The international journal Design | Arts | Culture is a digital open access and peer-reviewed multidisciplinary academic journal, published by the "Design, Interior Architecture and Audiovisual Documentation" research lab, Faculty of Applied Arts and Culture, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece, in cooperation with a continuously evolving network of peer institutions and guest editors. The journal is hosted in the open access e Publishing platform of the National Documentation Centre of Greece (EKT). This journal is biannual (with regular and from time to time special issues) and publishes research articles, projects and portfolios, as well as book reviews and student works. It aims to provide an academic forum for sharing and connecting ideas, projects, practices and findings about design, applied arts and culture. This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This journal does not charge submission or publication fees.
Announcements
Call for submissions: DAC vol.6, issues 1&2,"Anthropocene in the meantime"
2025-03-10
In the era of the anthropocene the industrial vision of destruction and renewal has contracted a challenged credibility. Is this industrial vision dead? We ask this question in two issues of Design|Arts|Culture (DAC) to be published ultimo 2026 and primo 2027. We invite contributions scoping:
(1) the archaeology of the ‘industrial quality product’ [keyword: affordances & the global south];
(2) the ‘industrial lens’ as an archaeological tool [keyword: investigative aesthetics & gender];
The contributions from art, architecture, archaeology and anthropology (4A)—in making industrial society modern (Ingold 2013)—articulate the ways the industrial venture has been designed & displayed in public discourse. 4A would here define design in the expanded field (1914-1991).
On the other hand, the industrial venture itself may yet have an untapped potential in the ideas of destruction and renewal that grew, developed and expounded throughout the Romantic era, as laid out & archived in W. Benjamin’s Arcades project (1927-1940): in a period from ~1820-1870.
We call for contributions with a practical and reflective concern scoping the materiality of the product, the concept of the industrial edition and the updates on human living (posthumanism & the anthropocene): are items, manufacture and use looped together in various public parcours?
Or, have they long since fallen apart into fragments of resource extraction, manufacture, logistics, computation and end-usership? Some would find support Benjamin Bratten’s layered theory of the stack. Others would find critically object to layers with e.g. Karen Barad’s new materialism.
Issue Editor:
Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Oslo, Norway
Current Issue
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2025): POLARITIES LIMITS AND THRESHOLDS
Published: 17.03.2025
It is becoming increasingly clear that the figure of polarization surrounding technological, political, and cultural issues assumes in the 21st century the place of debate . On the one hand, its visibility focuses on the intensification and extremism of positions; on the other, recognising it can help to reflect on the critical potential of its manifestations.
In this context, it is essential that these arguments are not only perceived when they become radicalised, but that they are also capable of mobilising the common space in its multiple configurations, revealing particularities and differences.
Volume 5 of the DAC Journal, "Polarities, Limits and Thresholds,” – that included essays, portfolios and projects by designers, visual artists and theoreticians – , takes the power of this figure in order to interrogate practices, highlight discourses, outline conceptual possibilities and contribute to the relevance of the theme through art and design.
Guest Editors: Ana Rainha, João Lemos, Margarida Azevedo e Marta Varzim Miranda
Editorial Note: Ana Rainha
Contributions to this issue include: Ana Sofia Cardoso; Ana Belén Rojo Ojados; Katerina Kokkinaki; Zoe Georgiadou; Yannis Koukoulas; Marianna Missiou; Marta Miaskowska; Maria Melgarejo Belenguer; António Mendanha; Sonia Díaz & Gabriel Martínez; Penelope Petsini; Marta Varzim Miranda; Tomé Saldanha Quadros; Emílio Remelhe; Angelos Kalogerias; Ifigeneia Ilia-Georgiadou; Jeremy Aston; Luciana Barbosa; Marco Gomes.
Graphic Design: João Lemos, Margarida Azevedo
Full Issue
Editorial
Articles
How to apply social sciences to design research.
A case study beyond the master class.
