From production to meaning: A framework for reading product histories
Why the Production–Consumption–Mediation paradigm from design history offers a rigorous foundation for uncovering what brands have actually built — and what it's worth.
Working on a brand exhibition is always, at some level, an exercise in historiography — in deciding which stories count, and why. Curating Shaping Dreams, Designing Lives brought into sharp focus how closely this kind of work aligns with a core framework from design history: the Production–Consumption–Mediation paradigm.
The framework asks researchers to consider not just how an object was manufactured, but how it circulated through markets and supply chains, how it was represented in advertising and popular culture, and how it was actually used, adapted, and passed on by the people who owned it. Applied to industrial consumer products, it transforms what might otherwise be a corporate timeline into something far richer — a social and cultural record.
"There is so much to learn about ourselves and our world by looking closely at what we make, buy, use, and pass on — and why and how we do it."
The Godrej exhibition drew on over 150 archival records precisely because the richest stories rarely live in official company chronologies. They live in customer testimonials, in catalogues written for salespeople, in government procurement orders, in newspaper clippings, and in the objects themselves — repaired, inherited, and carried across decades. Each of these sources speaks to a different dimension of the Production–Consumption–Mediation triad.
For organisations with deep product histories, this methodology has immediate practical value. It surfaces differentiated narratives that are genuinely unreplicable — because no competitor has lived the same social and material story. It also reconnects brand teams with the actual cultural stakes of their products, moving well beyond milestone timelines into territory that can meaningfully inform product strategy, communications, and public engagement.
