Author Archives:
Artefacts Series
learning from science and technology museums
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, [...]
Industrial Design at the Canada Science
and Technology Museum, Ottawa
© 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 [...]
Interview with Galit Gaon
Creative Director of the Design Museum, Holon, Israel
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 [...]
Interview with Esther Cleven
Curator of the Graphic Design Museum, Breda,
The Netherlands
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 [...]
Raising the stake for design museums?
Bill Moggridge appointed new director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
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 [...]
The strange case of Mr. Schwarz
Could museums of design help changing his mind?
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 [...]
Design in Museums: Towards an Integrative Approach
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 [...]
Design Museum, London
Stretches, controversies, identity
In the article Establishing the Manifesto. Art Histories in the Nineteenth-century museum by Christopher Whitehead which I already mentioned and quoted, the author also offered some recent cases where museological and curatorial projects might be read and interpreted as agents of “boundary work”. Among these, he reported about two exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert [...]
