V&A/RCA History of Design MA Graduate Publication by Unmaking Things

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History of Design 2014 Victoria and Albert Museum Royal College of Art In memory of Professor Gillian Naylor (1931â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2014)

Contents

Foreword Abraham Thomas

Introduction

Graduating Students

Collective Writings

106

Afterword Professor Jane Pavitt Dr Marta Ajmar

108

Directory

110

Additional Projects

112

Colophon

ABRAHAM THOMAS

Foreword It’s a great pleasure to be invited to write the introduction for this year’s publication for the V&A/RCA History of Design programme. I recently joined Sir John Soane’s Museum from the V&A where I had spent eight years working with the design drawings collection. One of the highlights of that role was seeing the quality of RCA students who engaged with the V&A collections through their refreshingly diverse research projects. It was always a privilege at the start of each academic year to speak to the History of Design students about the wide-ranging nature of the design drawings collection in my care, and to develop new insights into them as a result. Looking at the research projects that make up this year’s cohort, it’s fantastic to be reminded of the richness of tone and variety of voices that the History of Design programme has always endeavoured to encourage. Working with design drawings that articulate a sense of process and dialogue developed my advocacy for a history of design that was pluralistic in nature, and the same attitude of openness permeates through this year’s research projects. Themes of global cultural exchange are explored in a dissertation on falconry in the Early Modern Period, while notions of identity are investigated in a study examining masculine working-class clothes, and consumer culture and branding are the subjects of dissertations on disposable paper cups and contemporary Japanese confectionery. These are just a few selected examples, but their variety, depth and thoughtfulness reminds us of the important, and I would argue unique, status held by the History of Design programme, through its provision of a truly world-class centre for postgraduate research in design and material culture. By drawing upon the pioneering research activities at both the RCA and the V&A, the programme offers a compelling blend of academic discourse and curatorial expertise. Productive exchanges would often occur between RCA students and my colleagues in the V&A collections departments, whether during seminars in the V&A Research Department, or through opportunities that arose for students to contribute to wider Museum projects. In my mind, these valuable interactions provide just the sort of context which allows these RCA students to develop skills which have proven essential for the careers that many of them have gone on to pursue, ranging from the world of academia and teaching, to curating and writing, and even working on government policy research. Like the RCA and the V&A, Sir John Soane’s Museum was founded

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on principles rooted in the value of providing education and research opportunities through its diverse collections. This is an aspect of the Soane’s DNA that I am keen to develop over the next few years. Writing this foreword - six months into my new job - offers a moment to reflect upon these shared values and to consider the collaborative opportunities that might exist in the future for our three institutions. I’d like to wish the History of Design students all the very best with their plans, and I look forward to seeing how their research projects evolve. Abraham Thomas Director, Sir John Soane’s Museum

EDITORIAL TEAM

Begin Where Others End ‘The history of design or material culture, or decorative arts, as it is variously understood, usually begins where others end’ — Paul Greenhalgh Whether starting from a maker’s finished product, or drawing from the theory of another discipline, Paul Greenhalgh’s claim that the work of design historians begins where others end resonates with the graduates of 2014. Building upon the work of previous scholars, our cohort have utilised a range of alternative approaches and methodologies to offer new insights into an exciting range of subjects. Illustrating the ambition and diversity of the research interests we have developed and some of the methods and approaches we have employed, this publication provides a sense of our collective projects and research experiences over the past two years. Encouraged to explore the alternative histories which objects reveal, the History of Design programme has provided a solid foundation in historiography, theory, object analysis and alternative research methods. As our dissertation topics illustrate, this has supported an exciting range of research interests which cover a broad geography and chronology. Whilst Luisa Coscarelli has examined the history of smell through an analysis of pomanders from Renaissance Italy and Germany, James Haldane has explored the role of architecture within the geo-political discourse surrounding the Arctic and Antarctic. From histories of X-Ray and the Model House Group, to contemporary Kyoto confectionary and way-finding in Los Angeles, the diversity of these subjects reflects our cohorts’ response to this growing discipline. In reaction to this range of topics, our cohort has utilised a variety of research methods. Amongst others these included in-depth archival research, the conduction of oral histories and innovative experimental histories. Zenia Malmer’s article serves as one such example. Rather than merely relying on textual descriptions of ice cream production, Zenia chose to re-enact the ice cream making process using nineteenthcentury utensils. Emily Aleev-Snow also employed an experimental history methodology, engaging with current falconry practitioners and the production of falcon hoods to better understand early modern falconry. Oral histories proved equally fruitful for those researching more contemporary topics, and both Elizabeth Coulson’s work on ‘casuals’ and working-class masculinity in Thatcherite Britain, and Steffi

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Duarte’s study of anti-apartheid print media have used these methods. An excerpt from an interview Clementine Power conducted for her work on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt can be found in the Collective Writings. Students have further followed their sources to South Africa, China, Japan, the United States of America, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and North Korea. This reflects the increasingly globalised perspective of design history. Sincere gratitude is due to the course and its benefactors for their generous support with this research. This has enabled access to specialised archives, objects and experts from around the world and has facilitated enriching insights. Lani McGuinness’ photo essay documents her journey through North Korea and Charlotte Flint’s article provides an account of her experiences of problematic archives in New York. In addition to assigned projects, the continuing success of Unmaking Things, the online platform that encourages the dissemination and discussion of design history research, has provided a valuable creative space for students. Established in 2011, this year the blog has featured columns on the role of design in the history of science and medicine, contemporary design, craft, and food as well as other topics. Students have also organised out-reach events including the contemporary history conference Talking Presently, and a weekly evening seminar series, Death by Slideshow. As well as assisting curatorial teams within the V&A, these practical experiences have further supplemented our studies. Whilst it is impossible to effectively account for the nature and breadth of our projects during our time on the programme, this publication attempts to bring together some of our rewarding research outcomes and experiences. It provides a reference for the students and their intriguing final projects, and presents a selection of extracts, photo essays and articles produced over the past two years. The programme has proved a challenging but fruitful experience and whilst it concludes with the completion of our dissertations, the course has left an indelible impression. We would like to extend our thanks to the entire faculty for their support and guidance, Abraham Thomas for his foreword and to Arthur Carey for the publication design. We are now looking forward to new challenges, seeking PhD’s, positions in research, education, and arts institutions, once again treating this ending as another beginning.

M R A

MODERN RENAISSANCE ASIAN

Graduating

Students

ALICE TWEMLOW (PhD)

Purposes, Poetics and Publics: The Shifting Dynamics of Design Criticism in the US and the UK, 1955–2007 The history of design criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK is punctuated with self-reflective interruptions during which design critics were acutely self-conscious about their purpose, role in society, relationship to their publics and use of critical techniques and formats. This research examines a selection of such moments and considers the extent to which they disrupted, and even redirected, the ways in which design criticism was practiced, produced, and consumed. The chapters focus on disruptions including a selection of articles which forcibly activated a new set of values for mass produced product design; a protest at the International Design Conference at Aspen in 1970; a set of articles by cultural critics that critiqued the prevailing celebratory commentary on style and lifestyle in 1980s London; an independent exhibition that offered an alternative view of contemporary design in 1990s London; and lastly, a debate between the authors of a US design blog and an established British design critic writing in print magazine that highlighted the rift between amateur blogging culture and the editorial values of traditional print media. Three main problematics provide continuity throughout the discrete time periods, as well as points of comparison between the critical works examined. In identifying five moments of historical discontinuity in the practice of design criticism, this thesis thus assembles a time-lapse portrait of the intellectual, stylistic and material constitution of design criticism between the 1950s and 2000s, and consequently meaningfully contributes to a growing historiography of design criticism.

Alice Twemlow is founding chair of the MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Alice is a contributor to Design Observer and writes about design for publications such as Eye and Architect’s Newspaper. She is the author of essays in books including The Aspen Complex

(Sternberg Press 2012) and 60 Innovators: Shaping Our Creative Futures (Thames and Hudson 2009). She serves on design juries and editorial boards and organizes and moderates conferences. She is currently preparing her PhD dissertation on the history of design criticism for publication by MIT Press.

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Sheila Lavrant de Bretteville, Newspaper spread for the 1971 International Design Conference, Aspen. © Alice Twemlow.

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Portrait of Reyner Banham from "Speaker Biographies" booklet for the 1970 International Design Conference, Aspen. © Alice Twemlow.

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"Student Handbook" Cover, 1970, featuring image of junked car sculpture by students of Northern Illinois University, 1969. © Alice Twemlow.

ANNIE THWAITE

‘The True Way to Cure Witchcraft’: The Science behind Curing Bewitchment in England 1650–1715 In 1682 Jane Kent was tried at the Old Bailey, charged with using witchcraft to torment and kill five-year-old Elizabeth Chamblet. Kent had allegedly bewitched not only the girl, but also her mother, who – fortunate to survive – had consulted a ‘Spittle-Fields’ doctor for a cure. Dr Hainks advised Mrs Chamblet to put her urine into a bottle, to add her own hair and fingernails, and to boil them together. Contemporaneous accounts record other victims of bewitchment using this cure – placing their urine into bottles while adding varying ingredients including bent pins and felt hearts before burying them into their wall's cavities or beneath their floors. Yet whatever the precise combination of ingredients, and whether the author was sceptical towards or advocated the practice he was describing, all primary accounts had one significant factor in common: all identified this ‘urinary experiment’ as a cure for specific cases of bewitchment. Upon unearthing these objects today, archaeologists and historians have labelled them as ‘witch bottles’, categorising them and their associated ‘ritual’ as superstitious and prophylactic and a facet of popular magic used to ‘ward off witchcraft’. However, a materially based examination of the bottles, their social and spatial geographies and contemporary literature that surrounds them demonstrates instead that those who used and discussed this cure were in fact much more elite, urban and scientific than has been previously assumed. This thesis thus aims to challenge the continually reproduced assumption that these objects were merely folkish charms.

Annie joined the Renaissance stream of the V&A/RCA HoD course following her BA in History at the University of Warwick. Whilst exploring many areas of Renaissance material culture, Annie has a particular interest in the history of Reformation and Restoration England. Her first year essays included studies of an early modern

Catholic recusant Pyx, the representation of death in early modern jewellery, and Renaissance theories of vision. Annie’s dissertation focuses on a specific cure for bewitchment, in order to demonstrate the dichotomy between magic and science in England, 1650 –1715. She is co-editor-inchief of Unmaking Things.

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Two ‘witch bottles’ from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Accession nos. 1893.81.3 and 1910.18.1.1. © Annie Thwaite, 2014.

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Cloth heart pierced with bent pins, cork, human hair and nail parings, found inside a ‘witch bottle’. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Accession no. 1910.18.1. © Annie Thwaite, 2014.

CATERINA TIEZZI

Dressing for Track: Elite Women, Fashion and Society at the Royal Ascot 1895–1914

You simply did not just show up to Royal Ascot. The many Ascotreports written in the press, along with strategically placed advertisements, and memories collected in personal diaries, suggest how careful preparation was paramount. From 1895 to 1914, for a Society Lady to visit the Royal Ascot horse races implied that an invitation for the ‘Ascot-week’ needed to be secured, appropriate transportation planned, meals thought out, and ‘after the races’ activities orchestrated. After all, the press, public, personal acquaintances and royals were all watching. Consequently, dressing for this event caused incredible anxieties for both wearers and producers. It is said incredible sums of money were spent by these specific consumers who carefully sourced a selection of four different garments to be shown at Ascot. These needed to be opportunely elaborate fashionable garments, becoming for the wearer, and similar to what other Society Ladies had chosen. From the point of view of these garment makers, Ascot week was exploitable, an occasion to further establish a good reputation with wealthy clients. Despite all this effort, almost no ‘fabric-evidence’ of Ascot dresses has survived. We are left only with photographs and illustrations of those garments. With this in mind, I wish to reconsider how Royal Ascot has been portrayed as an event that is significant for more than just horse racing. In particular, I ask who designed these fashionable dresses and what their role was.

Caterina Tiezzi joined the modern strand of the History of Design MA programme in 2012, after receiving her BA in Visual Studies from the California College of the Arts. Since joining the course, she has become interested in the examination of design change as seen in payment cards, and has very much enjoyed researching

about women’s fashion at Royal Ascot for her dissertation. During her studies in London, she has also volunteered in the Furniture, Textile and Fashion department at the V&A, and is co-editor of the ‘Craft, Technology & Production’ column on Unmaking Things.

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Holland Tringham, ‘Royal Ascot, 1898’ in The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, (June 25, 1898), pp. 1090. Courtesy of the National Art Library.

CHARLOTTE FLINT

Corporeal Control: Wearable Electronic Monitoring Devices, 1989–2013

‘It’s a similar sensation to handcuffs being tight, but having them attached for three months of your life’. – Harry Conway At the beginning of my research into the surveillance of offenders through electronic monitoring, I was disheartened with the lack of interest concerning the monitored body and the everyday experience of the tag wearer. After reading testimonies of former offenders, I discovered that the wearable device could be uncomfortable, impractical and could attract stigma when made visible. The silenced voices of former tag wearers provoked me to investigate further, constructing my dissertation around the untold stories of the monitored body. This dissertation explores wearable monitoring systems between the years 1989 to 2013 and investigates five different devices and their individual methods of monitoring the body. The first chapter explores the spatial surveillance of offenders and people with Alzheimer’s disease using electronic tags. Chapter two is built around Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring (SCRAM) bracelets, their effect upon the body and the social responses generated by the visible item. The final chapter investigates self-monitoring devices, worn to record bodily statistics concerning health and fitness and the effect self-surveillance has upon the wearer. Built around the design and history of these five wearable technologies, this dissertation explores ideas of power, agency and the body with reference to human experience and surveillance. In order to further understand the sensation of being monitored, I interviewed a number of monitoring device wearers to construct a history of wearable surveillance technologies and their users.

Charlotte joined the History of Design MA after studying the History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Throughout the V&A/RCA programme, she became fascinated with the material culture of surveillance and the devices used to monitor the body. She has presented her research at the 2013 Leeds Postgraduate Forum on

Genetics and Society and the Talking Presently symposium. Charlotte is the co-editor-in-chief of Unmaking Things and co-edits the column ‘From Live to Future’. During the MA, she has had a piece of writing published in ARC and worked on the 2013 Koestler Prison Art Award Exhibition held at Southbank Centre.

