Exhibiting design within museums and collections has in recent years come under growing pressure to respond to new demands. Design museums, traditionally focused on the preservation of artefacts, are now asked to redefine their role in the context of social change, political conflict, the climate crisis, and the resulting instability of material resources – a shift widely discussed in contemporary museology and cultural policy debates.³ This shift is closely tied to the rise of critical perspectives that foreground environmental and systemic reflection on design practice itself. What role, then, might a design museum play in a society increasingly aware of the consequences of resource exploitation?

Institutions dedicated to exhibiting design – whether called “design museums”, “museums of decorative arts”, or “museums of applied arts” – were historically shaped, particularly in Western Europe, as instruments of cultural and national representation. Their establishment in the 19th century was closely tied to the project of modernity, which emphasised industrial progress and the dissemination of taste. By exhibiting applied and industrial arts, these museums contributed to the construction of national identity, technological self-confidence, and stylistic hierarchies. Their collecting policies, modes of display, and curatorial languages have often remained bound to value systems centred on cultural-aesthetic criteria, thereby legitimising design as an autonomous cultural field largely detached from its material, social and political foundations.

Such an approach, however, appears increasingly short-sighted within today’s global capitalist system of production. It means that design continues to be interpreted in ways that obscure its contemporary transformative potential. A critical dimension, borrowed from the natural sciences, can by contrast open up new questions for the museum’s interpretation of design: Who and what is represented, and what remains invisible? Material, labour, origin, extraction. This may prompt a rethinking of exhibition formats, encourage us to perceive design as part of material flows and geopolitical processes, and foster curatorial methods that map design artefacts as elements of wider environmental, social, and political relations. After all, nothing ever emerges from the green field.

Contemporary efforts toward environmentally responsible institutions can, paradoxically, draw inspiration from the very origins of museology. The roots of today’s museums lie in natural history collections and cabinets of curiosity, where human-made artefacts were displayed alongside natural specimens, mineral samples, geological cross-sections, and astronomical maps – as if together they constituted the totality of the “world of objects”, a world of second nature.⁴ The collection of things was not only meant to cultivate aesthetic sensibility, but also to shape social orientation and civilisational progress. This genealogy cannot be revived in its original form, yet the contemporary design museum must recognise that objects cannot be understood in isolation from the infrastructures that sustain them.

The notion of a romanticised nature as a passive backdrop for human activity no longer holds in the Anthropocene. Instead, it must be replaced by more complex frameworks that acknowledge entanglement and reciprocity. The environmental crisis thus calls into question the very foundations of classical design discourse centred on the human, a paradigm that still dominates professional practice. To treat nature as an externality of society is no longer tenable. How can we speak about this within the museum context, especially when the visitor is almost exclusively human? Donna Haraway, in her text Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, analyses the visual and seemingly objective methods of presentation employed in natural history museums – most notably dioramas and taxidermy – as instruments that perpetually reproduce the culture/nature dichotomy. Using the example of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Haraway exposes the social constructedness of scientific knowledge: museum techniques make it possible to ‘realistically’ stage the ‘real’, yet immobilised moment of nature into which the ‘primitive’ human is also inserted.⁵ Such representations not only serve to place individual human races within a scientific system and hierarchy but also actively produce and reinforce racial superiority. 

What is particularly significant in Haraway’s work is her background in the natural sciences and her effort to ‘bring together the study of culture, technology, and nature’ to overcome the deeply entrenched divide between these categories.⁶ Practically all of her writings challenge the traditions established in Western discourse since the Enlightenment. Rather than centring on the figure of rational man, she strives to think about human existence in non-hierarchical terms.⁷ The biological sciences, especially since the imperialising eighteenth century, have played a powerful role in shaping ideas about who inhabits the Earth. What would a biology textbook look like if the field of natural sciences included interspecies empathy? If we can describe the human being as a geographical leviathan⁸ – a reflexive entity that transforms the world and is itself transformed – is it not precisely the confrontation of culture and nature that holds the key to understanding the global impacts of climate change as a complementary whole?

The history of ecology is intertwined with the history of classification: the ways in which we categorise things directly shape disciplinary structures, while systems of knowledge organisation are never neutral. They are shaped by social, political, and cultural constructs that they themselves reinforce. When such classificatory tools enter the realm of design, they not only facilitate knowledge management but also irreversibly transform the discipline itself.⁹ As ecological thought developed since the 19th century, it began to turn taxonomic modes of observation into a form of design practice, where the analysis of plants, organisms and ecosystems acquired epistemic significance.

Many scholars trace the beginnings of ecological thought to the drawings of Alexander von Humboldt, who sought to depict the complex interrelations among plants, organisms and climatic conditions through innovative visual strategies. This approach marked a significant departure from Linnaeus’ system of classifying the natural world, which organised organisms primarily according to their external appearance and arranged them in a top-down hierarchy reflecting the author’s perspective. Humboldt’s diagrams blurred the boundary between empirical illustration and systematic quantitative visualisation.¹⁰ The concept of evolution acquired a clear visual form later in the work of Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist, philosopher and the inventor of the term ecology.

