The 4T Design and Design History Society invited participants to submit abstracts for its 2025 symposium titled "On the Move: Objects/Images/Spaces". This symposium seeked to explore how objects, images, and spaces, whose movement have a profound implication both for the multiple histories and contemporary practices of design, migrate and transform across cultures, times, and borders. These include the interaction of local communities and practices with the design movements and styles that travel across borders; the role that the exchange of ideas and expertise plays in the transformation of contemporary design practices; the impact of the displacement of people and cultures on the (re)production and reception of design; and finally, the role of designers in refugee contexts and diasporic communities. By fostering creative discussion among a diverse community of scholars, practitioners, and students, this symposium aimed to create a space for critical engagement with the mobility of design —objects in motion, images that move, and spaces in transition—across various domains.
Symposium Themes and Topics:
We welcomed submissions that explored, but were not limited to, the following themes:
Objects in Motion: The migration and transformation of material culture—how objects travel across space and time throughout their “object biographies” and how they are reinterpreted and adopted in new contexts; The study of objects as markers of shifting cultural, social, political, and economic landscapes; how design objects have been transformed and reappropriated in new contexts; and how these objects reflect the complexities of migration histories and the mobility of materials, techniques, and meanings.
Images on the Move: The relentless circulation of images, from print media to virtual platforms, and the ways in which visual culture adapts and evolves; the role of images in shaping identities, consumer practices, and collective memory; and how images are recontextualized and reinterpreted in different settings while they migrate.
Spaces in Transition: The movement of spatial concepts across different geographical, ecological, and material contexts; how the design of spaces—discursive, cultural, urban, architectural, domestic, or personal—responds to the fluidity of boundaries between physical and virtual realms; the flow of spatial practices across various geographical and environmental landscapes; digital platforms, Internet activism, and alternative spatial practices.
ORGANIZING BOARD
SCIENTIFIC BOARD
