Conclusion

signalled an evolving curatorial strategy, that was moving away from the original focus of the museum on the mass manufactured object when it opened in 1989. In 2018 McGuirk revealed a new curatorial strategy for the Design Museum that was intended to underpin all of its activities.384 Three programming strands would guide future curatorial programming at the museum. The intention was to offer a range of subjects to appeal to broad audiences that made the impact of design visible. The exhibitions and displays would interpret design as a process and as a way of thinking, rather than the finished object.

The first strand, Design for an Expanded Audience, is intended to appeal to a larger, broader audience and presents a blockbuster type of exhibition. Examples of this approach are Ferrari: Under the Skin (15 November 2017 -15 April 2018); Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier (10 May - 7 October 2018) and Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition (planned for 26 April - 17 September 2019). The second strand, Design in a Changing World, offers subjects considered by the museum to be ‘less popular’ subjects but ones which are incredibly important reflecting design’s response to wider political, social and cultural issues. Examples of this type of thematic exhibition would be the museum’s annual Beazley Designs of the Year, California: Designing Freedom (24 May - 15 October 2017) and Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008 - 18 (28 March - 12 August 2018). The third strand, Design as Practice, explores how designers work and think and invites designers into the museum “to think in public”. Examples of this focus on contemporary practice in design include the museum’s annual Designers in Residence programme and exhibitions Breathing Colour by Hella Jongerius (28 June - 24 September 2017) and David Adjaye: Making Memory (planned for 2 February to 5 May 2019).

Conclusion

Since opening in 1989, the Design Museum has provided a platform for the many views of what design can be, through its exhibitions programme,

384

Justin McGuirk, Presentation to MA Curating Contemporary Design students at the Design Museum, 26 September 2018.

learning and public programme, its design awards and residencies. An analysis of its programming activity since 1989 has revealed that the museum has been interested in fashion, architecture, product design, graphic design, transport and technology, in socially vital projects and speculative research and in designers who pose questions with their work as well as those who try to answer them. It also reflects the museum’s dominant focus on industrial design and western male designers which, in 2004, resulted in very public tensions between the Director and the trustees. The introduction of exhibitions addressing the areas of fashion and craft and its changing missions statements suggest a continual attempt by the museum to capture and interpret a rapidly changing landscape for design.

The Design Museum, and the Boilerhouse Project before it, used the medium of the exhibition as the primary vehicle with which to communicate its definition of design. The exhibition has the potential to offer both a narrative and an experiential approach and, as a discussion of selected past exhibitions has shown, the museum has employed both approaches. New curatorial strategies have, in turn, created new and expanded roles for the curator.

The museum’s Director, Deyan Sudjic, considers that the role of the curator is to mediate and to explain, to tell an effective and engaging story in as few words as possible, and to bring together images and objects that can evoke, or provoke. In his view, the curator’s task is to select and be selective. To do so, the curator needs to understand the gap between curatorial intentions and the impact that a display has on an audience.385 Sudjic has used the analogy of the theatre, suggesting that running a museum is like running a theatre. In both, there is a visible response to the programme from visitors. If visitors like what the museum is doing they will spend time there, if they don’t, they won’t come. But for Sudjic there is something about an exhibition that, when it works, will persuade many

385

Penny Sparke & Deyan Sudjic, Representing Architecture: New discussions - ideologies, techniques, curation, London: Design Museum, 2008: 21.

more people to pay for the experience that would invest the same amount in a book or magazine:-

“…an engaging physical exhibition…does indeed offer a richer, more immersive experience that speaks to more people than any depiction in a book or magazine. In the same way that live performances continue to flourish even as sales of recorded music have been decimated, so the primary shared physical experience that an exhibition offers has a future.”386

Significantly Sudjic uses the words ‘immersive’ and ‘experience’ which clearly reflect a more general shift in museums, discussed in Chapter 2 (2.7), represented by a move away from object-focused displays in favour of a more experiential exhibition environment.

Writing in 2016, the museum’s Chief Curator, Justin McGuirk, stated:-

“I want to get away from the idea of a design museum being a place where you put objects on plinths. I want a more experiential format that allows you to think about issues, ideas and experiences… Design used to be for the user but now the user is increasingly one of the determinants of the outcome.”387

The proposition that exhibitions have the potential to educate, entertain, engage and provoke is an idea to be explored in the following chapter. Chapter 4 examines the practice of curating design through a single case study, Hello, My Name is Paul Smith, an exhibition I curated at the Design Museum in 2013. I use my first-hand experience of curating the exhibition to discuss the processes, theories and methods behind it. I also want to show how it reflects and builds on the more recent developments in curating practice discussed in previous chapters, and how it might signpost future directions for curatorial practice in the field of contemporary design.

386 Deyan Sudjic, B is for Bauhaus, London: Penguin Books, 2014: 60.

387

Richard Martin, ‘What are design museums for?’, Apollo, 26 September 2016. Available at: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/what-are-design-museums-for/ (Accessed 10.03.18).