Books by Tania Messell
This innovative volume brings together international design scholars to address the history and p... more This innovative volume brings together international design scholars to address the history and present-day status of national and international design organizations, working across design disciplines and located in countries including Argentina, Turkey, Estonia, Switzerland, Italy, China and the USA.
In the second half of the 20th century, many non-governmental organizations were created to address urgent cultural, economic and welfare issues. Design organizations set out to create an international consensus for the future direction of design. This included enhancing communication between professionals, educators and practitioners, raising standards for design, and creating communities of designers across linguistic, national and political borders. Shared needs and agendas were identified and categories of design constantly defined and re-defined, often with overt cultural and political intents.
Drawing on an impressive range of original research, archival sources and oral testimony, this volume questions the aims and achievements of national and international design organizations in light of their subsequent histories and their global remits. The Cold War period is central to the book, while many chapters draw on post-colonial perspectives to interpret how transnational networks and negotiations took place at events and congresses, and through publication.
Publications by Tania Messell
Design by Disaster: ICSID and the League of Red Cross Societies (1971–1979)
Design, Displacement, and Migration, edited by Sarah Lichtman and Jilly Traganou, Routledge, 2023
The 1970s witnessed the marked interests of international and national relief circles in the cont... more The 1970s witnessed the marked interests of international and national relief circles in the contribution of design to disaster relief and conditions of displacement, circumstances which resulted in collaborations between design and large humanitarian organizations. This chapter sheds light on such interconnections by examining the initiatives pursued by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), the League of Red Cross Societies and the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO) throughout the decade. As the chapter argues, while ICSID aligned in part with growing calls for decentralized and participatory aid responses, disaster relief also assisted the Council in promoting design as an expert-driven problem-solving activity responding not only to human needs, but also to the technical and economic imperatives of relief organizations. Disasters and their aftermaths became moreover conceived as opportunities to spur speculative design practices, in line with a Modernist discourse of tabula rasa, which further preserved a binary understanding of Western expertise on the one hand, and distant disaster struck populations on the other. With design being currently harnessed on a wide scale by humanitarian actors, the chapter contributes to tracing long-standing and shared rationalities as they have intersected between design and relief spheres historically.
Disaster Relief and 'Universal Shelters': Humanitarian Imaginaries and Design Interventions at Oxfam, 1971-1976
Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, 2022
The 1970s witnessed rising efforts to develop standardised emergency shelters amongst Western hum... more The 1970s witnessed rising efforts to develop standardised emergency shelters amongst Western humanitarian organisations, at a time when ideological, technical and logistical transformations expanded zones of interventions. Such attempts were often shaped by modernist and counter-cultural experiments in predominantly Western architecture and design circles, through which mobility, standardization and vernacular building typologies intersected. Emerging from these entwined discourses and practices, portable, standardized and easily reproducible approaches to housing became envisioned as a possible response to post-conflict and natural disasters. Examining the development and trialling of the site-moulded polystyrene shelter design developed by Oxfam between 1971 and 1976, commonly known as the ‘Oxfam Igloo’, the chapter argues that the project remained grounded in very Western conceptions of ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski 1999), a hierarchical division which has remained part of the contemporary humanitarian landscape. The chapter furthermore argues that an artefact like the Oxfam Igloo can only be understood through an interdisciplinary enquiry.
International Design Organizations Histories, Legacies, Values, edited by Jeremy Aynsley, Alison Clarke and Tania Messell, 2021
Design Struggles Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives, 2021
The frameworks of globalisation, national identity and locality have in recent years been extensi... more The frameworks of globalisation, national identity and locality have in recent years been extensively discussed in the field of design history, in which methodologies versed in trans-national and global approaches have been assiduously applied and compared. But while this scholarship has highlighted how design at times circulates across, under, and above the nation state, Professor of Design History Kjetil Fallan's body of work has regularly argued for the validity of national and regional frameworks, albeit through a critical lens, as exemplified in his latest volume, Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (2016), co-edited with Grace Lees-Maffei. In Designing Modern Norway, Fallan continues to develop a non-essentialist approach of the nation, by offering a sweeping account of the complex and multifarious process through which a modern design culture developed in Norway from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, and of its pro-ponents' efforts to design a modern nation. Whilst Fallan acknowledges that the nation can be regarded as designed from its wider infrastructures to everyday material culture, and that the home represents an area of central concern in Norwegian culture, Designing Modern Norway focuses " less on actual domestic consumption practices (or design practices) and more on the ideological, moral, norma-tive and prescriptive underpinnings of, and reflections on, such practices " (p. 5). Fallan achieves this by dividing the book into nine loosely chronological chapters, each of which examines how particular design organisations, institutions and events contributed to the wider debates on the nature and contributions of design in Norway. In so doing, the book introduces a wide range of design actors to the reader, whilst successfully mapping competing agendas for nation building and longstanding debates around issues ranging from modernity to technology, aesthetics, and sustainability. This article is downloaded from www.idunn.no.
