12-14 OCTOBER 2023
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
"Voice, Agency and the Value of Design"
Sarah Teasley
Professor of Design, RMIT University
Sarah Teasley is Professor of Design in the School of Design at RMIT University, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Research and Innovation. She is known internationally for research that combines approaches from social history and design research to explore how power relations shape experience and agency in design work, education and policy. Through her research, teaching and engagement, she aims to highlight and address unequal economic and political social relations, with particular attention to class and gender in design industries in modern Japan.
Her research is highly collaborative and transdisciplinary, applying methods across design research, social history, history of technology, STS and cognate fields. Her publications include Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022), Design and Society in Modern Japan (2016), Global Design History (Routledge, 2011) and numerous articles, book chapters and reports. Recent and current projects include a peer mentoring programme for women in creative industries and social innovation in Asia-Pacific as part of the Design and Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific (DESIAP) network, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Australia-Japan Foundation (Australia), and research into the impact of emergent information technology on designers’ work in Australia and Japan, 1970-2000, supported by the Australian Research Council.
She holds degrees from Princeton University, Musashino Art University and the University of Tokyo, and taught previously at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Northwestern University and the Royal College of Art, where she was Head of Programme for History of Design. She was previously Vice-President of the Design Studies Forum (US) and Associate Editor of the journal Design and Culture. Presently she is Editor of the RMIT Design Archives Journal and serves on the editorial board of Design and Culture, Design Issues and Design History.
