Much early design history was concerned with the ‘designed’ and mass produced object. However, since the translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) and Daniel Miller’s Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1986), design historians have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which material culture mediates and forms personal identities. The impetus for this paradigm shift came from feminist, political and post-modern scholars who challenged both the modernist canon of design artefacts and the methodologies of modernist design history to explore the non-designed and the amateur. Design historians have borrowed from social anthropology and ethnography to investigate the aesthetics of everyday life, especially mass consumption practices. Judy Attfield has more recently raised the possibility of ‘things with attitude’ in Wild Things (2000). Furthermore, new possibilities are opened up by the historian of science Bruno Latour who has suggested in Reassembling the Social (2005) that ‘objects too have agency’. Yet despite its prominence in design history, the material remains largely immaterial for art historians.

This session seeks proposals that investigate the meanings of things represented in artefacts. It welcomes proposals that consider artefacts produced by artists and designers as material things rather than simply conveyors of visual images. How does the materiality of artefacts contribute to their meanings? What effect does the life of artefacts ?? as things ?? have on their meaning? And how are artefacts used to construct individual and group identities? We especially welcome contributions from practitioners who are dealing with these issues in their work.

05.- Cultural Heritage