In this episode, we speak with Johanna Agermann Ross, a curator and writer based in the United Kingdom, originally from Sweden. Since 2023, she has served as the Conran Foundation Chief Curator at the Design Museum, where she is part of the senior leadership team and oversees the Curatorial and Collection departments. In this role, she is also leading the development phase of the museum’s new collection gallery, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Prior to this, she was Curator of 20th-century and contemporary product and furniture design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she co-curated the Design 1900–Now Gallery and helped establish the initiative Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures. In 2011, she founded the design journal Disegno, where she continues to serve as Director. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts London in 2025, her alma mater, and holds an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art.

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In this episode, we speak with William Seung, a curator and design historian whose interests span contemporary design, digital culture, and East Asian visual and popular culture. He is currently Assistant Curator of Design and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he contributed to the development and launch of the museum’s newly opened Contemporary Design gallery, alongside programmes exploring the relationship between design and emerging technologies. Before joining the V&A, he worked at M+ in Hong Kong, where he supported several major exhibitions, including the inaugural collection display Things, Spaces, Interactions (2021). He later joined Somerset House as Assistant Curator for CUTE (2024). William holds a Master’s degree in History of Design, jointly offered by the Royal College of Art and the V&A.

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In this episode, we speak with Dr Jesse Adams Stein, Director of Design Studies at UTS School of Design. An interdisciplinary design researcher, her work investigates often-overlooked aspects of design: labour, industrial craft, skill, repair, and industries in transition, across both historical and contemporary contexts.

Stein is the author of Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour (Manchester UP, 2016) and Industrial Craft in Australia (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of two recent Routledge collections on design, labour, and planetary breakdown (2025).

Her current research focuses on the role of installers as key communicators in NSW's energy transition, and examining the history and politics of high-visibility workwear. She is also a long-standing advocate for the right to repair, skilled trades, and industry policy reform, and co-initiated the UTS Repair-Design project in 2019.

Active in Australia's public history sector, Stein serves on the History Council of NSW and has collaborated with institutions including Museums Victoria, the Powerhouse, and the National Library of Australia on oral history projects documenting Australian manufacturing, including Reshaping Australian Manufacturing (2017–2019) and Makers, Manufacturers & Designers (2021–2023).

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In this episode, we speak with Dr. Wendy S. Wong, Full Professor in the Department of Design at York University, Toronto, whose research focuses on Chinese comic art, graphic design history, transnational Asian visual cultures, and identity studies. An internationally recognized scholar in these fields, she is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (2002, Princeton Architectural Press) and The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design (2018, Palgrave Macmillan). She also co-edited Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art (2022) with John A. Lent and Benjamin Wai-ming Ng, examining comics cultures across six East Asian and seven Southeast Asian countries. 

Dr. Wong has contributed to major reference works including The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design (2012) and The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (2016). She has held several editorial roles, including serving as Regional Editor for Greater China for the Encyclopedia of East Asian Design (2020), a member of the Journal of Design History Editorial Board (2012–2017), and Associate Editor of Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum, a role she concluded in 2022. Her current research explores transnational Asian art, diasporic identities, and decolonization through storytelling, research-creation, digital technology, and generative AI.

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In this episode, we speak with Dr Sabrina Rahman, an art and design historian whose research examines the design of everyday life in Britain, Central and Eastern Europe, and South Asia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2016 she has been a Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. She is currently working on a book project entitled Diasporic Designs: Modernism, the Vernacular and Interiors of Migration, 1850s-present, which explores how visual and haptic modes of communication have contributed to notions of local diasporic identity and cosmopolitanism across cultural, geographical and temporal boundaries. Sabrina co-convenes the BAN research group Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites with Kate Nichols and Victoria Osborne. The group’s activities build upon her previous curatorial work at institutions in Austria, the United Kingdom and United States, as well as her commitment to anti-racist and decolonial practices in the public realm.

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In this episode, we speak with Rick Poynor, one of the most influential voices in the study and critique of graphic design and visual culture. A writer, editor, curator, and academic, he has shaped design discourse for more than three decades. He is the founding editor of Eye magazine, co-founder of Design Observer. His books including No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003), Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties (2004), and David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian (2020), have become key references for understanding how design communicates cultural and political values. Until 2023, he served as Professor of Design and Visual Culture at the University of Reading.

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In this episode, we speak with Dr Yaw Ofosu-Asare,  a Ghanaian-Australian designer, educator, and researcher whose work bridges decolonial design, critical pedagogy, and African futures. He is the author of Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices (Routledge, 2024) and African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). With a PhD in Education, his research explores the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, and visual communication as tools for liberation and transformation. He has designed for grassroots organisations, educational institutions, and global social change movements, blending community-based design with speculative thinking. I am currently based in Australia at the RMIT University, where he teaches communication design and contributes to projects on climate justice, disability inclusion, and cultural sustainability. 

