By 2004, long after my time, control of the Design Museum was on vectors of escape from the earthbound purity of its original intentions. An exhibition about the flower arranger Constance Spry, who led the team that created ‘Coronation Chicken’, caused a frightful spat. Conran felt betrayed by trivia and James Dyson resigned from the board in a technophiliac huff. A woman who thought about housing policy was lionised in an exhibition. In the absence of authentic new design heroes, architecture itself became subject for scrutiny. Fifteen years after its opening, design was acquiring so many meanings that it was becoming meaningless, while the Design Museum was becoming muddled, even as it became ever more popular.

And this process continues: globalisation has blown away assumptions about the priority of Eurocentric criteria. We have open-source design, critical design, feminist design. With the off-shoring of manufacturing, fugitive ‘brands’ have become more valuable than the actual products they represented.

In this embarrassment of confusion, it was decided to move the Design Museum to larger premises, although, to be honest, its managers had had difficulty filling the existing building with meaningful material. There was a flirtation with the Tate, but Nick Serota outsmarted them and it came to nothing. Or rather, it came to the Tate’s new Herzog and de Meuron building instead. Then, as the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea found itself in need of offloading the decaying and obsolete Commonwealth Institute, on the rebound, the Design Museum offered to refurbish it.

...

The new Design Museum, which opens in November, does two unwelcome things: locate ‘design’ on a nasty shopping street and confirm a suspicion that, even in his eighties, Conran’s restless ambition may be getting the better of his remaining good sense. But while the old Design Museum perfectly reflected a shared set of beliefs, the new one will only be a partial witness to its patron. Conran should, perhaps, be more wet-eyed than me. Sometimes we can remember things only as a sense of loss.

I am left unsure if ‘my’ Design Museum was the end of something old or the beginning of something new. Auden thought love would ‘last for ever’ and I felt much the same about the curious little modernist building on Shad Thames. A temporary monument? Indeed, a pop-up museum! It’s a bittersweet, darkly humorous thought. 

Form, function and confusion: the Design Museum in 1989
Form, function and confusion: the Design Museum in 1989 - So what was the old Design Museum? It arose from a conversation between Terence Conran and me in 1978. He was the proprietor of Habitat, whose decent, modern merchandise revolutionised popular taste, and I was the author of a book about design he had just discovered. He was about to revolutionise me by asking for help to make something that would be as useful to contemporary students, from the point of view of inspiration, as the old V&A had once been to him. Our prospectus began with a series of popular exhibitions in that august old museum and then we built a spiffy new one of our own. Mrs Thatcher opened it in August 1989 at Butler’s Wharf, just southeast of Tower Bridge. At the time, the glorious view of the City included only Seifert’s NatWest Tower as a punctuation mark on the horizon. Two year’s after Big Bang, the mood was still very Eighties. And so, too, I now see, was the character of the Design Museum.