Rethinking Drinking: A Proposal For a New English Pint Beer Glass

‘Things’ was originally founded in 1994 by a group of writers and historians based at the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art. ‘Things’ embodies the belief that “objects can open up new ways of understanding the world, building on research and taking a curatorial eye out into the world.” ‘Things’, then, “is a space devoted to looking at objects – ‘not only beautiful ones; and not only their making, but also their buying and their selling, their wanting and their using’, with all the means at our disposal, including fiction, poetry and image (and sometimes sound) as well as rigorous factual enquiry.”

This piece consists of a semiotic (theoretical) and design (practical) explication of the Nonic pint glass. As such it seeks to show how the theories and practices of design meld with those of material culture to create a series of new, and diverse, social meanings