Conclusion

visual engagement with art.”279 These exhibitions will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3 when I explicitly discuss the development of the Design Museum as a context for my own curatorial practice.

Conclusion

As this chapter has identified, the last two decades have witnessed significant changes to the operating landscape for museums in the UK resulting in a rapidly shifting landscape for curatorial practice. The chapter has marked out the emergence of new discourses surrounding the design exhibition. Fluctuating budgets, advances in digital technologies and evolving audience expectations have presented new challenges, but also opportunities for contemporary curators. In the present moment, the field is being influenced by a multitude of cross-cultural and global conversations which are opening up new definitions, processes and ways of working.

One of the most significant discussions in the field of contemporary design curating practice, as well as in cultural institutions more broadly, is how institutions can more successfully interact and engage with their audiences. This research has suggested that contemporary curatorial approaches are informed by a sophisticated understanding of the motivations for visiting an exhibition and the devices available to foster direct engagement with its content. The shift towards highly designed environments, adopting approaches common to the leisure and retail industries, has extended into the design exhibition.

Since the late 1990s a number of educational theorists have promoted the idea that education and entertainment are related and complementary aspects of the museum experience.280 Educational and

279

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, 1976.

280

Educational theories include; Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, The Educational Role of the Museum, London: Routledge, 1999; John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking (eds.) The Museum Experience Revisited, London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

entertainment-related needs are provided by exhibitions but also by learning programmes and public programmes. Whilst museums and galleries are fundamentally educational in character, entertainment in museums has the potential to offer something new, exciting and potentially valuable as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill identified in 1994:-

“Entertainment in museums, however it might be presented, is used as a method of education, in the full knowledge that leaning is best achieved in circumstances of enjoyment.”281

In 2016 Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, London was interviewed shortly after the museum’s move to a new location in Kensington, west London. As more museums compete with spectacular attractions, entertainment and the internet, he was asked how the Design Museum had reacted. Sudjic responded by saying that Terence Conran, the founder of the museum, had tried to introduce the same elements of change. The first time a car was displayed at the V&A in 1981, as part of the Boilerhouse Project, it provoked a strong public response. The subjects of the Boilerhouse exhibitions included Coca-Cola, Sony Design and Issey Miyake, all of which were seen as transgressive at the time. Even the techniques of display, to put film inside a display was seen as “somehow not done, somehow too flashy, too showy”. Sudjic went on to say:-

“Museums in those days were dominated by the keepers whose primary objective was to amass great objects and look after them, and a wider audience was distracting, or might damage things. Nowadays, museums have shifted to a more narrative, curatoriallyled approach. It’s more like journalism. Using things to say something is important.”282

The following chapter turns its attention to the Design Museum, London as the institutional context for my professional practice and practice-informed

281 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and their Visitors, London: Routledge, 1994: 140.

282

Herbert Wright, ‘Understanding the World through Design’, CoBo Social webarchive, 23 November 2016. Available at https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/deyan-sudjic-interview/ (Accessed 10.02.18).

research. The chapter will examine how the key shifts and approaches identified and discussed in Chapter 2 influenced policies and programming at the museum, and translated to the way in which design exhibitions and events were conceived and presented.