Mudac is embarking on a fascinating quest: to retrace the history of design in French-speaking Switzerland. More than an exhibition, Archives du design romand. What narratives? offers a platform that will evolve over the course of live discussions with designers, historians, and journalists, to capture the emergence and evolution of design. oio studio, which has been invited to take up a residency, will be experimenting with the possible contributions of artificial intelligence to meet these challenges.

A series of enrich­ing meet­ings

From indus­trial design to graphic design, watch­mak­ing, fash­ion, and inter­ac­tion design, all these forms have thrived in French-speak­ing Switzer­land, both in terms of creation and trans­mis­sion. To under­stand the emer­gence and evol­u­tion of design, and to develop the neces­sary meth­od­o­lo­gies, mudac has decided to give the floor to the play­ers involved: design­ers, histor­i­ans, and journ­al­ists will take part in a range of lectures, inter­views, and round table discus­sions. Staggered over the months of the exhib­i­tion, these meet­ings will be organ­ised around six them­atic phases.

Free of charge and open to all, the meet­ings are aimed at both special­ists and amateurs, invit­ing the public to meet experts such as univer­sity direct­ors and teach­ers (ECAL, HEAD, CEPV, EDHEA, etc.), Alex­an­dra Midal, design histor­ian, Chris­tian Brändle, director of the Museum für Gestal­tung in Zurich, and Anna Nieder­häuser, Head of Design Promo­tion at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. On 16 Novem­ber, members of the public will be able to parti­cip­ate actively in the discus­sion by bring­ing along their own design object to be archived, so that together we can reflect on the criteria we need to apply to develop a collec­tion worthy of our collect­ive concerns.

An ever-evolving exhib­i­tion plat­form

More than just an exhib­i­tion, Archives du design romand offers a plat­form that will grow as the project progresses. Obser­va­tions, ques­tions, objects, and docu­ments will be added to the exhib­i­tion as the project unfolds, reflect­ing the evolving and iter­at­ive nature of the research. The public will discover the fruits of the discus­sions that have taken place, while works from the collec­tion will gradu­ally be revealed to echo the topics covered. oio design studio will contrib­ute to the discus­sions through its Archivives project. Designed as an archiv­ing system, it collects docu­ments and inter­views in order to explore, using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, the unpre­ced­en­ted possib­il­it­ies of what archiv­ing might look like in the future. To feed the archives, Le Curieux and mudac curat­ors inter­view design­ers from French-speak­ing Switzer­land.