Design history research: how we help to develop a greater understanding of our global cultural heritage

Research in design history, allied with scholarship across material and visual cultures, has changed the ways in which history is framed and the way societies are understood. It has transformed how design work and designed objects give insight into social and cultural history.

The University of Brighton contributed significantly to the initial development of design history as a formal discipline in the late 1970s and continues to be a major centre for academic work. Over several decades, the university's research has helped to establish design history as an internationally influential discipline. It has transformed museum and archive approaches to acquisitions, promoted wider public understanding of design and  influenced the form and content of design courses around the world.

Building on its international reputation for the subject, history of design research at the University of Brighton has, for example, pioneered new methods of analysis and practices of interpretation. It has moved across disciplinary boundaries to redefine traditional narratives of design, with particular emphasis on interrogating design’s international and transnational networks. Research has been undertaken in partnership with cultural industries, museums, galleries and policymakers. Partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) exhibitions, for example, has created new engagement with design from specific periods and  progressed practical understanding of design and its cultural impact as well as prompting public dialogue and debate. 

The quality of the University of Brighton’s Design Archive collections and the excellence of its stewardship of these have been important benchmarks for scholarly design history developments in countries around the world. Examples from the many research investigations at the Centre for Design History demonstrate the extent to which the University of Brighton’s design history researchers have created new insights into identity, society and cultural history and how research has identified links between design history, contemporary culture and social history . 

 

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Craft, fashion, costume and naturism: research revives the aesthetics of British social movements

Professor Annebella Pollen’s research has explored the historical aesthetics of creative oppositional cultures, mystical beliefs and alternative spiritualities. Locating her work at the interface of dress history and social history, her work on the British Woodcraft Movement, with a particular focus on the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (1920 – 1951), undertook an exploration of art, craft, design and dress as contributing to identities through radical strategies of resistance and reform.

She located and analysed largely un-exhibited and unpublished public and private collections of Kibbo Kift artefacts, uncovering a largely forgotten aspect of British art, design and social and cultural history. Through detailed historical analysis of designed artefacts and a focus on symbolism in dress and design, Annebella Pollen’s research offered new insights and interpretations that connect the Kibbo Kift and their practices with contemporary popular public discourse on youth culture, design activism and radical resistance. This underpinned the exhibition she co-curated, Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred.

The reconstruction of this history brought the context and cultural life of this group into the present, attracting diverse audiences with reviews published in specialist craft, fashion, costume, popular culture and design blogs and journals, as well as mainstream press. Response to the research moved public perceptions of the Kibbo Kift from the idea of an isolated group to one connected to history, society and modern culture. Annebella Pollen’s book and Whitechapel exhibition also led to new forms of artistic expression in the fashion industry, and Sadie Williams, a London-born Young British Designer, cites this as the main source of inspiration for her Spring/Summer 2018 collection.

Annebella Pollen's interests in dress (and undress) as utopian and countercultural practices has continued into research on historical practices of social nudism, or naturism. Bringing naturists' ideas and images to light, Pollen's 2021 book, Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th-Century Britain draws on extensive naturist archival sources and has reached naturist communities internationally. The book's examination of popular photographic publishing also continues her interests in photographic genres that have not traditionally been considered worthy of academic scrutiny but which engage large numbers of participants, from photographic competitions to camera clubs.

Black and white photograph of traditional tent with striking decoration showing two adults and a child in a stylised landscape. Made by the Kibbo Kift. Courtesy of Annebella Pollen and the Kibbo Kift Foundation.

Angus McBean. Decorated Kibbo Kift tent, c.1928. Courtesy of Annebella Pollen, author of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (2015).

Digital Prospects for Inclusive Civic Historic Museums

Dr Lara Perry’s research has involved her working with a range of museums and museum professionals over the last decade. This has involved leading initiatives with, for example, networks of international galleries, including the Tate and the Smithsonian, to investigate feminist curation, and co-editing the associated publication, Politics in a glass case: feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions, a pioneering collection that offered an alternative narrative of feminism’s impact on art.

A recent project, Digital Prospects for Inclusive Civic Historic Museums, brought together three cultural organisations that focus on their local communities to develop and exchange digital ways of working with audiences. The project started up just as the Covid-19 pandemic did, and supported all the partners to develop their digital offer at this challenging time. This project has contributed to an evolving understanding of how cultural organisations can improve and evolve their service to their communities with the thoughtful and considerate use of more ordinary digital communications.

