Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
Posters, advertisements, packaging, magazines and displays are not merely commercial media: they can also be used to study visual techniques, media and cultural contexts. This guide proposes reading them as documents, while addressing their limits and the importance of cataloguing.
Open storyThe collections, archives and historical texts of the National Museum of Decorative Arts make it possible to read decoration not merely as ornament, but as the result of production, craft, consumption, design and display.
Open storyA critical tour through the available evidence on board-game renewal from the 1970s onward: European design, the market transformation of the 1990s, and a constellation of titles including Master Mind, The Settlers of Catan, Jungle Speed, Dixit, and Dobble.
Open storySpanish stickers did not begin as a stand-alone product: they moved from accompanying goods to being sold in packs and arranged in albums. This account explains what changed in that transition, why swapping duplicates mattered, and where the available history has limits.
Open storyA critical tour of six documented motor collections and museums shows that preserving a car or motorcycle is not only about displaying an object: it also means retaining manuals, tools, public uses, and stories of design and industry.
Open storyA fashion collection is not merely an assemblage of beautiful garments: it requires documentation, exhibition limits and a cultural reading. The Museo del Traje preserves almost 30,000 objects, while museum research helps explain why wearing, displaying and preserving are inseparable decisions.
Open storyA reading of Spanish toys as material heritage: from industrial collections and museum holdings to exhibitions that place them alongside their social, technological and design contexts.
Open storyThe exhibitions and collections cited by Spanish institutions offer a way to approach Madrid fashion from the post-war period to the 1970s without treating a single image as a complete truth. This guide proposes reading garments, accessories, photography and the press together, while distinguishing what can be stated from what must remain open.
Open storyFrom stickers attached to consumer goods to albums sold in packets, the Spanish history of sticker collecting explains a leisure practice based on completing, trading and preserving. Panini’s international Mexico 1970 album helps locate a decisive shift: football turned an already widespread practice into a mass phenomenon.
Open storyA reading of museum graphic design as cultural infrastructure: it orders information, guides the visit, connects archive and exhibition, and makes conservation work visible without reducing communication to decoration.
Open storyModena’s Museo della Figurina offers a starting point for considering the sticker not only as an item for swapping, but as a printed object requiring provenance, description and context. This reading connects its collection with public principles of inventory, conservation and access.
Open storyA critical reading of the comics magazine as a periodical format: its bond with the newsstand, serialized publication, changing market scale, and today’s coexistence of print, albums, and the internet.
Open story
