Designing the past: the National Trust as a social-material agency

The National Trust was founded in 1895 for ‘the preservation of places of historic interest or natural beauty’. While the distinction between the cultural and the natural seemed obvious at that time and members and visitors were not even implicated actors, we argue that the National Trust may be better understood as a co-constructed network effect of the social and material, which in turn affords social-material agency. There are currently 3.5 million members of the National Trust and 50 million visitors every year to National Trust properties, which include the largest collection of gardens in the world and over 300 historic houses and open-air properties. While the notion of design itself may seem to be an exemplar of the humanist love of agency, we argue (following Latour) that traditional notions of agency, which were asymmetrically distributed to the human actors, take insufficient cognisance of evident occasions of ‘material agency’ (Pickering, 1995) and the site of conservation is one site whereby the agency produced by social-material assemblages seems interesting and revealing. Whereas the social-material practices of design may seem in some tension with those of conservation, we argue in this paper that a close analysis of a particular site of conservation shows a manifold of ‘designing’ actors. Whatever the National Trust conserves could be considered as an example of particular and situated designs condensed from the interactions of humankind and nature. Similarly the visitor experience is also designed. While conservation can imply a certain social-material agency, it is much less well understood how conservation co-produces agency, and how these network effects serve the purposes of conservation by the Trust, visitors and other actors through the agency of the social and material. This paper will reveal some of the social-material practices which afford a visit to a property and what such visits afford the social-material practices of the National Trust

Design, history and time: New temporalities in a digital age, eds. Zoë Hendon and Anne Massey (Book Review)

This 2000-word invited review discusses each chapter and the overall concept of Hendon and Massey's book, which brings out the use in many cases of a single object as a source of semiotic, social and political analysis. One of the things that emerges as most clearly “designed” in the volume under review is history itself. When Herbert Simon proposed in 1969 that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” he was thinking about designing the future. This volume emphasizes how we design certain pasts to suit and shape our chosen narratives. It is a truism of historiography that histories are selective and formative. What this fascinating collection adds is a perception that the design of history is as important as the history of design, and that it takes a multitude of forms both tangible and intangible. Those who succeed in designing the past may control the future

The contribution of an events programme to sustainable heritage conservation: a study of the National Trust in England.

Whilst for many nations progressing a sustainable development agenda is a priority, for others, conserving their existing socio-natural heritage in a sustainable way may be significant. In the United Kingdom, the National Trust, a charitable organisation, supports its extensive conservation role through a wide-ranging programme of events each year. This study explores the various ways in which these events have been developed to contribute to sustainable heritage conservation. The method for this case study consisted of the collection and analysis of both primary and secondary data. The former obtained through in-depth interviews with key personnel within the National Trust, with secondary data from National Trust and other sources used in support. The findings show the Trust’s events play a vital role in educating the public in sustainability, in respect of both natural and cultural heritage. The interview participants revealed that the events are conceived in two main ways – first, a top-down approach whereby events relate to a national organisational campaign and secondly, events which develop from the bottom-up and reflect the uniqueness of each of the Trust’s properties. This study therefore extends the prevailing approach to events and sustainable development by considering the very positive contribution of an events programme to heritage conservation, which has implications for other conservation bodies throughout the world

Tradition and Modernity: Elements of the Chronicles and their Role in the Novel Colors of Cherry by Enes Karić

The essay deals with the relationship of the novel The Colors of Cherry by Enes Karić with the chronicle tradition, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The essay concentrates on formal elements which are taken from the chronicle (the subject of the story, time, space, structure, narrator, sequencing and repetition, etc.), analyzing the way in which they are transformed expanding their semantic features. The way in which the novel interprets the role of narrating in designing the past and the role of the chronicle in symbolic representation of time experience is considered indirectl

Engaging displays of architecture and design history : approaches to museum exhibition practice

