Category Archives: Design and Museums Reader
Gavina: Lampi di Design
exhibition, MAMbo, Bologna
«This exhibition provides a platform of enquiry that offers a clear and simple reading, for further critical studies, taking on board something which for Gavina was always a necessary condition: keeping up with his time.»
With these words Elena Brigi and Daniele Vincenzi present the exhibition, of which they are curators, Dino Gavina: Lampi di Design [...]
>Reflections on a design museum for Japan
Journalist Edan Corkill, in “The Japan Times”, offers some reflections on what a design museum in Japan could be. Writing about the exhibition Design: ’60s vs. ’00s, organized by D-8, the Japan Design Association Meeting, held at Mikimoto Hall in Tokyo’s Ginza district, Corkill not only describes the sections of it but reports extracts of [...]
Bibliography of Design
image: “Museums and collections”, from A Bibliography of Design in Britain, 1851-1970, by Anthony J. Coulson, London, Design Council, 1979, p. 51.
Where can bibliographies on design be found?
Besides list of references included in books, monographs, and essays on design, it is really hard to find bibliographies on design issues as a discrete subject — but [...]
A Design and Museums Reader #4
Meikle, 1998
«… there has also been a crucial shift in the way American art museums display and interpret designed objects. Back in 1983, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a major exhibition on ‘Design Since 1945′, curators of the decorative arts concentrated on defining styles, canonizing works by ‘great’ designers, and highlighting the aesthetic quality [...]
A Design and Museums Reader #3
Dilnot, 1984
«Design activity since 1945 can be explained by paying attention to the main motors of economic-industrial motivation in this period. However, resistance to “theory” and to concepts brought in from other disciplines or areas is often rooted in the dislike of the idea that the imported concepts are merely background. However, factors such as [...]
A Design and Museums Reader #2
Whiteley, 1995
«Design doesn’t exist for its own sake – much to the disappointment of unreformed Modernists and some curators of white cubic museum. It exists, instead, in real lives, real situations, real places, and real time.»
Nigel Whiteley, Design History or Design Studies, in “Design Issues”, vol. 11, 1995, 1, Spring, pp. 38-42: 38.
photo: Alessandro Mendini’s Proust [...]
A Design and Museums Reader #1
Papanek, 1974
«It is most interesting to compare the many museum catalogues of “well-designed objects”. Whether printed in the twenties, thirties, fifties or seventies, the objects are usually the same: a few chairs, some automobiles, cutlery, lamps, ashtrays, and maybe a photograph of the ever-present DC-3 aeroplane. Innovation of new objects seems to go more and more [...]
