A couple of weeks ago, I was asked about a piece which I had written about the early history of the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design, which I was involved with in its early days.   I thought the piece would be available online, but apparently not (I thought everything was available online).   So, I promised to post it, not necessarily in its final version:-

At the Open University’s recent conference ‘40 Years On: The Domain of Design History – Looking Back Looking Forward’, Professor John Styles gave an account, ‘Design History enters the Museum’, of the history of the V&A/RCA MA course. Styles applauded Dr Charles Saumarez Smith, now Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy but then Assistant Keeper in the V&A’s education department for his contributions. He was the first person to head the course; in the first years of its existence there was considerable resistance to students in the museum. It was Saumarez Smith’s hard work and diplomacy, Styles asserted, that allowed the course to flourish.

A History of the History of Design

I will start with the V&A’s side of the history.   Roy Strong realised that it would be good for the Museum, and for its staff, to be involved in the world of postgraduate study.   The decorative arts as a subject area had developed its own traditions of study, subordinate to, and not nearly as sophisticated as, art history.   Some of the staff had been trained as art historians (I think of Anna Somers Cocks, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Metalwork, a classic product of the Courtauld; Simon Jervis, Deputy Keeper in the Department of Furniture and Woodwork, who had read art history under Michael Jaffé at Cambridge; and Michael Kauffmann, the Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, who had been a Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute).  But the majority were amateurs, like Peter Thornton, the Keeper of the Department of Furniture and Woodwork, who had been trained as an engineer, before reading modern languages at Cambridge, and John Mallet, the Keeper of the Department of Ceramics (Keramic as he always called it), who had worked at Sotheby’s.   The core discipline at the V&A was regarded as the identification and attribution of works in the collection.   There was not much sense that objects could, and should, be subject to a rigorous programme of academic study.

The initial idea was that the V&A might link up with the Courtauld Institute, regarded, with excessive reverence, as the home of art history.   It was John Physick, Roy Strong’s Assistant and author of a book about the V&A’s architectural history, who apparently suggested that the V&A should join up with the Royal College of Art, with which it shared common origins.

The folk memory of the origins of the Course was that Roy Strong met Christopher  Frayling, Professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, half way up Exhibition Road.   I thought that Chris was already a Trustee of the V&A, but discover that this had not yet happened when the Course was first devised.   Chris had his own ambitions for the Department of Cultural History at the RCA.   Design History was already an active subject of study at the polytechnics, developed as a result of the Coldstream Report, which required academic teaching alongside studio courses in art colleges.   This teaching was initially provided by art historians, but students wanted teaching which was relevant to what they were studying.   So, teachers began to develop knowledge and expertise in the study of twentieth-century industrial, product and graphic design.

Chris Frayling, who had studied Jean-Jacques Rousseau at  Cambridge, realised that if one combined the nascent study of design history with the V&A’s resources for the study of decorative arts, it would help to give intellectual authority to the subject area and make the Royal College of Art into the capital of the emerging discipline.   He was allowed to recruit not one, but two members of staff, to establish the Course.  Gillian Naylor was already the grande dame of design history, a veteran of the editorial staff of Design magazine and author of works on the Bauhaus and the Arts and Crafts Movement.   Penny Sparke was younger, a friend and protégé of Gillian’s.   She had written her Ph.D. under Reyner Banham on ‘Theory and Design in the Age of Pop’, was teaching at Brighton Polytechnic and had helped to establish the Design History Society with Stephen Bayley.

The Course was launched in 1982.   Students arrived in late September.   I joined the staff of the V&A in October 1982, recruited as an Assistant Keeper in the Education Department of the V&A to run the V&A’s half of the Course.   It was, at least from my perspective, somewhat haphazard in its methods of teaching, based on lectures by outside experts, some good, but without any underpinning system of organisation.   We decided early on to run one full two-year cycle and then re-plan the Course for the next cohort of students.

Many of the characteristics of the Course derive from this process of replanning, which was greatly assisted by the intellectual drive and ambitions of John Styles, a visiting tutor from the history department at Bath University.   We retitled the Course ‘The V&A/RCA Course in the History of Design’ (it had previously been called ‘Design and Decorative Arts:  History and Technique’).   We regarded History of Design as a new discipline, distinct from design history.   We introduced the idea that the first term would involve the systematic study of a single object in the V&A’s collection, based on the object analysis which had been pioneered by Jules Prown at Yale and Benno Forman at Winterthur.   The second term was about nineteenth-century technology and involved studying methods of making in the studios of the Royal College of Art.   The third term was about twentieth-century design and theory.   The second year was devoted to writing a 20,000 word dissertation.

It was a revolutionary course, making use of the resources of the V&A, the stacks of the National Art Library and the collections, as well as the expertise of its curators, whilst, at the same time, encouraging and expecting students to be knowledgeable about contemporary design and making.   The history of manufacture and of interiors, the scholarly study of the crafts, material culture studies and fashion history:  a world of study was opened up.

The idea was that students would be trained to go out into the world to develop new areas of research, to teach in the new universities, to work in museums, and write about design.   Over the last thirty years, they have done so.   The discipline of design history has been enriched.