The Extended Art and Design Institution: experimenting with new relationships

The presentation focuses on the work of students produced at Chelsea College of Arts, as a lens to look at the relationship between some of the issues we are facing as spatial design educators today and the issues discussed and questioned by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6.

If in the 19th Century the Committee took place alongside a major industrial revolution, the ‘Victorian Futures’ conference takes place alongside another one. In the cusp of the digital revolution, it seems relevant to revisit the relationship between higher education and manufacturing, museums and the world out there, or what we understand as an extended art and design institution. We will discuss this through two student projects from the past academic year that re-imagined the East End Museum of Science and Art in Bethnal Green.