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An electronic monitoring device or ‘tag’, © Charlotte Flint, 2014.

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A secure continuous remote alcohol monitoring (SCRAM) bracelet, © Britton Riley.

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A secure continuous remote alcohol monitoring (SCRAM) bracelet, © Charlotte Flint, 2014.

CLEMENTINE POWER

Crafting History: The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in the Contemporary Period

In October 2013, NAMES Project Curator Jada Harris asserted that ‘the African American community is in a state of emergency relative to HIV and AIDS.’ Three months earlier, ACT UP/NY member James Krellenstein contended that ‘the safer sex campaign in the men who have sex with men and the trans women community has failed.’ This strong rhetoric is backed up by staggering statistics: every year since 1993, the rate of Americans living with HIV/AIDS has risen, with 32,052 persons diagnosed with AIDS in 2011 alone. And, in 2010, 15,529 Americans died with AIDS, giving full force to the position that the crisis in America is not over. With these pressing ideas in mind, this dissertation argues for the significance of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. It is at once activist object, educational tool, and rich archive. The Quilt is interpreted as a postmodern text that, rather than embodying a single cohesive collective memory, provides a collection of memories; a diverse assemblage of ways to remember the crisis, and those lost to it. Drawing on oral histories of panel-making, the dissertation unpacks the fragmentary nature of memory and mourning, exploring how the Quilt continues to act as evidence of lives lost, while also offering a sense of agency to the bereaved. The panel-making process has proved to be highly therapeutic for many people, indicative of the fact that bereavement from AIDS is a unique experience, and thus new formats of mourning may well be necessary. The Quilt teaches, with authority, how to perceive AIDS, asserting a history that is nationally-minded, yet interwoven with intensely personal stories.

Using a design historical and theoretical lens, Clemmie’s interests are strongly geared toward cultural and social history in the contemporary period. With an interest in alternative modes of output for historical research, Clemmie co-convened Talking Presently and co-directed a series of workshops interrogating how the female

body is implicated in design. Clemmie is passionate about gender and sexual orientation equality, and, in particular, the position of persons living with HIV/AIDS. She has worked in healthcare settings and campaigned with charities including the National AIDS Trust and the Terrence Higgins Trust.

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Block #4292, image courtesy of the The NAMES Project.

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The NAMES Project’s warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia © Clementine Power.

DOROTHY ARMSTRONG

Unravelling the Carpet: Oriental Carpets in 20th Century British Exhibitions

During the twentieth century a series of exhibitions on Middle Eastern and Central Asian culture in London told a series of different stories about the East. These exhibitions in 1931, 1976, and 2005 reflected the changing politics, economics, racial and religious assumptions of the time. By focusing on the choices made about a particular group of objects, Oriental carpets, whose status has been very fluid, I map the alternative story told by these objects, and the challenge they pose to the established narrative of power. The first object I have chosen is an image taken by the British curator of the exhibition ‘Carpets of Central Persia’ held in Sheffield in 1976, being viewed by a South East Asian family. The family might be Hindu or Sunni Muslim, possibly recently arrived from the British Commonwealth, whose construct of a family of nations had been offered as a replacement for the colonial master-servant model. The carpets they look at are sixteenth century Safavid, products of the Shia Muslim culture of Iran, about to be forcefully reinstated there by the Iranian revolution of 1979. The place they look at them is Sheffield, in the belt of cities most transformed by the arrival of Muslim commonwealth citizens. The second object is the catalogue of the Royal Academy’s Turks exhibition of 2005, whose cover image of an enthronement ceremony conducted on a carpet is not from Turkey but from Iran. From such faultlines and fractures revealed by carpets, I try to uncover the challenger narratives in these exhibitions.

Dorothy was loaned an Oriental carpet by a relative in 1984. In the intervening thirty years, she had a career in the City of London and three children. In 2011 she returned to that original woven inspiration by studying for a postgraduate diploma in Asian Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and writing her examined

essay on nomadic carpets. A member of the Asian specialism of the V&A/RCA MA, she has had the exceptional experience of thinking intensely about carpets alongside the museum’s world-class collection, and amongst people whose range of cultural interests has stimulated unexpected and enriching connections.

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Cover of Turks Catalogue, Royal Academy 2005, showing enthronement scene, Persia. Opaque pigment, ink and gold on paper, 39.2x61.4cm, Topkapi Saray Museum, H2153, folios 90bâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; 91a. Catalogue cover image reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Academy of Art, London.

ELIZABETH COULSON

Casuals: Positioning Subcultural Style and Working Class Masculinities in Britain, 1978–1990

The bright colours of the European sportswear, the soft pastel shades and textures of lambs wool v neck jumpers, an effeminate ‘Wedge’ haircut with straight, slim jeans and training shoes starkly contrasts with the hard, aggressive acts of hooliganism which came to define football fandom during the late 1970s and 1980s. Yet it was this look which has come to typify a section of working class male football fans known broadly as ‘Casuals’. Casuals adopted the sportswear associated with the upper and middle class sports of tennis, golf and skiing and made it their own, subsequently subverting the purpose for which many of these items were intended and utilising them for the purpose of fashion. As much of the dress Casuals wore was foreign in origin and expensive, facilitated by the expansion of Britain’s football involvement in competitions over the Continent, these young men travelled across Europe searching, and most likely stealing, new and exciting examples of sportswear and training shoes unavailable in Britain in this period. This thesis attempts to disentangle the Casual from its relationship with football hooliganism and suggest that the adoption of Casual dress was a means through which working class men could recreate many aspects of working class masculinity which were crumbling during the 1980s. Conducted through the collection of oral history interviews, photographs and detailed study of the garments themselves, the dissertation explores how men created a distinctly working class masculinity through Casual dress.

Before coming to the course, Elizabeth received an undergraduate degree in History of Art from the University of Glasgow. Whilst on the course, she has supplemented her growing interest in the histories of dress, street style and discussions surrounding subcultural theory. She worked with the V&A Fashion, Furniture

and Textile department to re-hang the European Galleries, 1650 –1850. She co-edits a column on the course’s online platform, Unmaking Things entitled ‘Taking Fashion Seriously’ alongside course colleague, Liz Tregenza, and co-organised the evening seminar series, ‘Death by Slideshow’ with Georgia Cherry.

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Contact sheet of photographs by David Corio, 'The Ins and Outs of High Street Style', The Face (July, 1983). ÂŠ David Corio, 1983. Images reproduced with the permission of David Corio.

ELODIE MALLET

The Postmodern Hand: Prototypes in the Design Practice, 1980–2000

What makes the hand postmodern? Looking at the making of objects in general, and the promises and challenges of prototyping in particular, can certainly help us answer this question, as prototypes have the power to reveal perspectives on the cultural, social and political meaning(s) of design that would remain invisible should we only focus on finished objects. This is all the more true in the context of postmodernism. The changing roles of prototypes in the 1980s and 1990s reveal(s) the extent to which designers’ practice was altered during this period of intellectual and technological advancements and challenges. Contrary to established beliefs, despite the development of computer technology, a great deal of importance continued to be given to the skills of the hand. The prototyping phase was slowly turned into a real learning adventure, during which designers were particularly inclined to engage with their practice. In the meantime, a few designers chose to exhibit their prototypes (instead of their objects) in order to make statements about the value and power of their craft. While this new trend raised many issues about the relationship between art and design, it succeeded in opening new avenues for designers eager to work in the margins of the (post) industrial world. Influenced by the postmodern idea according to which there is not one way of doing things and that everyone should have a voice, prototyping also became a participatory activity involving both designer and consumer. To answer the initial research question, one has to examine the different changes that affected the making of objects in the 1980s and 1990s and investigate the extent to which these changes were dependent on a complex set of intertwined factors. This is what my dissertation sets out to do.

Elodie graduated with a degree in Product Design from ENSAAMA–Paris. She then worked for designers such as François Azambourg and Simon Hasan. She recently joined the V&A/RCA History of Design programme to acquire historical and theoretical knowledge about design. Elodie is particularly interested in curato-

rial practice and the role that museums play in today’s design world. In 2012, she was awarded the Friends of the V&A Scholarship, which aims to support students intending to work in a museum after graduating. She is currently the curator’s assistant for the 9th Design Parade at the Villa Noailles–Hyères.

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Michele de Lucchi Prototypes of Household Appliances for Girmi, 1979. ÂŠ Elodie Mallet, 2014.

EMILY ALEEV SNOW

'To Breed a Familiar League of Friendship, Love and Unity': Understanding the Practice of Falconry through its Material Mediators, 1400–1650

Humans and birds of prey have partnered in the practice of falconry throughout Afro-Eurasia for several thousand years. Until nearly the end of the early modern period falconry played a vital role as a motivator and mediator of trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange, and shaped notions of nobility and gentility, the class structures of human society, religious and spiritual debates, and studies of the natural world. The widespread and deeply ingrained material and intellectual importance falconry has accrued across geographies and time would be impossible without – and is fundamentally predicated upon – the relationship(s) between humans and raptors. The dissertation examines the material culture of early modern falconry, particularly focusing on the design and usages of falconry treatises, leather hoods, and visual representations of falconry relationships. It explores how these may have constructed or reflected the perceptions and trajectories of the geographically- and temporallycontingent human/avian and human/human relationships. Addressing these as design interactions, it considers how these relationships were constructed and mediated by the material culture of falconry practice, and posits that attention to the agency of the material objects and offers a more well-rounded understanding of human perceptions of falconry; the birds involved; and how the birds’ own agency influenced those perceptions and interactions.

Emily Aleev-Snow is an MA candidate on the Asian strand of the V&A/RCA History of Design programme. Her interests include early modern global history and histories of technology and the natural world, with a focus on what objects can reveal about the sharing of knowledge across

geographies and time. Her research while on the course has ranged widely, from trade in coconuts to anomalous hydraulic clocks to falconry practice. Additionally, Emily is co-editor of the ‘Object of the Week’ column on Unmaking Things.

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Falconry hood of three pieces of leather covered with embroidered canvas with silver, silver-gilt and silk threads. England, c. 1570 –1629. Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. T.151–1965. © Emily Aleev-Snow, 2014.

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An image of a hawk surrounded by falconry material culture, taken from the title page of Edmund Bert's An Approved Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, published in London in 1619. © Emily Aleev-Snow, 2013.

FRANKIE KUBICKI

‘Let Paper Do It’, Readdressing the Disposable: A History of the Paper Cup, 1865–1940

Paper cups are ubiquitous, pervasive, an omnipresent disposable in today’s modern world. This was not always the case. My dissertation establishes an early history of disposability before the 1950s consumer boom and ‘throwaway living’ – the infamous term coined by Life magazine in 1955 – is widely thought to have originated. Examining this early manifestation of disposability I focus on one particular disposable – the paper cup. Tracing its history from innovation in paper manufacture through the products establishment in the 1910s and popularity throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a history previously neglected by scholars is constructed. Charting the creation, consumption and use of these objects the final chapter aims to draw conclusions from the example that has unfolded – what can be learnt about the nature of disposability itself? Central to this examination is the material from which the product is made – what is it about a paper cup that makes it disposable? Paper plays a vital role not only in the creation of the product but significantly how it was understood. A 1940 Good Housekeeping article titled ‘Let Paper Do It’ exemplifies this communicative power, demonstrating that paper cups were understood as part of a wider range of goods whose labour saving quality was bestowed not only by what they did but also by what they were made of.

Frankie graduated with a degree in history from King’s College, London in 2008. She has since worked in a number of museums and galleries, including Wellcome Collection and most recently as Exhibition Organiser for Two Temple Place. Her research interests lie at the intersection between social history and design history.

Frankie’s passion for gender studies manifested itself in co-creating an Across RCA Week project, ‘Art, Design and the Female Body’. She also co-edits Unmaking Things column ‘Material Matter’, which explores the history of science and medicine. Frankie was awarded the Bard Scholarship for the academic year 2013/2014.

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‘Dixies Sell Themselves’ Dixie Cup Sales Brochure. Individual Drinking Cup Co., Inc. 1930s, Hugh Moore Dixie Cup Collection, Special Collections, Lafayette College Library, Easton, PA. © Special Collections, Lafayette College Library. Reproduced with permission.

GEORGIA CHERRY

Defining the Dark Light. The Mediation of X-Ray in England, 1895 – c. 1906

“That all our ideas of photography should be reversed, — that the interiors should be revealed and surfaces not, that the bones of the hand should be photographed and the skin and flesh left out of the picture, was certainly a discovery that startled the world into belief that anything was possible.” ‘The X-Rays’, The Photographic Review, Vol. 1, No. 11 (November, 1896), p. 346.

Georgia joined the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme after completing her BA in History and Art History at the University of Nottingham. Her research has focused on the history of technology and the material culture of science and medicine from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Awarded the Clive Wainwright

Memorial Prize 2013, Georgia has assisted as a researcher for academic publications and design projects. She co-directed AcrossRCA’s ‘Art, Design and the Female Body’, and the evening seminar series ‘Death by Slideshow’. She currently coedits ‘Material Matter: Material Cultures of Science and Medicine’ for Unmaking Things.

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Almost a year after the announcement of x-ray’s discovery in January 1896, this passage captured a popular and telling sentiment. As a mysterious ray of unknown nature, x-ray presented an entirely new mode of vision; an impetus to question established laws of physical surface, matter and stability; and cause to revise fanciful concepts as potentially conceivable realities. X-ray’s application as a diagnostic apparatus, and its association as a cure and cause of disease is familiar. Yet between 1896 and 1906 x-ray was also inscribed as evidence of Spiritualist’s claims of the supernatural, a clairvoyant medium, a spectacular entertainment, a new type of portraiture, an industrial innovation and a scientific advance. This multitude of meanings formed the focus of this research which offers new insights into how x-ray was ‘mediated’ in England in the decade following its discovery. The study offers a novel approach to studying x-ray and mediation, and pushes at the disciplinary boundaries of Design History. It further challenges formerly dislocated medical and cultural narratives in favour of their realignment. Drawing from newspapers, periodicals, images, advertisements, films, exhibition guides and handbooks, it traces and contextualises the origins, development, corroboration and curtailment of x-ray’s early interpretations.

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G. A. Smith, The X-Rays, or The X-Ray Fiend, Archives of the British Film Institute, London. © George Albert Smith, 1897. All rights reserved. Image reproduced with permission of the British Film Institute.

