Published: 28 October 2026
Design Stories Warsaw: Fifteen papers on responsibility in design
Author: Magdalena Miszewska
The post-conference publication from Design Stories Warsaw is now available to read and download. It brings together 15 papers exploring how women designers, researchers, and educators approach responsibility in design. The topics range from social challenges and cultural memory to new ways of thinking and making.
What's inside?
The publication is organized around five themes: Networks of Responsibility, Searching for Solutions, Narratives in Making, Curating Design Futures, and Pedagogies of Practice.
The papers explore a wide range of topics, from care and diversity in AI systems to textile practice, material storytelling, museum archives, and robotics in design education. Together, they show how design is shaped by social relationships, ethical choices, material knowledge, and the stories we tell about the world.
Explore the ideas and perspectives shared at Design Stories Warsaw
Download the conference publication (PDF)Giving women in design a voice
Design Stories is part of “Looking Through Objects”, a curatorial project documenting how women designers have helped shape the Polish design scene over the past 20 years. The project gives them space to share their methods, experiences, and ideas in their own words.
Central to the project is the principle of voice as epistemology: designers are not only subjects of inquiry but knowledge producers in their own right. By enabling practitioners to speak and write directly, Design Stories captures uncertainty, experimentation, and contradiction—dimensions often obscured when design is documented solely through objects or exhibitions.
Gian Luca Amadei and Agnieszka Jacobson-Cielecka
project curators
About the conference
Design Stories Warsaw took place at SWPS University’s School of Form on November 20–21, 2025. Women designers, researchers, educators, and historians explored different perspectives on responsibility in contemporary design.
Read more about the event on the Design Stories Warsaw conference webpage
Design Stories Warsaw was organized through a collaboration between SWPS University and the Royal College of Art in London, with support from the British Council and in partnership with Disegno Journal. It was part of the British Council UK/Poland Season 2025.
Meet the project curators
Gian Luca Amadei
Gian Luca Amadei is an architectural historian, researcher, and curator. His interests lie at the intersection of architectural history, urban planning, sociology, and cultural context. He is an advocate of lifelong learning and a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London. He is also the author of the books: Discovering Women in Polish Design (2009) and Victorian Cemeteries and the Suburbs of London (2022).