The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, Edited by Kjetil Fallan, 2019
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded by designers fro... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded by designers from Europe and the United States in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and establish international standards for the profession. By the early 1970s, environmental concerns became a cornerstone of international relations, and defining environmental issues in global terms helped legitimising the competence of international organisations in the matter. In this context, concerns for the designer’s role towards the environment were increasingly voiced within ICSID, whose efforts towards the promotion of environmentally responsible design practice were particularly aimed at the so-called ‘developing countries’. In the latter ICSID advocated the benefits of grass-roots practices and raised industrialisation, an ambivalent stance that resulted from the organisation’s close ties with industry and heightened collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). However, at a time when the management of the earth’s resources entered international debates and ICSID’s initiatives in developing countries was a source of growing discontent, diverging understandings of the environment and development emerged in Latin American design circles. These tensions epitomised in an Interdesign workshop organised in 1978 and coordinated by ICSID and UNIDO in Mexico, which gathered an international roster of designers to conceive rural equipment drawing from alternative energy sources. As the paper reveals, the solutions devised were regarded as utopian and unfit for rural conditions by the Latin American participants, who in response to ICSID’s centralised structure laid the foundations of the Latin American design organisation ALADI to spur the region’s economic and cultural independence. Performing a close reading of ICSID’s environmental discourse in the 1970s and of the Mexican Interdesign through a postcolonial lens, the paper highlights the contribution of histories of international organisations to the geographical expansion of environmental histories of design through their capacity to uncover a ‘pluriversality’ (Walter Mignolo) of environmental understandings.
Journal of Design History, Special Issue 'Locating Design Exchanges in Latin America and the Caribbean', eds. Livia Rezende and Patricia Lara-Betancourt
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in London in 1957... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in London in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and to establish international standards for the profession. By the 1970s the Council had expanded its attempts to rationalize local production processes in developing countries and spur their entry into international markets, in line with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s (UNIDO) programme. As this article reveals, Latin America represented a crucial zone of intervention for the ICSID, whose efforts culminated in a congress held in Mexico City in 1979, organized around the theme ‘Industrial Design and Human Development’. The event nevertheless exposed heightened concerns about ICSID’s development policies and centralized structure, alongside the creation of the Latin American design organization ALADI by a circle of Latin American designers, who promulgated the benefits of place-based design practice and regional cooperation towards Latin America’s economic and cultural independence. Mapping ICSID’s initiatives in the region in the 1970s and examining the multifarious reception of the Council’s design precepts by Latin American design circles, this article highlights how processes of translation shaped their interactions, ultimately countering a ‘diffusionist’ model of cross-cultural exchanges.
DESIGN + RESEARCH + SOCIETY FUTURE-FOCUSED THINKING, DRS Conference Proceedings, 2016
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to raise ... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and to establish international standards for the profession. While the organisation expanded to include member societies from developing economies in the 1960s and 1970s, it was predominantly led by Western members, and design mainly promoted as a tool for industrial development, due to ICSID’s close collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). Examining ICSID’s early promotional activities in developing countries, in particular its first congress in Latin America ‘Industrial Design for Human Development’, held in 1979 Mexico, this paper appraises the reception of Western design precepts by a circle of Latin American designers and theorists, whose design methodology, which promulgated the primacy of local needs, resources and expertise, paved the way towards a more multifaceted understanding of design within ICSID and beyond.
