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.