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W. J. Morton, ‘Entire Adult Body at One Exposure’, Archives of the Roentgen Ray, Vol. 2, No. 1 (July, 1897), p. 17. © W. J. Morton, 1897. Republished with the permission of the British Institute of Radiology.

HANNAH LEE

Skin Deep: The Materiality of Skin Colour and the Construction of the ‘Other’ in the Early Modern Mind, 1450–1650

Taking as its starting point the wide range of objects made by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth century that feature depictions of Africans, this dissertation explores the questions around the materiality of skin colour in the early modern period. It proposes that by focusing on both the materials used to make these objects, which include pieces of jewellery, ceramics and sculpture, and the techniques used to create them, it is possible to argue that the early modern perception of black skin was more nuanced than previously understood. From a group of early sixteenth century tin glazed ceramics to sardonyx cameos with portraits carved into the multiple layers of coloured stone, it is possible to argue that the subject of an African figure offered more than the iconographic opportunity to portray the ‘exotic’, acting as the ideal medium through which craftsmen could both represent their most sophisticated skills whilst exploring and representing the creative powers of nature from the microcosm of the workshop. Reading these objects in this manner proposes the suggestion that in the early modern mind black skin did not necessarily have negative connotations, representing not only luxurious materials and creative prowess, it signified the divine creation of variety in nature, celebrated by scholars and craftsmen alike.

Before the V&A/RCA History of Design MA Programme, Hannah studied for her BA in History at the University of Oxford. Following her second term essay on glass trade beads, her research directed her towards an interest in early modern global exchange and cultural perception, interests which have influenced the Unmaking

Things column ‘Objects in Translation’, of which Hannah is editor. Hannah received the Basil Taylor Memorial Prize to assist research travel at the end of the first year, and has been learning Italian, a skill which she hopes will aid her in future research endeavours.

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Drug Jar, Tin-glazed earthenware, Deruta, Italy, 1501, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. C.132–1931. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

HOLLIE CHUNG

Unpacking Convent Ceramics: Bridging the Gap Between Thematic Materiality and Convent Culture in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy

When addressing convent material culture there exists a dislocation between document and object. The nineteenth century Napoleonic suppression of the monasteries resulted in a confiscation, distribution and selling off of monastic property; as a consequence reliable convent provenance for convent goods are exceedingly rare. Thus, much of what is known about convent material culture is necessarily gleamed from textual sources such as inventorial records, testaments and the occasional visitor account. This thesis explores an untapped corpus of convent-specific goods: Convent ceramics, which are, in most cases plates or dining wares, personalized by the name of a female monastic and a date. These largely unexplored wares, originating from Faenza and the Veneto region, offer a domestic facet to otherwise sensationalised histories of convent life, which commonly exploit notions of rebellious luxury and forced enclosure. Subsequently, their potential as vehicles to formulate a rounder sense of convent culture is speculated throughout. The dating of these ceramic wares posits them at a time of monastic tension due to ever-rising convent numbers, and intense patriarchal visitations carried out between 1592–1618 in order to assess living conditions and the extent of female monastic material possession.

Before the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme Hollie Chung received a BA in Art History from The University of York, specialising in Renaissance mannerist vedute (cityviews) in Granducal Florence. During the course she has developed an interest in objects of devotion, hierotopic agency, and more recently, the field of

maiolica and ceramic materiality. Hollie has enjoyed two years as the Renaissance strand’s course representative, and has spent the past year volunteering for the V&A's Sculpture Department, interning for a modern design gallery of Mexican and Austrian design, and editing the Unmaking Things column ‘Materiality/Immateriality’.

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Subsequently, any personal goods maintained at this time must be considered within the heightened tensions of such an environment. Convent ceramics, in both their stylized and personalized capacity stimulate exciting questions about female monastic consumption and identity. Furthermore, they offer new ground to reinvigorate a largely dormant sector of convent material culture studies – one based on thematic materiality and the potentiality of design agency within conventual proximities.

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Plate, Italy, 1638, Tin-glazed earthenware, painted, C.312–1931, © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Plate detail, 1638, Tin-glazed earthenware, painted, C.312–1931, © Victoria and Albert Museum.

JAMES HALDANE

Constructing the Map: Architecture & Resources in Contemporary Polar Geopolitics

As the philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski once observed, “the map is not the territory”. He was alluding to the contentious relationship between the physical landscape and attempts at its governance and representation. For the borders and coordinates etched across our maps have no geological validity. They are the abstracted products of human territorialisation, the overlaying of designed ‘order’ on the natural landscape. Where does building fit into this process? As a key underpinning of any colonisation effort, it represents a vital tool in the assertion of geopolitical legitimacy. However, when it comes to the controversy surrounding the future of Arctic and Antarctic, standard constructions won’t suffice. Many countries and corporations wish to secure a claim to these regions’ resources, but what kind of building can match their ambitions? With constantly rising snow and changing coastlines, how can any design embody permanence? While these questions will certainly continue to agitate the contemporary architectural consciousness, they have been visited before. In the midst of the Cold War, a global cohort of designers pursued speculative solutions for similar ‘edge situations’ – including outer space and even the seabed. Can these historic proposals inform the analysis of the contemporary boom in polar construction? Moreover, by exploring these connected movements, what can we understand about the geopolitical networks in which each arose? It’s vital to recognise this political context as a game in its own right – for governance is design. The ultimate question, however, is who has the right to play?

James’s work focuses on contemporary design and the history and theory of architecture. His writing and curatorial projects advocate an expanded conception of design, both in its practice and critical analysis. He is a design correspondent for The Architectural Review, and writes for a number of other publications including

ARC, the journal of the Royal College of Art. In December 2013, he co-convened the Talking Presently symposium at the V&A, a conference exploring original methodologies for contemporary historical research. While on the programme, James assisted with collections research for the new V&A museum to open in Scotland.

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Halley VI Research Station, Hugh Broughton Architects & AECOM Photograph ÂŠ Sam Burrell

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Iceberg Living Station (detail), MAP Architects

JESSICA JENKINS (PhD)

Visual Arts in the Urban Environment in the German Democratic Republic: Formal, Theoretical and Functional Change, 1949–1980 Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, most of the urban fabric of the former East Germany has been altered beyond recognition or completely dismantled. However, during the four decades of the German Democratic Republic, public spaces, and the works of visual arts within them, were the subject of intense critical discussion, and formed the basis for the development of theories on the socialist character of art and architecture, which evolved from the late 1960s as Komplexe Umweltgestaltung “Complex Environmental Design”. This research makes visible and elucidates the cultural-political significance of that urban visual culture. It examines the political, social and artistic function of murals, paintings, sculptures, applied arts, form design, and visual communication within East German architecture and public spaces, and seeks to complexify the commonly understood historical narrative which traces a rupture from the doctrine of an extravagant Socialist Realism to a form of impoverished Modernism. It demonstrates how this change is better understood as a gradual and halting evolution, in which art as a medium for projecting the ideal of socialism was displaced by an understanding of design as a means of sustaining and enhancing the lived experience of socialism. The narratives, formal and material qualities of some of the works examined – overlooked even in contemporary re-appraisals of East German art history – rather than being marginal to Socialist Realism, actually opened up spaces for its development.

Jessica Jenkins is a designer, educator and design historian whose PhD research interest in the design history of the German Democratic Republic grew from many years spent living and working in the former East Berlin following the fall of the Wall. Her first degree in Graphic Design (1989) was from Bath Spa University Col-

lege where she majored in Illustration with First Class Honours. Since then her professional life as a designer has taken her to London, Berlin and Paris, and currently to Cairo where she holds the position of Professor of Graphic Design at the German University of Cairo.

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Adolf Thiele, Terracotta relief, c.1950. © Jessica Jenkins.

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Erich Enge, Lenin's Worte Werden Wahr (Lenin's Words Come True). Ceramic tile mural, Halle Neustadt, 1971. © Jessica Jenkins.

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Jose Renau (Lothar Scholz), Die Beherrschung der Natur durch den Menschen (Man's Mastery of Nature) (detail). Ceramic tile mural, Education Centre, Halle Neustadt. 1970 –1974. © Jessica Jenkins.

JOSEPHINE TIERNEY

Designing Taste: A Reexamination of British Printed Textiles from 1830–1899

Walk through the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum and you will see many examples of printed textiles from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. However, these examples are only the tip of the iceberg. They represent a small and carefully curated selection of objects, considered worthy of the V&A’s approval and there is a distinct absence of one particular genre. Despite the thousands of yards manufactured throughout the nineteenth century, you will find few examples of the mass-produced, mass-market printed textiles created between 1830 and 1899. Their absence tells of their dismissal as cheap novelties for the working classes, devoid of taste and aesthetic quality and of little importance for the discipline of design history. This research aims to readdress this bias and counters the common view of nineteenth-century mass-market printed textiles as tasteless. Arguing for a revision of the impact of mechanisation on their design, and the ‘decline’ in quality that is supposed to have followed, it contends that this perception of bad taste was the construction of a powerful group of social and cultural elites, many of who were involved in the institutionalisation of design and taste through the establishment of, for instance, the V&A and the School of Design. Using a wide range of sources from textile samples, primary documents and literature and nineteenth-century photography, this research reintroduces the voices of the manufacturers and consumers, both at home and abroad, to offer a fresh perspective on the design, production and reception of British printed textiles globally.

Jo graduated from a BA in French and History at the University of Warwick in 2012. During her degree she spent nine months as an intern at the Musée de la Toile de Jouy, Paris and worked on an exhibition on Yves Saint Laurent at the Manchester Costume Gallery. Jo has helped with research

for the European Galleries 1600 –1800 while at the V&A and volunteered at the National Archives, Kew. Jo has also featured on Unmaking Things with articles on the materiality of dress in the museum and nineteenth-century novelty textile prints.

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Photograph of Cullercoat Fishwife Ester Wakenshaw, Newcastle, 1896, Newcastle Libraries, Accession No. 027637, ÂŠ Newcastle Libraries, 2014.

LANI MCGUINNESS

Producers/Re-Producers: Women by Design in North Korea

Propaganda and reality are in constant battle in North Korea. It may be that nowhere in the world does such a large chasm exist between a government’s projected image of its citizens and the actuality of lived experience. An ideal of national identity has been designed by the regime, which clearly identifies desirable behaviour necessary for citizenship. Women constitute a major social group that has been relentlessly targeted by North Korean propaganda, which claims to have liberated women from the oppression associated with the periods before the division of the peninsula. The visual arts, revolutionary opera and film, have been used to assert that women in Korea are truly emancipated, and that the country is free from gender-discrimination. However, it is clear that the former oppression that was suffered by Korean women has actually been intensified. Whilst pre-division women were expected to take care of all housework and child-rearing, North Korean women today carry the double burden of balancing all family-related tasks and working fulltime outside the home. A key tool in the state’s dissemination of the ideal of the nurturing mother-worker has been the use of iconic women, or ‘female heroes’, both historical and fictional. Yet for all this promotion of the chaste, virtuous, nurturing Korean woman, gender-discrimination against women, especially in the forms of violence and sexual assault/rape, is rife in the manifestly patriarchal state. In its attempt to stifle the voices of those it wishes to subjugate, the DPRK uses propaganda ferociously to create a mediating layer between itself and the world external to it, which replaces the real with the ideal.

Lani graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2012 with a degree in History of Art. In the course of her studies at SOAS she studied the art of various African and Asian cultures, including Korea. During the first year of her Masters in Asian Design History, Lani

continued her research on art and design in Korea, eventually focusing on gender in North Korea. In November 2013, Lani visited North Korea as part of her research for her thesis. After the completion of her Masters, Lani plans to continue working on politics and society in North Korea.

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A wedding couple walks alongside Pyongyang's Revolution Monument for their wedding video. ÂŠ Lani McGuinness, 2013.

LIZ TREGENZA

London Before it Swung: British Ready-to-Wear under the Model House Group and Fashion House Group 1946–65 In 1946 James Laver stated ‘Fashion has reached one of those turning points in history when everything may happen, just because anything may happen in the world.’ It was into this turbulent setting that ten British wholesalers, the elite of ready-to-wear, formed the Model House Group in 1946. The 1960s are often recognised as the dawning age of London as a fashion centre, but this thesis considers what happened before and who laid the foundations allowing this new scene to develop. The Model House Group and Fashion House Group were at the forefront of the flourishing ready-to-wear industry a decade earlier, placing importance upon imaginative fashion presentation, public relations and designing clothes that combined Parisian design inspirations with British fabrics. The story however is an international one, and Group members export activities were vital to their success. In 1959 The Fashion House Group established ‘London Fashion Week.’ This bi-annual event utilised everything from dancing guardsmen to pub-crawls to entice the overseas buyers, the column inches it received is testament to its success. Today names such as Frederick Starke, Susan Small and Frank Usher are almost forgotten from public consciousness, but in the 1940s and 50s they were household names. Their significance as fashion firms and their chairmen’s significance as businessmen is due for re-assessment. London may not have ‘swung’ under the Groups, but the enterprising activities of the Model House Group and Fashion House group were helping to change the image of ready-to-wear and create a real threat to couture.

Liz Tregenza’s research interests focus primarily upon twentieth century fashion history. Liz’s background is in fashion design and it was a passion for vintage clothing that led her to her dissertation topic. Since joining the course Liz has presented a number of papers on fashion history. No-

tably in April 2014 she presented a paper at the IHTP in Paris on British ready-to-wear. Whilst studying towards the MA Liz has worked for a number of museums including the V&A. Liz likes to keep herself busy and in September 2014 her first book, Style Me Vintage: Accessories, will be published.

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Fashion House Group Inaugural show, The Ambassador, May 1959.

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Dress by Frederick Starke, 1959, © Liz Tregenza.

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Frederick Starke suit lining and label c. 1955, © Liz Tregenza.

