TILT seminar: Liz McFall

The insurance problem, historically, seems always to redound to questions of trust. How can trust in an intangible, obscure and complicated product be built and maintained? As far back as the late eighteenth century part of the answer to that has been found in the buildings themselves. Purpose-built architecture was commissioned to convey messages of strength, solidity and mythological antiquity and reproduced as corporate graphic identities in print paraphernalia from letterhead to advertisements and souvenir calendars. But is there more at play in insurance architecture than promotional strategy? This chapter explores the changing relationship between insurance buildings, insurance brands and property investment strategies. It considers how insurance buildings and investment shaped the urban environment through the twentieth century and how that began to change as the century closed. The ascendance of the tech industries and the emergence of ‘insurtech’ altered the long-established role architecture played in expressing the solidity of insurance. Architecture, and interior design, still plays a central role in branding insurtech start-ups, and the insurtech branches of legacy insurers, but rather than solidity, it is used to convey lightness, agility, creativity and informality.

Speaker: Liz McFall

Dr Liz McFall is Director of Data Civics and Chancellor’s Fellow based in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She is a sociologist of markets with a particular interest in how markets for difficult products succeed (and how they fail). Her current research focuses on the impact of data-driven innovations in insurance and in civic regeneration and place-making. She is co-founder of AWED, a collective that make films and installations exploring the orchestration of civic sentiments and data techniques most recently Closes and Opens: a history of Edinburgh’s Futures. Her books include Markets and the Arts of Attachment (Routledge 2017), Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (Routledge 2014) and Advertising: a cultural economy (Sage 2004) She is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Time:  12:00 -13:30

Moderator:  Gert Meyers

* For more information regarding this event please contact: Heidi van Veen