design, museums, etc.

On Exhibition Design
from The Design Journal

Written by maddamura on February 25, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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In recent years, design museums, design in museums, and museum design are all topics that have attracted growing interest from scholars and professionals: on the one hand, the issues related to the musealisation of design and to design museums, on the other hand the issues raised by exhibition design and by the use of design as a conceptual and practical tool to design museum and museum experience.
In this last sense, it is noteworthy to mention an article written by Alice Lake-Hammond, free lance designer, and Noel Waite, University of Otago (New Zealand): Exhibition Design: Bridging the Knowledge Gap, published in the latest issue of “The Design Journal” (edited by Paul Atkinson, vol. 13, n. 1, pp. 77-98).
As the abstract reads, in this article the authors consider «the changing role of exhibition design and its contribution to the interpretation in the increasingly audience-centred museum environment». To do so, they investigate the case study of the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa, its new design and strategy, as a good example of how designers were involved at different stages – exhibitions concept plan, architecture, exhibition design etc. – and did contribute in developing the museum experience, finally helping to «bridge the gap» between expert knowledge and visitors. No surprise, Ralph Appelbaum, the award winning designer and a leader in the field of interpretive museum design, was involved in this project.
Not only do Lake-Hammond and Waite examine the case study, but they trace an historical framework about the development of exhibition design and the changing role of designers in museums, providing good references to existing literature both of museum studies and design studies.
Moreover, they conclude the paper with «a preliminary map of the key interpretive design considerations of concepts, contexts and narratives as a guide to the exhibition design process in contemporary museums», in order to enhance the dialogue between designers and curators and the involvement and participation of designers in the concept and contents development.
The design process model they advance – which is also illustrated via diagrams – regards concepts, contexts and narratives as three major aspects that should be considered to develop a strong interpretive design and where designers can help curators and museum professionals.
In the very last sentence the authors state that in «an information-saturated world, there is a growing need for articulate communicators to help us understand our past, integrate new knowledge and inspire new ways of seeing our future, and we would argue that the field of exhibition design is one place they can reliably be found».
Indeed they are right. What would be interesting to ponder about additionally, however, is whether and to what extent design curators and design museums have reached this kind of awareness. If one looks at the museum world as a whole and at the advancements in museum studies, it is true that in general «[w]here once the curator was the sole keeper of expert knowledge, the contemporary exhibition process has become a collaborative effort involving curators, designers, educators, technicians and, increasingly the audience themselves».
Yet, this truth seems to turn into an exception when one looks at some design museums and design exhibitions, where, to use Eilean Hooper-Greehnill’s words, it seems the modernist transmission model of communication still prevails.[1]

Note
[1] Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Changing Values in the Art Museum. Rethinking Communication and Learning, in Museum Studies. An Anthology of Contexts, ed. by Bettina Messias Carbonell, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 556-575.

Posted in Design Museums, Exhibition Design, Museums, Quotations, Resources and References, Reviews

