Shu-Wen Lin and Chantal Willi
Electronic Media Review, Volume Nine: 2025-2026
ABSTRACT
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) formed the Architecture and Design curatorial department in 1988, focusing on works of graphic design, product design, furniture, and architecture. In the context of modern and contemporary art museums, SFMOMA has adopted the shared practices to collect and display design objects as aesthetic objects without their functionality. In 2014, SFMOMA, along with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, launched a four-year Artist Initiative to develop a series of interdisciplinary research projects. Acknowledging the limitations of traditional display methods, SFMOMA investigated new approaches to collect, display and conserve design in the 21st century. In-use video was one of the strategies used to respond to the transformation of design with complex digital elements and interfaces. By producing in-use videos for two exhibitions in 2015 and 2018, SFMOMA was able to present various functions in use that could not be understood by static display formats, and helped make the hidden world accessible without turning the object on while on display.
During the two-year preparation for Art of Noise (2024), an exhibition dedicated to audio technologies, we observed an interest shift to actively acquire and present design objects’ functionality. To show playback functions of media players in the exhibitions, incoming accessions and selected collection objects were studied, tested, serviced, and repaired for the filming of in-use videos. To address the emerging interests and challenges, we have been revisiting our institutional policies and laying out our mission, resources, and timelines it may require to care for functional design objects. Additionally, we spoke to our colleagues in other institutions to learn if they have experienced a similar shift to present the full lifecycle of object functions and provided insights into a potential landscape change in collections care.
The aims of our endeavor are two-fold: addressing the evolving focus and the additional expertise and workload for ongoing and future activations. We started by asking the following questions: what happens if functionality becomes an element to be acquired? How can we test and keep track of its maintenance requirements? How does the desire to show functionality influence our conservation practice, and what is the proper scope? Through collaborative whiteboard exercises, we worked on disentangling layers of decision-making by different stakeholders and defined several sets of categories for design objects with electronic functions. As modern devices are often designed to be multi-purpose, we further identified groups of functions and their needs of care. Starting from the pre-accession process, we continue to reshape the process by introducing the intake form and activation record, which led to defining a terminology that can be agreed upon. In this paper, we would like to share our efforts to construct a holistic approach and initiate conversations with the community as we continue to refine our practices to care for functional design objects.