Emily Candela

The thesis focuses on artefacts from three key areas in which ‘science’ and ‘design’ – as fields, cultures of practice, and historical subjects - interact in different ways. It comprises four episodes reflecting on these relationships through the investigation of molecular form in material culture: the first interrogates X-ray crystallographers’ practices of visualising molecular structures; the second advances a new history of the Festival Pattern Group scheme for the 1951 Festival of Britain, in which crystallographic visualisations formed the aesthetic basis of patterns for domestic objects; the third centres on the postwar production and consumption of furnishings with a ‘ball-and-rod’ form and construction reminiscent of those of molecular models; and the final episode forms a biography of the lives of ball-and-rod furnishings in retro culture today.

This research revises existing narratives of the cultural transmissions between the science of X-ray crystallography and the production and reception of designed objects in postwar Britain. I argue that these transmissions were more complex than has been previously acknowledged: they were contingent upon postwar scientific and design practices, varying modernist ideologies, and the dynamics of historical memory, both scholarly and popular. This project reveals the effects of submitting historical subjects situated on discipline boundaries to interdisciplinary interpretation. Old models, such as that of unidirectional ‘influence’, subside and the resulting picture is a refracted one.