The first design museum, set up in London more than 150 years ago, featured a "Chamber of Horrors", a cornucopia of the most gruesome excesses of Victorian manufacturing. This didactic mission to expose the aesthetic crudity of the bulk of British industrial design was established by Henry Cole, an eccentric Victorian who combined careers as civil servant, designer (he was reputed to have designed the Penny Black stamp and a Minton teapot as well as to have invented the Christmas card) and design proselytiser.
It was his idea to have the Great Exhibition of 1851 and he used its profits to establish the Victoria & Albert Museum, which was intended to foster good practice in production in the workshop of the world - in those days the British empire churned out half of the globe's manufactured goods.
Today, with so little real industry left, design has been elevated to sacred status and Britain, we are told, is all about the creative industries.
Our churches are deserted on Sundays but our galleries are full and, just as we worship hugely expensive canvases, so we bow down before uncomfortable chairs and over-detailed tables, suffer at Ikea and spend on designer labels and heavily styled mobile phones.
Not surprisingly then, museums of design have become international temples of taste. So an increasingly bitter row at London's Design Museum in Docklands, which culminated in its director, Alice Rawsthorn, quitting, has made headlines.
A dispute had been simmering between Rawsthorn and two of the biggest figures in British design, vacuum maestro James Dyson and the museum's founder, Sir Terence Conran.
Dyson resigned his chairmanship last year in protest at what he saw as the fluffiness of Rawsthorn's exhibition programme, the catalyst for his pique being a show on 1950s flower arranger Constance Spry, for which a big product design show was apparently dropped.
This leaves the museum, one of an extremely select group of influential institutions dedicated to exhibiting design, temporarily rudderless at the very moment when its trustees are considering a £50m expansion and relocation (in time for the 2012 Olympics) and in the wake of a government report, the Cox Review, that calls for increased support for the design industry. So what direction should the Design Museum now take? Is Rawsthorn or Dyson right, or are they both wrong? Is a design museum even necessary or desirable?
Since Henry Cole's cavalcade of bad taste, the landscape has changed dramatically. Modernism has come and gone. And come back again. The kind of commercial trash so derided in Cole's time now commands high prices and good taste has been happy-slapped by kitsch and irony.
A survey conducted by the Design Museum and the BBC to find the most enduring icons of British design highlighted some of the problems facing a museum of design. Among the competitors were the red phone box (largely defunct) and the red Routemaster bus (sadly defunct). These "icons" were shortlisted along with the Verdana typeface, the Dr. Martens boot, the Penguin paperback, the worldwide web and the Anglepoise lamp. The fox killers won via a mass vote from hunt supporters.
An institution that can embrace all these disparate "designs", as well as truckloads more from abroad, is always going to have problems finding a focus and a direction. The V&A, estimable museum that it is, suffers chronically from this lack of direction - Raphael cartoons, classical plaster casts, costumes, historic locks, medieval bric-a-brac and contemporary glass all jostle for space and attention, while some of the greatest examples of modernist product design languish in rapacious, darkened vaults.
The design world has fragmented into a number of entrenched camps but the two sparring at the Design Museum could, for our purposes (please excuse the painfully passé terminology), be termed modernists and postmodernists.
The modernists, represented by Dyson, are the inheritors of the Bauhaus tradition of functionalism. Typically product designers and architects, the modernists' concern is that design should be something integral to production and use.
Good design, they believe, improves life through working well - looking good is an inevitable side effect of form following function. From the Bauhaus on, this tendency has been led by the Germans and, to a lesser extent, the Swiss, but the British have always exerted a strong influence on modernism, even if they weren't always at its centre.
From Christopher Dresser's stripped-down 19th-century designs, silverware and teapots, which still look stunningly contemporary, to the exemplary map
and graphics of London Underground, from the functionalism of Kenneth Grange, Jasper Morrison, Terence Woodgate and Sam Hecht, the exquisite architecture of Norman Foster right up to the elegance of Jonathan Ive's beautifully minimal iPod, there is an enduring and internationally influential strain of British modernism.
