industrial Design community. Forty-one issues were published between 1954 and 1963, initially at quarterly intervals then bimonthly on issues of design applied to industry, graphic art and package. Directed by Alberto Rosselli and promoted by Gio Ponti, his partner and father in law, the magazine is affiliated with the architectural magazine «Domus» for its nine years of life. The editing staff is initially composed of friends and professionals close to Rosselli, all young people at their first editorial experiences: the architect-designer Giancarlo Pozzi, Franca Santi Gualtieri graduated from the Accademia of Brera, Michele Provinciali graphic, and Luciana Rosa Foschi, first as a secretary and then editor since 1957. This staff was over time increased by many other contributors including Angelo Tito Anselmi (editor), Maria Bottero who replaces Mario Galvagni as a columnist in the review of books and products. Other columnist were Bruno Alfieri, Bruno Munari, Gillo Dorfles, Carlo Santi, Ettore Sottsass Jr. etc. The aim of the paper is threefold: 1. analyze a magazine, also created by female contribution, still poorly explored and known through a systematizazion of papers related to the Industrial Design 2. investigate the drafting work of professional women for whom «Stile Industria» became a springboard for new editorial experiences. For example Franca Santi Gualtieri will collaborate with the magazine «Abitare» founded by Piera Peroni since 1961, with an editing staff almost exclusively female, until becoming director in 1974. Also Maria Bottero will enter the editing of important architecture magazines such as «Zodiac» and «Abitare». 3. Finally, as a third objective, to report citations or good feedbacks of the works of women in the field of design starting from «Stile Industria»

Design, style and moulds

This article explores the relationship between design, style and moulds across the history of design.

DESIGN STORIES. An insight into design history and contemporary practice from women’s perspective

DESIGN STORIES. An insight into design history and contemporary practice from women’s perspective, 2022

The Design Stories seminar is part of Looking Through Objects, a curatorial project that celebrates women’s contribution to change in Poland, the Baltic region, and beyond. Women’s role in design has changed over time from that of being muses and supporters to active protagonists, independent players, and thinkers. Over the last decade, mindfulness and holistic thinking have become essential characteristics of design processes, more so than the spectacular, short-lasting showy qualities of design that we have seen in the past. Along with the Design Stories seminar, the project includes a touring exhibition featuring a selection of contemporary practitioners from Poland. The show’s first stop is Tallinn (Estonia) at the Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design (17 June – 25 September 2022). In this iteration Looking Through Objects will feature 16 Polish and 16 Estonian designers in two sister exhibitions, which will give the audiences an opportunity to draw connections and spot differences between designers and researchers from these countries. Within the broader context of the Looking Through Objects project the Design Stories seminar provides an interdisciplinary space where design researchers, historians, and practitioners can share their views and experiences on women’s contribution to design. Intentionally, we wanted to position Design Stories at the junction of all the practices connected with design rather than make it solely academic. We feel that this approach is more in tune with the contemporary context of design, in which the fluidity of the practice is resisting the confined boundaries of given labels and titles. Due to this unique characteristic of design as a discipline, we find it more holistic and realistic to hear from historians, as well as acting designers directly involved in design through practice. We believe that this provides a range of voices and perspectives (observers, researchers, practitioners) that will help readers to draw their own conclusions on what design is today. With this in mind we also wanted to gather subjective and objective perspectives from the participating speakers. These have informed the structure of the publication. In the section Design as Tool designers illustrate skills used to solve the issues they encountered along the way, and lastly in Design as Practice they reflect on their own experience. These provide an insight into their creative work and challenges and opportunities from their personal experience in the field. By contrast an objective perspective into design is provided by 4 researchers (writers, curators) in the section Design as Story. They provide an overview of the context within which practitioners operate. From their vantage point, we get a glimpse of the complexities and challenges of the contemporary design world. This publication is reaching you at the start of the exhibition’s journey, in Tallinn. Its next step will be Gdańsk in 2023. We are grateful to the National Museum in Gdańsk for their involvement in the realisation of this project. The seminar content can be experienced in digital and printed format and through the audio-video recording of the live-streamed seminar sessions (25–26 November 2021), which are free to access via YouTube and the SWPS University website. We feel that this publication is only the start of a longer journey. We are planning to use the format of the Design Stories seminar as a regular yearly appointment and as a platform via which to discuss design practice from the female perspective and with a special interest in female designers, their roles and attitudes. The publication is part of the "Looking Through Objects" project led by the National Museum in Gdansk. The project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland under the "Inspiring Culture" Programme.