How individual, group, urban, commercial, religious and national identities can be shaped and defined through graphic design

Extending his earlier enquiry into histories of graphic design, Professor Jeremy Aynsley’s research on Julius Klinger (1876-1942), a leading figure within Austrian poster design and graphic art, investigated how individual, group, urban, commercial, religious and national identities can be shaped and defined through graphic design. The research resulted in the curation of an exhibition Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age, at The Wolfsonian– Florida International University, Miami Beach, and a subsequent tour to the Poster House, New York.  

The exhibition took a major step in deepening public engagement with historic and contemporary culture through design, offering unique insights into Julius Klinger’s life and work and the displacement he experienced. It cast new light on the overlooked historical importance of the Jewish contribution to Modernism in design and Klinger’s perceptions of the impact of American modernity on Europe through his response as a designer. The collaboration was one of several projects with the Wolfsonian that began with Jeremy Aynsley’s co-curating Print, Power, and Persuasion. Graphic Design in Germany, 1908-1945 in 2020 and his contribution to Fashioning the Modern French Interior. Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s in 2008. Through these projects, Jeremy Aynsley has supported the Wolfsonian to meet its aims to connect its collections with contemporary societal issues and also led the Wolfsonian to review its curatorial practice, intensifying its engagement with graphic arts. 

The Wolfsonian Florida International University. Entrance to graphic design exhibition 'Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age'. Large plinth and red and grey decor in wide gallery space.

The Wolfsonian Florida International University. Main gallery for Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age co-curated by Jeremy Aynsley. Large white walls with stone grey floor. Display boards and islands.

Installation photographs of Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age, at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, co-curated by Jeremy Aynsley from his research. Images courtesy The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach.

 

Graphic interventions: how political statements have been made through exhibitions, posters, banners and zines

Dr Harriet Atkinson’s AHRC-funded research investigates how exhibitions held before, during and after World War II communicated political messages. The project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953' examines exhibitions in informal public spaces such as bombsites and train stations, as well as the work of renowned designers such as F.H.K. Henrion and Misha Black and artists Betty Rea and Nan Youngman. 

The project is bringing new voices to discussions on propaganda design, and developing new audiences as well as generating new opportunities for young film-makers. Graphic Interventions is Harriet Atkinson’s podcast series, investigating contemporary political statements made through posters, banners and zines. These have covered the subvertising collective Protest Stencil and their campaign ‘Teach the truth about Britain’s past’ and poster-making collective See Red Women’s Workshop, through interviews with key founder members.  A film is also in development with Four Corners London, which centres on exhibitions’ use as public sites of propaganda and protest from the midst of World War II and the refugee experience in wartime Britain, drawing out exhibitions as platforms for newly-arriving people from across Central and Eastern Europe. 

Poster with stylised red hands grabbing a white dove. Lettering reads For Liberty Exhibition, Paintings by members of the artists international association, At John Lewis Blitzed Site, Oxford Street.

Poster detail, 'For Liberty Exhibition', held at the blitzed site of John Lewis, Oxford Street, 1943. 

 

Inspiring and nurturing the next generations of design historians 

In the years since the discipline was fostered at the University of Brighton by international scholars that included Professor Jonathan Woodham and Professor Lou Taylor, the department has been responsible for academic growth with global reach and an outreach policy that as seen major change, taking design into new methodologies that can reach out to and benefit new audiences.

Its dedicated PhD Programme in the History of Design fed by the successful MA in History of Design and Material Culture and the MA in Curating Collections and Heritage has been responsible for inspiring and nurturing those who later became curators and historians in global institutions, as well as developing the focus of expertise at the University of Brighton. Current students benefit from the framework of active partnerships and are hosted by institutions such as the V&A, the British Museum, National Science and Media Museum and Black Country Visual Arts, working to support the future agendas of these museums and archives by examining and reframing their histories.

Today, the Centre for Design History continues to foster partnerships and inform public understanding of the designed world, including research that is deeply informed by the politics and ethics of design. Researchers are taking a leading role in explicitly decolonial activities, for example radical revisions to decolonise the sector-leading reference work World History of Design (Bloomsbury).  The centre fosters a lively community of postgraduate students who collaborate with cultural organisations as well as researchers who are publishing globally influential work and organising events that de-centre design history, moving beyond Euro-centric frameworks to privilege international scholars and address histories beyond the west. 

 

 

 

Further examples of research excellence at the University of Brighton