https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.2The history of design stems from the history of art, from which it has inherited its methodology. As a consequence, it has traditionally focused on creators, objects, and the ideas behind them – particularly on outstanding works by renowned designers. The introduction into design studies of new methodologies, rooted in anthropology (the history of materiality) or specific to it (the production–consumption paradigm), has shifted attention toward the perspective of the user—who, after all, does not live surrounded solely by “design icons.” In line with the “people’s turn” in the humanities, this article puts forward the concept of a people’s history of design. Its aim is to reveal and analyze the practices and experiences of working-class communities in relation to design (women workers’ perspectives, taste and habitus, agency and practices of resistance) as well as what is common and often anonymous.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.3The text takes the form of an exhibition-essay that recounts the story of objects once transferred by the National Museum in Kraków to the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum also in Kraków. These items were classified as “ethnographic” or “folk,” and thus deemed unsuitable for a museum with a “national” profile. Some of them originated from the now-defunct Museum of Technology and Industry, whose diverse collection was divided among several institutions. Despite a shared, symmetrical history after 1945, the two museums defined their symbolic roles differently, which led to a practice of transferring objects considered to meet the definition of “ethnographicity.” The “exhibition” presented in the text aims to outline the history of the relevant collections, indicating the selection criteria that guided the formation of “national” and “ethnographic,” “artistic” and “folk” collections; at the same time, it underscores the fluidity and “porosity” of classificatory categories and of the status of objects in both Kraków collections, while drawing attention to the significance of museum practices. The inventorying, classification, documentation, and display of objects – often invisible to the wider public – constitute part of the painstaking work of museum professionals, who conduct actual investigations into the provenance of objects and reconstruct their complex histories within and their travelling between the collections.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.4The article presents Arvydas Každailis’s phantasmagorical visual journal (1965–1968) as an exceptional source for investigating Lithuanian graphic design under Soviet occupation and its entanglements with the West, especially Poland. It discusses the journal’s format (a ring binder of forty-two leaves, collages, an “image bank”), principal quotations and inspirations (Bridget Riley’s Op Art, Giorgio de Chirico, the Polish press, biennials), as well as the tensions of censorship and the role of his contemporaries’ ego-documents. It reconstructs traces of Lithuanian-ness (typography, heraldry) and the journal’s impact on Každailis’s later work, proposing a reading of this document as a quiet creative manifesto.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.5The article – devoted to the role played by designers in the eighteenth-century British capitalist economy – examines the socio-economic conditions that enabled the emergence of this profession, the ways design shaped desires within an incipient consumer society, and the financial sources that contributed to the primitive accumulation of capital in the British Isles. It also discusses the triangular trade, with a view to demonstrating the links between design and slavery. The text concludes with the story of the potter Josiah Wedgwood in whose career concentrate pioneering marketing techniques, technological innovation, and the moral dilemmas faced by designers under capitalism.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.6Over the two decades following the Second World War, the Institute of Industrial Design – founded in 1950, together with the state agencies that preceded it – adopted Western production paradigms, notably the rationalisation of production, to align Polish design with the standards of the First World. During the Political Thaw it promoted a functionalist aesthetics, and around 1962 – under the influence of the design methods movement – it rendered the design into an applied science, shifting emphasis from aesthetics to economics and the social sciences. Drawing on previously unexamined projects from the archives of the Institute of Industrial Design and on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of Provincializing Europe, I analyse this process through the case study of the Department of Ceramics and Glass. I argue that the adoption of industrial rationalism placed Polish design within a European model that prioritised industry while marginalising craft and the body; furthermore, the Institute’s collective, semi-mechanical practices – together with attempts to establish Polish national culture by incorporating folk art – constituted an effort to enact ontological design.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.7Over the two decades following the Second World War, the Institute of Industrial Design – founded in 1950, together with the state agencies that preceded it – adopted Western production paradigms, notably the rationalisation of production, to align Polish design with the standards of the First World. During the Political Thaw it promoted a functionalist aesthetics, and around 1962 – under the influence of the design methods movement – it rendered the design into an applied science, shifting emphasis from aesthetics to economics and the social sciences. Drawing on previously unexamined projects from the archives of the Institute of Industrial Design and on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of Provincializing Europe, I analyse this process through the case study of the Department of Ceramics and Glass. I argue that the adoption of industrial rationalism placed Polish design within a European model that prioritised industry while marginalising craft and the body; furthermore, the Institute’s collective, semi-mechanical practices – together with attempts to establish Polish national culture by incorporating folk art – constituted an effort to enact ontological design.