Jilly Traganou will be giving a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Thursday, October 16, 2014, from 12 to 1:30pm. Her talk is entitled “The Olympic Design Milieu.”

Jilly Traganou is Associate Professor of Spatial Design Studies at the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design. She will be a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center from September 2014 through June 2015. Traganou is the author of The Tokaido Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo And Meiji Japan (Routledge Curzon, 2004) and a co-editor, with Miodrag Mitrasinovic, of Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate, 2009; travelspacearchitecture.com). Traganou has published in Design and Culture, Design Issues, Journal of Design History, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, and has chapters in Critical Cities Vol. 02 (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), Global Design History (Routledge, 2011), Design as Future Making (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), Iconic Designs (forthcoming by Bloomsbury), Cartographic Japan (forthcoming by Chicago University Press), and other books. In 2012 she was guest-editor of a special issue in the Journal of Design History, titled “Design Histories of the Olympic Games” (25:3), and in 2014 she co-curated, with Izumi Kuroishi, the exhibition “Design and Disaster: Kon Wajiro’s Modernologio” at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons (currently on tour in Macau). Traganou has also co-organized and participated in practice-based collaborative research projects in critical design pedagogy (such as “Spatial Imaginary and Multiple Belonging: The Open House Workshop” with Eleni Tzirtzilaki and Lydia Matthews, Athens 2008). She is currently finalizing a book titled Designing the Olympics (forthcoming by Routledge), and her new research project focuses on designerly ways of dissenting. Traganou currently serves as Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Design History (Oxford University Press).

Traganou’s presentation will introduce Olympic design as a complex, multi-sited operation that involves numerous actors from the elites to the grass-roots. Traganou will base her presentation on Victor Margolin’s “product milieu” idea, looking at Olympic products designed in relation to civic institutions, the market, and the realm of non-professional design activity. With this, Traganou will examine both the representational and the participatory functions of the Olympics, looking at ways that Olympic design represents and formulates national and global identities, but also at ways that identity and citizenship are enacted through different types of citizens’/users’ participation in the making of the Olympic design milieu.

Coffee and tea will be served; attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch.

RSVP is required.