Articles and Papers by Bonne Zabolotney
BC Campus Open Education Resources, 2022
An anti-oppressive action framework is a tool designed to engage faculty in building a shared app... more An anti-oppressive action framework is a tool designed to engage faculty in building a shared approach to pedagogy and curriculum. Throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, we worked with design faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design to discuss, co-design, and reflect on what it means to work in anti-oppressive spaces and how we might shift and grow our approach to curriculum. These workshops were intended to build and prototype a flexible and adaptable tool for the development of anti-oppressive frameworks in academic disciplines. Our framework is a set of principles and ways of knowing inclusive to faculty, students, and staff. It does not only reflect “good intentions.” Instead, it is a tool that assists in sharing knowledge from marginalized sources and challenges designers to rethink how their pedagogy and curriculum might reproduce inequalities. This framework makes space for participants to review their curriculum and recognize the opportunities to address ableism, social inequalities, racism, and other universalist or Euro-centric approaches to knowledge that continue to limit our teaching and learning communities.
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Devil's Artisan, 2020
Understanding Andrew King's contribution as a printer, woodcarver, and designer begins with an un... more Understanding Andrew King's contribution as a printer, woodcarver, and designer begins with an understanding of place and practice. This essay examines the cultural context of King's work: a colonial society experiencing a shift towards pragmatism, enacted throughout the prairies, and even included in designs such as circus and event posters.
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Book Chapters and Books by Bonne Zabolotney
Designing Knowledge: Emerging Perspectives in Design Studies Practices, 2024
By positioning designers and their practices at the centre of design studies, Designing Knowledge... more By positioning designers and their practices at the centre of design studies, Designing Knowledge merges theory and practice to highlight how knowledge creation can contribute to an expanded and more inclusive design practice. Bringing together a rich variety of perspectives, methods and approaches, and exploring and critiquing current issues in design studies, this book encourages designers to reflect on their work in a new light.
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Attending to Futures: Matters of Politics in Design Education, Research & Practice, 2023
Design history powerfully governs the design field, regulating how we describe, value, categorize... more Design history powerfully governs the design field, regulating how we describe, value, categorize, critique, and uphold design and design practices. This chapter discusses the ways that our design history narratives precondition our critique of design, preventing us from shifting towards a more inclusive and diverse design history discourse. These preconditions are symptoms of structural power that guide our understanding and values of design, defining and validating what design is and is not. As an aspect of the political economy of design, these preconditions disguise themselves as 'a priori' principles which push back on the much-needed shifts and changes toward inclusive design history narratives.
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Packaging Toronto, 2021
Originally titled, "Elements of Power: Brands, Packaging, and The People’s Store," this essay exa... more Originally titled, "Elements of Power: Brands, Packaging, and The People’s Store," this essay examined a collection of Eaton's packages throughout the 20th century. The persistent existence of these boxes, bottles, and packages are evident of the brands’ abilities to surpass the point of purchase — where the initial attraction and desirability of the products take place — to develop a personal and long-lasting relationship to their consumer. Generations after these packages were designed and sold to Toronto citizens, these packages endure as a testament of the cultural force of Eaton’s Company Limited.
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Wood, L., and Haylock, B. (Eds.). (2020). One and many mirrors: Perspectives on graphic design education. London: Occasional Papers and The Physics Room., 2020
In this exchange, two senior design academics discuss the changing state of design practice and t... more In this exchange, two senior design academics discuss the changing state of design practice and the demands that might be placed on graphic design education in the future.
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BC Council on Admissions and Transfers, 2020
With a shifting K-12 curricula and new forms of assessment for high school students in British Co... more With a shifting K-12 curricula and new forms of assessment for high school students in British Columbia, this project seeks to understand how post-secondary institutions in BC and elsewhere are working with competency-based credentials and assessments in their admission processes.
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Vaughan, L. (Ed.). (2017). Practice-based design research. London: Bloomsbury., 2017
The political economy of design is not a typical area of academic or practical interest for desig... more The political economy of design is not a typical area of academic or practical interest for designers. While not entirely invisible to scholars and practitioners, it is not fully defined and it is generally not discursively identified and situated within the broader discipline of design. For designers with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, most design practices operate within well-established relationships between design and business, engineering, manufacturing, and so on. PhD students, in contrast, are well positioned to research, study, and develop a political economy of design in order to articulate design’s own knowledge of how it contributes to the world, and how designers can effect change at a meta-level. An investigation at this meta-level provides designers with areas of new knowledge to access, in order to critique or challenge existing economic, cultural or political structures. Using Communication Studies as a working model for design, we can see the possibilities of identifying and forming a framework to develop a practice around a political economy of design.
