Over the summer and fall term, this enthusiasm propelled numerous project undertakings. Photographer Chris Gergely shot the entire YU xDX collection, building lightboxes and photo stands ensure the artefacts were seen in the best light (literally!)– from our newly acquired Oragene DNA Testing kit (thanks Carleton!) to our extensive range of chrome-plated kettles and kettle-prototypes, without a reflection in sight. Shriya, the resident designer RA at York, constructed a new YorkU-hosted and archived website (good advice from Amie Wright CU’s Public History RA), new social media campaigns (as you’ve seen over the last few months), and more!

Behind the scenes: Fred Moffatt preparing a setting for the reflective K800 kettle’s advertising campaign.
Photo: Fred & Glenn Moffatt Fonds, xDX Collection, York University.

While the majority of the xDX activities at York have been iterative and ongoing, more recently we have also been trying to wrap our heads around fostering connections within and between the artefacts and archives held at xDX partner institutions in a more complex fashion. Enter the notion of the E28 conceptual object: an idea that was proposed to us by LINCS and CHIN almost a year and a half ago, which we have been fixating on, in various permutations, since. Though we’ve moved away from actually using the class of E28, the prompt allowed us to think about and add design-specific links into the xDX model. Much of our internal grappling in creating these links has been ontological and phenomenological – characterized by a yearning for a typology that can bring us closer to the platonic ideal of a designed object. Speaking for myself, these discussions have been invigorating within internal ideation meetings and for my own doctoral research, which seeks to navigate ‘infrastructural memory’ in a more literal sense – the matrixes of memory ascribed to physical sites through memory institutions, situated in and reconstituted by the ebbs and flows of temporality, materiality and political wills.

Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe’s ideational diagrams for ‘conceptual objects’ held in the xDX Collection.

Ultimately, as someone who does not come from a design history background, thinking through connections and processes specific to designed things within the xDX Collection (and beyond) – is an exercise that resembles seeking the essence of design itself, something that cannot be entirely determined by infrastructure, material form or process. Circling back to the beginning of this blog post, the work we have been conducting over the last year has led me to believe that trying to capture the essence of design is akin to the work we have been doing on this project, from the conversations we’ve engaged in during our workshops to the construction of our LoD model: something experimental, found at the intersection of iteration and collaboration.


Aviva Weizman, Lead York RA