LUISA COSCARELLI

Pomander and Balsambüchse – Agents in the Material Culture of Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury German Medicine in the European Context

Inspired by an article by Evelyn Welch on smell in Renaissance Italy, I decided to pursue a study of a ‘smelly object’: the pomander. This object is made up of aromatic herbs and spices, as well as the animal secretions musk and ambergris. The latter – from which the object takes its name – is a secretion of the male sperm whale, produced by its inability to digest the beaks of cuttlefish. These pleasant smelling spheres, which are often encased in precious metals, are portrayed as the plague preservative of the Renaissance. It was believed that bad smells were an indicator of the proximity of disease, which was believed to be contracted through inhalation. The battle against pestilential air was fought with the help of pleasant aromatics. I soon discovered that ‘pomander’ functions as an umbrella term for multiple different objects. Therefore, one focus of my dissertation was to separate the Balsambüchse (ointment box) from the pomander, and examine the forgotten object in its own right. After defining each of the objects, an examination of their aromatic ingredients revealed that the pieces were not exclusively used as plague preservatives, but in a wider context of health preservation. This became especially apparent when I looked at how the objects were gendered through the way they were worn – women wore them on long chains close to the womb. Hence, I propose in my dissertation that the objects are linked to a culture of health preservation of the womb and female fertility.

After starting her studies at the University of St. Andrews, Luisa completed her BA at the Humboldt-University of Berlin with degrees in German Literature and History of Art. She is a member of the Renaissance strand of the V&A/RCA History of

Design Programme. During her time on the course Luisa volunteered for the V&A exhibition ‘The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 1945 - 2014’, and she is also an editor of the weekly Unmaking Things column ‘Object of the Week’.

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Pomander, unknown maker, 1600 –1700, Europe, gold filigree enclosing a ball of ambergris. Accession No. 849 –1892, © Victoria and Albert Museum.

NATE SCHULMAN

Addressing LA: Wayfinding in the City, 1990–2010

Why do the majority of commonplace neighbourhoods in contemporary Los Angeles feel un-mapped, if not un-mappable? Even if ultimately un-answerable, the question must be asked. Finding your way in LA requires nearly constant coming-and-going. Yet moving too fast in transit means storming past the stationary, losing sight of it along the way. Senses of place, of history, are lost in the commotion. Appreciating the preponderance of diversified approaches to urban living means slowing down and standing still. With 467 square miles of built environment, Los Angeles naturally forms an inevitable maze – a constantly evolving terrain of multiple community identities. Indeed, LA has nearly as many officially certified areas as there are countries in the entire world. Keeping track of so many distinct units of place, let alone getting to and through them, requires finding one’s way. ‘Wayfinding’, defined as ‘direction for people in motion’, serves just that need, and forms the core topic herein. Instead of forever privileging the car over other means of getting around, Los Angeles begins a transformative journey over the years 1990–2010. I focus on three modes of getting around LA during these last two decades: Driving, Walking and Public Transit. Investigating outwards, three case studies under each thematic heading help sketch out a history of design for wayfinding in the city – all the better to better Address LA.

Still a Southerner after all these years, Nate Schulman hails from Asheville, North Carolina. A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA, Graphic Design), he also holds a Masters from CalArts (MA, Aesthetics and Politics). Since training as a graphic designer, he has as-

sisted influential Los Angeles graphic designers Ed Fella and April Greiman. He is the sole recipient of the American Friends of the V&A Scholarship. Nate’s love for design carries him on all his travels through visual culture.

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As backdrop to a busy built environment, wayfinding must compete for priority in today’s Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Myriam Thyes.

NICHOLAS PETTERS

Constructing Meccanoland: Engineering a Boy’s World, 1901–1925

If you are at all familiar with the British construction toy Meccano, and if you were to page through the December 1925 issue of Meccano Magazine, you would observe some features which you might expect: instructions for new models, competition announcements, letters from Meccano consumers, reports from Meccano clubs and advertisements for the product itself. You might not be surprised to see the twentythird instalment of ‘Lives of the Engineers’, to read ‘The Story of the Forth Bridge’ or to peruse the regular ‘Engineering News of the Month’. However, you might not have predicted discovering a feature article on ‘The Wonders of the Snowflake’ or an address on ‘The Adventure of Living’ by Theodore Roosevelt. You might also be curious to find out why one of the ‘Three Great Objects’ of the Meccano Guild was to ‘foster clean-mindedness, truthfulness, ambition and initiative in boys’, and puzzled to see full-page advertisements for products manufactured by competitor toy companies. Through an analysis of Meccano Magazine I consider why all of this content came to be incorporated into Meccano promotional material in the early twentieth century. I argue that Meccano components are inherently ‘meaningless products’ which only acquire meaning when assembled and which, because of their materiality, lend themselves to constructing engineering and mechanical models. I suggest that Meccano embraced these qualities, deliberately aligned its product with engineering, associated it with education and encouraged the development of communities around it; a successful strategy which established Meccano as a household name.

Nicholas Petters worked as a freelance designer for theatre, television and film both before and after graduating with a BA (Hons) in Dramatic Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. After a brief foray into studying architecture, he joined the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme. While here he

wrote about an eighteenth-century Sheffield penknife and about Dinky Toys made by Meccano in Liverpool. He volunteered as a researcher for the V&A European Galleries Project and presented at ‘Death by Slideshow’ at the RCA. He intends to continue exploring, researching and creating in the future.

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Cover of Meccano Magazine, August 1925. ÂŠ Nicholas Petters, 2014.

NING HUANG

Contemporary Kyoto Confectionery: Urban History, Cultural Legacy and Regional Identity Ky¯gashi, o Kyoto confectionary, is not simply edible; it has deep cultural meaning for the Japanese public. J¯namagashi, o in particular, is often considered the epitome of Japanese confectionaries for its fine taste, sophisticated design, historical significance and specific functions. The o birth and development of j¯namagashi is so deeply rooted in Kyoto, Japan’s former Imperial capital, that it is identified as an important o component of its cultural legacy. The term ‘Ky¯gashi’ was first made a proper noun in the late nineteenth century, referring to Kyoto-produced confectionery for Imperial ritual functions and tea ceremonies. This designation has arguably become a self-conscious mode of branding a culinary product that is exclusive to that city. o This thesis focuses on the j¯namagashi produced and mainly consumed in Kyoto today, and attempts to unpack the close relationship between the industry’s development and Kyoto’s urban history, cultural heritage and regional identity within Japan alongside growing local-global interactions and conflicts. It takes into account the socioeconomic and demographic shifts within Japan and how they affect the o design and branding policies through which the j¯namagashi industry justifies itself to an ever-changing Kyoto public. Based on first-hand sources, this thesis is among the first to explore the contemporary wagashi industry from a history of design point o of view. It not only thoroughly analyses j¯namagashi’s material and cultural aspects and its cultural significance to a Japanese audience, o but also it suggests a critical reading of the j¯namagashi industry’s economic and cultural branding strategies, an analysis which is absent in wagashi-related writings.

After receiving her BA History of Art degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Ning spent a few years in Japan before arriving on the V&A/ RCA History of Design MA Programme. Kyoto, the old Imperial capital embodying nostalgia for and fantasy of a traditional Japan, fascinates Ning from all aspects,

including its nature, widely celebrated in Japanese classics, well-preserved cultural heritage and highly regarded arts and crafts. Her current research interest seeks a possibility of understanding contemporary Kyoto in relation to its past and future through the study of Kyogashi, an edible ¯ design object of Kyoto specialty.

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Tatsuta mochi (Tatsuta rice cake) by Kawabata Doki, ˉ Kyoto. © Ning Huang 2013.

SOPHIE COPE

Objects in the Sea of Time: Dated Objects in Early Modern England

Saucepans, dog collars, nutcrackers, and shoe brushes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this is just a selection of early modern domestic objects that have survived inscribed with dates. From the late sixteenth century there was a significant rise in the number of dated objects. Dates might be engraved, painted, or moulded onto an object. Most were added at the time of making, although many were re-engraved or re-fired later in their existence as they were re-appropriated by new owners. Whilst historians and curators often mention the presence of dates on these objects in passing, few have looked deeper into their larger significance. Why was there a desire to mark the passing of time on material surroundings? And what can dated objects tell us about early modern ideas of time? Alongside a contextual investigation into contemporary perceptions of time and memory, in my research I have also used the theories of George Kubler to think more conceptually about the meaning of dated objects. In his 1962 work, The Shape of Time, Kubler argued that the durations occupied by objects are much longer than biological life spans, reaching far back and stretching infinitely forward. Some artefacts are so durable that they might even be able to surpass time. With objects occupying a much longer continuum, ideally outliving their makers or owners, we could see these dates as personal markers on the sea of time, not unlike graffiti.

Sophie graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2012 with a BA in History. Since joining the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme she has researched a variety of topics, from medieval French jewellery to theories of memory during the Scientific Revolution. Her dissertation looks at how the passing of time was

expressed in materials in early modern England. This work draws on the Dated Objects Project she is involved with, using the diverse collection at Crab Tree Farm, Chicago. Sophie has catalogued and researched some 400 objects for this project, and is currently assisting with the forthcoming publication.

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Tin-Glazed Earthenware Plate, England, 1774. Private Collection. © Sophie Cope, 2013.

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Wooden Stay Busk, England, 1776. Private Collection. © Sophie Cope, 2013.

STEFFI IBIS DUARTE

Agents of the Struggle: Posters by the ANC in Exile and European Solidarity Movements Against South African Apartheid, 1960–1990

This dissertation considers the role of posters produced by the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, and solidarity organisations throughout Europe, in the global struggle against South African apartheid (1960–90). Though ‘posters as activist practice’ is a popular topic among art and design historians, these scholars have not yet explored anti-apartheid posters produced geographically outside of South Africa. Likewise, existing anti-apartheid histories have either marginalised these posters to mere illustrations or ignored them altogether. It hopes to assert the power in global networks, expound design history methodology, and join a new wave of scholarship that conceptualises the struggle as a global and multi-linked movement. This dissertation therefore relies on primary research to piece together a yet uncovered history. Thus it combines existing secondary sources with object analysis, archival research, and oral history. Through mobilising the concepts like agency, and Latour’s Object Actor Network, it materialises the global struggle against apartheid in ways that current scholarship cannot, and should not, ignore.

Prior to entering the course, Steffi received her undergraduate degree in Financial Economics and Art History at the University of Rochester. She is the Windgate Museum Intern and research assistant for the V&A’s forthcoming exhibition Disobedient Objects, and co-editor

of Unmaking Thing’s Craft, Technology and Production blog. In addition to her interests in craft and contemporary design, her days are spent writing on the role of material culture and graphics in the global struggle against apartheid.

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David King, ‘No to Apartheid!’, London, 1985. Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. E.190 –2011. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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‘Abolish Apartheid, Divest Now’, c.1980s. Unknown designer. © Steffi Duarte, 2014.

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David King, ‘Free Nelson Mandela!’, London, c.1980. Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. E.214 –2011. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

SWATI VENKAT

Reinventing the Wheel: Technologies in Gandhi’s Khadi Movement 1917–1935

The twentieth century bore witness to the birth of a radical social experiment in colonial India. Amidst political upheaval and intense nationalist activity, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi directed the energies of the nation into a programme of economic reconstruction that hinged on the spinning-wheel and the coarse homespun Khadi fabric it produced. The aim was not merely that of independence from imperial rule through challenging the hegemony of Manchester and Lancashire textiles, but that of ‘swaraj’ or true liberation born out of self-reliance in all aspects of individual and collective life. Persistent focus on the political dimension of Gandhi’s career has resulted in Khadi being viewed as a form of resistance designed to expedite nationalist goals. This has ended up obscuring narratives of the reform and innovation that propelled this movement. Employing the lens of material culture, this study unfolds a counternarrative of the novel and visionary deployment of technologies in pursuit of an alternative modernity grounded in the core precepts of non-violence and self-sufficiency. Challenges and failures faced in the translation of Khadi ideology into living practice offer insights into the minds of Khadi’s protagonists and practitioners, revealing multiple, varied and sometimes conflicting conceptions of ‘ideal’ technologies. Drawing upon new directions in research on Gandhian science, it is argued that Khadi may be seen not as retrogression but as a parallel course to the hegemonic conception of progress, and as a revolutionary paradigm that sought to re-insert compassion and ethics into economics and technology.

As an undergraduate studying textile design at the National Institute of Design in India, Swati developed an early fascination with historical and socio-cultural aspects of textile making. In her final year she carried out an extensive study of the traditional textiles of the Monpa community of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east

India, focusing primarily on the distinctive card-weaving technique. Her transition to history of design was therefore a natural progression. She is interested in employing her practice-based experience in developing a ‘material culture’ approach towards the study of living textile traditions in India.

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A woman spinning on a double-spindle foot-operated spinning apparatus designed by Prabhudas Gandhi. Image from Magan Charkha, 1940. ÂŠ National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

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A series of illustrations from technical manual, Takli 1946, depicting the process of spinning using a handheld spindle. Originally published in Kundar Balwant Diwan's Takli, 1946. ÂŠ National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

TANIA MESSELL

A New Face for the Future: the Development of Early Corporate Design Programmes in France, 1950–1975 Cohesive corporate design programmes were developed in the midst of post-war economic prosperity, during which the scope of large companies expanded in both size and activity. At a time these adapted their organisation through drastic restructuring and developed their commercial departments, unifying visual identities were thus created to spur the recognition, and as such success of their products and services in increasingly complex markets. Design, as such, had become a key tool in the achievement of corporate goals and aspirations. As little had been written on the subject in France, I set out to examine why, by whom and how the first visual identities were introduced and developed between 1950 and 1975. In order to trace

Tania entered the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme with a Bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a strong interest in the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk or a total work of art, in which the systemisation of design aims at creating a cohesive whole. She has since then written on the visual identity developed by the early 20th century’s

Viennese Wiener Werkstätte and the branding of Provencal ceramics while acting as a co-editor of the Unmaking Things column ‘Design*Systems’. In addition, Tania has undertaken voluntary research for the V&A, and was awarded the Montjoie Fund, which assisted her in her research in France.

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their introduction and application in different sectors, I examined the five-and-dime store Prisunic through an analysis of its shop spaces, the electrical equipment producer Merlin Gerin through the examination of its printed materials and the airline UTA through the examination of its key agent, the plane itself. As the research revealed, their commission went hand in hand with the firms’ expansion, during which social unrest and heavy de-skilling resulted from the firms’ fragmented organisation. Cohesive visual identity thus acted as a unifying tool for the companies’ image both internally and to the outside world. By examining the collaboration between the corporations and the commissioned designers, the dissertation also appraises the difficult entry of the design profession in France, as well as the positioning of practitioners between creation and commerce.

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Gérard Guerre, Merlin Gerin Design Manual, 1967. © Tania Messell, 2014.

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Gérard Guerre, Merlin Gerin Design Manual, 1967. © Tania Messell, 2014.

