The Chartered Society of Designers is celebrating its 80th anniversary by collaborating with the University of Brighton to create an Atlas of the Design Professions in Britain (1930-2010), exploring the disciplinary reach and geographic spread of British designers over the eighty-year period.
The funded project focuses on the networks that designers collectively build and embraces the national and international design alliances they form.
It also aims to explore educational and personal connections between designers and their positioning over space and time, from studios and design office to regional, national and international locations.
Driven by the contention that a mapping of the identities and working practices of designers might act as a model for evolving working patterns and profiles, the project will interrogate the University of Brighton Design Archives and the membership records of the CSD from its founding as the Society of Industrial Artists in 1930, and may also involve the use of archive held elsewhere, for example at the V&A.
The intention is to mine this data to explore how hitherto-unexplored patterns of membership reveal the shifting demographics of design, mapped by place, discipline and gender and rendered as a series of interactive maps.