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”…

… like material documents, not monuments…
Yes, we also decided to show that posters have a back as well, that brochures have internal pages… Because we did point out the tactile aspect, people tend to look at it as an iconized object. So, even if we gave them context, the atmosphere, the stories, narration like you can see in other kinds of museums as technical museums and historical museums… some public tends to see them as objects only, and evaluate them as if they were in an art museum.

It’s a hard job, to move perception further.
Yes. You asked me [in an email] if we had any problems. Making the exhibition [100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design] was fun, it was interesting to think about the aims, and how to get context into the exhibitions. I looked a lot at science museums, since they did a lot of experimentation in the 1990s, also with art installations within them, and also at historical museums, how do they do deal with storytelling, and I learned that these museums are dealing with the building of the experience much more than art museums. They have the storytelling within the space, and they use the space, interaction, lights to tell stories… I tried to get that into our museum, and I think we succeeded in it. But then we had to learn that not all people are used to get into these kinds of experience, because they do not go in these museums.

It’s a different public.
Yes, our public is designers and mainly students who want to become designers or work in the field of media and communication, and people in their 50s and 60s, the typical art-interested public, and they are used at art museums and they want get in touch with the “extraordinary”. This public does not get the exhibition as we intended it. But then you also get the people from around the corner, and we also have a lot of tourists in summer… these people are really happy with this exhibition. So we do reach them because they can connect with daily life and storytelling, they visit different kinds of museums, and they are used to be involved in experiences like that. Well we did not make maybe an experience, we just used different techniques to tell the story, and they do understand the story. So the art and design public is really difficult.

Yes, and I think this is one main problem that design museums still have, to attract a different public, which you cannot attract if you do not connect design to their experience and daily life, or to their memories…
It is interesting you asked me that question, since we now as museum have to deal with this topic: which direction to go, and if we go towards the normal public then how to deal with the art museums public, and the other way round. A general public is interested in the historical, social and economic side of design history, the history of ideas too, it gives them a starting point to understand design. And then the other ambition, to connect with the art and design public, more interested in the future of design. How to get both these audiences is an issue.
When we opened, we had it clear cut, having the permanent exhibition for the big public, people who do not know anything about design, like an introduction – which is also interesting for designers – and we had an exhibition especially made for children, completely a different experience, and we also had an exhibition about contemporary design, completely different from the permanent exhibition, giving space to designers to do their projects and installations etc. So we have now all these things in the museum, but, you know, in a time of crisis, cultural institutions are really going now into a hard period, and it is tough to keep all these balls up in the air.

Is the institution funded by the city of Breda?
Yes mainly by the city of Breda, but there is also money coming from the Province and the State and a little of sponsoring. Institutions in Holland have been privatized a lot in the past ten years or so, and we all need to look for money, and now with the crisis is really getting difficult for the first time. We’ll see where this is going.

As far as the permanent exhibition is concerned, I could see images from the installation; did you use captions and labels to convey information to the visitors, about contexts and so on?
Well, the problem of how to get information across is still in an experimental state. We have a handout with an abstract of the relation between graphic design and society in the 20th century. We knew that only few people would read all of that and it is not the perfect medium. But we are happy that people are taking it with them, and read it afterwards once they are home. It is a story in itself, but it is also quite intellectual, in a sense. At the moment we do develop also an iPhone application, so people can make a link from the object to stories and contents. All of that means, we tend not to put too much text into the exhibition, because graphic design involves a lot of text in itself already, you know…

I see, of course, it may be even harder, since you have text on the “objects” and you should use text.
Yes, that is the main reason why we invested so much in other means to tell the story. The atmosphere and light of the spaces is telling stories about the diverse periods, e.g.. We have projections and sounds. We also have interactive elements, that do make people experience that communication is getting more interactive and individual. People can skip and do different things, too. As a curator you have to let go the idea that you can tell the whole story. That is what I learnt. Usually history museums do not deal with this problem, they tend to build the walk through the exhibition like Ikea, you have to start at A and you really have to follow each step; but people do not really use exhibitions in that way, they skip, they zap like watching TV. So you have to try to get the atmosphere in those details like they can zap into, and probably they will not get the whole story but they do not need to, as long as they do understand the main point of the storyline: graphic design in Holland is part of modernization, its development is connected to how Holland did modernize. If they get that point they are already very far, I think.

I have the idea that graphic design is more part of common culture, or there is a higher awareness about visual communication in Holland than in Italy, where also there is not public awareness form the government, beside the idea/image of “made Italy”…
Well, it is interesting, I think that design in Holland is a bigger industry than anywhere else, that is probably the way to put it. When Holland was modernized and industrialized the designers got involved in the building of the country, and that is not so long ago, 50-60 years ago. That is different form other countries where modernization started earlier, and the design industry was not as big as it is now. So we can say also that in Holland it is more a systematic thing, but also really about communication thinking, where Italy is more connected to art thinking, and individual companies that work with designers but more as a private project. But in the end I would hesitate to say that Dutch people are more design-minded.

I read you are developing a database of graphic design, how it works, does it include videos or interviews with designers still alive, or which kind of information?
Technology is difficult for museums. Since 2002 we’ve been looking to develop a knowledge database for theweb, where you connect to different locations where information is gathered. We were focusing on making links. We have a file system with files on subjects, peoples, we try to find sites on the web where that stuff may be public. The Dutch Design Archives and the Dutch Advertising Arsenal (NAGO and ReclameArsenaal) publish all their objects including archives on the web. But also we want to reflect to what happened to the status of information because of the internet and democratization. In the paper you read I talked about how to get different views into the institutional context. It is not an easy issue, but you have to deal with it. People want to share not just information but their vision, their personal position, so it is a deal about who is in the position of giving information. There is not one answer. I still believe that institutionalization is a process… it seems as if museums are not in power anymore, but I think that we see how this process of institutionalization of knowledge works on the web: people share information, but this become relevant as long as it is becoming part of a network, as an institution. So we can see this process, and we have to discuss it with the public.

Are you also hosting exhibitions from abroad and international design?
Yes, in the exhibitions the focus is on picking up issues of media and visual culture, not just the focus on Dutch graphic design history. They focus on exchange about what is going on internationally.