Call for Papers PAD#29
Guest Editors: James Postell (Politecnico di Milano), Grant Baker (Nottingham Trent University), Tom Hurford (Nottingham Trent University)
PAD Pages on Art and Design, Issue 29, will be published in December 2025.
Designing and Making: Evolving Roles, Methods, and Responsibilities
Humans make. Nearly 3 million years ago, Oldowan tools shaped stone into other implements, today, nanofibers accelerate the healing of wounds. Both share a timeline that demonstrates the innate human need to produce made artifacts that improve life. During this significant period of time, perceptions of makers and their relationship with design have ebbed and flowed, often reflecting changing opinions on occupational value and societal status. Crafts that were once revered, aspirational and central to design processes now face realities such as aging demographics, as experienced by many regionally based industries such as the Malaysian pewter industry, or in the case of British made mouth-blown sheet glass, extinction (Heritage Craft Association, 2025).
PAD 29 examines evolving roles, methods, and responsibilities between designing and making. Social, cultural, environmental, and physical properties of making are embedded within design training and professional and disciplinary practice models. Industry is an established trope; from Ashbee and the Arts and Crafts, to Dyson and vacuum cleaners. However, Walker’s seminal ‘Production-Consumption model’ positioned design, including the making aspect, in a more total context that encouraged discussion to ‘always speak about design within society, rather than design and society’ (Walker,1989, p.68) to better reflect the complexities at play. More recently, factors such as material extraction and processing, carbon footprint and circular economies, have forced made objects to be scrutinised through an increasingly critical lens raising questions such as should this be made, rather than can this be made?
Condensing said complexities into ten ‘challenges’, Redström (2017) delights in how design thrives on intrinsic dichotomies asserting that these present opportunities to re-think design methodologies to capitalise on practise-based design. Therefore, this call requests papers that reflect and discuss what roles physical making have played, currently play, and will play in the future in the contexts of disciplinary design processes in education and industry settings. Using case studies, examples of contemporary practice and the unpacking of current design methodologies, the submitted scholarship will provide a health check for making and materiality in a digital age. Themes to be covered can be, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Historic and contemporary relationships between education, design and production
- Reflections on the value, cultural meaning, and ethics of making and materiality in design
- Evolving attitudes to production, consumption, waste and Life Cycle Cost
- Making methodologies of the past, present and future
Abstract submission by email to editors@padjournal.net
Timing
Launch of the Call: June 2025
Deadline Abstract: 30 August 2025
Acceptance of Proposal: 7 September 2025
Full Paper: 20 October 2025
Camera-ready: December 2025
Publication: by the end of December 2025