Designing Australia. Readings in the History of Design [book]

Designing Australia. Readings in the History of Design, Pluto Press Australia, 2002

The aim of this work is to present an anthology of selected essays and excerpts from Australia’s historical writings on design to allow the reader to sample some of the issues associated with designing for the serial production of objects and architecture. Such selections are always arbitrary. The choices are, for the most part, shaped by the editor's perception of the persistent themes and ideas associated with a particu¬lar design media. An anthology of this type also provides an opportunity to present new information not readily available to the general reader. Information regarding other writings and authors would be welcomed.

Two design drawings makers. Lina Bo (Bardi) and Ray Kaiser (Eames)

MoMoWo Symposium 2018 International Conference | Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018):Toward a New Perception and Reception, 2018

This gender essay has two parts. The first is historical, biographical and descriptive. The second one is analytic. The works of Lina Bo and Ray Kaiser can be interpreted, in some designed items as a form of "architecture of the body" in which a synthesis of the avant-garde of Europe and United States and the "ancestral reality" of Brazil and India takes place: modern versus popular, process against product. There is an important unpublished investigation of design drawings Ray and Lina to this purpose realized by the authors. Those drawings play with a materialistic philosophy overlapping with a humanistic way of looking the world. The second part is analytical. It reconstructs the specific antifeminist position of these two creators understood as a matter of those who do not need to be feminists because there should not be male chauvinists. This surprising position provides a heterodox alternative of the masculine archetypes last century in the world. Lina and Ray were neither dandies nor aesthetes nor decadents. As a conclusion, the paper will show the work of these two women "as subjects" that through another kind of documentation from no architectonic newspapers, magazines and television unleash new interpretations and enhancement. Makers, drawings, canvas, traveling, craftswoman,

Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice

Avery Review, 2017

This is a call for the development of a more robust theoretical position about the gender implications of advanced parametric design and the use of machines to design and fabricate architecture. As digital fabrication has made material the network conditions of cyberfeminism, it is time to revisit the relationships between feminism, architecture, and technology. We propose a framework that relies upon intellectual traditions of feminism and deliberately focuses on developing technologies as a locus of power and influence in architecture. Architecture has been slow to fully acknowledge, incorporate, and integrate women into its practices.3 Within the building profession, digital technology has emerged-and in many ways, is still emerging-as a site of architectural influence: those who control the process of design through technology control architecture. CNC fabrication and robotic construction are cultivating new cultures of digital craft, and in searching for future opportunities, we would do well to recall the long history that links craft and feminine labor. By looking again at the often-neglected contributions of Ada Lovelace and the Jacquard loom to computation and digital fabrication in the nineteenth century or a more recent project such as the Elytra Filament Pavilion, we might see how this digital moment has been framed by feminist craft rather than the more familiar origin stories that surround computation.

Anna Castelli Ferrieri and the Tectonics of Plastics in Industrial Design

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2022

The article examines three key works by the Italian designer Anna Castelli Ferrieri (1918 – 2006), whose career began in urban planning and architecture yet proceeded to gain the most success within the field of industrial design. It foregrounds her interdisciplinary career, traversing professional boundaries between the fields of urban planning, architecture and industrial design through a socio-technical framework of the material objects that she designed. By investigating the commercial success of the Kartell 4970-84 Modular containers, the 4870 Stackable Chair, and the 4822-44 Stool, this research identifies a particular characteristic of Castelli Ferrieri’s design method; an approach which, this article argues, draws upon her education, knowledge, and experience in architecture. It is with these projects that we can see how Castelli Ferrieri attempted to create, with the limitations of manufacturing processes and the characteristics of materials: a tectonics of plastic. https://issuu.com/rmitdesignarchives/docs/rda\_journal\_26\_12.1\_issuu