Writing Design: Words and Objects

Writing Design is concerned with how designed objects and design practices are communicated through word and image. It therefore engages with design historical methodology and historiography to examine design is written about effectively. The Writing Design project forms part of the work of the tVAD Research Group in its work on Relationships between Text, Narrative and Image.

Writing Design asks: how can we best communicate about and analyse objects using words, and what is at stake in the translation from objects and practices to texts and images? Writing Design asks participants to reflect on their methodology in these acts of translation. Writing Design selects, collects and disseminates examples of successful methods of word-based analysis of design practices and outcomes.

Outputs include an edited anthology, Writing Design: Words and Objects (Berg, 2011); an edited journal volume, 'Writing Design: Words, Myths and Practices' in Writing Visual Culture (previously Working Papers on Design); an international peer-reviewed conference, Writing Design: Object, Process, Discourse, Translation, the annual conference of the Design History Society, 2009.