Hot Metal: Studies in Design and Material Culture

Hot metal is the first book of its kind to unpack the fundamental interconnections between design, material culture and labour in the context of deindustrialisation. It centres on the lives of printing industry workers between the 1960s and the 1980s, who experienced the disruptive technological change from hot-metal typesetting and letterpress printing to computerisation and offset-lithography, shortly before facing factory closure and the obsolescence of their craft skills.

This book provides new perspectives on how the world of work is intertwined with the tangible and affective worlds of materiality. It argues that workplace culture is not just the sum of sociopolitical relationships, but is also bound up with a world of things. Through things, the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced. The book integrates oral histories and archival photographs from an intriguing case: a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia, providing an evocative rendering of design culture and embodied practice. The chapters examine spatial and visual memory within frameworks of oral history, gender-technology tensions, workers' strategies for survival, the rise of neoliberalism and the clandestine making of objects 'on the side'.

Hot metal is an engaging multidisciplinary text that will appeal to scholars in design history, material culture studies, labour history, the history of technology, gender studies and beyond. It is an accessible, richly argued text that will benefit students seeking to learn about the nature and erosion of blue-collar work, the integration of oral history with visual and material culture and the history of the printing as a craft.