Vivien Chan is a design historian, educator, writer, and imagemaker based in the UK.
is a reading room and design history research studio founded in 2025.The studio is the home of my collaborative, experimental practice as a design historian, educator and facilitator. Out of Practice can be found on the first floor of The People’s Hall, in Nottingham’s Lace Market area.Out of Practice leads with the question of what ‘practice’ means - the endeavour to keep trying, commitment to the process of learning and making, and understanding ‘practice’ to be a collective praxis. To be ‘in’ and ‘out’ of practice is to lean into failure, reflection, sensation, speculation, joy.
The studio is focused on three threads:
📖 A reading room with a library of design research books and zines
💭 A programme of experimental workshops, events, research residencies
🌀️ Collaborative design research, specialising in design history and material culture
The People’s Hall
Located in the People’s Hall in the heart of Nottingham, the site of the Nottingham Government School of Design in 1843, Out of Practice continues, expands and disrupts the legacy of radical design education. Drawing on feminist and decolonial design research practices, Out of Practice experiments with what we imagine design practice to be.The Georgian part of the house was originally Morley House, built by Ann Morley, a widowed businesswoman and entrepreneur in the salt-glazed pottery trade. In 1843 the building was sold to the Nottingham branch of the Government School of Design, a radical national policy to create schools to teach the nation ‘good design’ in order to compete with international export trade. In Nottingham, the focus was on the lace trade, where students were taught fundamentals for drawing and sculpture. These schools pre-empted the modern design history of Britain beginning with the Great Exhibition, which led to the establishment of South Kensington Museum, the predecessor of the V&A Museum, Science Museum, National History Museum and the Royal College of Art. Morley House was reorganised and extended to work as a school, where majority of the teaching was held in the lantern room on the first floor, next door to where Out of Practice is now.
Nottingham Government School of Design moved to another site in 1953, and the building was bought by local industrialist and philanthropist George Gill. The building was then turned into The People’s Hall, which housed a library, restaurant, meeting rooms and events spaces and offering courses, where workers could gather to read and discuss outside of drinking spaces. The People’s Hall had both philosophical and political motivations, serving as an alternative space to the originally planned by unbuilt Temperance Hall and also meant to disperse growing disatisfaction in working communities. Nevertheless, The People’s Hall also seems to have a radical history of feminist and leftist organising, where clandestine meetings for Women’s Rights, anti-war, and leftist politics could take place safely.
The People’s Hall remained as a public institution until the 1990s. A few attempts to renovate and reopen the building in the 2000s were foiled by various economic crises and national policy change. From 2025, the building reopened for the first time after abandonment for 20 years under the custodianship of the Nottingham Historic Buildings Trust, which aims to rescue and reimagine Nottingham's historic buildings at risk.