The Pioneering Research Practices of Designer Janja Lap

Abstract

Janja Lap (1929–2004) is known to the Slovenian professional public as a first-rate glass designer and industrial designer in the field of electro-optical device development. For most of her pro-fessional life she was also a devoted researcher in the field of design, yet this facet of her work remained largely overlooked by both the professional and general public until the beginning of 2021, when the Museum of Architecture and Design acquired her archive. In this text we attempt to show that what sets her research apart is the way it thoughtfully weaves together two scien-tific approaches to design that each characterise a different school: one the Faculty of Architec-ture in Ljubljana and the other the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. In other words, we can trace in her work the intertwining of two threads of knowledge: one arising from the archi-tectural and urbanistic background she acquired during her studies under the mentorship of Edvard Ravnikar in what was then Yugoslavia, and the other obtained at the RCA under the mentorship of Bruce Archer, the British mechanical engineer and the first professor to devote himself to systems-level research in design, and Sir Misha Black, a pioneer in the development of scientific research approaches in the field of design