The Design Archives: an internationally valued site of cultural heritage and innovative engagement

International recognition for the University of Brighton Design Archives' influence on archival practices

When, in 2018, the impact of the University of Brighton Design Archives was endorsed by the prestigious Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education, the awards committee cited the Design Archives’ pioneering use of digital technologies since the 1990s, recognising that the university is at the forefront of the history and interpretation of design in the United Kingdom. Key funding bodies, including the Getty Institute, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, have recognised the international significance of the University of Brighton Design Archives’ work.

Establishing a position of influence in archive research and practice, University of Brighton Design Archives has become a model and a reference point for other archives, cultural organisations and individual artists, designers, curators, historians and researchers. Each year over 200 national and international researchers, designers and practitioners, spanning five continents, have consulted with staff, while its collecting policy has expanded categories of representation within its holdings, making them intellectually and creatively relevant to professional and academic researchers from around the globe.

Its work has driven the development and practices of other design archives and the wider heritage sector. Exploring British Design, a project conceived and run in collaboration with the UK Archives Hub, made a specific, practical contribution to archival practice based around the power of creating structured and semantic data, and upscaling connectivity across collections. The findings of the research has enabled an approach that challenged traditional methodologies for archival description, the principles of which were then embedded within a re-design of the Archives Hub service and data model, benefitting hundreds of archives with content accessed millions of times each year.

The Festival of Britain, South Bank, London, 1951. Catalogue DCA-30-1-FOB-CO-12. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. 

The University of Brighton Design Archives has developed and fostered influential collaborations

Through the development of long-term partnerships, the University of Brighton Design Archives’ team of researchers and practitioners have forged strategic research-based alliances with professional beneficiaries, shaping professional archival practice worldwide and extending engagement with and interpretation of design’s histories.

Research on émigré designers by Sue Breakell and Dr Lesley Whitworth have responded to public debates about migration, highlighting the contribution made by European designers to the development of the profession in this country and to the evolution of distinctive post-war material environments. Re-framing design historical and archival understandings for academic and public audiences, this work has embraced complementary activities to extend engagement with archival content. They collaborated closely with the Jewish Museum on the Designs on Britain exhibition and catalogue (2017– 2018). The Chief Curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum noted that the University of Brighton Design Archives' ‘scholarly rigour and expertise in the study of émigré designers [was] critical to the development and success of the exhibition.’

With partners from Jisc and the Design Museum, the AHRC-funded project Exploring British Design (2014 – 2015) challenged conventions in the presentation of design historical sources. The project broke down barriers between information professionals, curators and researchers by presenting data non-hierarchically as network points for design activities. It created new routes to discover materials about designers, institutions and events through building and linking detailed biographical authority records. This evinced new relational understandings within design history, rather than conventional hierarchies or linear chronologies. The project produced new insights into user behaviour and used them to examine how digital data structures and presentation can enable archive users to develop new research questions and strategies.

The University of Brighton Design Archives collaborated closely with the Jewish Museum on the exhibition Designs on Britain. Photograph courtesy of the Jewish Museum and photographer Leon Chew.

Lesley Whitworth’s curation of the 2016 exhibition Design Research & Its Participants traced the evolution of a new form of professional enquiry from its beginnings in the 1960s and through the constant re-shaping of design research agendas, including environmental and social contexts for design. Commissioned by the Design Research Society in association with its fiftieth anniversary international conference, it brought to light new interrelationships, and critically examined the contributions of key, highly networked and invested individuals, and the nature of involvement in the design profession during this period.

Research at the University of Brighton Design Archives has shaped how organisations engage with their publics in relation to their own architectural and cultural histories. The Head of Collections and Research at the Design Museum used research carried out at the Design Archives to build a new narrative on the museum’s history. This  moved away from reliance on existing histories of the building in order to situate it within the wider politics of representation and Empire. This has been embedded within the museum through the development of a heritage trail running through the site explaining the history of the building to members of the public, and in the production of The Story of the Design Museum (2016), which included a chapter on the troubled legacy of the former Commonwealth Institute.

The University of Brighton Design Archives continues to provide access both online and in-person to the treasures it holds. Its staff are constantly developing new means to understand and engage with the material in its collections; their research work includes curatorial projects and publications on aspects of design elucidated by the collection. They also offer PhD supervision on a range of subjects including archives, museums and design history.

More than this though, the University of Brighton Design Archives plays a key role in the development of archival practice within design and the re-evaluation of how design can be understood through the traces of its history. Between 2014 – 2020, findings and content from the Design Archives appeared in more than 150 publications, websites and exhibitions, and 350 items on loan were seen by over 400,000 people in countries including Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Spain.

Lesley Whitworth from the University of Brighton Design Archives curated the exhibition Design Research & Its Participants (2016). Photograph by Sirpa Kutilainen.

Further examples of research excellence at the University of Brighton