In spring 2019 the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, will present the exhibition tentatively titled Toward Everyday Design: Making and Selling the Arts and Crafts Idea, co-curated by university faculty members and historians of architecture and design Christopher Long and Monica Penick. Using this planned exhibition as a case study, this thesis investigates the capacity of the museum exhibition as a medium for conveying histories of architecture and design to broad, public audiences in an accessible, meaningful, and engaging way. To situate Toward Everyday Design in the broader context of exhibition practice, I consider the traditional and contemporary approaches to museum exhibitions, particularly of architecture and design. I argue that opportunities for engagement with the exhibition can be enhanced through a thoughtful balance of these approaches, as well as through approaches related to the exhibition’s authorship, the objects it features, their spatial arrangement and display, and the exhibition’s accompanying interpretive texts and programs. The resulting discussion offers specific strategies for presenting architecture and design histories in public museum exhibitions, while illuminating the value that such projects have for local and scholarly communities.Architectur

From Little Machines to Big Themes: Thinking about Clocks, Watches and Time at the National Museum of American History

The collection of docks and watches at the Smithsonian Institution resides in the engineering section of the National Museum of American History. This collection, established to document the internal technical history of European clockwork and measuring instruments, is now called on to tell stories about the changing ways Americans have measured, used and thought about time. This paper looks at how and why approaches to collecting and interpreting these objects have shifted over the past one hundred years and outlines the exhibition challenges and research opportunities this shift poses. Résumé La collection de montres et d'horloges du Smithsonian loge dans la section technique du National Museum of American History. Établie pour rendre compte de l'histoire technique interne des mécanismes d'horlogerie et des instruments de mesure européens, cette collection est aujourd'hui mise à contribution pour raconter l'évolution des façons de mesurer, d'utiliser et de percevoir le temps des Américains. Cet article examine comment et pourquoi les méthodes de collecte et d'interprétation de ces objets se sont modifiées au cours des cent dernières années et montre les défis en matière de présentation d'expositions et les avenues de recherche qu'amène cette évolution

Architectures of Emergency. Sentinel operations for a rapidly changing environment

[EN] The declaration of an emergency is given by various protocols that respond to a series of interventions driven by an environmental urgency (Anderson 2017), designed by global networks of experts that mobilize advertising modes of economic development in the face of environmental collapse (Goh 2021). This research proposes a different imaginary of the Emergency. This reflection aims to resignify the Emergency from the embodied experiences of the disruptive events we live, opening the discussion on the frictions between a normative world based on human security and the modalities of militant movements dedicated to redressing social, environmental, and economic inequalities (Whyte 2018). In this sense, we develop the idea of sentinel modes of care that reflect the affective scaffolding of life-related to the environment and potential catastrophe (Wright, Plahe, and Jack 2022). A state of constant alertness characterizes sentinel care within a more-than-human register of the relationship and potentialities of the territory. This text aims to position itself on emergency protocols while exploring other imaginaries and their impact on spatial practices.Mompean Botias, E. (2023). Architectures of Emergency. Sentinel operations for a rapidly changing environment. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 598-611. https://doi.org/10.4995/VIBRArch2022.2022.1527459861

Disability, the Sideshow, and Modern Museum Practices

This paper addresses questions about disability history, the history of the relationship between museums and people with disabilities, the history of museums and exhibits as collections of curiosities including people with disabilities, and how that past has informed the present.  Preserving and distributing knowledge have been the major pillars of museums’ work during the modern age.  Racial and ethnic inclusiveness were addressed throughout the Civil Rights Movement and the decades that followed, and accommodations have also been made in society for physical disabilities with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Many times the community has excluded disabled people, whether intentionally or not.   In addition to evaluating information on how museums and other organizations of the past, the sideshow, and the community in general treated people with disabilities, this paper also presents information about how modern museums react to their learning disabled visitors.  The paper presents information about research into possibilities of a model for museums to use to develop specific programming and exhibits for people with cognitive delay and disabilities