Visitors welcome

More people visted museums in UK than games in the Premier League, and with 42,ooo,ooo visitors the numbers are much more higher than the visitors of theatres and musicals.
Especially art [and design] museums benefit from this world wide boom. 120,000 visitors came to a single exhibition in Hamburg, 500,000 to the National Gallery in Berlin.


Source: an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine (only in German)

The chair, a popular object in design museums

Chairs sitting pretty as a design icon, but for how long? is an article from Alice Rawsthorm who lives in London:

...Why have chairs assumed so much importance? We all need comfortable objects to sit on, and to suspend us at the correct height to type or eat, while, we hope, saving us from back pain. But isn't it odd that something that was designed to do just that should occupy more cultural space than arguably more useful and complex objects? How has the chair been loaded with so much symbolism and meaning, and attained such stratospheric prices? And will it be as important to the design history of this century, as it was to the last? ...

The complete text: an article in the Herald Tribune

Photo: C. Vittoratos in the exhibition 300% Spanish Design in Athens

"50 $ Design Museum"

As industrial goods many well designed items of the past are still available on the market.

A few years back, I.D. Magazine ran a great feature, asking various designers to put together "design museums" using only $50. Unfortunatly it isn't available online, but I found a (more graphic oriented) replika in the web.

Link to the webpost

From a physical design museum towards a virtual design museum

The essay of Angeliki Dimaki made at Technology Institute of Athens deals with the potential of virtual design museums and the chance to make the stock part of collections accessable. The project was made for the Thessaloniki Design Museum.

Link to the pdf. document

Essay about the crisis of museums (in German)

Today I found this essay about the crisis of museums. Michael Parmetier critisizes the phenomenon to preserve everything old and unused. One paragraph is dealing with design museums and art museums. The author sais here that Some art museums are only displays for actual industrial production (Manche Museen für moderne Kunst sind nichts weiter als Schaufenster der aktuellen Produktion.)
Link to the article