Hasta La Ideas

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Teal Triggs, Instructor
Location: London, United Kingdom
Category: Design Education initiatives
Award: Notable

Seeing Voices: Inside BT Archives

A unique collaboration between BT Heritage staff and students from MA Design Writing Criticism, LCC, in the use of specialist archives as an integrated teaching method for design writing and curation. Students selected an object from the communications archive to research and interpret resulting in a publication and exhibition.

BT is the world’s oldest communication company, with a direct line of descent from the first electric telegraph to present day digital technologies. The challenge was to provide a fresh perspective on BT’s extensive collection ranging from products (e.g. telephones, merchandising products, buildings, phone boxes), to print (e.g. advertising and poster campaigns, in-house magazines) and photographs. The collaboration was intended to show that: 1) MA Design Writing Criticism students could bring the collection to the attention of a new kind of audience, 2) the seven students could develop their skills via written and visual interpretation of the material, thereby bringing new perspectives to the interpretation of the archive, and 3) by fostering a shared learning experience there was a knowledge exchange unique to those involved. The students and staff operated as a ‘team’, contributing their skills, knowledge and critical understanding to the group discourse. As a result, a continually evolving dynamism was ensured.

The collaboration was embedded within the class entitled ‘Design Histories of Practice’ – which required students to reconsider the context of critical spaces drawing upon historical precedents, whilst at the same time giving due consideration to the role of the curator as critic and critic as curator, addressing issues of interpretation and audience reception.

What was exciting about this project was two things: First, by going back into history we learned that narratives lie in every archive and in every object and, second, that this was a collaboration about learning and making visible an often-invisible research process.

What is the latest news on your project?
The latest news is that we will be running the project again with BT Heritage and with a new group of students who begin the MA Design Writing Criticism course in October. We hope to do something different with the final publication. So watch this space!

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?
The eureka moment for the project was when one of the students located a small book on the reference shelf of the BT Archive collection – it was a book from the 1920s about the magic of communication. We knew at that point this collaborative project was certainly on the right track.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

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