Anna Kallen Talley
Programme:
Design - MPhil/PhD
Start date:
Sep-21
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
Design, Information Disorder and the American Mediasphere
Biography
Anna Kallen Talley, AFHEA is a researcher specialising in modern and contemporary design history and theory. Her primary research interests include graphic design and communications technologies, digital objects and infrastructures, the relationship between design and political theory/philosophy, design and political economy, design ethics, and the curation of design. Her primary research skills lie in qualitative methods, including digital and physical archival research (including the use of web archives as data and web scraping), object-based analysis, comparative case studies, interviews, coding (NVivo), and integrative literature reviews.
She has recently submitted her PhD thesis, Design, Information Disorder and the American Mediasphere: The Political Aesthetics of Communication Design, for examination in September 2025. Her PhD was fully supported by a UKRI/AHRC grant through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. In 2021, Anna earned her MA in Design History and Material Culture (with distinction) from the V&A/Royal College of Art, and she holds a BFA in Art and Design History (summa cum laude) from the Pratt Institute. Anna is a Trustee of the Design History Society holds the position of Communications Director for Design Research Society. She is also a member of the European Communication Research and Education Association and the False Webs Network, a project funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and based at Edinburgh Napier University which seeks to unite science communicators and misinformation researchers to discuss the connection between research and policy.
Anna has written on digital design, contributed to policy papers from the perspective of design studies and has presented papers and organised panels at a number of international conferences. These include conferences of the Design History Society, the American Studies Association, and the College Art Association. She has also served as a peer reviewer for the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) biennial conference and the Design History Society annual conference.
Reflecting her interest in curation and museology, Anna has worked as a researcher in design museums, assisting with exhibitions and researching permanent collections. These include the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (Design & Digital), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Architecture and Design), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Modern and Contemporary) and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
At the University of Edinburgh, Anna has held teaching positions in the Edinburgh College of Art, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and Design Informatics. She has also been a guest speaker on the V&A/RCA MA History of Design course. Anna was awarded her Associate Fellowship with Advance HE in 2025.
Anna is currently a Tutor in the Edinburgh Futures Institute on two interdisciplinary modules. She has previously been a tutor on the Design Informatics MA programme (ECA/School of Informatics) and has served as a dissertation supervisor for undergraduate students in the College of Art.
In addition to tutoring, Anna has co-organised two methods training workshops for PhD students. In 2023, she collaborated with the University’s web archivists on a full-day workshop on using web archives for humanities research, including the analysis of web archives as data using computational methods. In 2025, she co-organised a workshop on interdisciplinary multimodal analysis, contributing frameworks for multimodal analysis from the perspective of design research.
Research
Research
Anna’s primary research interests include graphic design and communications technologies, digital objects and infrastructures, the relationship between design and political theory/philosophy, design and political economy, design ethics, and the curation of design. Her work is often interdisciplinary, spanning design, political science and science and technology studies.
Anna’s doctoral research explored the relationship between communication design and post-factual news online, contributing new knowledge to the topic of information disorder from the perspective of design scholarship. It considered the production, distribution and mediation of news information, as well as the visual rhetoric of information disorder, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between design and mis/disinformation. The aim was twofold: first, to unpack the relationship between communication design and information disorder by analysing how design, influenced by ideological constructs in design, methods of practice, technological restrictions and developments, and economic pressures, affects the way political news is produced, mediated and distributed. Having demonstrated the socio-political valence of design and establishing a visual rhetoric of political aesthetics through this analysis, the thesis turned towards its second aim: examining the ethical responsibilities of communication designers given design’s effects on political information.
In addition to her doctoral work, Anna has written on the creation of her project, the digital, rapid-response archive ‘Design in Quarantine’, which was awarded the Design History Society’s 2020 Virtual Design History Student Award and received international press coverage (RMIT Design Archives Journal). She has also reviewed books on graphic design and digital culture (Journal of Design History) and most recently is the guest editor of a Special Section of the Journal of Design History on Digital Material Culture (forthcoming). Her introduction, ‘Methodologies for Digital Design History: State of the Field, Definitions and Possibilities’, is the first to set a research agenda for digital objects in the field of design history. She has also contributed to the policy paper Understanding and Addressing Misinformation in Scotland, emphasising the importance of visual media literacy and the political economy of design in the context of online information disorder.
