As part of the V&A/RCA MA in History of Design Publication for the class of 2019. In your hands is Almanac, which will be your handbook for the next seconds, minutes or hours you spend exploring our last fifteen months.

We understand an almanac to be a book published every year that includes information for that year, such as important days or times of the sun rising and going down. Our Almanac’s ‘information’ is a series of narratives, tracing students’ research and presenting accounts of history told through object-centred analysis. Each narrative is the product of a specific matrix of personalities, personhoods and personal interests; it is collectively the curated account of numerous trips into archives, of hours spent poring over images and artefacts, and of conversations with people who were there or have stories to share.

Almanac’s title and arrangement therefore alludes in irony to historical publications that purported to be ‘the’ authoritative source of knowledge on a subject (encyclopaedias, atlases, canonical histories) – the artificiality of which its authors sought to expose and subvert in their research. As you flick through the coming pages, you will notice that what follows are stories – some visual, some written, all rooted in critical study – that reveal ‘a’ history rather than ‘the’. What follows then is a disruption of the traditional order and neatness given to history and knowledge;

it is less a roadmap through different historical topics than an invitation to engage

in a discussion about storytelling, ‘truths’, methodologies and voices.