Abstract: In this talk, design historian Johanna Mehl explores the tangled relationship between society and aesthetics through the lens of design. Focusing on the mid-20th-century crisis of Western modernism – when growing skepticism toward the rigid structures of modern life, from labor and family to leisure, coincided with a break with the modernist architectural program – she unpacks how built environments shape subjectivities and vice versa. As the 'cheerful robots' and 'hungry ghosts' of the modern city began to stir, their discontent took aesthetic form, revealing how design becomes both a mirror of social anxieties and a vehicle for social dreaming.
About the speaker: Johanna Mehl is a PhD candidate in cultural studies and design history at TU Dresden, where she holds a Saxon State fellowship and a research associate position at the Chair for Digital Cultures. As a scholar, designer, and educator she is interested in design as a knowledge culture and its entanglements with environmental history, cybernetics, systems theory, and media theory.
