Authorship and Anonymity in Experimental Design: Museum of the Ordinary and Museum Guixé

author(s) design authorship, anonymous design, experimental design, Museum of the Ordinary, Museum Guixe keywords Individual creativity is a celebrated attribute of well-known designers. Undoubtedly the attention lavished on particular star designers by consumers and the media has evolved from design exhibitions reminiscent of those in fine art museums. An alternative to the celebration of designers as quasi-artists in exhibition contexts is to draw attention to designs by unnamed and anonymous practitioners. I argue that the paradigms of authored and anonymous design since the 1990s echo the debates at the Deutscher Werkbund in 1914 and in the 1950s and 60s at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung (HfG), Ulm. Against the background of these divided definitions of design, the paper analyses Museum of the Ordinary by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers and Georgianna Stout (1998), a project that drew out design’s situated meaning by transposing the institutional markers of museums to the street, and Museum Guixe by Marti Guixe (2007) which transposed the street to the museum in a design retrospective presented as a hawker’s market. Since both projects registered the trend for exhibiting design as artworks in museums and can be linked to the celebration of the designer as artist or brand the paper concludes that they represent a productive tension between authorship and anonymity as competing definitions of design. I argue that these divided definitions of design maintain the complexities of the field and mitigate reductive positions in design discourse. Authorship and Anonymity in Experimental Design: Museum of the Ordinary and Museum Guixe Katherine Moline k.moline@unsw.edu.au University of New South Wales strand 3 authorship and anonymous design theme 3 identity