Design for War and Peace: 2014 Annual Design History Society Conference

This paper examines a cotton handkerchief decorated by women republican prisoners Armagh Jail in 1976. It considers the power of cloth, its appropriation and circulation through in prisons of the conflict ‘in and about’ Northern Ireland.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1952) chronicles the two years that Anne, her family, and four other Jews spent in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. This paper focuses on the postwar adaptations of Frank’s wartime diary into a Broadway play. It looks at the ways in which Frank’s original descriptions of her hiding space are translated and represented during the postwar period. It highlights shifts and transitions in spatial constructions and compares them to the diverse written and visual narratives of the diary. It considers how spatial design and material culture represents cultural context and emphasizes character development which resulted in what contemporary critic Algene Ballif described as Frank’s metamorphosis into an “American adolescent.” In addition, the paper focuses on the scenic designs of Boris Aronson (1900-1980) who designed the set for the initial New York stage production of the Frank diary. Aronson emigrated to the United States in 1923 where he also designed sets in New York City’s Jewish experimental theaters. Identified by director and critic Harold Clurman as a “master visual artist of the stage,” Aronson experimented with innovative theatrical techniques. Anne’s hiding space as described in her diary is shaped by the reality of war. On stage that space is reimagined, and In this sense, Anne’s hiding space may be related to more popular notions of teenaged girls and the spaces they inhabited in the postwar period manifesting a transition in how one visualizes a wartime space during peace.

The reconstruction in Italy is perceived as a call by architects who, after the fall of Fascism and the Civil War. The first postwar Triennale in 1947 is the test for the new design, architecture and urban planning in Italy.

This paper will set up and identify certain needs that a soldier's clothing of this period had to satisfy and will provide an analysis of the processes and systems of supply in place between 1645 and 1708 in order to identify changes and developments in the way that the English Military man was clothed.

Arthur Wragg

This paper looks at the glass figurines of Czech artist Miloslav Klinger, made to commemorate the 1955 Prague Spartakiad, as complex sites of memory, craft and political propaganda.

Through an examination of domestic advice and advertisements found in Cuban popular magazines, this paper explores the relationship between politics and popular media during the period 1950 to 1970. Over the past fifty-four years, the Cuban Revolution has continually fascinated scholars and non-scholars alike. Yet, studies have focused on either the period before or after the Revolution, as two distinct eras. Instead, this paper, which is part of a larger study, reinforces the idea that design played an integral role in the dissemination of ideology at mid-century by demonstrating the critical role that popular print media played in shaping Cuban society during a shifting ideological context. Through an examination of domestic advice and advertisements found in Cuban popular magazines, this paper explores the relationship between politics and popular media during the period 1950 to 1970, when Cuba transitioned from a quasi-capitalist satellite to a socialist nation isolated from the United States economically and culturally during the revolutionary era. Images presented in domestic advice and advertisements offer a vivid snapshot of cultural prescriptions for everyday life. Using Roland Barthes’ conception of ideology as one of transforming the “reality of the world into an image of the world,” the images presented in popular media reveal the dominant ideologies of the era. By framing domestic advice and advertisements for the home found in Cuban popular magazines as arbiters of ideology, I illuminate two divergent prescriptions for everyday life: one predicated on the U.S. paradigm of capitalism and the other on a socialist model.

Examination of the design competition of Nepal's republic memorial.

First World War vehicles as instruments of order and chaos.

This paper analyses typographic posters produced by the New Zealand Government in WWI to recruit men and money to the war effort. They chart the progress of recruitment strategies from voluntarism through to the contested years leading to conscription.

The paper highlights tensions that appeared in the near routine collection of trophies for memorials and the design of war cemeteries between British imperial offices and those of former colonies, particularly Australia’s War Records Section.

Propaganda: graphic design and print culture This research analyses image and visual graphic design to obtain a deeper understanding of the changes which occurred in women’s positions and images as a result of transformations in societal structure before and after World War I, as well as the far-reaching impact of changes in the social environment on women’s lives.

On adapted reuse of military establishments. As an analogy to the theory of readymades, the author argues that ‘readymade space’ is a utile metaphor to describe the cultural alchemy of appropriation in which vacant buildings such as military establishments are reused, adapted and designed to new purposes within the cultural economy.

