Symposium

Miao Lu, Lingnan University

Toward a Southern Perspective of Design: The Case of Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa

Africa’s mobile phone market is currently dominated by Transsion, a Shenzhen-based phone maker known for its affordable prices and locally tailored design features. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork about Transsion in China and Ghana, this talk will explore the cross-cultural design practices for the bottom of the pyramid population in Africa. Using “technology translation” as an analytical framework, it will map Transsion’s design network and elaborate various types of technology translations through the cases of SIM cards, batteries, and AI camera. I contend that design is not only about making artifacts but also about designing ways of knowing, seeing, and being. While Transsion challenges the cultural imagination of Western design, it’s also becoming a regional power in Africa. It is possible for Shenzhen to be Silicon Valley’s “South” and Africa’s “North” simultaneously. I call for a Southern perspective of design to rethink the geopolitics of design and imagine alternative socio-technical worlds.

Miao Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She works at the intersection of critical media studies, science and technology studies, and Africa-China studies. She is the author of The Transsion Approach: Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Her works have appeared in Information, Communication & Society, Big Data & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. She is currently working on a new manuscript, entitled Tropical Data Centers: Media, Heat, and Energy Politics in Afro-Asia.

Tommy Tse, University of Amsterdam

The Life of Clothes: Smell, Touch, and the Remaking of Authenticity in China–Africa Fashion Worlds

This presentation theorises assemblage authenticity in China–Africa fashion worlds as a sensory and relational achievement emerging through everyday practices of design, circulation, and evaluation, rather than a legal or brand-based category. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Nairobi, Maputo, and Guangzhou, it begins at Nairobi’s Gikomba Market after dawn, where reseller Eddie describes his “smell test” for determining whether a shoe comes from China or the UK. It is not bodies, but chemical residues from different sanitising regimes—traces that are read quickly in a market where multiple systems of valuation coexist. We then move to Eastleigh tailors who assert Tanzanian fabric origins to secure moral legitimacy, and to Maputo consumers who run fingers through second-hand clothes that “still carry their previous life.” In Guangzhou, authenticity is managed through half-drawn curtains and sequenced access: touch is initially withheld, then permitted as trust stabilises. These practices shape design, value, and credibility.

Tommy Tse is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and is currently a Visiting Fellow (2025–2026) at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, and Visiting Scholar (Jan–Mar 2026) at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research explores platform economies, creative and digital labour, consumer culture, and fashion. He leads the ERC-funded project China (Africa) Fashion Power, a five-year ethnographic study of fashion and cultural economies across Asia and Africa.

Innocent (Ib) Batsani-Ncube, Queen Mary University of London

‘Mutual dissemblance’ as ingratiation and agency in Sino-Zimbabwe architectural diplomacy interactions

This talk employs the modus operandi of China’s donation of a parliament building in Zimbabwe as a prism to examine contemporary intersections of architecture, novel approaches to global development, and recipient states’ agency. Conceptually, the paper draws on ingratiation principles - a well-established concept in social psychology and organisational behaviour - to deepen understanding of China’s relationship-building strategies in the Global South. Empirically, the paper proposes ‘mutual dissemblance’ as the apt descriptor of China-Zimbabwe interactions during the parliament building project’s delivery. Mutual dissemblance denotes the contrived actions or postures adopted by both parties (China and Zimbabwe) throughout design and construction, navigating implementation tensions while pursuing respective objectives. The paper elucidates how donors leverage design and architecture as political resources, alongside recipient states’ entrepreneurial tactics to ‘save face’.

Innocent Batsani-Ncube (Ib) is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in African Politics at Queen Mary University of London, Research Associate at LSE IDEAS and Author of China and African Parliaments. His book – based on research that was awarded the 2022–2024 African Studies Association (ASA-UK) Best PhD Thesis Prize - is the first to explore and explain the impact of China's expanding influence in African parliaments. Before joining academia, Ib was a leading figure in Zimbabwean civil society, where he founded a critical thinking and leadership development organisation – the Contemporary Affairs Foundation – managed United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) supported civic projects and participated in the national constitution making process.

Response:

Alpay Er, Özyegin University Istanbul

Alpay Er is Professor and the Head of Industrial Design Department at Ozyegin University (OzU), Istanbul Turkiye. He has previously served as head of Industrial Design Dept at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) between 2006 and 2013, and a visiting professor at the Universita Degli Studi Della Campania’da (Naples, Italy) in 2017. Presently a Regional Advisor of World Design Organization (WDO) after serving as the Board member of WDO - formerly International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID)- for three terms between 2011 and 2019. Prof. Er has served in several national and international design awards such as Red Dot, Red Star China, iF etc., and has acted as a consultant to various institutions and companies in Istanbul on design. For his contribution to the development of bilateral relations between Turkey and Finland, he was knighted by the Republic of Finland in 2017 (the Order of the Lion of Finland, First Class). Between 2016 and 2021, Prof. Er was the corresponding editor of Design Issues (MIT Press). His academic interest include political economy of design, design policy, history of industrial design in the periphery, design management and strategy.

