The purpose of the Design Museum is to make the impact of design visible. Since opening in November 2016 we have welcomed over a million visitors to the museum, put on 15 major gallery exhibitions and welcomed over 60,000 learners across our range of educational programmes. This aim of “making the impact of design visible” is the overall mission of the museum as an institution, but I thought it would be interesting to go through what this means for the curatorial team, and how we shape our work. | ||||
Ms. Eleanor Watson | ||||
| Assistant Curator, The Design Museum, London | ||||
 | Short bio | ||
| Eleanor has worked in the curatorial department at the Design Museum since 2016. While there she has worked on a number of exhibitions including the Beazley Designs of the Year 2018 and Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution. She is responsible for the museum’s free displays, curating a triannual programme to complement the main gallery exhibitions. The most recent of these was a retrospective on UK architect Peter Barber, ‘100 Mile City and Other Stories’. The exhibition was the first time Barber’s work was presented in a museum and was listed in the Guardian’s top five architectural moments of 2018. She has also set up and curates a free reading space within the museum, working with the Learning department to showcase the museum’s public programme. Prior to joining the Design Museum Eleanor worked at a number of cultural institutions in the UK and abroad, including Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and The Southbank Centre. Eleanor graduated with First Class Honours from UCL with a BA in French and Russian before undertaking a Masters in History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art under a full scholarship from the V-A-C Foundation. |