By comparing the work and career trajectories of these two architect-designers, this paper explored the changes in taste, style and cultural meaning of the dominant trends in Hungarian interior design before and after World War 1.

Portuguese design furniture (1940-1974) and the industrial policies of the New State's dictatorship. Through furnishing is revealed a discourse between a nationalistic intent and a gradual adoption of the modern movement, reflecting the dynamics that followed World War II. These experiments can be seen both as evidence of authoritarian regime as well as part of a resistance that would transform Portugal and its material culture. In the 1940s, there was the so-called rustic and the historicisms of scholarly root, reflecting the authoritarian character of power, but from the 50s, several creators fought for modernity in its furniture designs.

This paper will analyse both spaces according to their scale, location in the city, authenticity, phenomenology and prosthetic memory, in order to determine whether design can enhance and protect our collective memory. Berlin has become one of the most prolific centres of memory in Europe: the amount of memorials, traces and documentation centres devoted to remembering the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall era is rather overwhelming. There is, however, and important distinction to be made between those sites of memory which are located on an authentic site, and those which have been framed in a building that has been designed to recall this memories. This paper would like to analyse these two different approaches through the interior design of two very different museums: Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind and the Jewish Museum. On the one hand, the Museum Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind is a remarkable space thanks to the authenticity that transpires from every inch of the space: both the inside and outside of this museum have been barely touched since the end of the war, and as such the connections with the space is quite strong. On the other hand, the Jewish Museum promotes a similar experience and connection with the past thanks to a very phenomenological design by Daniel Libeskind. This paper will analyse both spaces according to their scale, location in the city, authenticity, phenomenology and prosthetic memory, in order to determine whether design can enhance and protect our collective memory.

This paper studies some Colombian museums that are reflecting upon war. Colombia’s internal armed conflict has lasted for more than fifty years, and its causes and effects are still difficult to understand. Recent political and social events are demanding for a better comprehension of the violence. This paper studies some Colombian museums that are reflecting upon war.

The 1938 exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art, on display in Europe and the United States.

The paper examines poster propaganda produced in South Africa during the Second World War. The production and use of propaganda posters is described and particular attention is paid to the manner in which the posters structure their visual arguments to appeal to their various audiences.

Contemporary Design History; History of the AIDS Crisis As Susan Sontag pointed out, the American AIDs epidemic is characterised by powerful, apocalyptic metaphors. And, whether one is talking in terms of the syndrome itself; in relation to government inaction, or of the militant activism that sprung up across America’s gay urban centres, these are invariably metaphors of warfare. Further, in discussing how we remember and memorialise AIDS, many scholars have drawn comparisons with the way we remember and mourn war, arguing that the AIDS Memorial Quilt owes much of its conceptual framework to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Meanwhile, the Quilt’s custodians, the NAMES Project, view themselves as closely aligned with efforts to memorialise the Holocaust, citing Yad Vashem as an exemplar memorial. Similarly, Gert McMullin, long-time Handmaiden of the Quilt, calls the panels her soldiers: ‘these are the old soldiers,’ she said, gesturing at the warehouse that houses the Quilt, ‘and we keep getting new troops in.’ Thus, we can see AIDS as part of an ideological war, affecting conceptions of masculinity, the body, and linguistics, whilst also prompting new modes of relating to, remembering, and memorialising trauma. With the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the contemporary period as a case study, I take a design-historical and theoretical approach to assess how we use unique material processes to remember and memorialise during prolonged periods of trauma. I argue for the Quilt as a postmodern text that, rather than embodying a single cohesive collective memory, provides a collection of memories; a diverse assemblage of ways to remember the crisis, and those lost to it.

The presentation looks at the design and production of this propaganda paper as part of the wider history of the Singaporean Straits Times, the newspaper it briefly replaced. The Syonan Shimbun was a Japanese newspaper published during the Occupation of Singapore in World War Two. The presentation looks at the design and production of this propaganda paper as part of the wider history of the Singaporean Straits Times, the newspaper it briefly replaced.