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.8At the end of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin remarked that “The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one.” The concept of zerstreuter Examinator – the examiner who is “distracted,” “inattentive,” but also “dispersed,” “scattered” – suggests that a judgement can be made by a plural, diasporic (which is one of the meanings of the German Zerstreuung) subjectivity. This creates a peculiar dialectic which oscillates between distracted attention – attention that has been destroyed by a “shock” – and attentive distraction – distraction that announces the “new tasks of apperception” and evolves into “heightened attention.” Benjamin placed hope in a messianic destruction of traditional modes of attention and concentration (Sammlung) brought about by new technologies, leading to a renewal of the capacity to experience and to judge independently of any pre-established norms. In light of these historical diagnoses, I would like to reflect on a lesser-known initiative undertaken by Jean-François Lyotard in 1984 when he curated an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The exhibition, entitled Les Immatériaux, focused on a paradigmatic shift in the relationship between humans and matter, a shift provoked by emergent technologies. It presented a space inhabited by “immaterials” – entities engaged in complex interactions over which the human subject exerts no control. We open to something inarticulate, to affects that come over us yet elude our comprehension – in both senses of the term: understanding and grasping. If, as Lyotard proposes, postmodernity is defined by a form of ”working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done,” then the present condition of art and social reality demands a response to the question of how such ruleless work might be realized.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.9The article examines the circumstances of the Weimar Republic’s participation in the International Biennale of Decorative Arts in Monza in 1923 and 1925, situating these appearances against the backdrop of the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry (1925) and earlier sectoral exhibitions considered from Polish, German, and Austrian perspectives. It foregrounds the roles of Walter Riezler, the exhibition’s curator, and Adolf Gustav Schneck, who designed the display. The analysis references the development of national-style discourses in architecture, the applied arts and industrial design – with particular attention to the Viennese and Munich milieus – and the reception of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work in relation to Italian and French art.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.10Records of Waiting: On Time and Ornament – the Polish Pavilion project at the London Design Biennale 2025 – examines the political, social, and affective dimensions of waiting. The authors (Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska, Maciej Siuda) treat ornament not as decoration but as a form of recording time and a critical tool for revealing emotions and systemic inequalities. The project assumes that time is neither neutral nor universal – its experience and accessibility depend on social position, status, and power relations. Interdisciplinary research on historical ornamentation, the time required to carve specific motifs, and contemporary experiences of waiting across different social groups led to the creation of a hand-carved installation. It represents twelve situations of waiting, from minutes to years, forming a temporal landscape of the Polish society carved in wood. Operating at the intersection of research, design, and artistic practice, the project foregrounds questions of social inequality and highlights time as an unevenly distributed resource. It also reflects on new ways of interpreting and employing ornament and material cultural heritage as interdisciplinary critical tools.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.11This article examines three Detroit initiatives – Detroit Printing Co-op, Brightmoor Makerspace, and the studio Akoaki – as examples of “diffuse design” (Ezio Manzini) that activate community agency in a post-deindustrial city. Against the backdrop of Detroit’s history – from the “Motor City” and the “arsenal of democracy” to its designation as a UNESCO City of Design (2015) – the author shows how design methods and practices address class and ethnic inequalities, generate alternative models of development, and repair the social fabric. The article also poses the questions of an appropriate model of design strategy for Detroit and the role of foundations in the absence of venture capital.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.12This article analyzes the classicist and historicist forms employed in the Socialist Realist architecture of Nowa Huta as a point of departure for a broader reflection on the dissonant architectural heritage of socialism as a material emanation of totalitarian imagination. It also presents the framework of UnLoc, an interdisciplinary research project whose aim is to examine selected examples of communist-era architecture – understood in this context as “architecture of power” – and to explore the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool that helps decode its language and, drawing on community interviews, enables the “redesign” of elements of the built environment so that they better address community needs for sustainability and accessibility. The article reflects on how artificial intelligence can function as a bridge between heritage preservation and contemporary environmental and social challenges.
https://doi.org/10.52652/e.8.25.13This article examines failures – unfinished infrastructure projects in the vicinity of Baranów: the Olimpijka motorway, the Central Trunk Line – North (CMK Północ), the Pruszków II combined heat and power plant, and the Komorów–Mszczonów branch of the Electric Commuter Railway (EKD). We use their histories as a point of departure to outline a theory of investment ruin. Our approach draws on Jeff Malpas and Gary Wickham’s theory of failure, David Bloor’s “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge, and Bruno Latour’s study of the Aramis transit project.
