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




    Rebecca Ross

    Alphabetic Interventions


    In this paper, I will expand upon a thread from a 2023 chapter, “Situating Google's Alphabet,” published in an edited volume concerned with interactions between language and location.  In that piece, I explored Google's 2015 decision to rename itself Alphabet in the context of mid-twentieth century media studies debates regarding the meaning and impact of the alphabet and later twentieth century critiques of those debates on the grounds of their colonial presumptions. Here my intention is to further consider the value of the alphabet in a way that provokes thinking in domains beyond the textual. This will be explored through two typefaces designed by Adrian Frutiger: Univers (1957) and OCR-B (1968). Both are notable for their attention to the requirements of humans in response to the emergence of new kinds of machines for reading and writing, ranging from early phototypesetters to the first computers equipped with optical character recognition technology. The paper elaborates on recent feminist re-examinations of McLuhan considering how the alphabet is emphasized within his writings as an initial phase in a process of mediation to which human beings will become fully subject. Frutiger’s designs respond to early developments in electronic text in a way that strengthens the alphabet as an example of a uniquely open, multiple, and adaptable system. This is because the alphabet is imprecise—it disregards the ideal of lossless transmission—in a way that is generative and closely intertwined with continuous human processes of shaping meaning. In the context of ‘The Design of History and the History of Design at UAL’, a second ambition for this paper is to challenge boundaries between design and media studies approaches to history.



    — Rebecca Ross


    Dr Rebecca Ross is director of the Graphic Communication Design Programme at Central Saint Martins. She has published in the fields of Media Studies, Graphic Design, and Urbanism. Recent publications include, “Making Academic Publishing More Public,” published in Transverse Disciplines (Toronto, 2022) and “Situating Google’s Alphabet,” in Articulating Media (Open Humanities, 2023), both of which engage with broad questions regarding the situated-ness of media. She is also a designer, best known for “London is Changing,” a site-specific installation staged on digital billboards around Central London in 2015. Ross is co-founder and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer (since 2012) and recently developed a new course, MA Communicating Complexity for CSM. She is currently completing a monograph about postcodes and addressing, planned to be published with UCL Press in 2027.