Making Trans/National Contemporary Design History [=ICDHS 2016 – 10th Conference of the International Committee for Design History & Design Studies], 2016
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 by design... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 by designers representing professional organisations from Europe and the United States to establish international standards for the profession and to raise the professional status of designers (Constitution 1957), in a period in which the Enlightenment concept of “World Citizenship” permeated political and cultural post-war discourses (Sluga 2010). For the sociologists John Boli and Georges Thomas, NGOs act as ‘transnational bodies employing limited resources to make rules, set standards, propagate principles, and broadly represent "humanity”’ (Boli & Thomas 1997), a definition echoing ICSID’s strategies to become a world reference of industrial design through its efforts to promote the discipline as a universal problem-solving activity, aimed at benefitting 'Mankind’ (General Assembly 1963). Examining ICSID's establishment and early years, this paper reveals that diverging design visions and national agenda surrounded ICSID's establishment, which alongside critiques of its predominantly Western leadership, challenged the organisation’s universalist design conceptions, inner workings and purposes.
Conference Presentations by Tania Messell
Emergency Design, Resilience and the Humanitarian Complex (1970-1980)
Design History Society Annual Conference, Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey, 2022
Emergency Design, Resilience and the Humanitarian Complex (1970-1980)
Since the late 2000s the h... more Emergency Design, Resilience and the Humanitarian Complex (1970-1980)
Since the late 2000s the humanitarian field has witnessed an ‘innovation turn’ in response to what a growing number of individuals have viewed as its inefficient, backward-looking and top-down inner-workings (Scott-Smith 2016). As part of this movement, design methodologies versed in iterative and participatory approaches have been increasingly employed by aid workers to render communities more resilient in the face of disasters and other conditions of hardship. The histories of such practices and their material articulations have however received little attention. The paper addresses this gap by examining the merging of resilience thinking, design and disaster responses in the 1970s. By then, a series of large-scale disasters from the Biafran War which raged between 1967 and 1970 to the Peruvian earthquake of May 1970, allied with the perceived lack of efficient and appropriate responses, led to the growing involvement of architects in emergency shelter and post-disaster housing programmes. Through the latter, natural disasters rapidly became instrumentalized as sites of interventions where designerly ways of problem-solving and technical know-how were harnessed to save lives, provide relief, and mitigate future risks in the face of uncertainty. The paper examines the meeting of such rationalities by tracing the development of the A-Frame shelter by American researchers and architects from Carnegie Mellon University and the consultancy Intertect between 1974 and 1977. Merging the use of a generic ‘tropical’ materials and construction knowledge with a problem-centred approach grounded in Western technical know-how and system theory, the project epitomised a new-found alliance between design and relief actors within global circuits of aid. Mapping the conception, implementation and reception of the shelter as they were deployed in refugee camps around Dhaka (formerly known as Dacca), Bangladesh, the paper furthermore examines the politics of such rationalities in light of the aforementioned ‘innovation turn’.
Nature, Design and the Rationality of Crisis
Swiss Design Network Conference, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), 2022
The 1970s witnessed the heightened involvement of designers and architects in response to natural... more The 1970s witnessed the heightened involvement of designers and architects in response to natural disasters. By the late 1960s, the global Cold War, environmental degradation, overpopulation and the growth of interdependent markets contributed to a collective awareness of global interdependency. In addition, a series of large-scale disasters from the Biafran War which raged between 1967 and 1970 to the Peruvian earthquake of May 1970, allied with the spread of instantaneous communication and televisual media now allowed audiences to witness suffering at a distance through their screens. As a result, disaster sites became the theatre of imagined and implemented designs by many Western design practitioners who set out to respond to what they predominantly regarded as a matter of technical response. In this context, natural disasters rapidly became instrumentalized as sites of interventions where designerly ways of problem-solving and technical know-how were brought into play to save lives, provide relief and mitigate future risks. Grounded a humanitarian discourse versed in shared humanity and a moral orientation to suffering, such interventions also relied on a ‘politics of life’ (Fassin 2007) that suggested a world order made up of experts and of disaster-struck communities dependant on external assistance. Drawing from a scholarship which advocates the necessity to consider more-than-human agencies in transnational histories, this paper explores how natural disasters spurred and became the backdrop for American and British design responses in the 1970s, during which many connections were established between design practitioners and governmental and non-governmental actors within an expanding humanitarian network eager to innovate. The paper furthermore questions the extent to which these dynamics have remained in the more recent humanitarian ‘innovation turn’ (Scott-Smith 2016).