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Design as Collective Intelligence, 2017
There is an anonymous design, found in magazines, toys, games,
catalogues, and other items used b... more There is an anonymous design, found in magazines, toys, games,
catalogues, and other items used by Canadians everyday
throughout the 20th century, which profoundly intervened in the daily
experience of Canadians.
While design is a continuation of the tension between high culture
and low culture, and the perception that only some design work
is culturally more valuable, the ordinary work of designing and
manufacturing products, illustrating these products for publication,
designing and producing a catalogue, and then developing systems
of distribution for both catalogue and its contents is a remarkable
achievement with a profound and resounding cultural effect.
These designed objects mediate daily life. They set standards. They
contribute to a complex visual language to the average citizen, and
they move through time and space often unacknowledged and more
often than not, unattributed. They are a part of our collective heritage
and if we begin to acknowledge the current ordinary objects that we
depend upon on a day-to-day basis even now, we will see that they
remain a part of a collective and authentic everyday experience.
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Thesis Chapters by Bonne Zabolotney
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), RMIT University, 2019
This dissertation focuses on and investigates how a practice of design studies affects the develo... more This dissertation focuses on and investigates how a practice of design studies affects the development of new and challenging frameworks in design history and design culture in Canada. Using methods of curation, writing, and public discourse in order to refute “how Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed material things in order to make knowledge claims about both
them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge?
In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history — a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field — as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons.
More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context.
My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics — piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming — each applied to four goals of conceptual findings — de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to “[contend] with what we have made” (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.
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Conference Presentations by Bonne Zabolotney
Memory Full? Design History Society Annual Conference, 2021
This paper addresses the ways in which design culture educators and practitioners can transform d... more This paper addresses the ways in which design culture educators and practitioners can transform design history narratives traditionally upheld by scholars-to decolonize our knowledge, confront the projects of modernism, and work towards a plural and non-centralized approach to understanding design culture. As a necessary step towards decolonizing, we must focus on design culture scholarship to examine the histories and narratives about design that we have intentionally constructed. These narratives have been dominated by the projects of modernism, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and have reinforced a closed loop of Eurocentrism and capitalism in the study of design. In order to liberate our narratives and build an equitable and plural landscape of design culture narratives, this paper proposes three strategies: identify opportunities to invert narratives and methods in understanding histories; adapt new paradigms to locate and critique design that has typically been excluded from design histories, and develop terminology and taxonomies to expand our approaches to constructing design histories which could emancipate our work from traditional methods rooted in art history. These approaches negate the building of a design canon and move towards building design history that resembles a network or multi-modal infrastructure consisting of multiple knowledges, cultural contexts, taxonomies, typologies, methods, and materials. They move histories away from a linear canon of work that designers 'should' know towards bodies of work that designers could uncover and understand as an ecology of knowledge, terminologies, materials, and methods that inform contemporary practices in design.
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Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), 2020
Using the work of Andrew King and King Show Prints as a case study, this presentation grapples wi... more Using the work of Andrew King and King Show Prints as a case study, this presentation grapples with developing an understanding of historical large-scale graphic design work through a small-scale frame of reference, and the responsibility of the researcher to make historical work relevant to design practitioners. Andrew King, a printer, master carver, and proto-designer who practiced in Saskatchewan during the first half of the 20th century produced work at an unprecedented scale. His posters for circuses and other spectacles were printed at sizes large enough to cover the sides of barns, yet very little of his work was documented in context during its time. King also printed large dates, numbers, and other information to accompany existing posters, and some of these figures were carved and printed up to 7 feet in height.
Very few photos exist of King’s work in context, and they often display tiny and imperfect examples of his posters on sides of buildings, leaving design culture scholars to research King’s monumental work through extremely small documentation. These photos are also in black and white, leaving viewers to speculate the impact that colour and scale had on the average viewer. We can also view some of King’s original large prints in several gallery collections and archives, but this leaves us with pieces or examples of the letterforms out of context. Witnessing the large scale work at actual size and in situ seems to be an impossibility, and yet this would provide a profound understanding of large-scale work and its impact to contemporary design practices. How can scholars contend with the dilemma of studying this work in context, but with small and imprecise documentation, or at full size but without context? How can contemporary designers learn from this historical work?
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Canadian Design Studies Symposium, 2019
Political Economy is the study of structural force — social structure, economic structure, and cu... more Political Economy is the study of structural force — social structure, economic structure, and cultural structure. This force determines how we value the work of designers, and therefore directs the historical narratives we build about designers and their work. These pressures affect professional design practices, and equally affect how we provide narratives and context for this work in design studies.
