Interview with Sue Breakell

Carl: Why are (creative) archives relevant?

Sue Breakell: Archives have the power to build connections and make meaning, through their material forms and their visual and textual content. A moment from the past can bring its spark to be activated in the present, and taken forward into the future through fresh thinking.  There’s something particularly charged and energising about the archive of creative practice in that sense, that encounter with creative moments, connections and environments from the past, and the collaborative activity they can generate, whether that’s for design historians, collection curators or creative practitioners.  It’s not just about individual designers and their practice: the archive helps us understand the development of the design profession, its actors, and the nodes and networks that connected them.
          Recently we set our Graphic Design students a brief written by the typographer Anthony Froshaug (who taught for a time at HfG Ulm, as well as at various UK art schools) for their 1970 counterparts at Brighton Polytechnic, which later became the University of Brighton in 1992.  We wanted to see how they experienced a brief that was set more than 50 years ago, both in understanding it in its own time, as part of the history of their discipline, and in thinking about how it lands in 2023.  We shared it in its original form so they could see how it had appeared visually, how he had arranged the text on the page, all of which gives a sense of the person who made it. The relevance of the archive is multifaceted in terms of its content, its context, its materiality, which is especially powerful when designers work so much in the digital realm today. Next we asked the students to create an exhibit that responded either to something from the archive collections, or the idea of the archive itself.  Through their own interaction with the archive, they made a connection with something there and created something new and distinctive.  We were blown away by what they came up with.  It was also valuable to see the archive, and the work we do, through their eyes as emerging designers.  I’d like to think we gave the students something distinctive that they won’t get anywhere else on their course, something they can take away with them and remember in their future practice.

Carl: ... The Design Archives are actively trying to initiate a self-reflexive discourse,  Why is that? What are the goals/hopes?

Breakell: As well as our being driven by the idea of 'research-informed stewardship', we’ve been making connections with other design archives around the world for a long time. The umbrella initiative Archival Cultures of Design seeks to bring people together to talk about not only what the archive can tell us, but how it functions, and what else it might do for us, as a diverse global community. I became particularly interested in how differently ideas of the design archive manifested in different global contexts. So in some places, interest in the design archive has evolved as an extension of public or national design object collections, and builds formal narratives of design. Elsewhere, practitioners have themselves begun to collect and share design materials as a response to particular political conditions that might not encourage th e documenting of counter histories. Each context has particular conditions that pertain to design and shape the archives that are created. This tells us something about what we want the archive to be, and do for us, in our society, and in our global future. With Archive as Method we’re investigating archival knowledge, and how innovative archive-based practices can generate new, often collaborative forms of knowledge production.  

Carl: Who is coming to the archives?  Mainly scholars of the humanities/design studies or practising designers as well?

Breakell: Our core audience is design historians, but our audience is very broad and regularly includes curators, artists, designers, programme makers, journalists and publishers, as well as family history researchers. But it’s not just about who comes to the archive itself. We lend material to museums for exhibitions that reach different audience, and we share content widely through our social media.  With our institutional collections, the Design Council, Ico-D (formerly Icograda) and WDO (formerly ICSID) we have live relationships and work with them both to share their heritage and link it to current concerns and initiatives.  It’s by looking at the past that we can understand where we are today.  Within the University, we work equally with humanities and creative practice students, and indeed beyond. These multiple perspectives are really enriching to everyone, including us as stewards of the archive.

Carl: Would you wish to see other groups of people coming?

Breakell: Like many archives, we are looking at the diversity of our audiences and who our collections are relevant to. With their focus on British design and global design organisations in the twentieth century, our collections speak to a moment of mid-century possibility, when design in western countries promised to help build a better world. But there are many power imbalances in institutional archives, many gaps and silences in their representation: archives reflect the power structures of the world that created them. This is a conversation we often have with our students who ask: why aren’t there more women in your archive? Where are the LGBTQ+ voices, the global majority voices? The mission for us, as for archives of all kinds, is to work collaboratively to explore these questions and use our collections to keep responding to, and building for, today’s communities of students, scholars and practitioners.

Carl: Another talking point concerning design and archives?

Breakell: My own background is in visual arts archives in museums, particularly the Tate Archive. The idea of the archive has increasingly been mobilised by artists as a medium for the expression of complex ideas about the past, present and future.  Of course every field is different but I’d really like to see more of this among designers, using it as a means to both understand and question the present. Creative practitioners of all kinds really help open up new understandings of archives. We’ve done a few projects over the years and as a team we’re always looking to find new ways to think about how archives contribute to the understanding of design and not only its histories but its futures.