Artefacts Series
learning from science and technology museums

Written by maddamura on February 22, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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Cases of science and technology museums that have pursued an explicit and strategic policy of collecting and exhibiting industrial arts and design are quite rare. One can mention the Národní technické muzeum (National Technical Museum) in Prague, which comprises collections of Industrial design and Consumer industry – the Museum is currently closed, under renovation, to be reopened by Autumn 2010. Or the Powerhouse Museum, major branch of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, in Sydney, whose motto/logo reads “science+design”, and where design is not only considered in terms of decorative arts and furniture design (under the Design and Society curatorial department), but is also considered as product design (under the Science and Industry curatorial department). At the Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai, an entire section, The Cradle of Designers, is devoted to design, allowing people to discover computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacture (CAM) and to experiment designing and manufacturing. Moreover, as mentioned before in this blog, in 2009 the Science Museum in London and the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa decided to include design in their mission (see here and here).
Besides these cases, the tradition and the current panorama of science and technology museums already have lots to offer to the museology and museography of design, and to culture of design.
Consider, for example, the artefacts studies and researches developed by curators and scholars like those that are collected in the series of publications Artefacts: Studies in History of Science and Technology.
The result of the collaboration of the Science Museum in London, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, this series aims at exploring innovative approaches to the «object-oriented historiography of science and technology», beyond the «strict technical description of artefacts on the one hand, and an overly broad social history on the other» – as the Series Preface reads.
Each year an Artefact conference is held, where curators as well as science and technology scholars and historians share ideas on diverse topics – London’s Science Museum hosted the 14th edition in 2009, Canada Science and Technology Museum will host the 15th. These conferences also offer the occasion to attend workshops, working on artefacts’ interpretation, and in the end to select some papers for the publications.
So far the series – which is currently edited by Robert Bud, Science Museum, Bernard Finn, Smithsonian Institution, and Helmut Trischler, Deutsches Museum – include the following issues, each of them having special curators: Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines, ed. by Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, Helmuth Trischler, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999; Exposing Electronics, ed. by Bernard Finn, with Robert Bud, Helmuth Trischler, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000; Tackling Transport, ed. by Helmuth Trischler, Stefan Zeilinger, London, Science Museum, 2003; Materializing the Military, ed. by Bernard Finn, Barton C. Hacker, London, Science Museum, 2005; Presenting Pictures, ed. by Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, Helmuth Trischler, London, Science Museum, 2005 (see also the review in “Journal of Design History”, vol. 18, 2005, n. 3, pp. 307-309); Showcasing Space, ed. by Martin Collins, Douglas Millard, London, Science Museum, 2006; Illuminating Instruments, ed. by Peter Morris, Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press; next one should be on musical instruments.

«There is no room here for the objects», complained Bernard Finn, introducing the second volume of the series, making reference to the little attention historians of technology still paied to the study of artifacts. And he pointed to the objectives of the publications:

«Our goal is to persuade other historians that artefacts are fruitful sources of inspiration and of evidence, which might help persuade them to pay more attention to the collections we have so carefully accumulated in our museums».[1]

Against the risk that even the history and interpretation of technology in museums put the artifacts in the background, in favour of the study of literature and texts, Finn recalled the method of archaeologists, for whom the objects are the primary source of information and evidence, and he reminded the different values and opportunities arising from the artefacts study: from inspiration, which may come from direct contact with objects and their physical and material analysis that can reveal information beyond literature, up to the study design and the “style” of technology.

Indeed, what is interesting to notice is that, while the authors do not focus exclusively on design, many of the papers included in the series actually investigate histories and addess topics which also deal with design history and issues. One may argue that precisely because they are not interested in making statements on “good design” (whatever it means), and because they draw from systemic approaches for the analysis of technology and from material culture and archeology methods to study the artefacts, the authors explore histories well beyond the object per se, by analysing the contexts of conception and design, the systems of production and sale, of use and consumption of various products, from prostheses to automobiles, from computer to weapons.
To put it in the words of Tomás Maldonado, some of these papers look at both sides of that dialectic relationship «between needs and objects, between production and consumption», at the «focal point» where industrial design really happens.[2]
Artefacts series: worth reading…

Notes

[1] Bernard Finn, in Exposing Electronics, ed. by Bernard Finn, with Robert Bud, Helmuth Trischler, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000, p. 1.
[2] Tomás Maldonado, Disegno industriale: un riesame, new ed., Milano, Feltrinelli, 1991 (1st ed. 1976), pp. 14-15.

Posted in Design Culture, Design History, Museums, Resources and References, Reviews, Science and Technology

Industrial Design at the Canada Science
and Technology Museum, Ottawa

Written by maddamura on February 19, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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© photo Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa

In 2009 the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa started a programme and strategy to collect and exhibit industrial design. While the programme is still under development, some points seem to be quite clear. As far as can be learned from the considerations made by the curatorial staff, this case promise to lay a significant example for science and technology museums that will aim to engage with design. Moreover, it will certainly contribute in elaborating and spreading the culture of design among a wider public, advancing approaches and facing issues which may be rather different from those to which art museums and design museums have accustomed us.