Ana Belen Rojo Ojados
The DISSOLVING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN INSIDE AND OUTSIDE IN THE DESIGN OF THE CITY
María Melgarejo Belenguer
NO MORE DEBATES ABOUT PARODY. HERE IS THE TRANSPARODY!
CHANGING THE TRADITIONAL TERMINOLOGY THROUGH HORROR COMICS
Yannis Koukoulas, Marianna Missiou
MAPPING PRIORITIES IN PRODUCT DESIGN:
STUDENT INSIGHTS ON COURSE CONTENT AND PROFESSIONAL RELEVANCE.
Jeremy Aston, Luciana Barbosa, Marco Gomes
Artwork/Portfolio
EDITORIAL NOTE
Starting from some fundamental questions posed many decades ago: “What do we mean by «image»? Is it in our mind or on the screen or both? If both, what are some of the similarities and differences between the projected image and the mental image? More importantly, how fundamental and instrumental is the picture in your mind to your cognitive processes perception, memory, thought, creativity? What are the effects of imagery on memory?
Can relatively abstract concepts and thoughts involve imagery?” (Fleming, 1977, p. 43); this is the question anwered by the third volume of DAC Journal (Design | Arts | Culture) dedicated to “Image and Memory”.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its “theatre”. The cultural, symbolic world, the world of going beyond the material, the ultimate, the transcendent, constitutes an understanding of the concept of “place of memory” in Pierre Nora. Collective memory exists due to “places of memory”, as they are manifested in material, functional and symbolic forms: monuments, memorials, and images.
In this context, we should remember Theodor Adorno’s critical view of Walter Benjamin’s philosophical imagination (philosophische Phantasie) that makes of the singular ‘image’ (Bild) the very crystal ‘eye’ – of history. Commenting Adorno, Georges Didi-Huberman claimed “the paradoxical power and fragility of images.
On the one hand, they are unsuited to the generality of the concept, since they are always singular: local, incomplete, in short, insubstantial […]. On the other hand, they are universally open: never entirely sealed off, never completed […]”.
According to the French philosopher of art, “There is no critical theory without a critique of images. But nor is there any such theory without a critique – of discourse and image – by images themselves. […] Images are themselves capable of becoming critical tools. They are, as Jean-Paul Sartre long ago said, acts not things, active confrontations on the battlefield of ‘culture’. They do not merely illustrate ideas: they produce ideas or produce effects critical of ideas.” (Didi-Huberman, 2017, p. 260).
If images are embodied in pictures, we should also acknowledge that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. This commonplace quotation suggests that images contain more information than texts and that the pieces of information provided by images are more easily processed and understood by any observer. Otherwise, a picture can trigger a buried memory and recall a precise moment in time much more rapidly than words.
Quoting Walter Benjamin, “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
Image and memory are indelibly linked by the contemporary urges as the coagulation of the concept of “public image” due to Paul Virilio. Images are “fabricated” on different levels in different techniques mobilising the individual and the collective memory.
The connection between image and memory can be seen from the beginning of history, the images of individual or collective experience being present in material culture (Jones, 2007).
These images representing a type of external memory (Donald, 1998), fixed on a material medium, allowed the remembrance process (Gibbons, 2019) to encompass an enormous area of topics, from images of the deceased to images of memorable events.
Visual artists, art historians and theoreticians, historians, and archaeologists contributed with essays (both textual and visual) thematising various aspects regarding the mnemonic, individual and collective memories.
Reference List
Didi-Huberman, G. and Miller, C. (2017) “Critical Image/Imaging Critique”, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 249–261.
Donald, M. (1998) Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution. In C. Renfrew & C. Scarre (eds.) Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage (pp. 7–17). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Fleming, M.L, (1977) “The Picture in Your Mind.” AV Communication Review, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 43–62.
Gibbons, J. (2019) Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Jones, A. (2007) Memory and material culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