Design History Society Annual Conference, University of Oslo, Norway, 2017
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded by designers from... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded by designers from Europe and the United States in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and establish international standards for the profession. By the early 1970s, environmental concerns acted as a cornerstone of international relations and defining environmental issues in international terms helped legitimising the competence of international organisations in the matter. In this context, concerns for the designer’s role towards the environment were increasingly voiced within ICSID, whose efforts towards the promotion of environmentally responsible design practice particularly aimed at the so-called developing countries. Adopting a postcolonial perspective, in particular Homi Bhabha’s conception of the ‘language of resistance’, the paper in turn examines the reception of ICSID’s precepts in Latin America through a close reading of the Interdesign workshop held by ICSID and UNIDO in Mexico in 1978. As it reveals, the organisations’ attempt at exporting their design policies resulted in longstanding contestation in Latin American design circles and to the meeting of slippery and diverging understandings of the environment and locality. The paper finally argues for the contribution of histories of international organisations to the geographical expansion of environmental histories of design through their capacity to uncover a ‘pluriversality’ (Walter Mignolo) of environmentally concerned design visions.
ICSID, Development and Environmental Concerns, 1970-1980s
Swiss Design Network Conference, FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Switzerland, 2018
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to raise ... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and establish international standards for the profession. In the 1970s, resource management and ecology became cornerstones of ICSID’s development agenda. Performing a close reading of its reception in Latin American design circles, this paper highlights how intense environmental politics and coloniality of knowledge shaped their encounter. It moreover advocates the need to uncover a “pluriversality” (Walter Mignolo) of environmental perspectives in design.
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to establ... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in 1957 to establish international standards for the profession and to raise the professional status of designers. While the organisation grew to include member societies from 35 countries by 1975, the design historians Victor Margolin and Anna Calvera have pointed at the council’s design promotion as a tool for economic and industrial development, embedded in a Western narrative of progress (Margolin 2007 ; Calvera 2005). However, as this paper intends to show, existing theoretical and disciplinary frameworks can lead to at times conflicting understandings of international design organisations’ inner-workings. For the historian Bruce Mazlish, NGOs ‘are for many regarded as agents perpetuating neo-imperialistic agendas’ (2006), a statement supported by the sociologists Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez for whom these seek to spread progress through legitimated expertise and transnational models (1997). For the latter, NGOs coexist with nation states in the world polity where their agendas are influenced by world culture ideologies, such as world citizenship (Boli and Thomas 1997), a statement echoing Robert Cox’s definition of international organisations as products of hegemonic world order, which they legitimate and of which they facilitate the expansion (Robert Cox, 1993). However, empirical research on ICSID reveals that conflicting design ideologies existed within the council’s ranks, and that members from peripheral countries played a central role in shaping ICSID’s activities and structure from 1970 onwards. For the international organisation historian Sandrine Kott, international organisations are indeed ‘complexly intermeshing circulatory regimes’ structured by relations between individuals in constant movement between national and international spheres (2011), an approach reflecting recent attempts in design history to construct a polycentric design geography (Adamson et al.). The tensions existing between the data and theoretical frameworks will therefor receive a close examination while organisation theory and ANT will be used to draw a more accurate understanding of ICSID, beyond the centre-chore paradigm.
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in in 1957 to rai... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and to establish international standards for the profession. While the organisation expanded its zone of influence with the entry of member societies from Socialist and developing economies in the 1960s and 1970s, a disparity existed between the council’s universalist aspirations and governance. ICSID was indeed predominantly led by Western members, and design mostly promoted as a tool for industrial development through the council’s close collaboration with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organisation). This tension will be examined through a close reading of ICSID’s first congress in a developing country, ‘Industrial Design for Human Development’, held in Mexico City in 1979. The event crowned ICSID’s raised efforts to promote the benefits of industrial design to developing economies through the establishment of its Developing Countries commission in 1970, and the signing of the Ahmedabad Declaration with UNIDO in 1979. However, the event also served the agenda of the host country by promoting Mexico as the leading nation in design for development while it witnessed the establishment of the first Latin American design organisation, ALADI, annunciating the end of ICSID’s centralised structure and the limitations of ICSID’s guiding role.
