The National Trust is big. It is one of the biggest landowners of the UK, together with the Forestry Commission, Ministry of Defence, and the Crown. It manages more than 500 properties and has a collection of more than one million items. Their sound archive is held at the British Library and is one of the largest in the collection consisting of over 1700 recordings, the majority of which are oral histories. Seaton Delaval Hall is an 18th century country house designed by Vanburgh in the North East of England. It was acquire by the Trust in 2009 and has no oral history recordings. The main aim of the collaboration with the Hall was for me to record some oral histories and develop a method for the future collection of oral histories by the staff and volunteers of the Hall. However, because the Hall is part of the Trust I also had to consider oral history within the wider Trust; this gave me two intertwined cases studies. The Trust with its large archive and established forms of work and the Hall with no archive and no experience with oral history. The Trust’s situation demonstrated the wickedness of maintenance, while the Hall’s gave me the opportunity to design a strategy and methods which works with and around this wicked maintenance.
Every formulation of the oral history access issue is unique – this is the nature of these wicked maintenance situations. My design practice and my action research strategy were built around this fact. What follows is an example of the wicked maintenance situation in practice, how I researched it and how I designed something which navigates its wickedness.
The National Trust
“4.1 The Trust seeks to acquire objects under the following general themes:
- a) Objects associated with a Trust property and physically present when the Trust acquired the property, but which are still owned by the historic family (or families).
- b) Objects associated with a Trust property in the sense that they were present there for a significant length of time, but which were taken elsewhere prior to the Trust acquiring the property.
- c) Objects associated with a Trust property in the sense that they depict its buildings, gardens or estate or people historically connected to the property.
- d) Objects which were not associated with a Trust property prior to its acquisition by the Trust, and which do not depict the place or its people, but which have an intrinsic historical, art-historical, educational, scholarly or presentational value and which are in sympathy with the spirit of place of a property.”
The Trust’s collection of more than one million items does not include any digital or intangible items. The National Trust’s collection policy does not cover the acquisition of intangible or digital material. I realise “collecting” intangible material sounds strange but it is a growing practice after UNESCO declared the intangible heritage list [date], which the UK only joined (last year ?). Nevertheless, the Trust has not yet got a formalised method for collecting intangible or digital heritage. They of course have systems for the management of the digital files, retention schedules etc. but nothing that involves having digital files in their permanent collection. This is also why The British library holds the National Trust’s sound collection because the Trust closed their sound archive.
It is therefore important to note that the collection of oral history, which led to the large collection at the British Library, happened outside of this standard of collection. The measurements of the collection policy
The consequences of not fitting within the existing standard that is the collection policy means there is uneven collecting of material. This includes what was recorded. Amusingly there is something in the collection simply labelled “a few unpleasant chords”.
Measurement of value and quality.
Nevertheless creating a standard also has its drawbacks as is proven by the standard offered by the British Library.
As rittel and webber preach ever wicked problem is unique. this is also teh case of every single trust property. “To ignore the wickedness is ethically bad or something”
This is especially a problem with interim storage because the capacity will vary between sites
Which is why I made the guide to offer some direction, and
I had a report and workshop so a conversation can be started. I am a strong believe in people power Do I think it will catch on I do not know. I know important people have seen my work but I have also do not who is responsible for uploading my files to the correct spot.
