This blog post summarises research by one of the PEC’s researchers at Nesta, Dr Cath Sleeman, in which she analysed over 7,000 photographs of everyday objects from the Science Museum Group Collection. Below she shares a few of her findings. They illustrate how an online collection – such as a photographic dataset – allows us to study the form of objects: their shape, colour and texture. The insights gleaned can be used to enrich a museum’s catalogue and expand the ways of searching through the online collection.
Using online museum collections to study the design of everyday objects
A little greyer?
We tracked the colour of objects overtime and found a substantial rise in the use of grey, and a concurrent fall in the use of brown and yellow. These trends likely reflect changes in materials, such as the move away from wood and towards plastic. A smaller trend is the use of very saturated colours which begins in the 1960s.
Each frame shows the 2,000 most common colours amongst a group of 250 objects. One example of an object from that group is also shown. The groups of objects overlap; 10 new objects are introduced and removed with each subsequent frame.
While objects do appear to have become a little greyer over time, we must remember that the photographs examined here are a just a sample of the objects within the collection, and the collection itself is a non-random selection of objects.
A closer look at telephones
The turn towards grey can also be seen within individual objects such as telephones. The Science Museum Group Collection contains hundreds of phones, dating from the late 1800s to the present day. The video below shows that some of the earliest telephones shared the same greyscale palette that is seen today in many smartphones. The 1960s brought with it a much broader range of colours, and then the ‘greying’ began in the late 1980s, with the introduction of the brick phone.
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