Projects and exhibitions | University of Brighton Design Archives

black and white photograph of a large room with armchairs, tables and bookshelves. Different elements within the photograph have purple, red or blue boxes drawn around them with a corresponding tag and percentage the computer thinks the item in question is the item tagged.

Machine Learning Methods to enhance access to Design Archives image collections: Supporting Classification of Archival Images via Artificial Intelligence Models

A guest post by Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, Vladislav Vaculin and Andrei Sobo. During the summer of 2023, the Centre for Secure, Intelligent and Usable Systems in collaboration with the Design Archives and the Digital Skills in Visual and Material Culture network service at the University of Brighton hosted two research placements co-funded by Santander through the University of Brighton Undergraduate…

Portrait of Professor Emeritus Jonathan M Woodham

The Jonathan M Woodham Design History Awards

The Jonathan Woodham Awards are made annually for the best pieces of work in any medium informed to a significant extent (but not necessarily wholly) by research in the University of Brighton Design Archives. It must have been created in the preceding academic year. One award is made to a postgraduate student (£1,000), and one…

Black and white image showing a designer's office with products on shelves behind a desk

Archival Cultures of Design 2021-2

Archival Cultures of Design is an ongoing research theme established in 2021 in support of the Design Archives’ mission and goals to meld academic and professional practice through research-informed stewardship. It reframes longstanding priorities for the Design Archives research team, addressing design archives in theory and practice. In particular, it asks: what contexts and imperatives…

Black and white image showing a scene from a living room with old stove and chair

Archives Hub: Machine Learning and IIIF 2022

The Design Archives is contributing to an innovative project run by our longstanding partner, the Archives Hub, to investigate the potential of Machine Learning and the photographic platform IIIF for its operations. Our relationship with the Hub, which delivers our catalogue descriptions to the Hub’s web portal and via our own microsite, continues to provide…

Grey archival boxes with white printed labels neatly placed on an archive shelf at the University of Brighton Design Archives

‘The Indexing Project’: access points and data sharing 2021

Lauren Bridges recently carried out a project reviewing access points in the Design Archives database, to support recent developments in best practice. She completed her postgraduate Diploma in Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool in 2020. When you think of archival indexing, filing cabinets and paper indexing cards may spring to mind. Times have…

Gallery view showing giant green book titled 'Conference on design methods' on left side of image. The right side shows exhibition test , display table and framed images on the wall.

Design Research & Its Participants 2016

Design Research & Its Participants was an invited curatorial intervention in the fiftieth anniversary conference of the Design Research Society, taking place in Brighton 24-27 June 2016. Curated by Dr Lesley Whitworth, Design Archives’ Deputy Curator, the exhibition examined the inter-play of individuals associated with a range of design organisations active in the later twentieth…

A woman looking at old documents in a conservation studio setting

Navigating the Analogue, the Digital and the Archive 2015

This two-day workshop for the AHRC-funded ARENA (Arts Research Enrichment Activities) project held on the 5th and 6th of March, 2015, was hosted by the Design Archives and led by Professor Catherine Moriarty. Over the two days we sought to unpick what the archive meant in the past for researchers and academics and what it…

Black and white photo of Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, Burnham , view from sea facing the side of building.

Joseph Emberton: the architecture of display 2015

The Joseph Emberton Archive has been made available for research at the University of Brighton Design Archives since 2002. This exhibition for Pallant House, curated by Professor Catherine Moriarty and Design Archives Archivist and Research Fellow, Sue Breakell, presents selected material from the collection alongside loans from the RIBA Library to explore the buildings of…

Exploring British Design

Exploring British Design is a proof of concept, cross-sector web portal that conjoins data, expertise and audiences. It connects and amplifies information about Britain’s rich design history held in numerous museums and archives. Through the building of detailed biographical authority records as entry points, linked together by the relationships between people, organisations and events, the project,…

Design Exchange

Led by Professor Harriet Edquist, Director of RMIT Design Archives, Melbourne and Professor Catherine Moriarty, Curatorial Director of the University of Brighton Design Archives, this alliance sought to establish foundations for co-operation across the world in the form of research projects, exhibitions, knowledge transfer, continuing professional development and doctoral research. icam 17: Montreal – New…