March 2018 saw two members of the Centre for Design History contribute to the Swiss Design Network Research Summit annual conference ‘Beyond Change: Questioning the role of design in times of global transformations’ at FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, Switzerland. Addressing 500 delegates, Professor Cheryl Buckley’s keynote ‘ On the Record: Researching Women Designers’ developed her work on the relationships between design, women and gender as she proposed that ‘by returning to the question of women’s relationship to design, we can prise open understandings about what design means and who does it so as to illuminate the possibilities of design as a vital component of everyday lives?’ PhD candidate Tania Messell spoke about ‘ICSID, Development, and Environmental Concerns: 1970s–1980s’, as she explored the ways in which this important design organisation navigated changing understandings of design and designers’ roles. With three days of debate that proposed that ‘design cannot change anything before it changes itself’, Buckley and Messell’s research contributed to the important question: ‘how can we reimagine design as an unbounded, queer, and unfinished practice that approaches the world from within instead of claiming an elevated position?’
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