Conferences by Tania Messell
From industrialization to post-industrialisation, international design organisations have shaped ... more From industrialization to post-industrialisation, international design organisations have shaped the socio-political, geographical and disciplinary history of design as a force for change in the world. However, the histories, legacies and values of these organisations have largely escaped academic scrutiny. This conference invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to open out multiple perspectives on international design organisations in shaping agendas, identities and values within design and beyond. It aims to locate these histories in relation to the contemporary post-industrial, post-organisational society in which the design profession currently operates. Ranging in scale and scope, international design organisations have taken changing forms over time. These range form membership-based organisations such as ICSID and ICOGRADA (now Ico-D) originally formed to represent the professions of design, to more diffuse organisations and networks formed to promote the activities of design to government and business on an international level. This conference seeks to explore the particular dynamics of these membership-based organisations and networks for the design professions. It seeks to interrogate the internationalizing agendas of these organisations and critically contextualize their impacts and legacies for contemporary design. The organisers invite authors to identify and explore the changing shape, form and function of international design organizations as an entry point into wider debates about the agency of design within political, cultural, social and economic context.
Exhibitions by Tania Messell
More than 50 years have passed since the first international organisations of design were establi... more More than 50 years have passed since the first international organisations of design were established to gather practitioners and professional associations worldwide. Among these, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) have played prominent roles in formulating international design standards and representing the design professions.
In this exhibition, documents from the ICSID Archive (1957-1989) and the Icograda Archive (1963-2003) – both held in the University of Brighton Design Archives – have been selected to highlight how these networks moreover acted as key sites of encounter for practitioners and their professional associations through General Assemblies, international congresses, collaborations and publications, which favoured transnational exchanges and wide-ranging debates.
The world diagram on the wall – inspired by Peter Kneebone’s original design displayed in the glass cases, and altered to reflect the actual landmass of each continent– presents information about the members of both Councils between 1957 and 1989, emphasizing their global constituencies and reach.
PhD Thesis by Tania Messell
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in London in 1957... more The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) was founded in London in 1957, by designers representing professional organisations in Europe and the United States, to raise the professional status of designers, to establish international standards for the profession and to develop industrial design education. The creation of this professional organisation took place when the Enlightenment concept of ‘World Citizenship’ permeated political and cultural discourses, and at a time when international cooperation was regarded as the best remedy for nationalism and to prevent a Third World War. However, whilst ICSID’s founding members aimed to forge a ‘bridge of understanding’ across borders, as the designer Misha Black proposed in 1961, and the organisation attempted to act as an influential mediating niche in the Cold War and decolonisation context, repeated attempts to safeguard national interests, expand business networks and build legitimacy at home and abroad erupted within ICSID, whilst the entry of members from socialist and developing economies led to a growing disbelief in the Council’s centralised structure and primarily Western leadership. Drawing from transnational historical perspectives and the concept of ‘entanglement’, this investigation aims at expanding the design-historical map by shedding light on the
individuals and ideas that sustained this network between 1957 and 1980. Considering ICSID as a fluctuating social space, shaped by the movements of individuals revolving between national and international circles, the thesis is structured around a selection of Congresses and General Assemblies during which the meeting of heterogeneous design cultures, diverging imperatives and politics of translation shaped the production and reception of international design standards within and beyond ICSID’s membership.
Examiners: Prof. Paul Betts (University of Oxford) and Prof. Jonathan Woodham (University of Brighton).
MA Dissertation by Tania Messell
Unity in a Tangled World: Introduction and Development of Corporate Identity Programmes in France, 1950-1975
Cohesive corporate design programmes were developed in the context of post-war economic prosperi... more Cohesive corporate design programmes were developed in the context of post-war economic prosperity, during which the scope of major companies expanded in both size and activity. At a time when these companies were modifying their organisation through significant restructuring and the development of their commercial departments, cohesive corporate identities were created to encourage the recognition, and thus success, of their products and services in increasingly complex markets. In this context, design had become a key tool in the achievement of corporate goals and aspirations.
As little had been written on the subject in France, this paper sets out to examine why, by whom and how the first corporate identities were introduced and developed between 1950 and 1975. In order to track their introduction and application, it examines the ‘five- and-dime’ store (magasin populaire) Prisunic through an analysis of its retail spaces, the electrical equipment producer Merlin Gerin through an examination of its printed materials and the airline UTA through an examination of its key agent, the aircraft itself. As the research reveals, the companies’ design commissions went hand in hand with their expansion during the social unrest and heavy de-skilling that resulted from their increasingly fragmented organisation. Cohesive corporate identity thus acted as a unifying tool for the companies’ external and internal image while revealing the strategies developed by French designers to create an image which satisfied the companies’ desire to appear modern, unified, and ubiquitous.
