ABSTRACT
By beginning from a reading of displacement that emphasizes the aspects of location and dislocation, as well as the place from where this is understood, this article has sought to reformulate the question of place and displacement in the writing of Swedish design history. The canonical version of a modern design history, that which has gained international currency, emerges from a place that coincides with the administrative center of the nation-state. However, the understanding of this modernity varies depending on not just from where you understand it but also who you are. It is thus a relational and multi-sited design history. The main case that is being analyzed is centered in the post-industrial landscape of the so-called “Kingdom of Crystal,” in the Swedish region of Småland. Through the practice of frigger-making this article foregrounds the agency of the skilled glass worker, a history that continuously lives with the frigger-makers, in the former glass works-villages but it has to a very limited extent traveled beyond these places. As this history and making has not been valued it has not been collected by museums nor written about in Swedish design history—thus a large part of this history has been permanently displaced.