THOMAS WARHAM

Chairman Mao’s Parades: Spectacle and Spectatorship in the Festivities of Chinese National Day, 1949–1976 The patriotic celebrations of the People’s Republic of China have aroused interest from observers throughout contemporary history. From 1949 to 1970, the Communist Party of China mobilised the Beijing National Day (October 1st) parade as a means to publicise party policy on both a national and international level. The festivities demonstrated how the ruling elite co-opted nationalism as a persuasive tool to advance the aims and objectives of the Chinese Communist Party. The creation of the annual October 1st parades were one example of a wide array of propaganda created by the Politburo to promote their interests and maintain their authority. As a carefully constructed and imaginatively designed public event, the parades drew upon select cultural motifs in order to create an eye-catching nation-state aesthetic – one suitable for the evolving ideologies of Chinese communism. By focusing on the specific visual mechanisms employed by the Chinese state as part of a continually shifting national identity, the complexity of the political ritual may be more clearly understood. Calligraphy, portraiture, flags, floats and the human body were analysed as individual elements in relation to the parade medium. It is through ritual performance and collective social spectacle that nationalism gained widespread support in New China during the period. Analysing how the Mao–era National Day parades were designed elucidates why they proved a viable method for the dissemination of the wide variety of cultural, economic and political objectives encompassed under the wider aegis of Chinese nationalism.

Thomas Warham came to the V&A and the Royal College of Art having studied on a foundation course in Art & Design at Chelsea College of Art and an undergraduate degree in History of Art at University College London. He is a student of the Asian Design strand and finds the following of particular interest: post-colonial

theory, everyday ephemera and reevaluating definitions of art and design. He has contributed to research projects at Kew Gardens and assists at Hackney Pirates, a youth charity helping local children to read and write and contribute creatively to a community project.

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IMG A

Factory floats in the National Day parade, Tiananmen Square, October 1st 1968, China Pictorial © Thomas Warham

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Banners and lanterns above the National Day crowds, Tiananmen Square, October 1st 1970, China Pictorial © Thomas Warham

ZENIA MALMER

‘A Beautiful Creamy Mass, as Light as a Feather’: Mechanisation, Homogeneity and Ice Cream, 1844–1914 The words uniformity, homogeneity and regularity are more likely to evoke a continuous stream of products on a factory assembly line than the deliciously chilled topic of this thesis. From 1844 to 1914, uniformity in texture defined the quality of cream and water ices. To ensure that this luxurious confectionery could be achieved within the home, inventors promised that mechanical ice cream makers could churn dairy- or water-based mixtures into palatably smooth ices. Their biggest advantage was that inexperienced cooks, housekeepers or mistresses could operate them. Simply turning or pumping a handle activated a built-in churn system that mixed the ices in one stream-lined process. By conglomerating individual steps into one single operation, mechanisation was perceived as a tool that would supersede the longestablished craft technique of making ices with a pewter pot, wooden pail and ‘spaddle’. A

Over the past year, Zenia Malmer has immersed herself in the academic realms of food and design history. Her food/design research interests span a wide variety of topics, some of which have been explored on her co-edited blog ‘The Cabinet of Culinary Curiosities’ on Unmaking Things. Prior to the HoD MA, Zenia did her BA

in English Studies and Arts Management at Oxford Brookes University. Professional work experience includes a three-year stint at the Ministry of Culture in her home country Luxembourg, as well as providing research assistance for the Word and Image Department at the V&A.

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This thesis examines if machinery fully replaced craft skills in the making of ices. This thesis thus examines if machinery fully replaced craft skills in the making of ices, and also questions why the 'pewter pot technique' was still advised in cookery books up until the 1920s. Yet why was the ‘pewter pot technique’ still advised in cookery books up until the 1920s? Food in the nineteenth century was a valuable social currency. The way it was prepared reflected one’s culinary aspirations or pretension. According to cookery debates, ices made with standardising implements were a mere imitation of ices made following craft techniques; credible, but not perfect. Even when using mechanical aids, aspiring confectioners still had to know what to aim for. Sensory involvement and skilled judgment could not be replaced by a mere turn of a handle. These mechanical kitchen aids did not embody hard-to-grasp components such as taste. Ultimately, these remained ingredients central to the making of ices in the home which these machines failed to conglomerate. B

IMG A

A sectional view of a mechanical ice cream freezer. Turning the handle activated the centrifugal ‘dasher’ freezing perfectly textured ices. Originally published in Charles Herman Senn's, Ices and How To Make Them, (London, Food and Cookery Publishing Agency, 1907), 3rd edition, p.11

IMG B

A sectional view of a mechanical double ice cream freezer. Originally published in Charles Herman Senn's, Ices and How To Make Them, (London, Food and Cookery Publishing Agency, 1907), 3rd edition, p.06

Collective

Writings

C.W. 1

LUISA COSCARELLI

Designing Dogs — A Pug’s Life Dogs have featured in art and design for centuries – starting with prehistoric cave drawings, Egyptian relief, and famously a representation in the form of a mosaic in Pompeii. Dogs have also featured in illuminated manuscripts, medieval and Renaissance prints, textiles, in painting, or as sculptures differing in size and ranging in materials from wood to marble, ceramics, and terracotta. The variety of materials used to represent dogs is almost as vast as the different species of dogs themselves. Fascinatingly, at least 150 dog species we know of today all have one ancestor – the wolf.1 Belonging to the species of Canis, examinations of brain size, anatomy of the skeleton, and the teeth appear to confirm that dogs have a greater resemblance to wolves than to any other animals belonging to this species (coyotes or jackals for example). Furthermore, as Dr. Juliet Clutton-Brok – member of staff in the Mammal section of the British Museum – argues, “wolf, like man, lives in a family group based on dominance hierarchies, so that imprinting on man as the group leader can be extended into adult life.”2 This argument suggests that the similarities in social structure between man and wolf played a part in its domestication and subsequent evolution into the domestic dog. However, this evolution took time, and involved taming, and breedHogarth’s Dog Trump, after Louis-François Roubiliac, Chelsea Porcelain factory, 1747–1750, London, soft-paste porcelain, Victoria and Albert Museum Accession No. C.101–1966, © Victoria and Albert Museum.

ing in and out of qualities that were desired by man according to the role the animal was to fulfil in the community. These qualities could be connected to the dog’s appearance and it is truly fascinating to observe how the appearance of dogs changed over time. In addition, it is fascinating to think about how humans took on the role of ‘designing dogs’. One striking example is the breeding history of pugs. It is generally agreed that the pug first appeared in China, then Japan, before coming to Europe in the sixteenth century.3 Once in

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Europe it became the official dog of the House of Orange in 1572 after saving the life of William II, the Prince of Orange at the battle of Hermigny by barking upon the approach of the Spanish armies.4 Since its introduction to Europe this breed was popular with rulers through the ages, its popularity declining only in the nineteenth century, and regaining strength after the Pug Dog Show in London in 1885.5 However, the pug of the past does not look exactly like the dog we know today. Characterised by its stubby, almost inverted snout, short legs, and a sturdy, compact build, objects from the past reveal that this was not always the dog’s appearance. English painter William Hogarth (1697–1764) owned a pug named Trump. This animal has been immortalized by Hogarth himself in a self-portrait from 1745, and in the form of a porcelain figurine made in the Chelsea Porcelain factory around the same time of the painting. Noticeably, the pug has longer legs, a relatively elongated snout, and looks generally leaner than pugs of our day. The longer snout can also be seen in a painting entitled ‘Willpower’ by the animal painter Charles van den Eycken from 1891. Therefore, the shrinking of the muzzle must have occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is thought to have happened due to inbreeding and must have been part of a personal preference of breeders. All of this information is to raise questions about humans as designers of living beings, of nature, and whether design historians can talk about the design of dogs the same way that we can about the design of objects. In the end, different breeds of dogs have developed according to human necessity and human preference. We have tailored the appearance, character, and size of dogs to reflect our own tastes and desires. Guidelines for the look and personality of a dog breed are established today, which in a way relates to manufacturing guidelines for specific types of objects that regulate how things look – that they look the same – and limit error or danger.

Juliet Clutton-Brock, ‘Man-made dogs’, Science, 197, no. 4311 (1977), 1340 –1342, p. 1340

Clutton-Brok, ‘Man-made dogs’, 1977, p. 1341.

https://www.akc.org/breeds/pug/history.cfm

William Secord, Dog Painting – The European breads, (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’Club, 2000), p. 138. 4

Secord, Dog Painting, 2000, p. 141.

C.W. 2

EMILY ALEEV-SNOW

“The Most Popular Service”: Blue and White Porcelain, Willow Pattern …and a Tube Poster

Very often, as I’m wandering around the V&A I am confronted with an object or design detail that immediately sparks my curiosity and demands that I ask, “What IS that? How did it come into being?” Maybe this happens to you, as well? The answers to these questions often turn out to be tantalizingly complex, and likely to beget even more questions. Who was making this? How did it develop, and why? Under what circumstances were the ideas and knowledge for it transmitted – possibly across geographies and cultures and time? Who were the intended consumers, and who really used it? Did the object move spatially, or temporally? Why did this movement occur, and how was the object perceived, and assimilated or altered? What about the materials that make up the object? Why were they chosen and were they culturally contingent? How does an object reflect the practices or geographies or usages of which it is a part? Coming face to face with unfamiliar objects can open up new worlds of inquiry. Conversely, the objects most familiar to us, objects that we might unthinkingly perceive as solidly culturally, geographically, or temporally located in a certain way, can in actuality contain a wealth of global connections and other unexpected plot twists that can complicate and challenge our views of such concepts as origin, authenticity or tradition. UNPACKING “THE MOST POPULAR SERVICE”

This poster – commissioned by the Underground Electric Railway Company in 1913 for publicity purposes – contains a pastiche of the recognizable and ubiquitous blue and white Willow Pattern print transfer design that has featured prominently on British-made ceramic tableware from the 1790s to the present day. A train and a station building replace the typical pagoda and boat elements in the pattern, and a caption reads, “The popular service suits all tastes,” a play on words that conflates the popularity of the Willow Pattern dinner service and the train service.1 A meaningful reading of the poster depends upon the viewer’s recognition of the Willow Pattern design and acknowledgement of its widespread popularity. This poster is advertising a mass transit system, and therefore targeting a broad audience; this speaks to an assump-

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tion on the part of the Underground Electric Railway Company that the choice of this design would be relatable to a wide variety of social groups. HOW DID THIS POSTER COME INTO BEING?

It makes sense to start an examination of the development of the Willow Pattern by considering three aspects of the history of Chinese porcelain manufacture and trade: the far-reaching impact of Chinese

The Popular Service Suits All Tastes, 1913. Double Royal standard poster format, 625mm × 1010mm. Printed by Johnson, Riddle & Company Ltd, Published by Underground Electric Railway Company Ltd. London Transport Accession No. 1983/4/370. © Emily Aleev-Snow, 2013.

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EMILY ALEEV SNOW

porcelain on the European market, the evolution of blue and white patterns and techniques, and the development of the Willow Pattern and its rise to become a literal poster child for ubiquity. “TRUE” PORCELAIN VS. HOMEMADE CERAMIC WARES

The product that is today designated as “true” porcelain, composed of a mixture of kaolin and china-stone and fired at extremely high heat,

A dish featuring the classic Willow Pattern. Plate, Spode, Stoke-on-Trent, England, c. 1800 –1820, earthenware, transfer-printed in underglaze blue. Victoria and Albert Museum Accession No. C.847–1925. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

was developed at the kilns of Jingdezhen in the early Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368). China held a monopoly on the secrets of its production until the early eighteenth century, and the rest of the AfroEurasian world coveted porcelain for its brilliant white color, translucency, hardness, and impermeability. Chinese kilns took European commissions for shipments of porcelain from as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, but these items were out of reach for all but the wealthiest. The overwhelming desire for porcelain drove technological experimentation at home, as manufacturers strove to discover the secret of porcelain, or create a product as similar as possible. By the time European researchers finally figured out the recipe in 1708,2 British domestic manufacturers had created ceramic wares that gained a significant following, separate from that of porcelain.

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While the wealthiest may have still prized porcelain above all, a larger segment of society was buying domestically produced ceramic tableware. Rather than looking at this phenomenon as a straightforward case of import substitution (in which a highly desired but prohibitively expensive imported product is replaced in the market with a more accessible domestically produced product), the situation may have been more nuanced than that: though the middling sorts may have been no less interested than their upper class counterparts in acquiring the accoutrements necessary for the performance of fashionable dining practices, homemade products were in no way seen as inferior to imported versions, but rather part of a specifically middling class value system in which homemade production and economic practicality were sources of pride.3 A manufacturing process that resulted in the production of ceramics of varying levels of quality and expense made these domestic wares accessible to a very broad range of society4 – a group large enough that eventually the Underground Electric Railway Company could create an advertisement that depended on a widespread familiarity with these objects. BLUE AND WHITE PATTERNS AND TECHNIQUES

Most people might think of blue and white patterns on porcelain and other ceramics as purely Chinese in origin, but the development of these motifs and techniques is much more convoluted. Blue and white patterned porcelain most likely came about as a result of exchange between China and the Middle East. Porcelain was a highly desirable commodity in the Middle East and certainly inspired many craftsmen there, but it was plagued by an aesthetic issue: the monochromatic glazes favored in China ran counter to the long-held Middle Eastern preference for brightly colored decoration for ceramic wares.5 Muslim merchants living in China at the beginning of the fourteenth century were aware of (a) a strong and lucrative market for porcelain in the Middle East, (b) Middle Eastern craftsmens’ technical difficulties in using cobalt oxide to achieve a highly desirable blue and white decorative pattern on their wares, and (c) the technical innovations happening at the Jingdezhen kilns; and they sensed a business opportunity. Massive quantities of cobalt oxide ore were shipped from the Middle East to China, and Chinese craftsmen took inspiration from the metalwork, textiles and other objects in the Muslim merchants’ lavishly appointed homes to create relatable porcelain forms with blue and white glaze patterns customized for – and shipped in bulk to – the Middle Eastern markets.6 It took until the end of the fourteenth century for these comparatively gaudy designs (continually adapted by craftsmen with images and

C.W. 2

EMILY ALEEV SNOW

motifs that would be meaningful to their intended consumers) to catch on in the Chinese domestic market, but by the time Europeans began commissioning shipments of porcelain during the sixteenth century, blue and white patterned porcelain had long been a strong seller in multiple markets. Unsurprisingly, blue and white patterned decorative glazing became a favorite for the ornamentation of other non-porcelain ceramics as well. THE WILLOW PATTERN

There is some debate about precisely who – there is evidence for either Thomas Minton or Josiah Spode I – was responsible for the creation of the Willow Pattern transfer print in the early 1790s, but it was reproduced by a number of companies on creamware or pearlware dishes.7 It is thought that Willow Pattern is a composite of various elements taken from imported blue and white Chinese porcelain.8 However, it is important to note that any notion of the Willow Pattern being created from ‘authentically’ Chinese designs is complicated by the fact that Chinese porcelain made for export typically featured images and motifs constructed by Chinese craftsmen, as representations of their perception of the European perception of ‘Chineseness’. (Are you still with me?) The Willow Pattern was only one of many blue and white Chinese-inspired transfer prints produced for British ceramics in A blue and white patterned brush rest made for the Middle Eastern market. A thorough examination of this object was undertaken last year by our colleague, Violet Pakzad. Brush rest, Jingdezhen, China, c. 1506 –1521, white porcelain moulded, decorated with cobalt blue under the glaze. Victoria and Albert Museum Accession No. FE.195 –1974. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and yet the Willow Pattern print seems to have been the most popular. The remains of Willow Pattern ceramic wares have been recovered from archaeological sites around London in enormous numbers in a variety of locations that have historically housed residents of different social strata.9 The Willow Pattern was undeniably popular, and accessible to a wide range of sorts, even to the point that a tale of star-crossed lovers based on

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the imagery in the pattern made its way into popular culture through literature and song from at least the 1830s.10 Finally, the idea that an object could represent an archive is one that I am completely preoccupied with, but how often do you suppose most people stop to think about how something as apparently mundane as the design on a Tube poster could only have come about through several hundred years of cultural, economic and technical exchange? Our sense of curiosity when looking at objects is not something that we have a monopoly on, so when we are (inevitably) asked what it means to be Design Historians, this fundamental connection with objects is the most easily sharable point of entry for explaining what it is that we do.

