Earlier this month, I very much enjoyed participating in a two-day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum to mark the fortieth anniversary of the history of design postgraduate programme run jointly by the V&A and the Royal College of Art. ‘Change Over Time/Time for Change’ was convened by Sarah Cheang and Spike Sweeting, course leaders at the college and the museum respectively (Spike has now passed his leadership role to Yuko Kikuchi).

Sarah Cheang and Spike Sweeting launching their Change over Time / Time for Change conference.

Sarah and Spike kindly asked me to speak for 20-30 minutes about my current research project, The Hand Book. What a honour to open the conference by sharing my research with a focussed audience. My talk, about material intelligence, and handling as a method for design history, was based on a chapter I had published recently. The topic was divided into three parts for the talk:

I started by reflecting on some academic contexts that design historians could draw on to understand the value of handling as a research method, from archaeology and material culture atudies, to anthropology, history and sensory history.

I then reflected on my experience of handling objects in the course of my research for The Hand Book at museums and archives, including the V&A, the archive of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.

I closed with some snapshots from my experience of writing about and sharing my research findings and the way in which subjective findings require different writing strategies and language to the standard academic writing norms that are inculcated through research seminars, conferences (not this one!) and edited books.

The opening panel also showcased talks by William Tullett (University of York) - ‘Smell by Accident and Design: Automobile Odours’ - and ‘Sonically-attuned design histories: Directions in research and communication’ by Emily Candela (RCA). I was delighted to be grouped with these two researchers, whose work I have followed keenly over the past several years. The three talks sat together well, addressing design and touch, smell and sound respectively and setting the agenda for sensory design histories.

Louise Purbrick started Panel Two, Ecologies, with a presentation titled ‘Liquidity: a small history of extractivism between the Atacama Desert and South Kensington’. Influenced by Edward Said, and Walter Benjamin, and applying JB Foster’s development of Alfred Crosby’s notion of Eco-Imperialism, Purbrick reflected on sodium nitrate, first used as a fertiliser in place of guano, and then valued as an explosive. Purbrick pointed out that water is variously a liquid, a solid and a gas and then noted the ambiguity of the term liquidity as pointing to liquid and capitalism, and the lithosphere of rocks. Through the medium of photography, Purbrick’s poignant account transported delegates to the desert. As one questioner pointed out, Purbrick drew on different photographic methods which each used a material that was discussed: sodium nitrate used in printing film photography, and lithium used in digital cameras, respectively.

Purbrick was followed by Henrik Schoenefeldt, whose talk, ‘Lost climates - An inquiry into the tangible and intangible dimensions of an environmental history of design’ provided a glimpse of the inner workings of the Palace of Westminster, composed of pipes, boilers and vents. In Schoenfeldt’s account this iconic building became a machine of sorts, albeit a now rather decrepit and inefficient one. Aditya Ramesh rounded out the panel with ‘Designing the large dam: from monsoon colonialism to the developmental state’. In India, the colonial rollout of reservoirs to otherwise parched regions brought with it standing water and therefore deadly mosquito-borne disease.

The last panel of the day, Ephemeralities, saw an art historical analysis of two of Constable’s paintings of locks by Zirwat Chowdhury and Irit Katz’s analysis of ‘Mobile Architecture and its Colonial Legacies‘ and especially temporary housing for refugees, from tented cities to the highly controversial Bibby Stockholm boat, as ‘Spaces of Expansion and Exclusion’.

Professor Emeritus Jeremy Aynsley delivering a keynote talk on the development of design history

Finally, Jeremy Aynsley reflected on how design history has changed over the years. He expressed some concern about encyclopaedic projects such as the World History of Design (Margolin, Houze and Rajguru, eds.) and shared his opinion that the V&A’s series of blockbuster exhibitions such as Art Deco and Cold War Modern were important interventions at the time, whose moment has now passed. Aynsley closed his talk with views from other design historians about important themes for the future of the field, including Kjetil Fallan emphasising environmental histories of design, Zeina Maasri contributing a silence as a response to the war in Gaza and Israel, and Alice Twemlow adding to my production-consumption-mediation paradigm, a fourth phase of disposal. Had Aynsley asked my view, I would have emphasised the growing critical mass of work on the design history of disability, including publications by Bess Williamson, Elizabeth Guffey and Aimie Hamraie, but instead I contributed this addition to the question session after the keynote.

Friday morning began with a panel chaired by Josie Kane on what the V&A/RCA History of Design programme calls ‘Public-Facing Practice’. I query this term because it implies one-way communication, unlike the term with which I am more familiar, ‘public engagement’. Justine Boussard promoted her commercial tours of the South Kensington museums, as well as her community co-production projects such as one which created a commemorative medal for a threatened and rescued allotment, as all being bound up with empathy for our ancestors. Harriet Atkinson described the process of making her 2023 documentary film ‘Art on the Streets’ as one of ‘Wearing learning lightly’. Harriet conceived, researched, wrote and directed the film with the support of a five-year Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship grant. Finally, Johanna Agermann Ross spoke about ‘Design Stories: creating captivating narratives’ focussing on one exhibition she had curated at Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Gothenburg, Sweden.

ART ON THE STREETS - TRAILER from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Day two keynote Laura Osorio Sunnucks shared an account of her work with indigenous communities in Latin America, specifically the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, who make and use the remarkable, intense and unfading Maya Blue pigment. The final conference panel, simply termed ‘Decolonising’, kicked off with V&A curator Angus Patterson’s account of the complexity of the museum’s small collection of Asante Gold at the V&A and the UK legislation preventing deaccessioning. Architect and educator Neal Shasore followed with an analysis of The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924) and the conference ended with Davinia Gregory zooming in from the US to provide some tantalising glimpses of a book co-edited with Sabrina Rahman, The Routledge Companion to Race & Design, as going ‘Beyond Design History’. Gregory explained that some knowledge cannot be learned through reading, it is based on lived experience. Gregory noted the key role of Frantz Fanon’s activism in the process of decolonisation, and the ways in which decolonisation of the curriculum is compromised. Unfortunately, the contents of the book could not be revealed at this time, but it is all the more anticipated as a result.

The conference was followed by a reunion at the RCA, opened by V&A Director, Tristram Hunt and departing College Vice-Chancellor Paul Thompson. Some key teaching staff also gave speeches. Christopher Frayling recalled how he conceived the idea of a joint course at a time when relations between the college and the museum were at a low ebb. Frayling approached the V&A’s director, Sir Roy Strong, with the idea of a masters degree delivered jointly as a way of bringing the two institutions together and allowing students to benefit from the expertise of the staff in each place. Both Frayling and John Styles (University of Hertfordshire), who left a post at Bristol University to teach on the joint course when it launched, recalled that persuading some of the museum curators to support the course was a difficult task. Penny Sparke remembered the late Gillian Naylor and Clive Wainwright, wishing for them to be in the room with us that evening. It was fun to chat with colleagues I hadn’t met for a long while, and those I had seen more recently. I am already looking forward to the 50 the anniversary in ten years time. I wonder how things will be different then.