Museu del Disseny in Barcelona

This is boom time for design museums. New York, London, Barcelona, Hong Kong – each city is building or rebuilding huge new institutions dedicated to design. But what are they going to fill them with? Surely, everything in our lives has been designed? Our phones and tablets, the web pages we access on them, our clothes, cars, watches, the street furniture and shop windows we pass by without noticing, the street itself and the buildings that define it – we are overwhelmed by design. So are these going to be museums of everything? What, really, is a design museum for?

A century and a half ago, the design museum (or “museum of applied arts” as it was then) was a revolutionary didactic idea. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s first such museum, emerged in 1852 from the profits of the 1851 Great Exhibition. This vast bazaar of the world’s manufactured goods – presaging the World Expo – was an attempt to display the fruits of Britain’s industrial revolution, its empire and its wealth, while gently acknowledging the rest of the world. It attracted 6m people (a third of the British population) but it also appalled others including William Morris and Henry Cole who were repelled by the excess and decorative frenzy of the fruits of an exploding consumerism.....Continue Reading

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