Pursuing her interest in digital objects and curation, in 2023, Anna completed a project for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Design & Digital section titled, Radical Uncertainties: Collecting Digital Objects at the V&A, Histories and New Acquisitions. This project explored how the ‘digitality’ of the V&A’s collection has changed since the museum began collecting digital art in the mid-century by looking at a selection of objects from the Digital Art and Design Collection. The project resulted in a new acquisitions questionnaire for digital objects as part of the V&A’s broader initiative to design a robust collecting and conservation strategy for digital material, blog posts on the V&A website, a cross-departmental workshop on digital collecting and presentation at the Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Also in the museum sector, Anna’s research has contributed to the exhibitions Automata at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (July 2021 - January 2022) and E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (Fall 2021-Spring 2022). Anna has also conducted research on the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
As a freelance writer on design, Anna’s work has been published in Design Observer, AIGA’s Eye On Design, the New York Review of Architecture (where she was also a regular guest editor), AN Interior, WHITEHOT Magazine, MODERN Magazine, and The Magazine ANTIQUES.
Academic Publications, Book Chapters and Policy Papers
‘History of Information Disorder: Production, Distribution, and Form’, in: Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) FalseWebs Research Network (ed) FalseWebs Network Policy Paper: Understanding and Addressing Misinformation in Scotland, 2025, pp. 21–24.
‘Methodologies for Digital Design History: State of the Field, Definitions and Possibilities’, Journal of Design History, (accepted for publication, forthcoming).
Guest Editor, Journal of Design History Special Section: Design History and Digital Material Culture. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
‘From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age’, Journal of Design History, 2024, epad059.
‘Copper’, in: Cormier, B. (ed) Pandemic Objects. (London: Architectural Association, 2024).
‘From Swiss Modernism to the International Compliant Style: Grids and Graphic Design in the Age of Information Disorder’ in Perspectives on Design III Research, Education and Practice. (Springer, 2023).
“Design in Quarantine: Creating a Digital Archive of Design Responses to Covid-19.” RMIT Design Archives Journal, 11.2, 2021.
Conference and Seminar Presentations
2024
“This is Not Breaking News: A Short History of the Design of Information Disorder”, Royal Society of Edinburgh & Edinburgh Napier University: False Webs Seminar, September 2024.
“REF 2021 Open Access Portfolio Project at the University of Edinburgh” Capturing Creativity Week, Loughborough University and Bath Spa University, September 2024.
“Practice Meets Research: Developing a Training Workshop to Support Use of Web Archives in Arts & Humanities Research.” International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference, April 2024.
Panel Co-Chair, “Polycrisis and Design: Ethics, Intervention, Possibility.” Design Studies Forum-Sponsored Session, College Art Association Conference, February 2024.
2023
“Radical Uncertainties: Collecting Digital Objects at the V&A, Histories and New Acquisitions.” Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, November 2023.
“Unpacking Mildred Constantine’s 1941 Latin America in Posters Exhibition: State Propaganda and the Limits of Curatorial Intent.” Design History Society Annual Conference: Displaying Design: History, Criticism and Curatorial Discourses, September 2023.
2022
“Old News, New Methods: Addressing Digital Material Culture through 19th Century Sensationalist Papers and 21st Century Fake News Websites.” Material Culture Caucus, American Studies Association Conference, November 2022.
“Rethinking Research Methods for Digital Material Culture.” Design History Society Conference: Design & Transience, September 2022.
2021
“A Disorderly Archive.” Design History Society Conference: Memory Full, September 2021.
“Design in Quarantine: Past, Present and Post-COVID Futures.” Pandemic Perspectives, April 2021.
“A Disorderly Archive.” Coalition of Masters Scholars of Material Culture ‘Pandemic Perspectives’, April 2021.
2020
“Design in Quarantine.” Design History Society Student Forum, October 2020.