Alistair Hardaker
Image: Fables for our Time © Rob Harris for the Design Museum
New adaptable gallery design will enable frequent rotations and timely responses to design developments, supported by £267k Heritage Fund grant.
The Design Museum has unveiled plans to redevelop its permanent gallery, with the goal of enabling faster display changes and frequent object rotations.
The current collection gallery, Designer Maker User, opened in 2016 when the Design Museum relocated to the Grade II* listed former Commonwealth Institute building in Holland Park, Kensington. The museum said the display has outlived its expected lifespan of five to seven years.
Plans for the redesigned space are hoped to allow curators to quickly display new acquisitions and respond to advances in design without requiring major reconfigurations.
The museum has secured £267,249 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to begin developing these plans. The development grant marks the first phase of the museum’s Transformation 2029 strategy. Following this phase, the museum will apply for a full grant of £2.7m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The Transformation 2029 strategy sets targets to increase annual visitor numbers to 800,000 by 2029 and ensuring long-term financial resilience.
“Designer Maker User was an important collection display when the museum moved to West London in 2016, and for a decade it’s been a valuable resource, including for our hundreds of thousands of annual visitors,” explained Johanna Agerman Ross, Conran Foundation chief curator at the Design Museum.
“But it is no longer reflective of where design is heading. In recent years we have seen unprecedented changes to how we work and live, and also how we as a museum display and speak about design. We now have this critical but thrilling opportunity to radically address how we make design more accessible to museum visitors, and how we ensure it’s engaging for many years to come.”
Tim Marlow, Director and CEO of the Design Museum, said its Transformation 2029 strategy will “future-proof the museum for the next decade and beyond.”
