History In The Making: Emily King looks back on 20 years of writing design history

On the day I meet Emily King my usual pre-interview defence mechanisms have failed completely and I’ve managed to play out our meeting about ten times already that morning. Not because I’m anticipating it to be an unpleasant experience, but because she’s not like the other people I’ve interviewed before; she doesn’t make music or art. In fact Emily is a design writer with about twenty years’ more experience than me. She writes books, curates exhibitions and contributes articles to national newspapers, previously holding the role of design editor at frieze magazine. She has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (the one that all the politicians have), a Masters from the Royal College of Art and a PhD from Kingston. Not only that, she’s an experienced interviewer too, which means she never breaks eye contact while we’re talking, speaks softly but with authority on all subjects we discuss and has me answering some of my own questions without my realising – “I don’t know, what do YOU think about that?” – clearly a skill learned while studying for her politician’s degree. For all her academic qualifications and career success, Emily sort of stumbled unwittingly into the art and design world. After the completion of her BA she found herself at the Victoria and Albert Museum working as the assistant director’s assistant, “a kind of glorified secretary,” and was so poor at it that they invented a scholarship for an MA in the history of design specifically for someone who was working at the museum, “which I think was really just to stop me being a secretary, to get me out of the office.” And that suited her just fine. “Really the V&A was my favourite place to go when I was young and I’d always wanted to work there. I used to love going during the era of the Boiler House, the precursor to the Design Museum, which was a gallery in the old museum boiler house curated by Stephen Bayley – which seems strange now because he’s become such an arse (you can put that in)! They used to have such great shows there and the permanent collection is just wonderful. I love the kind of ramshackleness, the different artefacts from different ages and different countries put together in one place.” When Emily started her Masters the RCA’s history of design course had only been on offer for about five years, which left most areas of design history open for exploration, unencumbered by the research of generations of predecessors. “The V&A and RCA course kind of had a monopoly on what design history was.I mean you were practically inventing it, which is quite intimidating when you’re the first person researching and writing about a particular area. “Conventional historians have a pre-existing model that they can destroy or build up, but as a design historian you’re often the only person ever to do research in that area. Some people will trace graphic design history back to cave men and others to mechanical reproduction, and you can choose how far you go and how you write the history. It’s really quite refreshing.” Victoria and Albert Museum Alongside the invention of new histories, the RCA students were also exploring fields beyond the confines of the design world. “We’d look at all sorts of social and cultural theory, so people like Stuart Hall [a post-Gramscian theorist], Raymond Williams [a prominent figure in the New Left] and Dick Hebdige [a subcultural theorist] would be really important to us. A lot of our ideas came from sociology, anthropology and cultural theory.” Presumably areas in which her studies in Politics, Philosophy and Economics had given her good grounding? “There were only one or two really big ideas that I got from studying PPE that really helped me. For one I think it makes you understand the people in power better – you know how they’ve been taught and you know how they think so you feel that you know them. It’s not a mystery to me how those people work. Then there’s Marxist economic thought, the kind of analysis of how the economy works that’s really important… and then Wittgenstein, who’s a very useful philosopher to think about. “I wasn’t particularly good at it though. I’m not a very good philosopher and I’m very bad at abstract thought. We’d spend a lot of time talking about whether a table would still be a table if it didn’t have four legs, you know, really, really hardcore empirical thought. Theseus’ Ship, [a thought experiment that questions whether an object that has all of its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object] actually I still think about that one a lot!” Emily’s interests were much better served by the real-world processes of design. “There wasn’t a notion that we had to study only professional design, they were interested in amateur design too; gardens,food, you know, anything really, it was seen in the broadest possible sense. Some people on the course really talked about amateur design, about how people made their lives but I, probably by focussing on graphic des