Celine Nguyen

Designer and writer in San Francisco / London

Writing

2024

On Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries, autofiction, and constraint-driven writing, for ArtReview

2023

Review of the Japanese photography critic and novelist Mieko Kanai's first novel to be translated into English, for the Cleveland Review of Books

2022

On Phạm Phú Vinh's research into midcentury modern Vietnamese architecture and techniques for a climate crisis, for the modernist's issue #44, LAYOUT

2022

On a lecture by the French architect Anne Lacaton, for the Harvard Graduate School of Design

2021

A roundtable discussion on the Climate Museum UK, cultural institutions, collecting practices, and responding to the climate crisis, included in Reimagining Museums for Climate Action

2021

A choose-your-own-adventure short story about online communities, mushroom foraging, and reconnecting with the natural world, for COMPOST Magazine

2021

On Yoni Angelo Carnice's research into Filipino-American landscape architecture history, for the Harvard Graduate School of Design

2021

Review of New_Public's online festival for Plot(s) Journal of Design Studies

2020

On biodiversity, procedurally generated environments, and the biological versus digital 'seed', for Yale's Paprika

Speaking

2023
Web History, ‘Washed Away’: Memory, Loss, and Resistance in Contemporary Web Design, 2005–2021 at Design History Society
Online

Presented as part of the 2022 annual conference on 'Design and Transience'

2021
Design, Information, Translation: Revisiting the Jacquard Loom at Society for the History of Technology
Online

Presented as part of the Present Perfect Progressive panel, organized by N. Bucky Stanton

2017
Everything Else and Design at AIGA
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Spoke as part of the Emerging Designers Symposium

Education

2020 — 2021
MA in History of Design and Material Culture at V&A Museum/Royal College of Art
London, UK

My research centers around histories of information; science, technology and society (STS); modern and contemporary design; the environmental impact of digital technologies; and how designers and design processes respond to technological upheaval.

Research essays include 'Information Overload Before the Internet: A Historiography of Eighteenth-Century European Encyclopedias' and 'Design, Information, Translation: From Point Paper to Punch Cards in Nineteenth-Century Jacquard Weaving'.

My MA dissertation, titled 'Small Tech, Slow Tech: Alternative Web Design Ideologies and Practices, 2005–2021', was inspired by my interest in early web design styles and processes and the contemporary interest in static site generators (SSGs).

2011 — 2016
Bachelor's in Computer Science and Communication Design at Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, USA