Call for Papers: Proposed Special Section of Media Industries

Production Design: Current Methodologies in Creative Labour

Production design is a central yet often overlooked form of creative labour within screen industries. Through the design of spaces, objects, environments, and visual concepts, production designers and art departments shape narrative meaning while navigating complex industrial, technological, and collaborative conditions. Despite growing scholarly attention to creative labour in media industries, production design remains under-theorised as a site of labour, authorship, and creative negotiation.

This special section of Media Industries invites contributions that critically examine contemporary methodologies in production design as forms of creative labour. The section seeks to foreground production design within broader debates about media production, labour organisation, collaboration, and technological change across film, television, and related screen industries.

We welcome original scholarly contributions that engage production design through a critical media industries perspective, rather than an instrumental or purely aesthetic approach. Submissions may be contemporary or historical and may draw on qualitative, archival, ethnographic, or practice-based research methods.

Indicative themes include, but are not limited to:

1. Production design as creative labour in film and television industries
2. Contemporary production design methodologies and workflows
3. Collaboration, authorship, and hierarchy within art departments
4. Labour conditions, precarity, and professional identity in production design
5. Digital technologies, virtual production, and changing design practices
6. Global and transnational production design labour
7. Production design, material culture, and industrial constraints
8. Archival, historical, and institutional perspectives on design labour
9. Practice-based and practitioner-led research on production design
10. Teaching and training production design within media industries contexts

We particularly encourage submissions that bring global or international perspectives, address underrepresented production contexts, or adopt innovative theoretical and methodological approaches.

Submission Information

The proposed special section will comprise three to five peer-reviewed articles (5,000–7,000 words each), along with an editorial introduction. All submissions will undergo Media Industries’ standard double-blind peer review process.

Authors interested in contributing to the proposal are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 300 words, outlining the article’s focus, methodology, and relevance to the special section theme to PDREN.research@gmail.com by 30 June 2026.