I had the chance to interview Anna Adamek, appointed Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Design, who shared her ideas and vision for the future of industrial design at the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

Museums of science and technology preserve and even exhibit objects of design, and they often deal with issues which are relevant for design history and practice. But cases of science and technology museums explicitly dealing with design are quite rare if not unique. Why did you decide to start a specific program for collecting and exhibiting industrial design?
One of our aim at the CSTM is to keep technology and society together in our interpretations, but that still leaves the creative process of design, a crucial element, missing. In the recent past we have been conducting sporadic research on design of technological objects for a while – for instance the design of locomotives, the design of carriages that were intended to be used by ladies or by gentlemen, the use of green colour in medicine, industrial transfers, decals placed on ships and railway to display corporate identity of the companies that owned them, etc. etc. So even though we conducted this research in unsystematic way, we did it because we felt that there was something missing in the interpretation of technologies.

Your position reads “Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Design”. Why are these areas kept together?
We do operate in an institutional structure, and it is not easy to change jobs to incorporate a new collection area. As the former curator of the Energy and Natural Resources retired, it gave us an opportunity to redefine the job, to include ID. It was a purely organizational opportunity. Of course, the fact that ID is incorporated into one curator’s job and is juxtaposition with Natural Resources may pose some problems – for instance, the curator may not be seen as an expert on the topic (but I would never claim to be!). But I think that there are also some advantages: this merger of two subject areas represents the basic philosophical approach that we would like to take, that is to say that the creative process of ID is present in every aspect of technology, and that we will not separate it from technological artifacts; it shows that we perceive ID as more than esthetics; it allows us to be eclectic and not to fall under one “-ism”; we can form partnership with the industry and with academia to enrich our interpretation while telling a story that goes beyond design; we can cooperate with design museums and enrich our exhibits and theirs.
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Posted in Case Studies, Design and Museums Issues, Museums, Science and Technology

Interview with Galit Gaon
Creative Director of the Design Museum, Holon, Israel

Written by maddamura on January 25, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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photo: © Design Museum Holon

On January 31, 2010, the Design Museum in Holon, Israel, will be inaugurated. Actually, the building will open its doors, while another six weeks will be needed for the opening of the first exhibition.
During my PhD research, on October 27, 2009, I had the opportunity to interview Galit Gaon, who is the Creative Director of the Museum.
Although it is too early to make any evaluation of the overall project, and although it is the iconic architecture by Ron Arad Associates that is taking most of the attention so far – an architecture which «could be featured on a postage stamp», as the architects were required – it seems that Gaon and her staff definitely did not miss to ponder on the museological program and the curatorial approach.

May we start from the architecture? Reading the press release, it seems this was the starting point, wasn’t it?
I am involved in this museum from last summer; the project was from Ron Arad Architects, there were two people involved in this project, one is Asa Bruno and the other is Daniel Charny who is now a curator in the Design Museum [London], but at that time was working with Asa, and they were writing the program for the museum, there was no curator involved. So the program was based on different design museums they have visited, and the conclusions they had from their visits, and they started about the museum… so there was no curatorial questions at the moment. Of course, contemporary design was scheduled very early, as have international exhibitions, travelling exhibitions, and also original exhibitions. But this is so general, we could have designed anything after this sentence.

Have you already a vision of the position of the museum in the “museum world”?
No, not yet, because it is not open. We know the position on the architectural side. Not yet in the curatorial side, and I think it will take us 5 years to understand where we stand in the line of design museums. In architectural side, we should be the only museum for design ,the building is specifically designed for this, it is not an old building or different house, it is a museum designed to be a design museum, which means that the architecture is designed to be a part of the museum.

Like the Vitra…
Ok, Vitra Design Museum of course was designed to be a design museum, but Vitra was at the beginning a museum for traveling exhibitions and was not sponsored by the municipality or with public money, it was a private museum. I am talking about public museums, not the private, commercial ones.