The other side is almost anti-design; it is everything that Britain is known for from pageantry to punk, Savile Row to Vivienne Westwood. It is humour and irony and an acute awareness of pomposity and pretentiousness that has prevented design from being taken as seriously here as it is in Germany, Italy or Japan. Both in its seemingly paradoxical adherence to tradition and its staunch iconoclasm, these are two sides of an anti-modernist coin.
Can a design museum purporting to represent British (let alone international) design cope with all of this as well as the fashion industry, computer games, graphics, advertising, book design and everything else that now forms what is so loosely termed the creative sector?
Design is not art. We visit galleries to see inspirational works too expensive or impractical for us to have at home. We visit museums to gaze at artefacts of great cultural value that we would otherwise not have access to. These are aged, authentic objects made into pseudoreligious relics for an atheistic, materialistic age, placed on pedestals. Design is the diametric opposite of art. It is about making the ordinary useful, affordable and beautiful; it is interactive.
Good design should be for the masses. If it fails to become a mass-produced object, if it fails to be affordable or if it sacrifices function for appearance, it has effectively failed as a design and, arguably, become art. This is the modernist position.
Ironically then, the contemporary model for a design museum was generated by modernists. New York's Museum of Modern Art incorporated contemporary design from the 1930s as part of an effort to demonstrate the far-reaching effects of what became known in the US as "The International Style".
For the American palate, modernism was stripped of its radical political intentions - rooted as it was in leftwing utopian ideals - and turned into a "style". Design was placed in the context of Picassos and Pollocks as an integral part of the modernist project. Everything from "Guernica" to Ulysses and your kitchen appliances would be part of this same movement.
This was progress and progress was inevitable: this is what the future would look like. MoMA, with its slick and unbelievably expensive ($425m) minimalist extension, completed in 2004 by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, remains the high temple of modern design. But the secret of its exhibition is that it does not isolate design, placing it instead in this broader cultural context.
If then, we define a successful design as a commercially produced, functional object that also looks good, what is it that its display in a museum adds that its position in a retail display does not (apart from the status desired by the increasingly influential designers themselves)?
I would suggest that there is very little that a museum can provide that cannot be achieved by a good store. When the Design Council still ran its Haymarket shop, as part of an effort to educate the British public in what constitutes good design, that was precisely its aim.
If a design superstore had space for exhibitions or events, how would it differ from a design museum? Would it, in fact, not be superior, as you would have the opportunity of handling and buying the finest products?
Stores like this do exist around the world. There is a remarkable state-funded shop in Lisbon selling the finest Portuguese contemporary design; the MoMAs in New York and San Francisco have fine shops (including off-site venues); there's the hugely influential Moss in New York; the whole of downtown Copenhagen; and the legendary Vinçon in Barcelona, a sheer delight in its unpredictable mix of quotidian hardware and top-end designs. It comes as no surprise then that the Design Museum was founded and funded by Terence Conran, who attempted to do something similar with his shops.
I am not suggesting that Conran's imperative was commercial. A designer himself, he is dedicated and well-intentioned and, I assume, was genuinely attempting to establish status for product design in an era of declining production and widespread apathy, from both a philistine government and an unengaged public.
The Design Museum emerged from the Conran-funded Boilerhouse project at the V&A in the 1980s to become a combination of shop window, educational forum and permanent collection, in a skilful, pseudo-Bauhaus warehouse conversion. However, Butler's Wharf, where the museum is located overlooking the Thames, although a visionary and influential development in its blend of eating, living and culture, was entirely the wrong place - a long way from an Underground station and too far off the cultural circuit.
What the museum should become and who should run it are less clear. Only a couple of decades ago design was considered rarefied and became an adjective for an aspirational way of life: designer jeans, designer shades, designer stubble, designer babies - design equalled desire. Now everyone can be a designer. TV overflows with interior design advice. The DIY ethic of punk graphics promoted the idea that anyone could design a record cover or poster. Millions now design their own web pages and computer use has led to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of graphics - layout, fonts, photo-cropping and so on. Do amateur designers deserve exhibiting? Their graphics are often more sophisticated, funnier and sharper than those of the big corporations whose agencies are so lauded. And what about those lovely fashion ads - surely they constitute design? But do we need another forum for displaying these already ubiquitous images?