1 London Transport Museum, The Popular Service Suits All Tastes 1913 – Poster http:// www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/posters/product/the-popular-service-suits-all-tastes1913-poster.html [accessed 18 October 2013].

2 At the court of Augustus II (the Strong), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670 – 1733). Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, Vol. 9 No. 2, (1998), 141–187 (p. 143).

3 Emily Aleev-Snow, Hannah Stockton, and Angela McShane, ‘Empires of Glass: Bristol Manufacturers Isaac and Lazarus Jacobs and the Colonial Taste in Bottles’, Imperial City: Bristol in the World Conference, UWE, 21–22 September 2013.

4 Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), ‘The Enduring Appeal of the Willow Pattern Print’, Materiality of Regency and Victorian Domesticity, Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2013.

5 Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, Vol. 9 No. 2, (1998), 141–187 (p. 153).

6 Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, Vol. 9 No. 2, (1998), 141–187 (p. 153).

7 Robert Copeland, Spode’s Willow Pattern & Other Designs After the Chinese (Studio Vista, 1980), p. 33; Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), ‘The Enduring Appeal of the Willow Pattern Print’, Materiality of Regency and Victorian Domesticity, Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2013.

8 Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), ‘The Enduring Appeal of the Willow Pattern Print’, Materiality of Regency and Victorian Domesticity, Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2013.

9 Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), ‘The Enduring Appeal of the Willow Pattern Print’, Materiality of Regency and Victorian Domesticity, Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2013.

10 There is some debate as to which came first – the Willow Pattern or its accompanying legend. It does seem more probable, however, that the story first arose here in Britain rather than being an actual “Chinese legend.” Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), ‘The Enduring Appeal of the Willow Pattern Print’, Materiality of Regency and Victorian Domesticity, Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2013.

C.W. 3

LANI MCGUINNESS

Pyongyang: Five Days in the 'Hermit Kingdom' A

Our guide at the DMZ (demilitarised zone) was tall and handsome. The tallest soldiers are chosen to represent the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to cover up the fact that North Korean men are purportedly shorter than their southern counterparts. He jokingly asked our tour leader Sarah to marry him.

First stop on a tour to Pyongyang is their arc de triomphe. It is modelled on the one in Paris, but is three metres higher; a fact that the North Koreans are very proud of.

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Wedding photos are taken at important sites around the city. We were the third coach-load of tourists to take photos of this couple.

Overleaf

It must have been an auspicious day to get married as the areas around the Mansudae monument were swarming with newlyweds. In the foreground note the photobomb by Mr Kim, the lovely cameraman for our tour. The Korea International Travel Company make DVDs of the tours, which combine propaganda with highlights from the tour.

C.W. 4

NICHOLAS PETTERS

My Journey into ‘Meccanoland’ When I first applied to the History of Design Programme I imagined I would focus my research and writing on architecture and/or design for theatre and performance. Both are subjects that hold personal interest and I had been professionally involved in theatre, television and film previously. It was my intention to build on these personal interests and past experiences and to pursue more in-depth study of these subjects. However, when I was asked in my interview for the course to choose an object, and explain how I would research it, I described how I would investigate a Meccano Dinky Toys model car. I’m not entirely sure why I chose this object over something else. It was the first thing that came to mind in my nervousness. I had recently visited the Museum of Childhood where I had recognised a toy car exactly like one my father owns. A significant object, which had screamed out at me in a museum a couple of days beforehand, had invaded my interview. I was excited to be accepted onto the course and, slightly overwhelmed by the first term workload, spent several weeks paying a lot attention to an eighteenth-century penknife. Dinky Toys were far from my thoughts until the following term arrived and I needed a subject for my next essay. Writing about Dinky Toys seemed like it might be fun. I was curious to know more about Meccano Ltd. (the company responsible for manufacturing them), to know who designed them and to know how they were made. I quickly experienced difficulties in sourcing primary material directly related to Meccano. Most of its archive was either lost, destroyed or pilfered when its Liverpool factory closed in 1979. A small selection of documents, rescued from a skip by a heroic archivist, were incorporated into the National Museums Liverpool Archive but these were mostly dated outside of the scope of my study. I also discovered that a significant proportion of all of the secondary texts written about Dinky Toys, and other Meccano products, were compiled by collectors and enthusiasts for a collector and enthusiast readership and so were of limited use to me. In desperation I decided to seek alternative methods for sourcing material. I joined a couple of online model toy forums which enabled me to connect with several Dinky Toys enthusiasts. They generously gave me access to a significant number of working drawings, design drawings, photographs of prototypes and sample models of Dinky Toys held in private collections.

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'A New Meccano Model', Meccano Magazine, December 1925. ÂŠ Nicholas Petters, 2014.

More traditional archives provided fragments of useful information. Ieuan Hopkins, the British Toy Making Project Archivist at the Museum of Childhood, kindly showed me all of the material which they hold on Meccano. This was again, very limited. He suggested I look through their comprehensive collection of Games and Toys, a toy trade journal, which proved to be a fruitful source. I spent several hours looking through the extensive archive of Lines Brothers, another large toy company with similar manufacturing capabilities to Meccano. Material documenting its munitions output during the

C.W. 4

NICHOLAS PETTERS

Second World War helped to clarify comparable work which Meccano was assigned during the same period and which was not discussed in any of the existing literature. At the National Archives, I consulted correspondence between Meccano, the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Munitions which yielded further details about Meccano’s production for war. It was exciting to discover this information and satisfying to fill a gap in the company’s history. In the end I managed to gather enough information, both from the above-mentioned documents and from a range of other disparate sources, to write an account of the design and manufacture of Dinky Toys between 1934 and 1964. When it came to choosing a topic for my dissertation, continued study of Meccano seemed like a good idea. I was intrigued by Meccano Magazine, published by Meccano between 1916 and 1964. Successive editors of this magazine had regularly included detailed articles describing the processes involved in the manufacture of Meccano’s products. Lengthy accounts of the company’s history, written by Frank Hornby (the company’s founder), had also been printed in its pages. In my Dinky Toys research I found this material to be an invaluable primary source of information about the company and its business. Other authors had similarly used the magazine in this way

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but no one seemed to have considered the design, the function or the history of the magazine itself. As you will notice from my dissertation abstract, included elsewhere in this publication, I decided to focus my attention on Meccano Magazine and to correct this oversight. Again, in the course of my research, I found myself corresponding with Meccano enthusiasts from all over the world. I travelled to Skegness in July to attend Skegex, the ‘International Meccano Show’. In August I visited the Brighton Toy and Model Museum and the Museum of Liverpool to attend talks and events organised to celebrate Frank Hornby’s 150th anniversary. I also travelled up to 'The Meccano Guild: The Secretary's Notes' (detail), Meccano Magazine, November 1925. © Nicholas Petters, 2014.

Leyland one cold October morning to attend a meeting of the North West Meccano Guild. I was proudly shown both simple and complex Meccano models, was told about childhood visits to the Meccano factory (apparently deafeningly noisy) and was lectured on the superiority of Meccano over Lego (a name repeatedly uttered with extreme contempt). When I started on this course, I would never have imagined that a response to a question asked in my initial interview would determine the focus of so much of the research and writing that I would undertake. Meccano is a subject which has consumed immense amounts of my time over the course of the last two years and I have sourced more material than I could ever have anticipated at the outset. ‘Meccano’ is also a word which I hope not to speak, write or type for a while! Once the weariness has resided, however, I might revisit ‘Meccanoland’ to explore the places that I did not manage to see the first time around.

C.W. 5

DOROTHY ARMSTRONG

Meeting the Maker As a student in the Asian specialism with a special interest in Oriental carpets, I set out to understand the impact of synthetic dyes on nineteenth century Persian carpets. I found that the story of these dyes demanded a radically interdisciplinary approach which included philosophy, optical science and economics, as well as more traditional design historical sources. Once the textual sources had done their work, I found that my ideas were transformed again by my encounter with the V&A’s own collection of carpets. For a long time I had an itch I couldn’t scratch about carpet commentators’ assumption that natural dyes are de facto superior to the synthetic dyes which began to be available from the mid-nineteenth century. It didn’t seem to me that this was necessarily so, and it was clearly not so in nineteenth century dress, where synthetics were welcomed. I set out to explore the roots of that assumption. It became clear that the preference for natural dyes in oriental carpets in the late-nineteenth century West was part of a significant conversation on colour. The conversation included William Morris’s belief in the superiority for craftsmen and consumer of pre-industrial techniques of production. It reflected the development and application of a western canon of taste to control the threateningly seductive East. It also sprang from a deep-rooted suspicion of vibrant colour which the in nineteenth century was associated with what they then regarded as morally-compromised groups; children, non-Western peoples, and women. Our current view of colour perception is more fluid. Twentiethcentury scientific work suggests that the physical capacity for colour perception varies across individuals, with some individuals possessing a larger number of colour receptors than others. Philosophers from Wittgenstein onwards suggest that colour description varies across societies and time, and with it the possibilities for colour perception. However, in the nineteenth century West it was possible to believe in the absolute superiority of faded, natural dyes over vivid, new synthetics in Oriental carpets, for what were beginning to look to me like ideological reasons. In Persia, meanwhile, the actions of the government in the nineteenth century seemed also to support the superiority of ‘traditional’ and ‘natural’ methods of dyeing, uncomfortably challenging my thesis that the response to synthetic dyes was primarily ideological and Western. The Persian government banned synthetic dyes, with draconian

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penalties such as the burning down of dye-houses which used them. Investigation of the economic history of Persia and of the carpet industry which fed the Western market for carpets began to tell another story. Between 1870 and 1910 European demand for Oriental rugs transformed carpets into Persia’s biggest export. Persia welcomed European companies who established proto-capitalist, semi-industrialised manufacturing processes in traditional Persian weaving centres such as Sultanabad and Tabriz. Those companies worked with natural dyes because that was what the European carpet market demanded, and the

Visitors at the exhibition Carpets of Central Persia, Mappin Gallery, Sheffield, 10 April–19 May 1976, May Beattie Archive, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 21a_029. Photo: May Beattie

Persian authorities were willing to protect that market. Economic history, as well as philosophy and optical science, challenged the notion of the intrinsic value and identity of natural dyes. I had made some progress in scratching my itch. I had explored the constructed nature of the Western preference for natural dyes, and how a combination Western dreams and Persian economic choices had resulted in the organisation of more than 30% of the Persian carpet industry into Western-style manufactories for the production of carpets for Western tastes. The story would have remained at that point, had I not been given the opportunity to help with the preparation of the V&A’s own carpets for their move to the recently-opened Clothworkers’ Studio. We removed old backings and hanging fittings in preparation for rolling,

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DOROTHY ARMSTRONG

Turkoman prayer rug (ensi), Central Asia, Nomazlik or Saryk tribes,1800 –1899, wool and cotton pile, wool warp and weft, 196cmx136cm, weight 10 kg, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.191–1922. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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fumigation and storage. We sat with each carpet for 15 minutes, our fingers in the pile, staring intently at the weave, knotting and coloration. The intent staring was not for the purpose of analysis, rather to avoid making holes in the carpets with our conservatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tools. It was in this process of intimate physical connection that I noticed small areas of intense turquoise green in a carpet, a very difficult colour to achieve in nature. This carpet was a highly-regarded latenineteenth century Turkmen carpet from the nomadic tribes of the Iranian borders. These carpets are prized for their austerely limited natural palette of red, cream and black. The opportunity to have a different experience of the carpet had opened up a different train of thought. What was a possibly synthetic green doing in a Turkman carpet? What if carpet weavers had chosen to use synthetics? Why might they have chosen to do that? What was its effect on the carpets? I went back to my research, and found that there had been a significant level of smuggling of synthetic dyes into Persia during the later nineteenth century. So much so that the Shah had to reissue his edict against synthetic dyes in 1904. Dye arrived in barrels of olives and sugar. Persian merchants and artisans were willing to take risks to get hold of it. Commentators suggested that cheapness and ease of use were the reasons for the smuggling. But we cannot know what a bottle of smuggled dye cost a Persian weaver, nor the investment involved in learning how to use it in a community which might not be literate, let alone literate in the German of the bottlesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; instructions. These commentators also assumed the inferiority of synthetically-dyed carpets. I proposed a different explanation; that Persian artisans saw a creative opportunity in these new dyes, enjoying their vibrant and new colours. I also suggested that illegal use of synthetics in their own work permitted Persian artisans to reclaim their autonomy in the increasingly industrialised environment in which they were expected to work. Working in basic conservation of the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s carpets had given me the opportunity to be a temporary carpet artisan, and the effect of that was to restore the artisan to my research, so that their intentions could be placed alongside the perspectives of cultural and economic history.

