Exploring British Design

A project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Digital Transformations Scheme, Exploring British Design, led by the University of Brighton with Jisc, embraces the experience, expertise, and content of the University of Brighton Design Archives and the Archives Hub to find new ways of approaching design history. Involving technologists, historians, editors and curators, Exploring British Design is informed by expertise from a range of institutions, and from the experiences of students, lecturers, librarians, museum professionals and archivists. The project connects and amplifies information about Britain’s rich design history held in numerous museums and archives. Through the building of detailed biographical authority records as entry points, and by taking an innovative approach to rendering archival structure, the project prototype allows researchers to undertake a self-directed approach to exploration and to build narratives across collections and across institutions. Exploring British Design deploys the archival standard, Encoded Archival Context – Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF), to disrupt conventions of ‘top down’ collection-based approaches to discovery. It reveals new designers and new relationships and serves to challenge assumptions about the ways that design’s history has been constructed and presented to us