The obvious reference in the conference title “Mind the Map,” is to the droll warning given at stops on the London Underground. But in this case, the Third International Conference on Design History and Design Studies, the gap in the map takes on a multitude of meanings.

First are the cultural and religious implications of the conference location, next to the Bosporus River in Istanbul, Turkey. The river separates Europe from Asia, with the region’s rich legacy of Byzantine and Ottoman Empires shaping a secular society with a mostly Muslim population. The location becomes all the more poignant in light of current global geo-political tensions. Turkey’s role as a NATO member and aspiring member of the European Community while bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria, made the choice of Istanbul absolutely relevant.

Another gap in the map was inherent in the relationships between monolithic and pluralistic interpretations of design history and design studies, as evident in the conference presentations. Attendees, primarily design historians and scholars with academic affilations, with enough curious students in the mix to spice up the atmosphere, came from the far corners of the globe, bringing an array of perspectives. Faculty from the University of Aveiro, Portugal proposed a new museum of Portuguese design, that would reconcile the need for traditional crafts preservation with the desire to construct a national identity in the global environment. Conversely, curators from the Museu de les Arts Decoratives in Barcelona presented their challenges in trying to catalog works of contemporary Spanish industrial design, in consideration of the objects’ relationships to everyday material culture. The curators felt that the development of theories about domestic objects would reduce their invisibility, and that the museum would be the best context for this.

Co-sponsored by the Kent Institute of Art and Design in the United Kingdom and Istanbul Technical University, the Istanbul conference location followed Havana, Cuba in 2000 and Barcelona, Spain in 1999. That Istanbul isn’t a major ‘design capital’ in the conventional sense is refreshing, but, that is not to imply that the city is a newcomer to the world of international design venues. It hosted the International Furniture Congress in 1999, and exhibited the graphic works of publication and digital type foundry Emigre the same year.

The conference co-chairs, Tevfik Balcioglu (from Kent Institute) and Nigan Bayazit (from ITU), and their selection committees, put together a robust program of papers and presentations, which reinforced the map concept in both place and time. Strands included such topics as Design History Narratives: From Local to Global; Facing the West in the Near, Middle and Far East; Design History, Design Practice and Their Boundaries; and Craft and Design in Cultural Globalization.

The topics of architecture, product design, typography, crafts and apparel design – among many others – were represented as though nation-states with boundaries both delineated and fuzzy. Presenters then applied various conceptual maps to navigate this terrain; art history’s cubism tackled type legiblitity, environmentalism defended customized after-market plastics prototyping, and gender studies asked about the disparity between women’s educational levels and their professional design opportunities. As with many conferences, the most memorable conversations and debates took place not in the session rooms, but during the breaks, receptions or over dinner. Typical of the latter was a menu involving introductions, olives, conversation, tomatoes, discussion, wine, debate and grilled lamb.

A recurring phrase at Mind the Map was ‘design on the periphery’; the periphery was at once geographical, cultural and social. Scholars from the Universidad de Guadalahara, Mexico advocated for local economic empowerment through design, using case studies of the huarache sandal and pulque, a liquor based – like tequila – on the agave plant. The sandals, once only crafted with traditional processes and materials, now have diverse designs as they are successfully marketed beyond the region; this adaptation honors the huarache tradition while bettering the living conditions of the producers and decreasing migration of the area’s youth. Another presentation discussed how Australia responded graphically to the HIV/AIDS epidemic: governmental tones of morality in its official campaign lacked the effectiveness of user-centered graphic designs created unofficially by grass-roots groups.

The definition of periphery, of course, depends on where the map-maker is standing. One is reminded of the maps of early European explorers, wherein their cartographers would reach the limits of the known world, and the delineations of continents would fade into a vast sea populated only with horrible-looking creatures, and the words: ‘terra incognita’. Perhaps when this conference is held again, in the summer of 2004 in Guadalahara, Mexico (in the two official languages of English and Spanish), this year’s periphery will be that year’s ‘terra firma’.