Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things

The first of the Design Museum's forays into what will be the collection on display at its future home in Kensington seeks — but ultimately fails — to tell the extraordinary stories behind certain everyday objects.

I arrive at the press view for the Design Museum's newest exhibition, Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, just in time to hear the Museum's Director Deyan Sudjic state that "art, in the gallery context, is best left to speak for itself, but design needs its story. The who, what and why?" It strikes me that Sudjic may have missed out on the entirety of the conceptual art movement, which depends utterly, in fact, on the story at the heart of the work. No matter. Ducking round the corner to get a better look at the exhibition, I find myself stared down by a rather imperious-looking piece of signage, forcefully directing me to go left if I want to get to Nottingham. Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir's signage for the British road system (designed between 1957-67) is always fun to encounter, particularly in an indoor setting. It makes you feel a little like you're playing your own version of the scale games brought on by cakes and potions in Alice in Wonderland. Whizzing past on the motorway, the signs don't look very large at all — of course, you realise just how enormous they really are when they're hanging on a wall. But to return to the question at hand, what, exactly, is the sign doing here?

The premise of this exhibition, the first of the Museum's forays into what will be the collection on display at its future home in Kensington, is to tell the so-called extraordinary stories behind certain everyday objects: hence the road signs, and all of the other pieces that make up the core of any design museum's collection. To tell these stories, the exhibition is divided into six parts: Taste, Why We Collect?, Identity + Design, Icons, Fashion and Materials + Process. Within these six themes sit perhaps some of the most pressing and important themes for any museum, but particularly a design museum. And yet, despite the exhibition title and the section names, there was very little sense that the exhibition was actually attempting to tell any stories at all.

Top and above: <em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013 — Top and above: *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013

Frankly, it felt as if someone went into the Design Museum's storage unit, earmarked a group of "important" objects one might feel ought to make up the core of the permanent collection of a design museum, put them on the showroom floor, and manhandled a title onto the objects in a last-ditch attempt to frame everything neatly. This sounds perhaps harsh, but the problem is not with the objects or even how they are displayed (in a very nicely-designed system by Gitta Gschwendtner), but with the low-level cognitive dissonance that comes from being promised extraordinary stories and not getting any.

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Left, David Mellor's traffic light. In the background, Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir's signage for the British road system, 1957-67 — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Left, David Mellor's traffic light. In the background, Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir's signage for the British road system, 1957-67

In Identity + Design, for example, where Calvert and Kinneir's signage shares space with David Mellor's F-type pillar post box, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's K6 phone kiosk and Wolf Ollins' much-derided logo design for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the full-size pieces are great objects and understandably form an important part of the Museum's permanent collection, but as for the extraordinary stories, they are nowhere to be seen. A few sketches of early designs are occasionally displayed near the original objects — in the case of the K6 or Transport, the new font designed by Calvert and Kinnear for the sign system — but the history, the promised how, what and why is sadly lacking.

It isn't enough to take the objects out of storage, put them on display and promise to tell us the stories that justify their being in the museum in the first place

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Right, the <em>K6</em> Kiosk designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Right, the K6 Kiosk designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott

The same holds true for the exhibition's other sections. Why we collect? — certainly the most important, complicated question any museum can and should regularly ask itself — includes a number of one-off pieces by famous designers, all of which incorporate an element of the ready-made. The section's wall text says that the museum decided, when it first opened in 1989, to collect, focusing on mass production and new technologies. But the disconnect between the text and the objects is baffling: the Campana Brothers' Cartoon Chair; Ron Arad's Rover Chair, his first ever piece of furniture; and the clear star of the show and new acquisition, Jasper Morrison's Handlebar Table. Not only are these objects deprived of an added layer of information, I'm also starting to feel a bit confused about the Museum's collecting policies. While some of these pieces are interesting, perversely, it's difficult to connect with them on any level apart from as objects in a gallery. I've never been the biggest Ron Arad fan, but his Rover Chair intrigues me and I want to know more. Looking at this chair is looking at the history of design. Not because Arad is now a design star and his pieces are bought by the rich and famous, but because you look at the chair, made from scrapyard pieces, and you see the ingenuity, the clear need to make that fuels so many designers, so many people, in fact. These objects don't come from nowhere. They don't exist in a vacuum free from personal, social and cultural context — they have stories. Stories that aren't being told here.

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Ron Arad's <em>Rover Chair</em>, 1981 — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Ron Arad's *Rover Chair*, 1981

Part of the problem is that there's just too much on display. From George Carwardine's Anglepoise lamp to the motorway sign system, or even plastics in the Materials + Process section: any one of these subjects, properly exploded and explored, would have made for a superb story.

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013 — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013

A particularly disappointing example is found in the exhibition's Materials + Process section, namely in its exploration of plastics. New materials and designer's willingness to engage with them is one of the most exciting recent developments in the industry. Plastics, in particular, are an incredibly fascinating material with an equally fascinating history, but this history is good for nothing if not conveyed properly. The exhibition presents very little of the history of the development of plastics — nothing about the development of Bakelite in 1907, the improvement and automation of injection moulding in 1937, or later developments that ultimately lead to events such as the 2008 landing of an airplane made of more than 20% carbon-fibre reinforced plastic at Heathrow airport. Jonathan Ive's first design for Apple, the candy-coloured iMac, sits proudly in this section apparently because it is made of plastic, without any acknowledgement of the fact that this design was only possible because of plastics.

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Richard Sapper's <em>Tizio</em> lamp, 1972 — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Richard Sapper's *Tizio* lamp, 1972

In the same section, a video interview with Harry Richardson and Clare Page from design studio Committee culminates in a hilarious moment where Richardson holds up an object that looks a bit like a plastic toy spade, but is otherwise unidentifiable, and points out how he has no idea what it is. Isn't it remarkable, he says to camera, that time and effort has been spent thinking about how to make this object and yet I have absolutely no idea what it is. Page cuts in, "I think we need to ask out culture to think a little bit harder about the way in which we use plastic. It's ubiquity means that we don't even see it." There's something rather remarkable about the fact that these two designers, in a short film tucked out of the way, manage to highlight exactly why this exhibition doesn't work simply by identifying the right questions that need to be asked about design. It isn't enough to take the objects out of storage, put them on display and promise to tell us the stories that justify their being in the museum in the first place. There is no doubt that there are many compelling, extraordinary even, stories behind most of these everyday objects. Disappointingly, in Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, they simply aren't being told. Crystal Bennes (@crystalbennes)

<em>Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things</em>, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Left, the Campana brothers' <em>Cartoon Chair</em>, 2007. Right, Charles Eames, <em>LAR armchair</em>, 1948 — *Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things*, installation view at the Design Museum, London, 2013. Left, the Campana brothers' *Cartoon Chair*, 2007. Right, Charles Eames, *LAR armchair*, 1948

Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things

The first of the Design Museum's forays into what will be the collection on display at its future home in Kensington seeks — but ultimately fails — to tell the extraordinary stories behind certain everyday objects.

Latest on Design

Latest on Domus