June Blog post

“What makes a design collection unique?” was a question posed to the xDX Team during our Workshop II in May by Philippe Michon, one of the xDX’s infrastructure partners at the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). This question remained top of mind as we worked alongside infrastructure partners, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) and CHIN, through the fall to finalize our data model. In fact, this question was a critical provocation to push xDX beyond the achievement of reassembling the Design Exchange collection online to the creation of a true fit-to-purpose resource for design researchers and historians.

2001 Chair (1970). Designers: Bob Forrest & Karen Bulow.
‍Photo: Paul Eekoff © Royal Ontario Museum

In this process of creating a design-history resource, identifying the elements of design that make it a unique discipline was crucial. One particularly unique and prevalent aspect of design, especially industrial design which makes up the bulk of the xDX collection, is collaboration: unlike fine art or folk-art objects, mass produced objects require the involvement of many stakeholders. Designed objects that makes their way into our lives have required the collaboration of designer(s), their clients, model-makers, manufacturers, advertisers, graphic designers, and retailers. How we track collaborators along the life cycle of a designed object is a major concern of our data model, and it’s our attention to these details makes the xDX dataset unique. Namely, we are constructing our dataset so that not only will all of these collaborators or actors be discoverable by researchers; researchers will also be able to use our dataset to make new and unexpected connections.

Canadian General Electric Hairdryer HD11, packaging prototype (c. 1965). Designer: Fred Moffatt.
Photo: Chris Gergely, Phototechnica © xDX Collection, York University.

For my social media posts this month, I’ve pulled objects that have multiple collaborators in the design stage of the object, whether many designers collaborating on the same object or different designers working on different components of one object. Importantly, some of these collaborations were unacknowledged when the objects first entered the Design Exchange collection and were only discovered as curators worked on various exhibitions, such as the recent Canadian Modern exhibit at the ROM or the 2008 The Art of Clairtone exhibition at the Design Exchange. With the launch of the xDX Research Space we anticipate researchers will also have valuable information to contribute as they parse through our data. To allow for these user-contributions, LINCS will provide a forum for new information to be added as it’s uncovered by researchers, making our own dataset an example of collaboration through this feedback loop.

Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe, MA RA York University