Dr Rujana Rebernjak is a Lecturer in Visual Culture and Graphic Design on the BA Graphic Design programme at Middlesex University. She is a design historian interested in researching, teaching and disseminating knowledge about socially and politically engaged design practice.
Her research focuses on the material culture of everyday life under state socialism in post-war Yugoslavia, exploring the relationship between the political system and architectural and design production.
With a background in research-led design practice, she is also interested in critical and speculative approaches to design. In her research and practice, she engages with wider audiences through publishing and curatorial projects: her writing has been published in magazines like Apartamento and Alla Carta and she has co-curated an itinerant exhibition of designers' manifestos called 'Manifesto'.
Rujana holds a PhD in History of Design from the Royal College of Art. She is currently working on preparing her doctoral dissertation, titled “Designing Self-Management: Objects and Spaces of Everyday Life in Post-War Yugoslavia”, for publication (forthcoming in 2021).
English, Croatian, Italian
Dr Rujana Rebernjak has a specialist interest in material histories of everyday life in Eastern Europe under state socialism. Her research is particularly concerned with the ways intangible structures of government are materialised in everyday experience through architecture and design. Her research has examined these themes in the context of post-war Yugoslavia, focusing on the relationship between self-management and architectural and design production.
She is currently working on the relationship between cybernetics and self-management, focusing on the way bureaucracy was 'designed' under Yugoslav socialism.
AHRC Techne funded PhD in History of Design between the V&A and Royal College of Art, titled "Designing Self-Management: Objects and Spaces of Everyday Life in Post-War Yugoslavia", 2014-2018
Frankopan Fund, Post-Graduate Award, 2014, 2015
