Blå blom and the Alternative Modern. Heritagization in Design.

The history of modern design is built on the identification of iconic and pioneering artefacts appreciated for innovation and originality in design (Lees-Maffei 2009; Fallan 2012).

With the tableware Blå blom as case study this project aims to analyse how parallel approaches to the modernist industrial design canon operated during 20th century.

Blå blom was Gustavsberg Porcelain Factory’s most long-running design, in production for 130-years, starting in 1874 (Fägerborg 1997).

Yet its modes of expression contradict the modernist ones: it is in rococo-style and reproduce English 19th century models.The argument driven is that design is tightly connected to heritage production and that design investigations needs the link between these fields to deeper understand mechanisms that underpins design at large.

By combining objectives of critical heritage studies (Harrison 2012) with interpretational tool from design culture studies (Julier 2014) and with special notice on the impact of Intellectual Property Law (Porsdam 2015) the project will instantiate much-needed research on the intermingling processes of design, heritage production and IPL.

To investigate design in this three-part relation is a bias new to the field (Lees-Maffei 2022). The project will run as a three-year project, 75% of full-time for the applicant.

The empirical data analysed are marketing materials, manufacturing documents (correspondence and production inventories) and public media outcome (press/TV/radio).