Explorations

As design gains significance in the major debates around our past, present, and future, the Explorations section of the Journal of Design History seeks to nurture innovative, experimental, and creative interventions in researching and writing about design and its histories. The Explorations section aims to:

• Support experimentation with new or alternative forms of scholarly communication, collaborative writing and/or interdisciplinarity.
• Extend the JDH’s authorship and readership base, supporting early career researchers, emerging and future scholarship.
• Diversify research dissemination and promote timely responses to key debates.

Call for Submissions

Explorations editors accept proposals for reflective writing pieces, interviews, position papers, meditations, practitioner statements, educator statements, letters, reflections on methods, among other formats. Submissions can be visually led, include videos, audio files and other media-based material. They should be 1,500–4,000 in length (excluding endnotes) and do not have a prescribed number of images. Explorations pieces are published in the Journal of Design History’s webpages on the Oxford University Press website. Contributions have their own DOI, are published as advanced articles, and are associated to a specific issue of the journal.

Pre-submission Enquiry Process

Interested authors should contact Explorations editors via the emails below to discuss their ideas. Authors are encouraged to include in their emails 1) a working title for the proposed contribution; 2) the format of the contribution (e.g., reflective writing, interview, etc), 3) an abstract or a draft that demonstrates how the proposal meets the aims of the Explorations section (above), what question(s) it addresses, the main argument(s) it advances, and the originality of the research on which the work is based.

Explorations editors offer top-level advice on the suitability of proposals to the section and the Journal. They review, for example, if the proposal has potential to contribute to the field of Design History, or whether it experiments with new forms of scholarly communication, collaborative writing and/or interdisciplinarity. Explorations editors can also offer technical advice to authors of video, audio or visually-led pieces.

To support early career researchers and scholars new to the field, the Journal or publishing, Explorations editors can share further details on the peer review process, including what questions reviewers will be asked. Once an idea seems feasible, Explorations editors will advise authors to make a submission via Scholar One for peer review. As per Journal of Design History standards, Explorations contributions being considered for publication will undergo double-anonymised peer review.

Contact

To discuss a proposal, please contact the Explorations Editors:

Dr Livia Rezende, University of New South Wales, Australia, [email protected]
Dr Sarah Cheang, Royal College of Art, UK, [email protected]