Archive Talk: Delany Boutkan and Mikaela Steby StenfalkArchive Talk: Delany Boutkan and Mikaela Steby Stenfalk

Design objects are increasingly being presented and traded in the contemporary digital landscape using images circulated on social media such as Instagram. A design increasingly derives its value from what it says in a picture. This changing relationship between the physical object and the online image also influences the cultural-historical status of a design, and has consequences for collections and archives. What does it mean for the archival practices of the future if more and more value is being given to digital images?

Design objects are increasingly being presented and traded in the contemporary digital landscape using images circulated on social media such as Instagram. A design increasingly derives its value from what it says in a picture. This changing relationship between the physical object and the online image also influences the cultural-historical status of a design, and has consequences for collections and archives. What does it mean for the archival practices of the future if more and more value is being given to digital images? Does the Instagram photograph eventually replace the tangible archive object itself in collections? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a development? In this _Archive Talk _Delany Boutkan and Mikaela Steby Stenfalk present and discuss their research into this phenomenon.

Delany Boutkan is a Dutch curator and exhibition maker with a background in product design. For her Master in Design Curating & Writing course at Design Academy Eindhoven she investigated the influence of social media's image circulation on the exhibition of design objects and collections in museums.

Mikaela Steby Stenfalk is a Swedish designer, researcher and curator with a background in architecture. She recently graduated from the Man & Media department at the Design Academy Eindhoven with a crowd-sourced exhibition concept using images from social media. She has also mounted her first exhibition at ArkDes, the Swedish National Museum for Architecture and Design.

The _Archive Talks _series invites experts to go deeper into the stories behind various archival materials, many of which are shown in the _Speculative Design Archive _exhibition. What background knowledge or thoughts are hidden behind the archives in the Storage Area, the Study Depot and the Showroom? What alternative forms have been used to compile, examine, disclose and interpret them? How does this effect the way they are used and their meaning? What does this mean for the creation of future archives?

Against the backdrop of the _Speculative Design Archive _we talk to archivists, archive users and other experts about specific archival models. All these different perspectives are the reason for the continuous conversations about the possible forms that a design archive can take and the meanings that can be attributed to them. Informal, interactive and in an intimate setting, each conversation adds a new layer to the exhibition.