2021 DHS Annual Conference: Memory Full? Reimagining the relations of Design and History

From 1 to 4 September 2021, the Design History Society held its annual conference for the first time in Switzerland. For the first time as well, it was held on a fully digital format, thanks to an engaged organisation team on site and the infrastructure of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design, Basel. The digital conference attracted 260 active participants. Four keynotes, 87 papers and two workshops, and a series of 7 book presentations and ten virtual visits through which students of the HGK FHNW guided conference guests virtually through Switzerland rounded off the programme. As convenors, Meret Ernst and Monica Gaspars welcomed 104 speakers as convenors, who came from almost all over the world - from 4 continents and 34 countries. Those who missed the conference and the high-level debates on archives and materials, critique and blind spots, practices of design history, and alternative formats may like to read the proceedings to be published in spring 2022.

2nd General meeting, 18 June 2021

Our 2nd General meeting was hold in Bern. It was followed by a guided tour of the Bestform exhibition with the managing director of the Bernese Design Foundation Meret Mangold on the topic of collecting and promoting.

Collecting in the GTA-archive, 28 May 2021

We were allowed to visit the estate of Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker in the gta archive in Zurich with the archivist und NDG-member Almut Grunewald.

NDG virtual #2 Visit to the Bally Archive and book vernissage, 21 April 2021

At this event first, the curator of the Bally archives, Rebekka Gerber, together with the two authors of the current Bally publication, Anna-Brigitte Schlittler and Katharina Tietze, gave us a virtual tour of the company's archives on film. Afterwards, the authors presented their book Bally – A History of Footwear in the Interwar Period.