SEATON DELAVAL HALL
the Vanburgh masterpiece. The hall was built in 18th century by the Delavals, who owned a significant amount of the surrounding land and industry, including a brewery, a glassworks, and Seaton Sluice harbour. There are many stories and legends that surround the hall and its Georgian occupants. Even after a great fire severely damaged the property in 1822, the hall continued to play a roll in the community. In the 20th century the descendants of the Delavals, Lord and Lady Hastings invested in its restoration, which allowed the hall to be opened to the public and eventually also function as a permanent home for the Hastings family, when they returned from South Africa in 1990. In 2007 Lord and Lady Hastings passed away and there was a large-scale effort to rise money for the hall to be acquired by the National Trust. This period of fundraising was momentous for the community of Seaton Valley, they were the ones who were going to save their hall. For one participant it was the first time they had ever “stood with a bucket on a roadside.” Another expressed relief that the acquisition and fundraising was done during the recession years after the 2008 financial crash; “It was recession time fortunately for us because otherwise this place would have made the most incredible hotel or golf course.” They did also admit that a golf course or hotel would have resulted in jobs for the surrounding community, however they acknowledge how important it is to keep the hall open to the public; “it [the local area] is proud little place and we love the hall and we are handing down to the next generation.” From taking these oral histories and generally chatting with people on site, it is clear Seaton Delaval Hall is a source of great pride for the local people. The participants would often expressive a sense of privilege that they are allowed to now be part of the day-to-day running of the hall either as a member of staff or as a volunteer. Many of them spoke of the support they felt from being part of the Seaton Delaval Hall community.
Seaton Delaval Hall is considered a relatively new and contemporary Trust site. By this I mean it was only acquired by the trust in 2009. It was a some what controversial acquisition at the time as the Trust had decided they had enough country houses under their care. It therefore became a requirement that this property was going to be more of an experiment, more focussed on the community.
Seaton Delaval Hall has not collected any oral histories. It first came to my attention when the ask my Masters course to do a collaboration. Recording many oral histories was part of their HLF funding which is why MDI and then eventually this project.
I was going to record some oral histories and then work out what the hell to do with them. AS we established in the previous there is a lot of unclear protocol and stuff hanging around oral histories at the national trust. The hall was therefore in a strange place because it both had no recording experience and yet it also was part of this larger institution that had 1700 recordings archived in the British Library and yet had also recently cut the oral history role. This meant I was simultaneously trying to create something from scratch within a very established and rigid setting.
Finding the blank canvas
The “blank canvas” consists of a logistical side and a collections side. The logistical side is all about what needs to be done in terms of storage and security, permissions etc. The collections sides about what should recorded and who will record.
Things I could decide: Permission forms, archive storage
Things I could not decide: interim storage, and collection
In addition to stuff which was simply beyond my due restriction, I got an idea of the amount of time I could play with. Return to the undervalued maintenance (it is not that it is under valued there is just simply no time)
In the end I created together with some of the hall’s staff a strategy for the hall, intergrating parts of the oral history progress into job roles. It was about understanding what resources there were to make this a reality.
I was in a strange way the output. There to create my own culture.
Returning to Ukeles and the social reproduction, we need to put humans at the centre as they are they are reflective and reactive. But you need to assign responsibility to this reflection otherwise it won’t be done as it is somewhat invisible work
CONCLUSION
What I did with Seaton Delaval Hall is what I hope other properties are able to do. Tailor the things I wrote in the guide to create their own culture. Human not forms led. DO not create a standard but create a space.
Design is destructive by nature. A new thing is created and it destroys what came before. This is why design theorists like Tonkinwise have advocated for transitional design and Papanek have emphasised the importance of DIY in design [ref.]. Along similar lines I propose wicked maintenance
as a way of thinking about design situations where there is a need for an adoption period and space to tailor. A period for adoption is necessary because certain institutions and organisations require some form of continuous stability, like archives which need sustained access to martial or the more extreme case of hospitals needing to maintain access to care. As Ukeles points out maintenance is about sustaining the change, picking up the garbage after the revolution, protecting progress [ref.]. A space for tailoring is needed because every institution or organisation will have a different set up and foundation for the
Wicked problems is the thing being addressed by design thinking. Maintenance is a wicked problem but I wish to use the term wicked maintenance to change the staging of the work. However, considering how design is currently being used in business “fail fast” and also the fundamental fact that design is destructive [ Lucy Lucy Lucy] . Wicked maintenance is used to allow people to focus on something slower, something kinder [care ethics some feminine coded. “Care theory is based on the notion that humans are fundamentally relational, existing in a dynamic web of associations.” (Hamington, p. 92)