Dr Rujana Rebernjak is a design historian focusing on researching, teaching and disseminating knowledge about politically, socially and environmentally engaged design practice. She is the Contextual and Theoretical Studies Leader in the Design School at London College of Communication, focusing on developing a framework of critical, contextual and theoretical thinking that underpins all undergraduate courses in the school.
Her research examines histories of design and architecture in Eastern Europe under state socialism. She is interested in the ways immaterial structures and formations - from bureaucracy and data to labour relations and political ideology - took material form in objects and spaces of everyday life during the post-war period.
Her research to date has explored these ideas in the context of self-managed socialist Yugoslavia and will be gathered in an upcoming monograph drawing on her doctoral research. Her recent publications include an article on the materiality of bureaucracy published in Grey Room, and a book chapter on the way self-management was displayed in public exhibitions in the 1950s.
Her current research project focuses on histories of environmental design in socialist Yugoslavia, as it intersected with counter-cultures and techno-utopianism, provisionally titled “From Bit to Environment: Cybernetics and Design in 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia”.
She holds a PhD in History of Design from the Royal College of Art/V&A.
Rujana welcomes potential PhD students interested in researching architectural and design history; cultural history under state socialism; material culture; environmental histories; design and diplomacy; graphic design histories; design and medical humanities.
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