AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) formed the Architecture and Design curatorial department in 1988, focusing on works of graphic design, product design, furniture and architecture. In the context of modern and contemporary art museums, SFMOMA has adopted the shared practices to collect and display design objects as aesthetic objects without its functionality. In 2014, SFMOMA, along with support from the Adrew W. Mellon Foundation, launched four-year Artist Initiative to develop a series of interdisciplinary research projects. Acknowledging the limitation of traditional display methods, SFMOMA investigated new approaches to collect, display and conserve design in the 21st century. In-use video was one of the strategies responding to the transformation of design with complex digital elements and interface. By producing in-use videos for two exhibitions (2015 & 2018), SFMOMA was able to present various functions in use that could not be understood by static display formats, and helped make the hidden world accessible without turning on the object while on display.   

During the two-year preparation for Art of Noise (2024), an exhibition dedicated to audio technologies, we have observed an interest shift to actively acquire and present design object's functionality. To show playback functions of media players in the exhibitions, incoming accessions and selected collection objects were studied, tested, serviced and repaired for the filming of in-use videos. To address the emerging interests and challenges, we have been revisiting our institutional policies and lay out our mission, resources, and timelines it may require to care for functional design objects. Additionally, we spoke to our colleagues in the other institutions to learn if they have experienced a similar shift to present the full lifecycle of object functions and provided insights into the potential landscape change in collections care. 

The aims of our endeavor are two-fold––addressing the evolving focus and the additional expertise and workload for ongoing and future activations. We started by asking the following questions: what happens if functionality becomes an element to be acquired? How can we test and keep track of its maintenance requirement? How does the desire to show functionality influence our conservation practice and what’s the proper scope?  Through collaborative whiteboard exercises, we worked on disentangling layers of decision-making by different stakeholders and defined several sets of categories for design objects with electronic functions. As modern devices are often designed to be multi-purpose, we further identified groups of functions and their needs of care. Starting from the pre-accession process, we continue to reshape the process by introducing the in-take form and activation record which led to defining a terminology that can be agreed upon. In this paper, we would like to share our efforts to construct a holistic approach and initiate conversations with the community as we continue to refine our practices to care for functional design objects.