Measuring & Being: How has the way we measure shaped the way we are?

PUBLIC TALK with Peter Hall

Drawing from Peter’s current research into a critical history of data visualization and his previous journalistic work on product design, this talk makes connections between international standards of fit, measurement and time and their entanglement with Western industrialization and colonization. He’ll argue that in this history of measurement there are links between an aesthetic movement and racist scientific theories of the 19th and 20th century that will help us better understand the long shadow of Modernism in design education.

Peter Hall is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London. His research focuses on mapping and visualization as critical and participatory design processes. His recent essays appear in The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design (Routledge 2018), The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury Academic 2017) and Design in the Borderlands (Routledge 2014).

Dr Hall previously taught at Yale School of Art, University of Texas at Austin and Griffith University Queensland College of Art in Australia where he led the BA Design and Design Futures (2012-15). He is a Visitor to the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London and Co-founder of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organization. https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/people/dr-peter-hall