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Posted in Design Museums, Interviews

Interview with Esther Cleven
Curator of the Graphic Design Museum, Breda,
The Netherlands

Written by maddamura on January 20, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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Some months ago, I found online and read an interesting paper by Esther Cleven, curator of the Graphic Design Museum of Breda and professor of design history at the University of Amsterdam (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Added Value and the Museum. Developing a Museum for Graphic Design in De Beyerd, Breda, presented at the international conference of the Design History Society, Design and Evolution, held at the TU in Delft on September 2, 2006. In this paper Cleven advances thoughtful reflections on the world of museums and more specifically about design museums.
I recently had the chance to talk and exchange ideas with Esther Cleven, on December 4, 2009, about design museums and her curatorial work at the Graphic Design Museum in Breda – a museum that I have not visited so far, but that I certainly will visit soon.

Reading your paper, I found interesting that you also noticed that the Technisches Museum Wien in Vienna has a great historical exhibition about technology and society, which is also an exhibition on design history. In 2009 Jeremy Aynsley’s “Designing Modern Germany” was published, and I think that if one wishes to visit an exhibition concerning some topics he deals with, well, you can find it at the Technisches Museum in Vienna. This might seem quite incredible. As I mentioned, I am looking for museums dealing with design under diverse perspectives, so of course I am also interested in your approach. As far as I read from your paper, you considered a wider panorama of museums in the Netherlands and in the field of design, and you also considered how important it is to stress and remind that design is to be understood in its social dimension… something which is not so usual in design museums, surprisingly…
Yes I know, it astonishes me as well.

… I can understand it is difficult to build exhibitions and to work inside institutions which may have a certain kind of tradition, and where you are probably not so free to pursue just intellectual considerations. Anyway, in my research I studied the history of museums dealing with design, and what I could see is that it is true, that still today there is the need to remind that design does not exist outside society.
I think the main reason for that is probably that most of the design museums or museums dealing with design are related to the history of art and the economy of collecting art. As a result they have a problem with the way in which design is valued by society as a collector’s item – it is about quality and value in terms of money. I think private collectors, antiquarians and art dealers still do have a lot to say about the evaluation of design within museums (of which, by the way, quite some designers are happy). If they are not directly involved, they shape public ideas on how to value design as much as they do in the case of art. Consequently, curators are very much imprisoned by these relations and stereotypes, and they are not so free to look on design from an academic or outsider view. Furthermore, and maybe because of this traditional art context, they may be less involved with presentation and narration.

I can see there are some changes actually. Still, there are recently born museums just dealing with contemporary design, and they seem to have again the same problem…
Yes, in these cases museums turn into marketing tools. It’s an effect we have to deal with in Breda as well and it’s a challenge to get around it. First of all, whenever museums share their institutional reputation, they do, more or less automatically, upmarket what is shown. Design too. Furthermore, today design is marketing. That is to say, it is marketed heavily and in order to do so it is iconized, in terms of names and objects, hitting to the antiquarian view of design. As a result it is more difficult to get the public to look at design differently, because they’re used too see design being marketed in magazines, shops, on TV or whatever, showing design as an icon, as something different from daily life. In the museum in Breda we tried to do is saying “design is part of daily life”. Many seem not to agree, but - we’re now open since one year and a half - people seem to understand what we did in the permanent exhibition. Nevertheless, they find it difficult to adapt their view that is formed by traditional art museums, the economy of the art market and design marketing to that historical approach: they still tend to expect an exhibition where the object is central. Unluckily, in a sense we feed that expectation because we decided to give the objects, as materials, a lot of space – because graphic needs that, tends to become a picture when you show it on the wall or in a frame - we concentrated on showing them as material objects to make them more “approachable”…

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Posted in Interviews

Raising the stake for design museums?
Bill Moggridge appointed new director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Written by maddamura on January 19, 2010 — Leave a Comment

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The year 2010 begins with an important news: Bill Moggridge, a founder of the design firm IDEO, has been named director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in New York, to be effective by March 2010 – see the “New York Times” article.
While it certainly marks a significant change in the history of this institution, which for decades has repeatedly tried to establish its identity as a museum of design, this event can be looked at as a signal to the wider world of design museums.
As it is known, the origins of the Cooper-Hewitt museum date back to the late nineteenth century, when the Hewitt sisters – nieces of the iron magnate Peter Cooper, who had already set in Manhattan, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art – founded in 1897 a museum of applied arts. Like many museums of applied arts born at the time, however, the Cooper-Hewitt was soon to face the difficult relationship between its historic collections and the development of contemporary production of goods, in a society that was growingly turning to industry. In its past, then, this institution often had to come to terms with its identity and its role, and in some way with the meaning of its existence.
The 1960s marked a particularly difficult time. In June 1963 the “New York Times” ran an article, Cooper Union Plans to Close its Museum, which underlined that the museum «does not contribute substantially to Cooper Union’s broad education program in engineering, science, art and architecture».(1)
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Posted in Design Museums

The strange case of Mr. Schwarz
Could museums of design help changing his mind?