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Universities Art Association Canada (UAAC), 2018
The history of Canadian Design remains generally unrecorded and unacknowledged outside of Canada,... more The history of Canadian Design remains generally unrecorded and unacknowledged outside of Canada, largely due to the vast amounts of anonymous works that precede its better known modernist works from the 1960s. A major challenge is to bridge the knowledge and understanding that is recorded through material biographies and autobiographies, with a desire to include anonymous, everyday, mass-produced, and often mundane design — including works from Medalta potteries and Eaton’s Catalogues — in a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. In order to refute “how Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed material things in order to make knowledge claims about both them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), this paper proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable landscape for Canadian design. Theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons. More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context. Importantly, these terms indicate an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work, further enabling the design in question to adopt an equally active space as adaptations of other design work.
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World Design Summit, 2017
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World Design Summit, 2017
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Interior Design Show (IDS) Vancouver , 2017
How do we build criteria to establish authenticity in Canadian design history? What might the lan... more How do we build criteria to establish authenticity in Canadian design history? What might the landscape, or eco-system, of Canadian design history look like?
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Papers by Bonne Zabolotney
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Articles and Papers by Bonne Zabolotney
Book Chapters and Books by Bonne Zabolotney
catalogues, and other items used by Canadians everyday
throughout the 20th century, which profoundly intervened in the daily
experience of Canadians.
While design is a continuation of the tension between high culture
and low culture, and the perception that only some design work
is culturally more valuable, the ordinary work of designing and
manufacturing products, illustrating these products for publication,
designing and producing a catalogue, and then developing systems
of distribution for both catalogue and its contents is a remarkable
achievement with a profound and resounding cultural effect.
These designed objects mediate daily life. They set standards. They
contribute to a complex visual language to the average citizen, and
they move through time and space often unacknowledged and more
often than not, unattributed. They are a part of our collective heritage
and if we begin to acknowledge the current ordinary objects that we
depend upon on a day-to-day basis even now, we will see that they
remain a part of a collective and authentic everyday experience.
Thesis Chapters by Bonne Zabolotney
them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge?
In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history — a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field — as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons.
More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context.
My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics — piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming — each applied to four goals of conceptual findings — de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to “[contend] with what we have made” (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.
Conference Presentations by Bonne Zabolotney
Very few photos exist of King’s work in context, and they often display tiny and imperfect examples of his posters on sides of buildings, leaving design culture scholars to research King’s monumental work through extremely small documentation. These photos are also in black and white, leaving viewers to speculate the impact that colour and scale had on the average viewer. We can also view some of King’s original large prints in several gallery collections and archives, but this leaves us with pieces or examples of the letterforms out of context. Witnessing the large scale work at actual size and in situ seems to be an impossibility, and yet this would provide a profound understanding of large-scale work and its impact to contemporary design practices. How can scholars contend with the dilemma of studying this work in context, but with small and imprecise documentation, or at full size but without context? How can contemporary designers learn from this historical work?
Papers by Bonne Zabolotney
catalogues, and other items used by Canadians everyday
throughout the 20th century, which profoundly intervened in the daily
experience of Canadians.
While design is a continuation of the tension between high culture
and low culture, and the perception that only some design work
is culturally more valuable, the ordinary work of designing and
manufacturing products, illustrating these products for publication,
designing and producing a catalogue, and then developing systems
of distribution for both catalogue and its contents is a remarkable
achievement with a profound and resounding cultural effect.
These designed objects mediate daily life. They set standards. They
contribute to a complex visual language to the average citizen, and
they move through time and space often unacknowledged and more
often than not, unattributed. They are a part of our collective heritage
and if we begin to acknowledge the current ordinary objects that we
depend upon on a day-to-day basis even now, we will see that they
remain a part of a collective and authentic everyday experience.
them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge?
In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history — a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field — as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons.
More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context.
My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics — piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming — each applied to four goals of conceptual findings — de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to “[contend] with what we have made” (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.
Very few photos exist of King’s work in context, and they often display tiny and imperfect examples of his posters on sides of buildings, leaving design culture scholars to research King’s monumental work through extremely small documentation. These photos are also in black and white, leaving viewers to speculate the impact that colour and scale had on the average viewer. We can also view some of King’s original large prints in several gallery collections and archives, but this leaves us with pieces or examples of the letterforms out of context. Witnessing the large scale work at actual size and in situ seems to be an impossibility, and yet this would provide a profound understanding of large-scale work and its impact to contemporary design practices. How can scholars contend with the dilemma of studying this work in context, but with small and imprecise documentation, or at full size but without context? How can contemporary designers learn from this historical work?