Design Histories Beyond Euro-America: Worlds, Canons, and Counter-Narratives

This seminar rethinks design histories through the deliberate unlearning of Euro-American modernity as the default frame of reference.
It interrogates how canonical historiographies have constructed 'design' as an industrial, Western project while marginalizing vernacular practices, craft epistemologies, regenerative systems, and alternative material cultures. The seminar also explores the historical boundaries of what counts as design, who counts as a designer, and which objects enter the canon, and which were left outside.
Positioning design history as a geo-politically entangled field - the course examines how colonial modernity, extractivism, petro-materiality, and global supply chains have shaped dominant narratives of progress and innovation. In contrast, it foregrounds counter-narratives emerging from the Global South and other historically peripheralized contexts, design worlds that demand different periodizations, and different criteria of significance.

The course is grounded in case studies spanning architecture, fashion, craft, object and graphic systems approached through the methods of design history: object analysis, and historiographical critique.

The seminar begins with the question: How do we move beyond the canon, toward the worlds and counter-narratives that design history has left out?

• Attendance at the first session is mandatory. Minimum 80% attendance. 
• Active participation in class discussions, group work, and intellectual performance is required.
• Submission of a mini poster (1 × A4 page designed): one visually composed page combining reflection, imagery, and key conceptual insights developed from the museum visit that situates your perspective within the design histories discussed. (30%)
• Final presentations (as a group): details in the second session and on Base. (60%)