Archiving Pedagogy

In this article, we will be exploring the impact of London College of Communication (LCC) teaching, research and practice on the legacy of Design School’s undergraduate courses using the example of one item: David Bowie’s – Low album on the format of 8 track cassette. By unpacking the work with the object as a text, practice and tool, we are questioning what are Art Schools for, especially exploring how our practices of collecting, research and pedagogy shape our organisational aesthetic at LCC. For that purpose, we use London Design Festival’s (LDF) contribution of the Low album to the project Room 2084, that gathered objects from staff’s personal collections with the intention to enter them to the university’s “design archive” at Archives and Special Collections. We will rely on Diana Taylor’s (2003) depiction of dynamic between the proposed object and its performative potency, Tim Ingold’s deliberations on practice and research (2018) and Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on collecting (1931 – 1934 [1969]) to theoretically support the approach to our practice, research, collecting and pedagogy