Tim Marlow on What Makes a Good Design Museum 

 

They call him “the Barbie guy.” Or at least that’s the nickname Tim Marlow says he earned from his colleagues at London’s Design Museum after the institution mounted a wildly popular exhibition on the platinum-haired doll. 

 

Launched in July 2024 to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the Barbie brand, the show drew 144,480 visitors over its nearly eight-month run. And it wasn’t even the museum’s most popular show last year: The World of Tim Burton, which ran from October 2024 to May 2025, drew an audience of 171,000. 

 

It’s an example of the kind of big-tent approach Marlow has taken since he became director of the Design Museum in 2019, after having served five years as artistic director of the Royal Academy of Art. For the general public, these blockbuster exhibitions are a back door introduction to design, and their popularity allows the privately funded museum to maintain initiatives like the Future Observatory, a programme that supports research into environmentally-friendly design. 

 

“I think what the Tim Burton show did is as critically and curatorially rigorous as any show we’ve done — it was a show framed by design in the most profound sense of the word,” says Marlow. “But the most exciting thing for me is not the crowd pullers, it’s that we’ve become the national centre for design for green research. That mixture, that’s where the magic is for me.” 

 

 

Public appeal 

 

In December, Marlow will be travelling to Hong Kong to deliver a talk at the Business of Design Week 2025 Summit. It will be a chance to learn about the role a design museum can play in both public education and nurturing a network of designers tackling some of the world’s most intractable problems. 

 

“Design does have a public perception problem,” says Marlow. “Design is everywhere and when you point it out to people, they get it. Design is a great frame for looking at things. But it’s something you have to keep pushing at.” 

 

If Tim Marlow’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is no stranger to Hong Kong. He was director of exhibitions for White Cube when the blue chip London art gallery opened a Hong Kong branch in 2012. Four years later, he worked with H Queen’s on the Harbour Arts Sculpture Park, which brought sculptures by 18 local and international artists to the lawns of Tamar Park. 

 

Last March, Marlow brought the Design Museum’s exhibition Weird Sensation Feels Good: The World of ASMR to the Airside shopping centre in Kai Tak. “It’s the first time it’s been taken out of a museum,” says Marlow. “One thing Hong Kong affords is the opportunity to stage museum exhibitions in different spaces.” Although the Design Museum has a fairly diverse audience — generally younger than other British museums — Marlow noticed that hosting an exhibition in a mall drew an even broader crowd than if it had been held inside a museum. 

 

“It was amazing,” he says. “And it shows that Hong Kong is phenomenally fertile territory that still hasn’t got close to fulfilling its cultural potential.” 

 

 

Space for design 

 

The Design Museum was born from a collaboration between designer Terence Conran and critic Stephen Bayley, who first carved out the Boilerhouse Project — a “museum within a museum” at the Victoria and Albert Museum that brought contemporary design to the fore. When that experiment outgrew its home, it became the Design Museum in 1989, staking a claim on London’s cultural landscape. Originally perched on the Thames in East London, it found a grander stage in Kensington, alongside the V&A, Royal Academy and Serpentine, a 2016 move made possible by Conran’s gift of £17.5 million. 

 

Tucked into a swooping modernist shell, the museum feels like a machine for curiosity. Its light-filled atrium rises around a sculptural staircase, leading to galleries that trace design’s imprint on everyday life, from Braun radios to Flying Pigeon bikes from Shanghai. Temporary exhibitions sprawl across the upper floors, mixing playfulness and critique, while the permanent Designer Maker User gallery grounds everything in the tactile and familiar. Downstairs, a café hums with conversation, a shop gleams with well-made objects, and beyond the glass walls, the city itself feels like an extension of the museum’s restless, ever-evolving design story. 

 

“It’s a balanced programme,” says Marlow. “Anyone coming to the Design Museum will be engaged by the range. There’s also enough there to attract different kinds of audiences. It’s what a good museum does — it’s not just an echo chamber. It’s opening people’s eyes.” 

 

Marlow says a key part of the museum’s success is the way it embodies the fluid, interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of design. “Design is a network. It requires commission, brand, opportunity, entrepreneurship and investment, and the context in which the design is made and the problems it solves. The intimacy of our workshops, the focus on collaboration with different parts of the design community, the porosity between different design disciplines” — all of these are crucial to ensuring the museum is not only popular but impactful, he says. 

 

 

A museum’s impact 

 

 In this day and age, what exactly should a design museum be doing to have the greatest impact, both on the public and designers themselves? Marlow has some advice. “The idea that museums are places that tell the world how to do things, how to think, how to organise the canon — I think that’s outmoded,” he says. “There is still a lot of obsession with product design in design museums. But people also want to see design thinking about how to approach our relationship to the world around us.” 

 

Key to that is the Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s research lab. “The idea that we can set up an institution with a research unit within it is game changing,” he says. “We’re actually able to commission design research on everything from reducing single use plastics in the Scottish health service to waste treatment on a northern island.” 

 

What to expect at BODW 

 

Marlow plans to highlight the work of the Future Observatory when he delivers his talk at the upcoming BODW 2025 summit. “It’s a new model for a design museum,” he says. “We can commission, channel and showcase contemporary design research. That is game changing for the way a museum like ours can operate.” 

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf  

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.