MA students’ BT Archive project chosen for Core 77 Awards
MA Design Writing Criticism students have had their BT Archive project chosen to be a finalist for the Core 77 Awards.
As part of the Design Education initiative category, the project is a unique collaboration between BT Heritage staff and students from the MA Design Writing Criticism, in the use of specialist archives as an integrated teaching method for design writing and curation.
The students involved were Alex Cameron, Xanthia Hallissey, Sarah Handelman, Emily Higgins, Prachi Khandekar, Kate Nelischer and Krisztina Somogyi and course director Teal Triggs was overseeing the project. They worked with David Hay, Head of BT Heritage, Siân Wynn-Jones the BT Heritage Collections Manager, Dean Pavitt Designer of Fieldstudy, Professor Val Williams Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) and PARC Deputy Director, Brigitte Lardinois.
As part of the brief they had to select an object from the communications archive to research and interpret resulting in a publication and exhibition.
The MA student’s involvement in the project was to show that they could bring the collection to the attention of a new kind of audience as well as develop their own skills via written and visual interpretation of the material, thereby bringing new perspectives to the interpretation of the archive.
The collaboration was part of the ŒDesign Histories of Practice class which required students to reconsider the context of critical spaces drawing upon historical precedents, whilst at the same time taking into consideration the role of the curator as critic and critic as curator, addressing issues of interpretation and audience reception.
Teal said that the project was exciting for two reasons:
“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.”
The MA students’ project was previously part of the exhibtion Seeing voices: Inside the BT Archive, held at LCC in March which consisted of mini-installations including items, images and sounds from BT’s Archive.
Words by Dominique Major