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In this episode, we speak with Ana Elena Mallet, an independent curator specialising in modern and contemporary design, and cultural management. She has taught History of Design, Art as well as Contemporary Photography in various institutions and universities throughout Mexico and has overseen the creation and planning of academic programs in different institutions. Since 2018, she is a guest curator at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, in charge of putting together the first-ever public Mexican Design collection in the country. Her research varies from the famous Mexican intricate woven looms to the core of Mexican design itself.

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In this episode, we speak with Justine Boussard, curator and creative producer with over a decade’s experience working on design and craft exhibitions, artist-led public engagement and creative programming with clients including the Design Museum, Crafts Council, Jane Withers, North East Museums and UP Projects. As the Amateur Ancestor, she creates experiences that harness the power of material culture and storytelling to expand participants’ sense of time and agency, when faced with the reality of the climate and biodiversity crises. She is a graduate of the V&A/RCA MA in History of Design (2012) and a member of Climate Museum UK. The Amateur Ancestor project has been supported by the Arts Council and Creative UK. After years in London, she has happily relocated to the North East of England where she dips in the North Sea as often as she can.

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In this episode, we speak with Elizabeth Guffey, Professor emerita in Art History at the State University of New York, Purchase College. Her research lies at the intersection of design, visual culture, museology and disability studies. She is currently working on a book project that describes and critiques the emergence of Post-Universal Design, arguing that paradigms from critical disability studies are reshaping the landscape of design for disability but also providing a new model for responsible, respectful and research-rich design practice in the future. Her most recent books are Making Disability Modern, and Designing Disability. 

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In this episode, we speak with Derrick Gaiter, an Assistant Attorney General in Florida. Through Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (“VLA”), Gaiter also provides pro-bono legal assistance to income-eligible artists, creative entrepreneurs, and arts organizations. Post his MA History of Design & Curatorial Studies degree at Parsons, he went on to pursue a JD. In this conversation, we will trace Derrick's journey of navigating the shift from design history to law, the parallels, and the contrasts. 

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In this episode, we speak with Ezrena Marwan, a graphic designer, educator, and archivist, who specialises in visual advocacy and the politics of archives. Ezrena co-founded Malaysia Design Archive (MDA), a platform tracing Malaysia’s graphic design history, and Sejarah Wanita, a project highlighting women’s contributions to Malaysian history. Currently, she is the Co-Lead of Liberatory Archives and Memory at Whose Knowledge?, where she is dreaming of alternative approaches to archiving to challenge colonial capitalist memory institutions. Through her work, Ezrena challenges dominant narratives in design, history, and social justice.

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In this episode, we speak with Sarita Sundar, a designer and design historian who combines her 30+ years of working with brand strategy and design solutions with her academic training in museum studies and heritage interpretation. Research informs the way Sarita works, often taking a critical look at how our culture engages with the visual. She is the founder of Hanno, a consultancy that visualizes and curates diverse narratives with a particular focus on museum, heritage and social communication. She is the author of From Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India, a path-breaking and award-winning book that chronicles how seats have evolved in India. She received a 2022 Fulbright Fellowship to study the intersectional design histories between the United States and India. Her present research studies the Planters chair along with Dr Rachel Lee through a grant from TU Delft.

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This paper explores how design has historically been shaped by Western politics and frameworks, influencing products and services across diverse contexts, and offers an alternative design approach grounded in Indigenous Filipino values, emphasizing human dignity, collective strength, and inclusion while encouraging designers to embrace plurality and diverse experiences.

This paper was published in the text Entanglements of Designing Social Innovation in the Asia-Pacific

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In this episode, we speak with Barbara Perata-Smith, a design history graduate from the Royal College of Art who has paved a career in sustainability and policy. She is an Environmental Strategist at the Civil Aviation Authority. She is currently on secondment with the UK Regulators Network, where she is leading the development of their environmental programme as a key strategic objective.

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In this episode, we speak with Shirley Surya, Curator (Design and Architecture) at M+, Hong Kong. Shirley shares insights into her curatorial journey after studying history of design at Royal College of Art - from working on the retrospective of Yung Ho Chang in Beijing to becoming the first member of the Design and Architecture curatorial team at M+. She shares her reflections on working across regions, the diverse roles of a curator in the making of exhibitions, the process of building the architecture collection, and much more.  

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License code: XACMOACB2PXE63FQ

You can read the full winning essay here: https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/architecture-artist-designer-demas-nwoko-nigeria

For more information on the prize, please visit the DHS website

For more information on the prize, please visit the DHS website.

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more information visit: https://zara-arshad.com/Reverberations

For more, please visit the DHS website.

For submission guidelines and form, please visit the DHS website.