Industrial design training

This series relates to the Council"s earliest debates about the provision and format of training for industrial design students. It includes a number of files from the late 1940s relating to discussion of the re-structuring of courses at the Royal College of Art. Robin Darwin, who became Principal of the RCA in 1948, worked briefly for the Council and later became a Council member.

One of the most urgent tasks facing the Council in the immediate post-war period was reforming the education of industrial designers. The files in DCA/7 trace the ongoing development of these early debates concerning the shape and form of such training opportunities. By 1950, DCA/7 was effectively out of use, and all such content was subsumed in DCA/19.

The surviving files have been retained in their original numeric order as allocated by the Council"s Registry. This means that records in a series do not necessarily have consecutive file numbers, and may not be located together.

File created by Lesley Whitworth, with minor amendments by Sue Breakell, August 2010.

Similar material can also be found in DCA/19. The distinction between the two series is not always clear, but there is some evidence to suggest that originally DCA/7 may have been strictly industrial design training, whereas DCA/19 was education in a broader sense, for example, of retailers and the general public.

After 1949 the DCA/7 designation was abandoned in favour of DCA/19. Some files originally opened in DCA/7, but whose multiple parts continued into the 1950s and beyond, were subsequently re-assigned to DCA/19.

Farr, Michael, 'Design In British Industry: A Mid-Century Survey', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955