Design is perceived by most as a positive concept meant to improve people lives. But it is first a means to answer efficiently a specific purpose. How can we morally accept that the act of killing led to the development of an important design industry? In past decades Design has emerged as a promising field of study that led to the development of specific training courses but also of cultural institutions entirely dedicated to this domain. However, the concept of Design has to free itself from chronological and moral limitations to fully encompass all creations produced by the Human brain, good or bad.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the consequences of this change, in other words, the examination of the ways, the strategies, the semiotics and the social uses of the objects which conform the so-called camouflage for peace. Both World Wars in the 20th century testified the birth and evolution of military camouflage design and its main variants: Disruptive Pattern Material (hereinafter DPM), which aimed to make invisible land armies and army air corps, and Dazzle Painting, which was devoted to blur war ship shapes. This type of war design was probably inspired by pictorial innovations of artistic avant-gardes from the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. Cubism, Fauvism and Vorticism. Modernist painting provided military camouflage with a civic origin. DPM and Dazzle Painting attracted a wide audience imagination since they were invented and practised for the first time during the years of the Great War. There was a sudden transfer from war to peace scenarios, from military backgrounds to civil ones. The aim of this paper is to analyse the consequences of this change, in other words, the examination of the ways, the strategies, the semiotics and the social uses of the objects which conform the so-called camouflage for peace. In this manner, we will analyse recent examples (end of 20th and beginnings of 21st centuries) of DPM and Dazzle Painting applications to the following fields: fashion and textile design, interior design, industrial design, architecture and contemporary art. Such analytical revision will be done by exploring in what sense and to what extent the recontextualisation of this type of design entails its rethematisation.

This paper examines the image of the Kalashnikov in the cold war period through two intersecting lenses that cut across disciplines of design –– the object in its public mediation and the image in its transnational circulation through print culture.

MoMA’s 1942 Wartime Housing exhibition demonstrated that housing contributed to the war effort. Through innovative display, the museum proposed that new materials, modern techniques, and community planning would create lively permanent communities.

This paper focuses on Pevsner’s wartime writings. This paper focuses on Pevsner’s wartime writings and intends to examine his architectural/art historical emphasis upon quiet, humane and ‘anonymous’ buildings and living communities, as his active response to the ongoing war, with an indomitable spirit indispensable for surviving the war.

An examination of the material culture and social history of the German internees held on the Isle of Man, who made furniture designed by CR Mackintosh for the Northampton home of the Bassett-Lowke family between 1916 and 1919.

My presentation will focus on the subject of nonprofessional craft as a tool of resistance against the official power. I will be concentrating on one particular case study from Soviet Estonia, dating from the 1940s.

Material objects and visual web presentation: the Virtual Peace Palace Museum. This paper aims to compare the ‘affect-effect’ of material culture and design on war and peace as may be experienced by direct contact with a real environment to a web-collection presentation mediated by images of objects on the web. The casus is the Peace Palace in The Hague.

An analysis of Ruth Taylor White’s “cartograph” for the 1945 guidebook A G.I. View of American Red Cross China, India and Burma, published by the American Red Cross.

This talk examines the propaganda campaign conducted by mid-nineteenth century American reformer Elihu Burritt and a group of engravers and artists who used the graphic potential of postal items, such as envelopes, to pressure politicians for peace.

In the interwar period, the Italian school reports and diplomas turned into a direct expression of the most advanced artistic research. Fascism revolutionized institutional graphic design to achieve a modern effective communication.

In the aftermath of two world wars, the V&A struggled to reconstruct a national view of contemporary art and design in which Britain’s industrial past and contemporary developments could be reconciled. Contemporary design was the main catalyst against which a new ‘romantic nationalism’ was reconstructed; to use Maurice Halbwach’s term, in creating a ‘collective memory’ of the past.

This paper examines dress as a form of anti-war Vietnam protest using the cross dressing character of Corporal Maxwell Klinger on the long-running American sitcom MASH as its focus.

The Serial production exhibition, by Giuseppe Pagano, opens a new attitude in Italian design. The most advanced industrial products are shown to the public: typewriters, calculators, metal furnitures, microscopes, optical instruments, raincoats and so on.

A description of the concurrent yet different development of electronic computers during WWII in the UK and US– most notably the secrecy of the UK development compared to the widely known work in the US and the consequent effects on the computing industry

Exhibitions designed by the British Ministry of Information exhibitions branch during World War Two as official propaganda: their methods and impact.