For nearly twenty years, I have been studying design from a transnational perspective. I approach the professional practice, ways of knowing and the outputs related to design as phenomena embedded in broader networks formed across several national and international contexts.

In my work, for example, tropical timber extracted from the Amazon Forest and designed into a sophisticated display to represent Brazil’s natural bounty in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867 is not understood simply as an instance of ‘Brazilian’ design. Rather, I situate the tropical timber display within processes of transnational cultural and economic mediation in which designed objects and design activity played crucial roles.

Approaching design activity and designed artifacts as transnational phenomena located in networks has impacted my work and the discipline in two ways. Firstly, this approach departs from the ‘national histories of design’ format common in celebratory accounts that help build national design canons.

It also disrupts historical accounts predicated on the ideas of ‘influence’, ‘copying’ and ‘importation’ as one-directional flows from the so-called centres of material production to the rest of the world. Transnational and ‘design network’ approaches favour comparisons of material and conceptual exchanges between nations and regions as complex historical phenomena. As design activities and designed artifacts are created, recreated, and transformed in a continuous, albeit asymmetrical, this approach captures processes of giving and taking that affects all parties.

Below, you will find selected examples of a ‘transnational design networks’ approach in my current publications and public engagement work.