This shift requires a new curatorial gaze. What has long been characteristic of musealisation – its focus on the autonomy of the object, visual value, and typological classification, as shaped by 19th and 20th century museum traditions – no longer suffices. In its place, a kind of critical geology of design may emerge: an approach that interprets each artefact as a stratified formation, its existence conditioned by extraction, distribution, consumption and waste. Such a framework foregrounds process, material genealogy, and environmental accountability rather than style or novelty. Exhibitions that trace the productive and ecological genealogies of objects thus acquire a specific pedagogical value. They not only shed light on the conditions of production but also cultivate the ability to perceive the material world as a network of relationships rather than as a sum of isolated artefacts. In this shift – from object to process, from artefact to responsibility – lies one of the most compelling roles of the design museum in the age of the climate crisis. Through the lens of design, the environmental crisis cannot be understood solely as a crisis of the physical and technological environment, but also as ‘a crisis of the cultural environment – of the modes of representation through which society relates to the complexity of environmental systems’.¹¹ 

In contemporary design curating, inspiration from the natural sciences can be understood not merely as the adoption of classificatory tools, but as a way of shifting perspective toward process, stratification and relationality. Just as scientists reconstruct evolutionary lineages or ecological interdependencies, a design curator may trace the genealogy of objects, including their material origins, energy demands, and the social imprints they carry. For instance, the research duo Formafantasma mapped the global impact of the forestry industry in 2020 for the exhibition Cambio at London’s Serpentine Gallery. The exhibition, spread across multiple spaces, visualised the effects of timber extraction and distribution for the production of goods worldwide, while, according to the curatorial intent, focusing ‘more on processes and ecological concerns than on finished objects’.¹² The oldest exhibits in the show were samples of rare hardwoods, first displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (just a few hundred metres from the Serpentine Gallery), which now represent trees ‘harvested to the point of extinction’. Another exhibition, Becoming geologic (2025) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has shown the built environment, ‘not as separate from nature, but as an extension of geological processes evolving in deep time’.¹³ 

Methods from geology, botany or ecology offer a speculative model for curatorial practice that makes it possible to illuminate connections across layers of time, environment, and social structures. As curator Paola Antonelli has described, design exhibitions as ‘laboratories for rethinking society, spaces not to show what already exists but, more importantly, what is yet to exist’,¹⁴ emphasising the forward-looking, processual nature of curatorial practice. Such narratives can be traced back to natural history museums: to taxonomic classifications, educational diagrams and analytical display cases. Yet when transposed into the realm of design, another imperative emerges: the space for institutionalised critical imagination. In this way, the design museum can rise above its traditional role as an archive of forms and begin to operate as an infrastructure that reflects the entanglement of resources, systems and things.

It is precisely in this shift from object to process, from artefact to responsibility that one of the most compelling roles of the design museum in the age of the climate crisis can be found. By embracing the transformative potential of (material) culture, we can work with the conviction that ‘cultural institutions are an essential part of social infrastructure’.¹⁵ According to Beatrice Leanza, author of the recent publication New Design Museum, design is not merely an expression of the normative structures that have led us into the current impasse, but also ‘a channel for reshaping cultural asymmetries – from access to resources to social justice’. Design exhibitions therefore face new challenges, particularly in the field of public education, since the origin of things – or as Marjanne Van Helvert writes, ‘these dirty matters’¹⁶ – cannot be separated from our material wealth. ‘Everything is made of earthly materials, masterfully and violently harvested from nature with necessary straightforwardness and precision, with extremely varying degrees of care and understanding of the social and natural environment.’¹⁷ 

The contemporary challenge for the design museum arguably lies in acknowledging that objects cannot be understood in isolation from the infrastructures that enable them. Curatorial practice is transformed the moment it ceases to represent design as a collection of finished artefacts endowed with explicit cultural value, and instead begins to propose new modes of understanding – ones that are more contextual than formal, and more situational than universal.

A return back to the ground does not imply the musealisation of soil, geology, or raw materials. Rather, it signifies an overcoming of the timelessness of the traditional museum that isolates artefacts from the world. It entails embracing temporality, exhaustion, decline and regeneration as inherent to a design perspective. Claire Bishop argues that presentism in museums reinforces a condition in which institutions are relieved from the responsibility to take a position – sustaining a facade of neutrality that masks broader power structures.¹⁸ Exhibiting design thus often operates within a framework of neutral aesthetics that conceals the global dimensions of production, extraction, labour and waste. Finally, it also implies an expansion of curatorial practice toward institutional transformation, where the museum is no longer merely a repository of objects but an active participant in the circulation of materials, values and relations.