Britain Can Make It

Britain Can Make It was an exhibition of industrial and product design held in London in 1946. It was organized by the Council of Industrial Design, later to become the Design Council.

Even before the end of World War II, it was recognised that post-war reconstruction of manufacturing and international trade of exported goods would require the widespread acceptance of industrial design as part of future British manufacturing. Accordingly, the Council of Industrial Design was founded in 1944 by the Board of Trade, as one of the first quangos.

In September 1945, only a month after the end of the war, the Council announced a national exhibition of design "in all the main range of consumer goods" to be held the following year. This was the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition, organized largely at the instigation of the Council's director, S.C. Leslie. The design of the exhibition itself was co-ordinated by Chief Display Designer, James Gardner. The exhibition was held from September to November at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Part of the reason for choosing this venue was that many of the museum's main exhibits were still in their wartime evacuation storage, outside London. The venue was undamaged by bombing, empty and available, and itself in need of an attraction to restore its pre-war visitors.

Here is the Man
    He solves all these questions
He decides what the eggcup shall look like
    He is the Industrial Designer
He works with the Engineers, the
    Factory Management – and is
    influenced by what you want

A major theme of the exhibition was didactic, in particular the display "What Industrial Design Means" which had been the first major commission for Misha Black and the Design Research Unit. Through Black's display, "The Birth of an Egg Cup" the role of the designer was presented as the crucial interchange between all the various aspects of design and production. Rather than merely show-casing goods on offer, the exhibition, and this display in particular, were a propagandist attempt to highlight the need to update British approaches to product design if manufacturing was to be successful in post-war competition. The audience was two-fold: the general public who were as yet unused to the notion of design as a distinct process, and also the existing manufacturers who clung to pre-war, if not Victorian, notions of how to run manufacturing industry.

...
Wikipedia