Towards Global Histories of Design: Postcolonial Perspectives- Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Design History Society

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The National Institute of Design was established in 1961, and recently, it celebrated its golden jubilee. For more than fifty years now, NID has been a witness to the socio-cultural, economic, and technological changes taking place within India and across the world in general. The institute continues promoting multidisciplinary learning of design through its educational and training practices and research initiatives.

NID's unique curriculum and revolutionary educational philosophy based on the Bauhaus design movement's credo of learning by doing is itself part of design history. These forces, both local and global that shaped NID's underlying spirit need to be understood and examined in today's context. Design history plays an important role in helping understand the discourse of design and how it has shaped national design identities. This is an important task as it enriches our understanding of design processes, products and their cultural impacts.

The four-day international conference on Design History: Postcolonial Perspectives organized at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, convened by Ms. Tanishka Kachru and Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan was an attempt to bring focus to postcolonial design histories. The National Institute of Design takes great pleasure in publishing the full-length papers presented at the conference. I am sure this publication will promote dissemination of diverse design history knowledge and concerns as well as encourage new work to be taken up in this area of study which is urgently required in fast developing countries.

The 2013 Annual Conference of the Design History Society was hosted by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. It was the 36th annual conference and the first one convened outside of Europe. It reflected both the increasing importance of design history as a globalised discipline and the timeliness of its theme which sought to utilise postcolonial approaches and subjects to work towards the development of fuller, more textured, global histories of design.

The premise of the conference flowed from an acknowledgement that enquiries into design history, so far, have largely privileged European and North American cultural spheres, offering rich insights into design as both product and process and the contexts shaping both. Equally. studies in design history from other geographies are in a nascent stage and scholarly voices have been faint and the insights sparse. These less-explored geographies share much in common. All of them have design traditions, often enduring over millennia. More importantly for this conference, many regions within these geographies share a colonial past with important cultural dimensions for all the regions drawn into the vortex of the colonial order.

Against this backdrop, the convenors decided to examine this ongoing challenge before design history through the lens of postcolonial perspectives. Recognising that postcolonialism has come to be a vexed term with different tonalities for different disciplines, they decided that it would be fruitful to examine what it could mean to design and design history in all the regions brought together by thecomplex socio-economic, political and cultural order of the colonial project. Accordingly, a call for proposals was announced seeking from scholars and practitioners contri- butions amplifying postcolonial design histories from global geographies. A key concern was to provide a forum for hitherto faint voices from the global south.

We received 1.45 abstracts for individual papers, 11 panel proposals of three papers each andı proposal for a roundtable. Each of these were double-blind reviewed by 3-5 members of an Academic Committee consisting of 26 people representing different specialisations and expertise within design history and, appropriate to the conference theme, belonging to different parts of the world. At the end of this vetting process, the Academic Committee accepted 95 individual papers for presentation (of these 23 were students), 8 panel proposals and 1 roundtable.