Abstracts
Abstract
This article describes the xDX project: Documenting, Linking, and Interpreting Canada’s Design Heritage. In 2019, the Design Exchange (DX), “Canada’s Design Museum,” deaccessioned its artefact collection and archival fonds to focus instead on public programming. The xDX Project is creating an open-data resource, the xDX ResearchSpace, to preserve the integrity of the former DX collection—now distributed across five institutions—and to support scholarship and public appreciation of modern Canadian design history. The authors propose that xDX’s dispersed artifacts and digital tools continue to facilitate object-oriented research, offering researchers, students, and publics the means to learn about and interrogate Canadian design history.
Keywords:
- Design Exchange,
- Design history,
- Linked open data,
- Object-oriented research
Résumé
Cet article décrit le projet xDX : Documenter, relier et interpréter le patrimoine du design canadien. En 2019, le Design Exchange (DX), le « Musée du design du Canada », s’est séparé de sa collection d’artefacts et de ses fonds d’archives pour se concentrer sur la programmation publique. Le projet xDX crée une ressource de données ouvertes, l’Espace de recherche xDX, afin de préserver l’intégrité de l’ancienne collection de DX – aujourd’hui répartie entre cinq institutions – et de soutenir la recherche et l’appréciation publique de l’histoire du design canadien moderne. Les auteurs proposent que les artefacts dispersés et les outils numériques de xDX continuent à faciliter la recherche orientée objet, en offrant aux chercheurs, aux étudiants et au public les moyens de découvrir à l’histoire du design canadien et de l’interroger.
Mots-clés :
- Design Exchange,
- Histoire de la conception,
- données ouvertes liées,
- recherche orientée objet
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Appendices
Biographical notes
Michael Windover is Associate Professor and Head of Art and Architectural History in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. Cross-appointed to the School of Industrial Design and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton, and adjunct curator of design at Ingenium, Windover is a historian of modern architecture, design, and material culture. He is author of Art Deco: A Mode of Mobility (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012), co-author with Anne MacLennan of Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio in Canada, 1922-1956 (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2017), co-editor with Bridget Elliott of The Routledge Companion to Art Deco (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor with Matthew Reeve of Casa Loma: Millionaires, Medievalism, and Modernity in Toronto’s Gilded Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). He is co-director of xDX Project: Documenting, Linking, and Interpreting Canada’s Design Heritage.
Jan Hadlaw is an Associate Professor in the School of Art, Media, Performance, & Design at York University, Toronto. She is the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the xDX Project: Documenting, Linking, and Interpreting Canada’s Design Heritage. A historian of design and media, her research focuses on histories of design, technology, and everyday life, especially the design of 20th-century technologies, their representation in popular culture, and their roles in advancing modern conceptions of time, space, and identity. Her work has been published in the Journal of Design History, Design Issues, Space & Culture, Technology & Culture, Material Culture Review, Objet et Communication, as well as several edited collections. She is a member of the International Committee on the History of Technology (ICHOTEC) executive committee, and the editorial board of the journal ICON.