Design History on Display?

This paper was prepared for a conference reviewing developments in the discipline of design history, including its impact on writing, broadcasting and museums. The paper explored the impact of design history upon the making of exhibitions. There is arguably a difference between museum exhibitions which deal with specific aspects of the history of design (whether monograph, period, or style) and those which also take a specifically 'design history' approach to research and curating, applying the kinds of questions, contexts and methodologies employed by the design historian. In research and teaching, design history has challenged judgements of taste, value and status applied to objects in museums (and to designers and movements in the museum canon). But how far has it informed the development of new curatorial approaches and subjects? Does much of design history's subject matter still reside outside of the curatorial field? This paper employed a number of case-studies of V&A exhibitions in the last 15 years