Our lives are more profoundly dominated by product design than ever before. We have become deeply attached to our tech-tools. Mobile phones, iPods, laptops and BlackBerries have become virtual limbs and, by and large, they are extremely well designed. Certainly the iPod is a late modernist classic, a seductively minimal object of desire that arrived by way of the Bauhaus and Dieter Rams' German functionalism via that persistent vein of British self-effacement. These objects are too familiar for exhibition.
On the other hand, the more rarefied end of design - ridiculous chairs, whimsical light fittings in the shape of birds or garlands, elaborate magazine racks and impractical cutlery - is also burgeoning, but increasingly looks as if it has been designed with exhibitions and PR in mind, rather than use. The endless round of museumification, design fairs and awards is perverting design into a component of the soundbite culture, where first impressions are everything, and where appearance, not function, drives production and investment. Industrial designer Sam Hecht has phrased this memorably as the conflict between "choosing" and "using".
But, of course, we all acknowledge that with so many products competing on the shelf, new things must be attractive, sexy and desirable, and contemporary design is littered with useless but nevertheless humorous or thoughtful products. Design remains an ultimately commercial enterprise: after all, we are not communists.
Like artists, designers can have conceptual aims; they can want to provoke thought as well as, or instead of, providing something useful. Belgian designer Marcel Wanders and the Droog collective apply a delightful Magrittian surrealism to their wholly hopeless but always witty products, while Brazil's Campana brothers bring colourful favela chic to the most expensive apartments. Any design museum would have to dedicate time and space to these figures (as Rawsthorn did) but it dilutes the original message: what is design about - function or fun? Is it as ephemeral as a web page or a witty vase, or is it, as the Bauhaus designers thought, the key to improving the lot of the proletariat by enriching the environment with useful objects? Are things beautiful because they are useful or vice versa?
These are big questions and any design museum needs to take a polemical position. If it doesn't, it becomes merely a magazine, its pages stuffed with a mix of what's new and glossy ads. Of course, a design museum should look at fashion, at shoes and hats (as Rawsthorn did with shows of Manolo Blahnik and Philip Treacy) especially when so much design talent emanates from this country - but how much more coverage does fashion need? And how can a museum compete with catwalks and department stores?
Rawsthorn, for all her alleged arrogance and eclecticism, succeeded in giving the Design Museum a buzz and raised visitor figures by 40 per cent; I'm not sure she could have done much more. Yet I think neither Conran and Dyson's idea of a temple to modernism nor Rawsthorn's magpie hipness are the way to build the institution into a major international destination. There needs to be a comprehensive rethink of the point of a design museum.
Products are not art - they are commodities, designed and made to be consumed, bought and used. Conspicuous consumption has become the key cultural activity of the 21st century, the way in which the mass of the people express themselves.
The development of the museum as an institution has its parallel in the rise of the department store. The two may seem disparate but are intimately connected: the desire to consume beauty and "good taste"; the urge to blend browsing with social exchange; the fruits of colonialism and imperialism, whether in cheap goods or cultural kleptomania; and the obsessions with classification, taxonomy and public display as a root to understanding the wider world.
The increasing desire of museums to become international institutions, to establish themselves as brands and franchise themselves through building outreach - as exemplified by the Guggenheim - has brought a further convergence.
Maybe what we need is a bazaar, a department store of design - a mongrel market mix of Milan's furniture fair, Sotheby's viewings and the finest design store in the world. In that case it needs to be where people shop - in central London - and, as was demonstrated by Sir Nicholas Serota at Tate Modern, now the most successful museum of modern art in the world, it needs to revel in London's established, often surprisingly monumental but satisfyingly ad-hoc urban fabric. It needs free access and the intervention of sublime contemporary architecture. It needs to bring people in, to educate, provoke desire and then, after all that, to give them something they can take home to improve their lives.