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CHARLOTTE FLINT

Concealed Objects, Problematic Archives Nervously waiting in a queue to enter the Queens County courthouse to record my first oral history, I check my pockets again for my voice recorder and camera. Having queued for almost an hour I eventually reach the security gates and have my pockets and bag thoroughly searched. Upon discovering my Dictaphone and camera the security guard briskly informs me that no recording devices are allowed to be taken into the courthouse, confiscating both devices until my return and ushering me through the gate empty handed. I travelled to Queens, New York City on a research trip whilst exploring wearable electronic surveillance devices for my dissertation, Corporeal Control: Wearable Electronic Monitoring Devices, 1989–2013. My journey to New York, and Queens in particular was motivated by the use of Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring (SCRAM) bracelets within their alcohol treatment court. Upon discovering the bracelet’s implementation within Queens’ alcohol programme, I contacted the programme director, Naima Aiken, who I arranged to interview the day my recording devices were confiscated. The exclusion of recording equipment from the courtroom itself is understandable, as personal matters concerning an individual’s offences are being addressed. However, the omission of my camera and Dictaphone made interviewing and accurately recording the responses difficult and meant it was impossible to record an oral history, as I initially planned. The research on SCRAM forms the second of my three chapters concerning differing types of wearable monitoring devices. The dissertation is built around five separate technologies, a number of which have been used within the criminal justice system. Due to the use of such devices as a form of ‘techno-correction’ and the sensitive nature of this topic, researching the history of these technologies has proven much more difficult than anticipated. The electronic monitoring of offenders through wearable devicesor ‘tags’ as they are more commonly known in the UK, was first implemented in America in 1983. Once established in America, the technology travelled to the UK where it was tested and subsequently introduced in 1989. Much of the knowledge generated concerning the technology has been fuelled by the media, with sensational newspaper headlines designing popular opinions of offenders and their monitoring accessories. Aside from newspaper articles and media coverage,

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electronic monitoring has also been discussed within the field of criminology. Yet whilst newspapers and criminological literature has been helpful, there is very little information concerning the physical object that monitors the body. Further complicating the research of such items, much of the British Home Office results from their technology trials have been embargoed, making statistics and results inaccessible. Within the brief historiography of electronic monitoring, much of the writing is described as ‘poor’ by criminologists. This self-confessed problem within the literature on the topic has also posed difficulties in researching the SCRAM bracelet. This wearable alcohol monitor has been discussed in minute detail within criminology and my main sources of research have been scientific journals, patents and official literature produced by the manufacturer Alcohol Monitoring Systems (AMS). Upon further analysis of some sources, it transpired that AMS, in fact funded much of the ‘independent’ literature. Although the information is still useful, it is thus necessary to question these documents as propagating only positive elements of the technology rather than offering an objective analysis of these devices. One of the main elements of my research methodology has been conducting interviews with wearers of various monitoring technologies in order to uncover truths about the devices and wearer-experiences. Such interviews have revealed that the SCRAM bracelet’s official literature disseminate false information about the object. For example, an official patent describes the use of surgical stainless steel within the device’s make-up that prevents wearers from having allergic reactions. Yet numerous wearers have reported uncomfortable itching and scabbing caused by the metal used. Finally, a further problem in researching the device is its status as something frequently ‘hidden’. The large, ungainly items worn to monitor the body have become recognizable as visible indicators of criminality. As a result of this, wearers often choose to conceal the item underneath their clothing to prevent social stigma. Since these items are often covered, they are not easy objects to view or obtain. Due to these problems experienced in the early stages of research, I have conducted and used interviews with previous offenders and tag-wearers in order to uncover truths about the device. In addition to this, I have examined theoretical approaches to surveillance to explore a brief and frequently problematic historiography of electronic monitoring. The difficulties experienced in investigating these items offer a comment upon the problems of researching politically engaged design, and the limited access to important information.

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CATERINA TIEZZI

Pay·me(a)nt Cards: Examples of Design Change Showed Through Object Analysis

Means of payments, explains Professor Bill Yang, are those methods that facilitate the delivery of money from one party to another.1 While many means of payments exist, bank payment cards provide an opportunity to show how object analysis, as utilised by History of Design, can serve to reconstruct the story of material evidence around us. This

article – based on a larger essay on design change seen in Visa-sponsored Barclay’s payment cards – will focus on the past and foreseeable changes of payment cards with emphasis on materiality. “Payment cards as we know them” have maintained their seemingly standard appearances for the past 60 years. Specifically the shape and size of these cards has remained encapsulated in a rectangle with rounded angles, measuring 5.5cm × 8.7cm × 0.1cm. This is because bank payment cards needed to fit within standardised card-readers across the world. This was the case despite the many variations that could occur among cards. Among these mentioned differences, functional options could be seen in credit and debit cards, but also in the

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necessary customisations that would occur on the data embossed on the face of cards. Despite the fact that we have come to recognise bank cards has having a particular shape and material, they have not always existed in this state. For example, Frank MacNamara’s Diners Club Card, which is largely considered to be the first payment card, was a little rectangular booklet, as big as a business card, that was actually made of card (i.e. a sturdier type of paper).2 Looking at more recent history, design change in the materiality of payment cards can be again. Thanks to developments in pay-wave technology, which allows a card holder to make a purchase by tapping his/her card on a specially devised card-reader, the shape of a card no longer needs to be fixed. This is true so long as it contains the necessary chip and information printed on its face. Taking advantage of this development Barclaycard – the card division of Barclay Bank – has made available PayTag. This is a payment card which is a third smaller than regular bank card. It functions via pay-wave technology and allows for £20 to be used by its owner.3 Interestingly the back of Pay Tag features an adhesive band that is meant to allow customers to easily attach this card to the back of their smart phones. While there are no technical necessities for this pairing, this strategic move has been promoted by Barclay as an educational strategy to have customers get used to paying by positioning their phones close to a reader, rather than by swiping cards.4 This, coupled with a rumoured roll out of phone-payment solutions, potentially means a sentence of ‘obsolescence by design’ for payment cards. Although these are only a few observations that can be made by reconstructing the history of payment cards as objects, it is interesting to see how the analysis of designed matter, one of the favoured methodologies of History of Design can offer specific insights to understand human inventions.

1 Bill Z. Yang, ‘What is Not Money? Medium of Exchange ≠ Means of Payment’, The American Economist, Volume 51 Issue 2, (Fall 2007), p. 102

2 David L. Stearns, Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System (London and New York: Springer, 2011),p. 13.

3 Stephen Womack, ‘The Sticky Credit Card that Can Be Put on a Mobile for Tap-and-Go’, in Tribune Business News, 22 April 2012.

4 Russell Parsons, ‘Barclays readies ‘mobile’ contactless card’, in Marketing Week Online Edition, 19 April 2012, http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=bth&AN=7 4452940&site=ehost-live, p. 7.

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ORAL HISTORIES

Interview Excerpt: Listening to history – the AIDS Memorial Quilt My research focuses on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. This 54-ton textile object serves as both activist tool and memorial, creating sites for education and discussion about the continuing epidemic, as well as serving as a vital resource for the history of HIV/AIDS in America. Much of my work relied on a series of interviews I conducted both over the phone and during a visit to the NAMES Project Headquarters in Atlanta. These rich sources provide a textured, detailed and thoroughly personal history of the crisis, as told through the materiality of the Quilt. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Gert McMullin, who has worked with the Quilt since before the NAMES Project opened in 1987. Here, she re-visits the chaotic nature of the early years of the crisis, and describes the effect the Quilt has had on her life. GM

Those years were the most horrible and the most wonderful I’ll have in my life [becomes emotional]. All my friends were dying and it was really really horrible, but it was really wonderful to see these people who would take their lives and kind of put it aside. [...] it seemed like a long time ago but then it seems like yesterday. You know I was a very selfish person, I just wanted to have fun. I’m not a good person, you know. I’m not the type you know mother Teresa and all that. I’m not like that. I wanted have a good life, but my life wasn’t good, and it was just great to see that there were other people. ‘Cause I always thought I was alone. That there were other people that would do that, and not go out dancing and not do this and not do that – and stay there. And get it to wherever we needed it to go. CP

Did it give you a focus in a time when you had no control? GM

Oh there was always no control. But what do you mean? CP

Well, people were dying and you are completely out of control— GM

It was frantic. It was horrible. CP

—did the quilt give you something solid to do? GM

What the Quilt gave to me personally is that [pause] my friends were

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the very first to die in San Francisco. [...] And so my friends were dying and getting sick and no one would let me talk about it. This was before it was even called AIDS: it was called GRID. And everybody—my boyfriend left me, I mean just everybody went away from me because I—and I must have changed a lot. But what it did for me was I was going to hospitals a lot and stuff. And I knew I couldn’t do any more of that. I was doing enough of that. And I needed to find something and somebody told me about Cleve Jones [puts on a voice] ‘I think is doing something with sewing,’ or whatever. And so I called him way before it opened, like six weeks before it opened. And it gave me a place where I could talk about my friends. Because nobody wanted to talk about it at all. I mean people would say, ‘oh, you’re no fun anymore blah blah blah blah.’ They were really [pause] you know, I watched friends of friends leave. You know, they’d know that a person was sick and they would never go visit them blah blah blah. And it just—it gave me focus. It gave me something that – I thought [pause] If I hadn’t found the Quilt, I would be dead. I know that. And I’m not sick or anything like that; God knows I should have been [laughs]. But, emotionally I was on a big train wreck. And, I don’t believe in suicide, but I just think that I would have exploded or something. Something was gonna happen. And I needed—as soon as I got—the first time I—the first day we opened the workshop, I felt at ease because these people hurt as much as I did. And I needed to be around somebody who hurt as much as

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I did. There was a real comfort in that, oddly enough. And, for a long time I couldn’t be around anybody who didn’t understand it. Or hadn’t had a lot of loss. I didn’t want anything to do with them. I lost a lot of my friends to death and I lost a lot of them because I had changed so much and they didn’t see the urgency in it. And they didn’t want to deal with it. For many people, it was just easier to not think about it. And for me, what I learned about myself, when I’m the most afraid of something I’d jump at the centre of it. So it wasn’t like I’m a brave person or anything. It was just, I was saving my own life in a lot of ways. CP

when you think about it now – you said it’s the most wonderful and the worst years of your life— GM

It is. CP

But when you think about it now, do you ever feel that you want to put it away and— GM

Never. CP

—feel like it’s done? GM

Never. It’s the biggest part of me and I’m the most proud of myself and the people who have worked and died. And not died—just the people that have worked and—it is the proudest moment of my life. — Clementine Power

Interview Excerpt: The Hidden Consumer? The following text is an extract from a discussion between two students who, from different starting points, have found common issues arising from their research into trade interactions between Europe and Africa and the development of the idea of the hidden consumer, with European manufacturers designing goods for a vague ‘African’ market. Josephine Tierney is a student on the modern strand whose dissertation on British printed textiles between 1830–1899 aims to reintroduce the voices of both manufacturers and consumers into a discussion of the design of these textiles and their reception globally. Studying on the Renaissance strand, Hannah Lee wrote one of her first year essays on fifteenth

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century glass trade beads, arguing that their design reveals an attempt by European producers to meet the standards of a discerning and varied African market. HL

So to start with I was wondering whether we could start with discussing the idea of the ‘hidden consumer’. Is this idea of a disconnection between the British producers and designers and the African communities into which the fabric was sold only really discussed in your secondary literature? Or was it also identified at the time? JT

Great question! There are many references to the export market and the consumer within, Africa being one of the largest export markets for British printed textiles and a number of contemporary manufacturers and commentators make specific reference to their attempt to cater to the tastes and needs of foreign consumers, implying that the African consumer was far from ‘hidden’ in the nineteenth century. Yet, tracing evidence for communication and interaction specifically between manufacturers of printed textiles and African consumers is challenging. Also, while there is evidence of manufacturers collecting samples of African cloth to use for inspiration (Charles Beving’s collection held by the British Museum is a great example), it is important to remember that the popular conception of Africa was very much a western imagining of the ‘dark’ continent. Thus while the African consumer may have been in the minds of manufacturers, it is unclear how accurately they understood the numerous different cultures and tastes which formed ‘Africa’. HL

What I find really fascinating is the contrast between the attempts by manufacturers to understand the specifics of the market, by collecting cloth samples etc, and the still generally held perception of the African continent as distant and mysterious, despite the long standing trade links. I’ve definitely come across similar paradoxes in my research into the trade beads. Primary information from European traders journals suggest a recognition that the African markets which they were trading into were highly specific and the customers were discerning and knew exactly what they wanted in terms of colour and shape, however there seems to be a communication gap between the traders collecting this information and the glass makers back in European centres such as Venice, who seem to be compensating for this communication gap by creating as a great a diversity of designs as possible in the hope that they might appeal to constantly changing and region specific ‘African

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ORAL HISTORIES

Glass Trade Beads, late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, glass, Venice, Victoria and Albert Museum Accession No. 4551:3 –1901 © Victoria and Albert Museum.

taste’. There are rare recordings however of beads being made specifically to imitate particular natural materials, such as a red stone found in Angola, which is an amazing example of a dialogue actually taking place! JT

That’s very interesting, would you say their business strategy (to produce a huge variety in the hope of being successful somewhere) was successful and sustainable? While it may not be the most economical method it certainly illustrates that they saw Africa as an important and necessary market to appeal to. HL

From what I can gather I would say that it seems to have been a sustainable method, given that the glass bead industry in Europe continued to grow from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. North America also developed into an important trading base, so their market expanded. From a Eurocentric perspective of economics evidence suggests that it was actually a very profitable method given the relatively low cost of production of the glass beads in comparison to the goods for which they were being exchanged, such as furs in North America and gold, ivory and even slaves on the west coast of Africa. They certainly have a very dark side to their history.

