Book Launch & Talk: Designerly Ways of Knowing - Camden Art Centre

Designerly Ways of Knowing: A Working Inventory of Things a Designer Should Know with Danah Abdulla and Peter Hall

To mark the launch of Designerly ways of knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know, Danah Abdulla will discuss her new book with academic and author Peter Hall. Danah Abdulla’s first book pays tribute to the late architect, activist and critic Michael Sorkin, whose original list Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know inspired this updated version targeted at designers. Described as a guidebook slash notebook of things designers should think about in order for them to know, The iterative list is not meant to be a definitive how-to guide but to spark conversations, prompt critical thinking and to help designers reconfigure their discipline.

Danah will be in conversation with Peter Hall, co-author alongside Patricio Dávila of the forthcoming Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data (Bloomsbury).

This event is organised by the Camden Art Centre and supported by Onomatopee.

Biographies

Danah Abdulla

Danah Abdulla is a Palestinian-Canadian designer, educator and researcher interested in new narratives and practices in design that push the disciplinary boundaries and definitions of the discipline. She is Programme Director of Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts (University of the Arts London). She has previously held positions at Brunel University London and London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). Danah obtained her Ph.D. in Design from Goldsmiths, University of London and is a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform. In 2010, she founded Kalimat Magazine, an independent, nonprofit publication about Arab thought and culture. Her research focuses on decolonising design, possibilities of design education, design culture(s) with a focus on the Arab region, the politics of design, publishing, and social design. www.dabdulla.com

Peter Hall

Dr Peter Hall is Reader in Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Colleges (University of the Arts London). His research uses mapping and visualisation as participatory design processes, with a focus on climate change and security. He is co-author of Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) with Patricio Dávila, and is the UAL lead on Plastic Justice, a pan-European educational collaboration to look into the issue of microplastics pollution.

Dr Hall has previously held positions at Central Saint Martins (UK), Griffith University Queensland College of Art (Australia), University of Texas at Austin (USA), and Yale School of Art (USA). His essays appear in the journals Design and Culture, Design Philosophy Papers and the books Design in the Borderlands (2014), Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design (Routledge 2018). His books include Else/Where: Mapping – New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (edited with Janet Abrams, 2006), Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist (1999) and Sagmeister: Made You Look (2001). He is a Visitor to the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London and Co-founder of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organisation devoted to researching design issues in intensive team-based gathering. www.peterahall.com