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.
