#PhDresearch Category
The fully wired home and the modern consumer
PhD student, Alice Naylor gives us an insight into the adoption of electricity into British homes between the 1930s and 1950s. Alice’s research mainly focusses on the history of the Kenwood Chef. But to understand how Kenwood Chefs were adopted by British consumers, she first had to understand more about the supply of electricity. Electricity […]
Colour and consumer durables in Good Housekeeping magazine
“Color in appliances probably is a thing of mixed emotions to everybody.” Good Housekeeping Institute, 1956 Readers of today’s interior design magazines, viewers of television shows and social media are likely to be familiar with brightly coloured domestic appliances. They appear frequently in idealised home interiors in print and onscreen. Refrigerators come in pastel blues, […]
“What an Electric Mixer can do to make light work of your kitchen chores”
Design historian Alice Naylor takes a look at how food mixers and refrigerators were presented in Good Housekeeping magazine in the 1950s. The popular thinking in the discourse of household management in the first quarter of the twentieth century was to propose the kitchen as a factory in the home. Household appliances such as vacuum […]
New Book: No More Giants by Dr Jessica Kelly
We are really delighted that Dr Jessica Kelly’s book No More Giants: JM Richards, modernism and The Architectural Review has recently been published by Manchester University Press. Jessica’s research began at MoDA back in 2009, when she received a PhD bursary from Middlesex University. Her PhD focused on the magazine The Architectural Review, held at […]
Keren Protheroe: Winifred Mold and the Silver Studio
Dr Keren Protheroe talks about her research on Winifred Mold, a designer working for the Silver Studio in the early twentieth century [Video].
Ellen Martin: The Value of the Everyday
The following piece is by Ellen Martin, who recently completed an MA in Design and Material Culture at Brighton University. Last year I completed my MA in History of Design and Material Culture at the University of Brighton – and the wonderful collections at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA) were crucial to […]
Hollie Price: Domestic life in British film and magazines
We have a guest blog post this week by one of MoDA’s regular study room visitors; Hollie Price who is a PhD student at Queen Mary University. My PhD research focuses on representations of domestic life in British films released between 1930 and 1951. This was a period in which British cinema was considered to […]