GESTALT ERROR 409

Interview with Sue Breakell

Design is a fast-pacing discipline, always in the present, looking for the best solution. But design also has a past which will teach you how other individuals in other historical contexts solved a big variety of problems, sometimes more successful sometimes less. Besides well written historical books and essays, archives can open up a unique window to the past. Especially to understand the life and motivation of creatives that lived in the past. From a German point of view the → University of Brighton Design Archives offer a unique outlook into the life of various designers that had to emigrate because of the national socialist terror regime in the 1930s and 1940s. Among them are → FHK Henrion, → Natasha Kroll, → Arnold Rotholz, → Bernard Schottlander, → Willy de Majo and → Dorrit Dekk. Most likely you don't know them by name, but have certainly come into contact with their work directly or indirectly – for example Henrion’s design of the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines logo which is still in use today. Definitely it is worth to check in on them and understand their life’s work in times of tremendous challenges and existential threads. For a good overview you will find Sue Breakells and Lesley Whitworths text → Émigré Designers in the University of Brighton Design Archives helpful. 
          Carl talked to Sue Breakell, archive director at the University of Brighton Design Archives for an article he wrote for ndion. They spoke about the relevance of archives today, the cooperation with design students from University of Brighton as well as the discourses the archive initiates with other institutions around the world. Following you will find the whole interview with Sue, which was – for some odd reason – more or less five questions. For the whole ndion article, follow → this link.

Carl: Why are (creative) archives relevant?

Sue Breakell: Archives have the power to build connections and make meaning, through their material forms and their visual and textual content. A moment from the past can bring its spark to be activated in the present, and taken forward into the future through fresh thinking.  There’s something particularly charged and energising about the archive of creative practice in that sense, that encounter with creative moments, connections and environments from the past, and the collaborative activity they can generate, whether that’s for design historians, collection curators or creative practitioners.  It’s not just about individual designers and their practice: the archive helps us understand the development of the design profession, its actors, and the nodes and networks that connected them.
          Recently we set our Graphic Design students a brief written by the typographer Anthony Froshaug (who taught for a time at HfG Ulm, as well as at various UK art schools) for their 1970 counterparts at Brighton Polytechnic, which later became the University of Brighton in 1992.  We wanted to see how they experienced a brief that was set more than 50 years ago, both in understanding it in its own time, as part of the history of their discipline, and in thinking about how it lands in 2023.  We shared it in its original form so they could see how it had appeared visually, how he had arranged the text on the page, all of which gives a sense of the person who made it. The relevance of the archive is multifaceted in terms of its content, its context, its materiality, which is especially powerful when designers work so much in the digital realm today. Next we asked the students to create an exhibit that responded either to something from the archive collections, or the idea of the archive itself.  Through their own interaction with the archive, they made a connection with something there and created something new and distinctive.  We were blown away by what they came up with.  It was also valuable to see the archive, and the work we do, through their eyes as emerging designers.  I’d like to think we gave the students something distinctive that they won’t get anywhere else on their course, something they can take away with them and remember in their future practice.

Carl: ... The Design Archives are actively trying to initiate a self-reflexive discourse,  Why is that? What are the goals/hopes?

Breakell: As well as our being driven by the idea of 'research-informed stewardship', we’ve been making connections with other design archives around the world for a long time. The umbrella initiative Archival Cultures of Design seeks to bring people together to talk about not only what the archive can tell us, but how it functions, and what else it might do for us, as a diverse global community. I became particularly interested in how differently ideas of the design archive manifested in different global contexts. So in some places, interest in the design archive has evolved as an extension of public or national design object collections, and builds formal narratives of design. Elsewhere, practitioners have themselves begun to collect and share design materials as a response to particular political conditions that might not encourage th e documenting of counter histories. Each context has particular conditions that pertain to design and shape the archives that are created. This tells us something about what we want the archive to be, and do for us, in our society, and in our global future. With Archive as Method we’re investigating archival knowledge, and how innovative archive-based practices can generate new, often collaborative forms of knowledge production.  

Carl: Who is coming to the archives?  Mainly scholars of the humanities/design studies or practising designers as well?

Breakell: Our core audience is design historians, but our audience is very broad and regularly includes curators, artists, designers, programme makers, journalists and publishers, as well as family history researchers. But it’s not just about who comes to the archive itself. We lend material to museums for exhibitions that reach different audience, and we share content widely through our social media.  With our institutional collections, the Design Council, Ico-D (formerly Icograda) and WDO (formerly ICSID) we have live relationships and work with them both to share their heritage and link it to current concerns and initiatives.  It’s by looking at the past that we can understand where we are today.  Within the University, we work equally with humanities and creative practice students, and indeed beyond. These multiple perspectives are really enriching to everyone, including us as stewards of the archive.

Carl: Would you wish to see other groups of people coming?

Breakell: Like many archives, we are looking at the diversity of our audiences and who our collections are relevant to. With their focus on British design and global design organisations in the twentieth century, our collections speak to a moment of mid-century possibility, when design in western countries promised to help build a better world. But there are many power imbalances in institutional archives, many gaps and silences in their representation: archives reflect the power structures of the world that created them. This is a conversation we often have with our students who ask: why aren’t there more women in your archive? Where are the LGBTQ+ voices, the global majority voices? The mission for us, as for archives of all kinds, is to work collaboratively to explore these questions and use our collections to keep responding to, and building for, today’s communities of students, scholars and practitioners.

Carl: Another talking point concerning design and archives?

Breakell: My own background is in visual arts archives in museums, particularly the Tate Archive. The idea of the archive has increasingly been mobilised by artists as a medium for the expression of complex ideas about the past, present and future.  Of course every field is different but I’d really like to see more of this among designers, using it as a means to both understand and question the present. Creative practitioners of all kinds really help open up new understandings of archives. We’ve done a few projects over the years and as a team we’re always looking to find new ways to think about how archives contribute to the understanding of design and not only its histories but its futures.