The Design Council Slide Collection Cataloguing and Digitisation Project

The Design Council Slide Collection was transferred from the Design Centre, London, to the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of History of Art and Design in 1995. Comprising almost 22,500 images, the collection has its origins in the early years of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID), established by the British government in 1944 as part of its planning for peacetime reconstruction. Aimed at addressing long-standing concerns about the standard of British design in relation to foreign competitors, the CoID sought to develop a more critical approach to design among UK manufacturers, retailers and consumers. Throughout the 1950s and 60s the CoID gradually broadened its scope, and by 1972 (when the CoID was renamed the Design Council), its role officially encompassed engineering design. During this period the Council was at the forefront of the professionalisation of design, dealing increasingly with issues relating to its use and management by companies, and with technical issues such as ergonomics.

Compiled by the Council primarily as an educational resource, the collection covers most areas of design. The majority of images show products of various kinds (including tableware, furniture, lighting, toys, domestic appliances, textiles, wallpapers, office equipment, engineering components and machinery), but other types of design such as architecture, town planning, interior design, graphic design and corporate identity are also included. Due to the national role of the Council, the emphasis is mainly upon British design from 1945 to 1990, but there are also many images illustrating design from other countries and from earlier periods. Together these form a useful resource for tracing the history of various kinds of designed artefacts and the emergence of new product types and materials, particularly within the post-war British context. The collection also contains a large number of original and unique images that directly record many of the Council’s own activities, including its annual award scheme (introduced in 1957) and the exhibitions that it organised or contributed to in UK and abroad. These provide valuable visual evidence of the criteria the Council used to evaluate design and of the specific practices and techniques that it employed in its attempts to influence British popular taste and material culture.

The project is greatly increasing the accessibility to researchers of this important collection by continuing the cataloguing and digitisation work begun under the JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) in 1998-99. Images are being catalogued to the standard provided by the Visual Resource Association’s Core Categories for Visual Resources (Version 2) and high-fidelity, high-resolution digital archival master images of the slides are being created in house (2700 dpi, 24-bit RGB/8-bit greyscale TIFFs). The Design Council holds copyright in the majority of images in the collection, and permission to digitise these has been obtained. Clearances have been secured from other copyright holders for over 2000 further images. The resulting dataset comprising digital images and associated metadata is currently being added to the material created under JIDI and already deposited with the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) for archiving and dissemination via its website (http://vads.ahds.ac.uk). Lower resolution JPEG access images are being created for web delivery. In addition, the long-term preservation of the entire master slide collection will be secured through the provision of optimised low-humidity refrigerated storage. A broad-based steering group representative of stakeholders in the resource is monitoring the progress and providing formative evaluation of the project.

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