Regularly featured within the pages of lifestyle magazines, on design and interiors blogs, Instagram influencers’ accounts, and inside the homes of the rich and famous, modernist furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh, has taken the world by storm. The initial months of the Coronavirus crisis coincided with the start of a collaborative research project surrounding these pieces.

As research ramped up, borders around the world closed, taking with them the possibility of first-hand, primary research in Chandigarh itself. After exhausting accessible secondary material, with interest growing in the objects of study, research pivoted online. The project team began exploring digital materials available on Chandigarh’s chairs, tables, benches, day beds, lighting, and even manhole covers. This digital pivot led to the establishment of a database of auction listings for Chandigarh’s modernist furniture, collating descriptions, titles, measurements, images, attributions, provenances and bibliographies for over 1,500 auction lots, many comprising multiple pieces of furniture.

Although digital data collections like the dataset collated on Chandigarh’s modernist furniture has been used by specialists in art crime and antiquities, compilation and analysis of auction data has yet to be deployed on a significant scale in the fields of Design and Interior Design history. Using the case study of the Chandigarh Chairs database, this paper outlines how work with open access data can shed light on items of design (their forms, construction, and historic use, among other factors) as well as the often self-referential and highly problematic process of creating and maintaining a market for items of design, recently exposed by economist Per Hansen (Danish Modern Furniture, 1930-2016 : The Rise, Decline and Re-emergence of a Cultural Market Category).

The Chandigarh Chairs dataset also highlights several unique methodological and conceptual issues surrounding the trade and movement of mass produced design; namely the definitional scale on which such objects are produced and inherent similarity both between ‘original’ and contemporary iterations of each design. This paper details such complications vis-à-vis the Chandigarh case study, exploring how addressing these issues can strengthen the field of Design History as it relates to markets and sales.