Symposium The Design of History and the History of Design


London College of Communication
15 September, 2025



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SpeakerS and Abstracts:

Huda Almazroua
Alberto Atalla Filho
Russ Bestley
Kevin Biderman
Silvia Bombardini
David Cross
Dora Souza Dias
Sam Gathercole
Ian Horton and Ian Hague
Jennifer Hankin
Zarna Hart
John-Patrick Hartnett
Fenella Hitchcock
Abbie Vickress and Sakis Kyratzis
Christopher Lacy
Timothy Miller
Danah Nassief
Jesse O’Neill
Nina O’Reilly
Patrick O’Shea
David Preston
Cheryl Roberts
Rebecca Ross
Antoin Sharkey
Andrew Slatter
Kate Trant
Vanessa Vanden Berghe
Judy Willcocks
Christin Yu



A symposium for UAL’s Design History research community


The Design of History and the History of Design is a one-day symposium that maps research into, through or at the boundaries of design history at UAL. While design history may underpin our teaching across different disciplines, research in design history across UAL is somewhat hidden. This symposium aims to share and make visible the work of researchers (staff and students) at all career stages across all UAL colleges.

Exploring the intersections of historical narrative and design practice, it examines how history is constructed, represented, and mediated through design, and how the discipline of design itself is shaped by its evolving historiography.

The symposium will serve as the starting point for a Design History Network at UAL, bringing together researchers from across the university. It also lays the foundation for a welcoming research community in design history, with potential for ongoing events, collaboration, publications, and curriculum development.

If you have any questions or would like to be involved in future activities, please get in touch with the convenors:

Rujana Rebernjak
r.rebernjak@lcc.arts.ac.ukTai Cossich
t.cossich@lcc.arts.ac.uk
Please also sign up for the UAL Design Histories Newsletter




    Christin Yu


    This paper explores the use of design as metaphor in decolonial frameworks. From literature that theorises the healing practices of embroidery to conceptualising weaving as a relational methodological practice, textile metaphors have had a particularly powerful resonance within imagining otherwise. Building upon these design metaphors, I present patchwork as a methodological practice. By highlighting the material and designed components of patchwork, I describe the piecing and mending processes of reconstructing whole pieces from fragments as powerful reimaginings of material absence. This work will theorise new temporal relations that emerge from patchwork as structure, which enables the conceptualisation of history not through linearity, but as an expanding and growing outward. Patchwork has a constitutive quality of potential, meaning that its shape can continually grow, and reform through its mending practices.

    It is this constitution of becoming that underlies patchwork which acts as a powerful decolonial framework to reconstruct histories of formerly colonised peoples. On the Korean peninsula, patchwork takes on a material form that is commonly known as jogakbo. Historical narratives of South Korea trace a linear trajectory from the institutionally collected objects to the neo-Confucian doctrines of disciplining women through needlework, simultaneously these histories also record that the constructions were forged from the creative practices of lower-class women. Lower-class women of the Joseon Dynasty would not have had the same material access to time for such laboured practices. Rather than solve these discrepancies, and present history as a singular truth, patchwork as metaphor defines national and cultural memory as an amalgam of disparate pieces, narratives, and voices. This presentation will map out the foundations for patchwork as decolonial method.        



    — Christin Yu


    Christin Yu is a Lecturer of Cultural Studies and Fashion Histories and Theories at Central Saint Martins. Her research interests explore East Asian textiles and fashion histories, decolonial feminisms, and material culture studies. She also serves as the Secretary of the British Association for Korean Studies and is an Associate Research Fellow for the Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation Research Centre at UAL. She graduated in 2024 from an AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art in the History of Design programme and is now working to develop her thesis work on patchwork.