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Books by Tania Messell
In the second half of the 20th century, many non-governmental organizations were created to address urgent cultural, economic and welfare issues. Design organizations set out to create an international consensus for the future direction of design. This included enhancing communication between professionals, educators and practitioners, raising standards for design, and creating communities of designers across linguistic, national and political borders. Shared needs and agendas were identified and categories of design constantly defined and re-defined, often with overt cultural and political intents.
Drawing on an impressive range of original research, archival sources and oral testimony, this volume questions the aims and achievements of national and international design organizations in light of their subsequent histories and their global remits. The Cold War period is central to the book, while many chapters draw on post-colonial perspectives to interpret how transnational networks and negotiations took place at events and congresses, and through publication.
Publications by Tania Messell
Conference Presentations by Tania Messell
Since the late 2000s the humanitarian field has witnessed an ‘innovation turn’ in response to what a growing number of individuals have viewed as its inefficient, backward-looking and top-down inner-workings (Scott-Smith 2016). As part of this movement, design methodologies versed in iterative and participatory approaches have been increasingly employed by aid workers to render communities more resilient in the face of disasters and other conditions of hardship. The histories of such practices and their material articulations have however received little attention. The paper addresses this gap by examining the merging of resilience thinking, design and disaster responses in the 1970s. By then, a series of large-scale disasters from the Biafran War which raged between 1967 and 1970 to the Peruvian earthquake of May 1970, allied with the perceived lack of efficient and appropriate responses, led to the growing involvement of architects in emergency shelter and post-disaster housing programmes. Through the latter, natural disasters rapidly became instrumentalized as sites of interventions where designerly ways of problem-solving and technical know-how were harnessed to save lives, provide relief, and mitigate future risks in the face of uncertainty. The paper examines the meeting of such rationalities by tracing the development of the A-Frame shelter by American researchers and architects from Carnegie Mellon University and the consultancy Intertect between 1974 and 1977. Merging the use of a generic ‘tropical’ materials and construction knowledge with a problem-centred approach grounded in Western technical know-how and system theory, the project epitomised a new-found alliance between design and relief actors within global circuits of aid. Mapping the conception, implementation and reception of the shelter as they were deployed in refugee camps around Dhaka (formerly known as Dacca), Bangladesh, the paper furthermore examines the politics of such rationalities in light of the aforementioned ‘innovation turn’.
Conferences by Tania Messell
Exhibitions by Tania Messell
In this exhibition, documents from the ICSID Archive (1957-1989) and the Icograda Archive (1963-2003) – both held in the University of Brighton Design Archives – have been selected to highlight how these networks moreover acted as key sites of encounter for practitioners and their professional associations through General Assemblies, international congresses, collaborations and publications, which favoured transnational exchanges and wide-ranging debates.
The world diagram on the wall – inspired by Peter Kneebone’s original design displayed in the glass cases, and altered to reflect the actual landmass of each continent– presents information about the members of both Councils between 1957 and 1989, emphasizing their global constituencies and reach.
PhD Thesis by Tania Messell
individuals and ideas that sustained this network between 1957 and 1980. Considering ICSID as a fluctuating social space, shaped by the movements of individuals revolving between national and international circles, the thesis is structured around a selection of Congresses and General Assemblies during which the meeting of heterogeneous design cultures, diverging imperatives and politics of translation shaped the production and reception of international design standards within and beyond ICSID’s membership.
Examiners: Prof. Paul Betts (University of Oxford) and Prof. Jonathan Woodham (University of Brighton).
MA Dissertation by Tania Messell
As little had been written on the subject in France, this paper sets out to examine why, by whom and how the first corporate identities were introduced and developed between 1950 and 1975. In order to track their introduction and application, it examines the ‘five- and-dime’ store (magasin populaire) Prisunic through an analysis of its retail spaces, the electrical equipment producer Merlin Gerin through an examination of its printed materials and the airline UTA through an examination of its key agent, the aircraft itself. As the research reveals, the companies’ design commissions went hand in hand with their expansion during the social unrest and heavy de-skilling that resulted from their increasingly fragmented organisation. Cohesive corporate identity thus acted as a unifying tool for the companies’ external and internal image while revealing the strategies developed by French designers to create an image which satisfied the companies’ desire to appear modern, unified, and ubiquitous.