Lineages and Legacies for Collecting Digital Design

Abstract Digital collecting and conservation today draw from disparate lineages of scholarship and museological practices. Digital design in the United States’ national collection at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum draws on three lineages: graphic design, interaction design, and installation/performance, which lead to distinct strategies for digital curation and conservation. Early collecting of digital graphic identities, typefaces, and posters was situated in the practices of graphic design scholarship and archiving, centered on renders and outputs of digital design processes. By contrast, interaction design represented through electronic interfaces followed from the collecting and privileging of hardware. A third lineage for digital curation comes from an understanding of interactions as performative, surfacing as installations with multiple audience members at larger scales. Cooper Hewitt’s 2021 acquisition of a live, interactive mapping website, Watercolor Maps by Stamen Design, provides a case study of the integration of these three lineages in the work’s acquisition, conservation, and display as an immersive interactive installation in the 2024 exhibition Acquired!