Panel Discussion

Vishal Khandelwal, Harvard University

Architecture and Development at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad

View of the NID campus in Ahmedabad, 2019. Photo by Vishal Khandelwal

This talk will focus on the architecture of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, through archival representations in text and image from the 1960s and 70s. Established in 1961 with funding from the Indian state, Indian industrialists, and the US-based Ford Foundation, the NID was the first design school of its kind in independent India, and one among other elite educational institutions founded in India around the same time and via interactions among Indian and foreign teachers, bureaucrats, and consultants. Its campus design during the mid-to-late 1960s resulted from an ethos of collaborative work that underlay other contemporaneous development projects in postcolonial India, including those involving architecture and construction. Yet, as this talk will argue, historical representations of the NID’s architecture impacted the school’s critical reception during the 1970s and after, not only shedding light on the financial ties between design and developmental work, but also advancing an understanding of modern architecture in India as one node within a larger constellation of image-making practices implicating design and development.

Vishal Khandelwal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He specializes in modern and contemporary architectural and design history, with a focus on South Asia. Vishal’s writing has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Modern Craft, and ARTMargins. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the history of design education in postcolonial India.

Bahar Emgin, Izmir University of Technology

The Redefinition of Craft in Mid-Century Turkey: Fragmented Interventions and Development

This paper examines the fragmented mid-century initiatives that sought to redefine Turkish craft as a strategic developmental resource. Rather than forming a unified movement, these efforts emerged through dispersed interventions by international aid programs, state institutions, professional associations, and local NGOs. Across these arenas, craft was mobilized to stimulate domestic growth and international competitiveness. In the process, it was assessed according to shifting criteria of authenticity, reproducibility, and marketability, generating both opportunities and tensions while producing an increasingly ambiguous definition of craft that ranged from small-scale production to folk and minor arts. These debates also exposed the gendered dynamics embedded in emerging definitions of craft. Drawing on archival records, periodicals, and institutional reports, the paper argues that these negotiations unfolded at the intersection of Cold War development agendas, industrial modernization, and cultural politics, as local actors navigated competing demands of aesthetic reform, economic planning, and cultural representation.

Bahar Emgin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Design at İzmir Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on design history and material culture in Turkey, with particular emphasis on craft, modernization, and gender. She has published extensively on the relationship between craft and design in mid-century Turkey, examining how craft was mobilized within debates on development, national identity, and industrialization. She also contributed to a research project on the social history of domestic appliances in Turkey, which resulted in two co-authored books in Turkish and several scholarly articles.

Danielle Charlap, Wolfsonian–Florida International University

Design and the Diplomat Curator: The International Cooperation Administration and the Fight for Influence

Design in Industry exhibition at the ICA Boston, 1952. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

In 1955, the US International Cooperation Administration began sending design professionals abroad as part of its strategic effort to align international development with US priorities during its Cold War with the USSR. While this group included top US designers like Russel Wright and Peter Müller-Munk, one member stood apart for his training as a curator. A student of Paul Sachs’s innovative Museum Course, James Plaut belonged to a new generation of museum professionals trained for management. This talk examines the unknown figure of the "diplomat curator" within the ICA's Cold War design campaign, a historically contingent role that emerged from the rise of a new expert class and the ambiguity of design as a nascent category in US museums. Plaut clashed with ICA designers as they fought to assert their position, exposing a broader ideological conflict within the Cold War business of creativity and design.

Danielle Charlap is a scholar of 20th-century design, craft, and museum history and Curator at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University She received her PhD in Art History and a certificate in Visual Studies from the University of Southern California; an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center; and an AB in History from Harvard College.

Response:

Tanishka Kachru, National Institute of Design, India

Tanishka Kachru is the Discipline Lead of Exhibition Design at National Institute of Design, India. She holds an MA in History of Design and the Decorative Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a B.Arch from the University of Bombay. Her research focuses on design histories from postcolonial and feminist perspectives, digital heritage interpretation, and heritage in smart cities. She is author of “Sujata Keshavan: Women designers in India” in Resnick, Elizabeth, ed. Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon, Bloomsbury (2025) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Craft and Sustainability in India (2024) and has published widely on design history and exhibitions. Her professional work includes exhibition and museum projects for institutions such as IIMA Archives, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, and the Ramakrishna Mission.

Panel Discussion

Closing remarks and End