Lord Cultural Resources & TCDC

Curatorial Consultant for ‘Design Values of Popular Culture’ at Thailand Creative & Design Centre (TCDC)

Bangkok’s design centre TCDC hired the world’s leading museum consultancy, Lord Cultural Resources of Canada, to manage its conception and launch in 2005. A half-year ahead of the opening, TCDC invited me to research the ‘design values of popular culture’ with Lord’s exhibition planner Chuck Sutyla and exhibition designer Adrian von Ulrich. We worked for a full year on the project. The basis of the project was to mine my book Very Thai and further similar examples from Thai society for patterns and insights that could reveal fundamental principles and methods of design in Thai everyday life, and its distinctive objects.

The research did not directly lead to an exhibition of popular culture, though some findings and objects were used in the inaugural exhibition about popular culture in northeast Thailand, Isaan Retrospective. Several subsequent exhibitions by TCDC would tackle examples and topics explored in the research.

The topic was so vast and the field was just emerging. TCDC’s aspiration to feature examples of designers creating products based on such design values had simply not borne enough fruit yet. In the years since, there has been a wealth of objects, furnishings, and event designs that have mined Thai popular culture for its underlying concepts and techniques.