Written by maddamura on January 18, 2010 — Leave a Comment

In year 2000, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York organized and presented Design Culture Now, the first edition of the triennial event which aims at providing «present critical overviews of key developments in American design» (National Design Triennial). In the first edition, more than eighty projects were selected «to highlight the current blurring of traditional boundaries through the exchange of techniques and ideas among once concrete disciplines». In the very same year, Frederic D. Schwarz, editor of “American Heritage” took the hint from this and another exhibition at the American Craft Museum in New York, actually not really to follow the blurring identified by the curators at Cooper-Hewitt, but to trace some clear-cut distinctions between disciplines like art, craft, design and engineering.
Evaluating the projects exhibited at the National Design Triennial as well as considering the categories identified by the curators – which were organized around notions such as “physical”, “minimal”, “reclaimed”, “fluid” etc. –, in his article Arts and Crafts and Engineering, Mr. Schwarz asserted without hesitation that while the criterion for distinguishing what craft is, is “authenticity” and some reference to tradition, the criterion to tell what design is, is “appearance”:

«For design, the inescapable criterion is appearance: A well-designed object must look good. The method of its creation is irrelevant, which is why a talented industrial designer can go from cars to buildings to drink dispensers to book jackets, while craft workers tend to specialize in one thing. And while function should ideally be taken into account, it is often decidedly secondary, as anyone who has sat in a modernist armchair can attest. Indeed, some of the most familiar triumphs of industrial design, such as Raymond Loewy’s locomotive bodies, are nothing more than decorations for the technology underneath».

In comparison and, one might say, as opposed to design, Schwarz portrays engineering as follows:

«As for engineering, the sine qua non is simple: It has to work. While a well engineered bridge or automobile will usually be aesthetically pleasing, poorly engineered examples can look just as good. If they collapse or fail to start, however, no amount of art theory will remedy the situation. This is what sets engineering apart from the allied disciplines mentioned above – and why good engineering is best experienced not in a museum but in the ordinary course of our daily lives».

Putting aside the narrow consideration Schwarz seems to have of museums – identifying them just with the art museum and as a place that is separate from where daily life actually occurs –, let’s focus on the misunderstanding and misinterpretation that support his view on design. A kind of misunderstanding that is not rare, not even in the new millennium.

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Posted in Design Culture, Design Museums, Design and Museums Issues

Design in Museums: Towards an Integrative Approach

Written by maddamura on September 20, 2009 — Leave a Comment

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Maddalena Dalla Mura, Design in Museums: Towards an Integrative Approach. The Potential
of Science and Technology Museums, in “Journal of Design History”, 22/3, 2009, pp. 259-270

Abstract:

To deal with design in museums today means not only to look at well-established design museums but also to integrate different resources and explore the potential of other types of institutions engaged in the preservation, study and exhibition of artefacts, documents and stories of the modern world. This article focuses on science and technology museums to suggest how they may contribute to improve and spread the understanding of this phenomenon among a wider public. Three cases of European museums, which already display an interest in design, are presented with the intent to show that these institutions should be regarded not only as repositories to draw on but also as autonomous interpreters of design. The aim is to provide a basis for further discussion, to eventually rethink the position of design in museums.

The article can be accessed/purchased from the “Journal of Design History”

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Random Quote

… museum visiting needs practice; and visiting museums where artifacts do the talking needs the most practice of all. — 
Roger Bridgman, Information Age. A Critique, in Exposing Electronics, 2000, p. 149

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This work by Maddalena Dalla Mura is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Italy License.