The Media Surface of Design Reform: Reproduction and the Traffic in Images, 1841–1852

At the London Museum of Manufactures founded in 1852, Henry Cole, Owen Jones and Richard Redgrave used their own writings and those of Augustus Welby Pugin to promote “conventionalised” ornament, prohibiting figurative representation in design objects. This essay advances a new interpretation of design reform by reading the “conventionalised” ornament rule as part of a broader engagement of design with its own mediatised conditions – a recognition signified by the term “surface.” After locating the origins of this concept in the early 1840s, the paper traces a decade-long polemic on the relations of images and surfaces. As new regimes of mediation, reproduction and circulation developed, they threatened – according to the design reformers – to make decorated design less like an artefact and more like an image. While theory was used to discipline the boundaries between images and artefacts and to fix the borders between the disciplines and labour of fine art, print culture, architecture and design, design practice explored ambiguous architectural surfaces: foregoing medium specificity to oscillate between media.