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I was wondering whether you could explain what the prints which you are looking at, as objects in their own right, can tell us. Has anything in their design raised questions about these issues? JT

The textile prints can tell us a great deal, however they can also be difficult to decipher. This has been a problem for historians in the past who have often argued that the bolder, brighter patterns were intended for export and in particular the West African market. While this may seem like a logical and reasoned conclusion when you consider the types of textiles being produced in Africa during this period, however, it muddies the waters somewhat when it comes to pinpointing the extent to which manufacturers produced specific designs for specific markets. There is a distinct lack of documentary evidence to indicate which designs were destined for export and which for domestic consumption. Furthermore, to say that the brightly coloured designs must be for export, is very reliant on Western perceptions of African dress which are largely founded upon nineteenth-century understandings. There is a big risk in looking at these colourful textiles and concluding that they must be examples of export textiles as they don’t fit with Western tastes. By doing this we are simply adding to the idea of East and West as binary opposites. This is one reason why photography has played such a big part in my research, by studying nineteenth-century photographs of African cultures you can move beyond the institutions, like the V&A and the British Museum, and explore what British prints were being worn in Africa but most importantly how British manufacturers could have been exposed to African tastes. HL

Amazing, it’s so fascinating how objects like these prints and beads can simultaneously embody the development of global connections and the distance, both physical and ideological, which still remained. — Josephine Tierney & Hannah Lee

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ZENIA MALMER

Experimental History: Pushing the Printed Boundaries of Textual Sources

The cornerstone of my research consists of a large amount of cookery books that were published throughout the nineteenth century. I quote heavily from them because they offer valuable details about the way in which ices were made. I read recipes like I read any other printed source, and can imagine clearly what sort of dish is being referred to, just by looking at the list of ingredients. Here is a straightforward example: if a recipe listed twelve egg whites beaten to a stiff froth, mixed with pounded sugar and baked in a quick oven, then it goes without saying that this was a recipe for meringue. If done properly, biting into a freshly baked, whiter-than-snow swirl, would reveal a slightly chewy centre enclosed by a softly crunchy, sugary shell. The mind demonstrates its amazing ability by projecting a three-dimensional image of what is being read from a flavourless piece of paper. This is especially true when it comes to delicious desserts. Like two-dimensional texts, the power of the imagination, however, has its own limitations. If, as a design historian, I am content simply to ‘read’ the social and cultural life of these mechanical ice cream makers, then do I not risk becoming a victim of textualism? What of the taste, texture and scent of the food described in these recipes? Is it enough to simply ‘read’ them or can an experimental approach unlock a sensory dimension withheld by textual sources?1 Through experimental history, I gained access to the working knowledge of a range of ‘improvised’ and essentially non-mechanical tools used to make ices in the nineteenth century. Ice cream instructions from The Queen periodical in 1871 suggested that using a corn flour tin, a pail and a spoon produced excellent ices. Surprisingly, there was no mention of mechanical implements. Following The Queen’s instructions, I made a cinnamon infused, rich apple-vanilla ice. Eating this delicious concoction was but a mere bonus; the real reward was being able to experience the working process and skills that were necessary to make it. A recipe rarely told you what could go wrong, but after further attempts performed on different days and under different circumstances, it was clear that even though I followed the recipe exactly, unforeseen variables nevertheless threw a curve ball at me. If the mixture to be frozen was quite thick, then it would take

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longer to freeze. If the ice pieces were not crushed enough, they did not mingle well with the salt which again slowed down the freezing rate. This may seem obvious to some, but it still caused me to panic. Staring at my experiments with a dumb-founded look, hand on hip, also did not help the situation. Despite these setbacks, the experiments made me aware of how artfully the wooden spoon needs the be manipulated to scrape layers of congealing ice cream from the insides of the biscuit tin, and to beat this up with the rest of the liquid mixture. Only by repeating this process continuously, could ‘the creamy lightness so much esteemed by the votaries of ice cream’2 be achieved. On top of that, it is my personal opinion that examining an object with the food it was designed to make, enriches my findings. While I don’t claim that I experience ices and ice cream making in the exact way that they were experienced in the past, experimenting with historical objects allows me to remove the mental and sensory ‘velvet rope’ imposed by textual sources so that I can finally taste the history that I’m writing about.

1 This paragraph is based on a quotation from an essay about the social significance of ‘thick sauce’ in the Songhay tribe in Africa. It strongly evokes what I believe experimental can accomplish, which is why I have adapted it for this short essay. Here is the exact quotation: ‘The “textualism” which results excludes attention to the senses of social life – taste and smell – which have been devalued in Western speech since the Enlightenment (Howes 1988 and 1990, Stoller 1989b). If, as anthropologists, we are content simply to observe or “to read” social life, our descriptions will only taste of the paper on which they are written. If on the contrary we try to evoke a full range of sensory experience, our descriptions will be full of taste, texture, and scent.’ Cited in Korsmeyer, Carolyn, The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, (Oxford & NY: Berg, 2005), p.134

2 Vine, Frederick T., Ices: Plain and Decorated. How to Make and How to Serve., (London: MacLaren & Sons, 1903), p.7

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ZENIA MALMER

To gain a better understanding of the way in which ices were made by hand in the nineteenth century, I recreated a simple strawberry ice recipe with a flowerpot, biscuit tin and wooden spoon, following the instructions published in The Queen, 1870. These images capture the different stages

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of textural metamorphosis, and reveal visually how the texture of ice is formed. During the freezing process, the mixture is beaten up rigorously, which transforms the foamy, liquid strawberry mixture into a light, grainy-textured, homogeneously frozen sorbet-like ice.

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Different stages of ice-cream textural metamorphosis. ÂŠ Zenia Malmer, 2014.

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ANNIE THWAITE

Revelation and Concealment: Flipping the Pyx Concealment and secrecy are fundamental to the design of this fascinating object. This silver-gilt pyx, was used in Roman Catholic worship to contain the Sacred Host, the consecrated wafer used in the service of Mass, could also be used to take the consecrated Host to the bedside of the sick. Seeing as this was an object that was originally purely a receptacle for the Host, there is a lack of common design elements, and no ‘template’ pyx. Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations governed pyx design, and consequently they were of diverse appearance. Examining the imagery that ornaments this particular object, however, gives us some fascinating clues to its history. Catholics believed in the ‘Real Presence’ – that the communion wafers and wine changed their physical substance at the priest’s consecration into the holy body and blood of Christ.1 Until the Reformation, for most people, physically receiving communion by consuming the wafer and wine was an annual event, before or after High Mass on Easter Day.2 Indeed the majority of the year the Host, inside the Pyx, was something to be seen rather than consumed. This pyx is thought to have been made in Elizabethan England, at a time when the established religion of the country was a form of Protestantism. Contemporary law forbade the people of England from practicing Catholicism. Those who continued to exercise popish worship, and abstained from attending Protestant church services, were labelled ‘recusants’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these Catholic recusants held secret services in the private chapels of nobles, remaining Catholic churches, or sometimes even everyday rooms in houses, covert and unconsecrated.3 This pyx could have been used as a receptacle to either display the Host during secret worship, or store and hide the consecrated host after the illegal mass had taken place. For example, Gregory Gunnis, a dissembled Marian priest, revealed that since 1558 he had preserved in a silver pyx two consecrated Hosts that he revered as ‘the Catholic church doth.’4 In the centre of the front panel of this pyx, there is a small glazed roundel – a circle of glass, or possibly rock crystal. This is bordered by engraving, including a Latin inscription translating as ‘The Word was made Flesh’ – an excerpt from John’s Gospel in the New Testament. This is a reference to the Holy Communion; just as Jesus Christ was made flesh by the Word of God, Catholics believe in the Real Presence in transubstantiation. However, these are New Testament words.

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Pyx, Silver, England, c.1600, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. M.18 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2012. ÂŠ Annie Thwaite, 2014.

When seen engraved on the front of a pyx, these words may not have been immediately recognized as Popish, and this pyx may not have been immediately recognised as a recusant object. Intriguingly, thus far, this object does not appear as an overtly Catholic pyx in form or decoration. This could perhaps have been a deliberate action on the part of the designer to conceal the unlawful Catholic identity of the pyx. Yes, Latin was no longer employed in Church services, having been replaced by English; and yes, it would not be wafer used in the Protestant church service, but bread, as set out from the time of the 1552 Prayer Book.5 However, there is a relative multitude of instances in which parishes, especially in the North of England, were extremely slow and apparently reluctant to enforce

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ANNIE THWAITE

such religious changes – where Latin, wafers, and several other ‘popish abuses’ were still employed and exercised even until the conclusion of Elizabeth’s reign.6 Pyx, Silver, England, c.1600, Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession No. M.18 –2012. © Annie Thwaite, 2014.

Two angels flank the glazed roundel, below a cross at the very top that attaches a metal hoop, and an object emitting a kind of draped material. There is no reference to this specific imagery in the V&A catalogue – it may be an engraving of a kind of ‘pyx-cloth’, or ‘kerchief’; a fringed cloth that could be seen hung over the pyx when hung above the altar.7 However, perhaps this imagery also acts as a symbolic curtain – revealing the most holy, secret and illicit Eucharist only to a select and clandestine group of Catholics. The overt Catholic imagery and Latin inscription of the reverse side tell a quite different story. The outer border translating as, ‘This is the table of our Lord prepared for us from Heaven against all those who bring us tribulation.’ These were among common words and phrases explicitly referring to Catholic Mass.8 There is a crucifixion scene, depicting Christ on the cross, flanked by the figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John. On the left is a scene of Moses with the brazen serpent, and the sacrifice of Isaac is on the right. The words below the images read: ‘FILIUS IMMOLATUS DATUR CIBUS VIATORIBUS’, meaning ‘The son who was sacrificed has given the bread to travellers.’ Catholics see the story of Isaac as foreshadowing the willingness of God the Father to sacrifice his own son.9 Moreover, the image of the crucified Jesus, depicted on much Pre-Reformation church plate, reflects the late-medieval perception of mass as a re-enactment of the Calvary sacrifice.10 Protestants would have regarded such images and

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inscriptions – especially their advocacy of saint veneration and prayer for the ill and dead – with great antipathy. It appears as if paradoxical elements of secrecy and overt Catholic belief are triumphantly combined in the design of this pyx. The clandestine features of the front panel, its covert Catholicism, subtle references and imagery would make the recipient feel as if a secret consecrated Host was being revealed just to them. This is in contrast to the relative overtness of the alternate side of the pyx – the Popish symbolism, imagery and wording leave no doubt in one’s mind that this is a Catholic pyx. It is an object that provided access to the blessed Host to all those of the Catholic faith who were afflicted by the veritable disease of Protestantism. Perhaps with more comprehensive analysis, this pyx could yield the well-kept secrets of its origins and past – or maybe they are never to be wholly revealed. We are, after all, not its intended congregation.

1 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations – Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors, (Oxford, 1993), pp. 2– 3

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 91– 3

See notably Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics, 1559 –1642, (London, 2004), on the changing use of space for Catholic recusant worship in Elizabethan England. Richard Williams, ‘Cultures of dissent: English Catholics and the visual arts’, in Benjamin Kaplan, et al (eds), Catholic communities in Protestant states – Britain and the Netherlands c.1570 –1720, (Manchester 2009), pp. 231–232 3

Conrad Swan, ‘The Question of Dissimulation among Elizabethan Catholics’, Canadian Catholic Historical Association Report, (Ottowa, 1957), pp. 105 –19

5 Robin Emmerson, Church Plate, The Central Board of Finance of the Church of England, (London, 1991) p. 9

6 ‘A View of Popish Abuses yet remaining in the English Church’ was written by Puritan John Field in 1572 criticising church services. See Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558–1582, (Surrey, 2009), p. 139

Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, p. 47

Edward Foley, A Commentary on the Order of Mass of ‘The Roman Missal’, (Minnesota 1973), p. 560 8

Cullen Schippe, Chuck Stetson, The Bible and Its Influence, (Virginia, 2005), p. 52

Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church, p. 56

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PROFESSOR JANE PAVITT & DR MARTA AJMAR

Afterword Beginning: on the first day of their first term, after nervous nods and smiles have been exchanged, the students of the V&A/RCA Programme are asked to introduce themselves by way of one image: many choose an historic artifact, a treasured possession, or a holiday snap. Ending: two years later, traces of that first conversation are still evident in the collective research interests contained within this volume: an LA street-sign, a vintage dress, a trip to China, a boyhood toy. The graduating students of 2014 show us, with depth, clarity and enthusiasm, how their personal passions have grown into work of outstanding academic quality. Employing diverse research methods and resources, an attentiveness to object and material analysis, and a fluency with critical theory, their final dissertations are a remarkably mature and original contribution to design history. We thank them for the ways in which their work has also enriched the scholarship and teaching of the academic tutorial team in both institutions. Whether working with collections and curators at the V&A, or engaging with designers at the RCA, they have made a vital contribution to the shared practices and knowledge of our partnership. Now, they will take this work into the wider world, as fully-fledged professionals. Most of all they benefit from sharing the MA experience with their peers. This collection of writings shows how diverse interests can find common cause. Throughout the two years of the programme, the students have worked on collective and individual projects, exchanging models of best practice and offering each other good-natured critique and support. No one has been afraid to listen to or offer up advice from an alternative perspective. For the alumni of 2014, they will remember a moment when falconry, electronic tagging, cures for bewitchment, carpet weaving and ice-cream making could all be made better sense of, together. We know, too, that they will remember the generosity of those who have supported them: curators, visiting academics, the donors of scholarships and awards. We thank them all. As co-heads of programme, we would also like to take the opportunity to thank the staff team: Sarah Cheang, Christine Guth, Angela McShane, Shehnaz Suterwalla, Sarah Teasley, Simona Valeriani, Verity Wilson â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and our new members of staff â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Livia Rezende and Spike Sweeting. Special thanks are due to the administrators, Katrina Royall and Matthew Maslin, for the many ways in which they support staff and students alike. Earlier in the year we bid farewell to Professor Jeremy Aynsley, as he moved from RCA to

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a new post at Brighton University. We wish him well. The students have dedicated this volume to the memory of Professor Gillian Naylor (1931–2014), who passed away in March this year. Gillian was an extraordinary presence in design history, and a cofounder of our programme over 30 years ago. For some years Gillian has supported an annual ‘best essay prize’ in memory of her son, Tom. This financial award allows one or two students, each year, to undertake travel for dissertation research. The award will continue, now in memory of them both. We hope you enjoy this collection of writings as much as we have enjoyed teaching the students. We wish them the very best for their future careers. Professor Jane Pavitt, RCA Dr Marta Ajmar, V&A

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