Alice in Designerland

The Design Museum, blessed at its opening by Margaret Thatcher, generously supported by Sir Terence Conran, and piloted by the then wunderkind Stephen Bayley, is the London museum whose time has never quite come.

It's a great idea, as we're all fascinated by the look of the things in our lives, so why not put the most exotic chairs, cars and gadgets in a museum?

It puts on fine exhibitions, like the current one on the dazzlingly colourful architect Luis Barragan. It has an admirable website, a laudatory education programme, and a touching devotion to Dyson vacuum cleaners, but it's an idea that, 12 years on from its opening, still feels like a prototype. There it sits, a white outcrop downstream from Tower Bridge, waiting for London to creep towards it and take it to its heart.

It has always been short of cash, ever since the run-up to its opening produced an overdraft that has only recently been tamed, which has made it short of exhibits. And it has The Shopping Problem: since so many of its exhibits are things you might buy in shops, why go to a museum to see them, where you are denied the thrill of buying, or dreaming of buying? The Design Museum is the museum most in danger of being upstaged by its own shop.

The problem is compounded by the odd puritanism that has traditionally affected the topic of design in this country. Design is mostly about pleasure, but for 60 years state-sponsored bodies have presented it as a sort of national duty, something like castor oil, to be taken for your own good and the good of the country. This attitude lingers in the fabric of the Design Museum, which has too much of the aura of a tuberculosis sanatorium to truly be called fun.

If there's one person who can tackle the shopping problem head on it's the new director Alice Rawsthorn, biographer of Yves St Laurent and former writer for the Financial Times and Wallpaper* magazine on subjects ranging from the week's most desirable object to matters more weighty.

In her monastic director's cubicle, Miu Miu bags in pastel-coloured bubble-wrap at her feet, she declares that she is a "a total shopaholic. I have had a lifetime of research, ever since I was a Saturday girl at Boots." She talks with passion of the museum's forthcoming Manolo Blahnik show. How many Manolos has she got? "Too many to count." Not that, with a History of Art degree from Cambridge, she's your usual mall rat. She's serious about her fashion, studious in her love of design. "I am enthused and entranced by visual culture," she says, "and I refuse to believe I can't seduce other people."

The daughter of an art teacher and an engineer, she grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, an age she remembers for its ever-growing flood of "incredible, glossy, glamorous plastic things. They were so great, and so easy to clean." Some people remember this as an era of decline, but not Alice Rawsthorn. She believes in new things, and the newer the better.

So her museum is not about to turn into Harvey Nichols, but it will be more lively. The top floor, now the somewhat apathetic space for selected permanent exhibits, will have small, fast-changing exhibitions. There will be fewer objects sitting inertly in cases, more graphics and more digital design, and projected on to the wall will be Jasper Morrison's World without Words, 160 images of things that the great designer finds most inspiring.

From Moscow she's planning to bring Architecture in Orbit, a show of designs for orbital space stations from the 1950s. This is Cold War futurist chic of a kind beloved by Wallpaper*, but none the worse for that. And she's planning an exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Memphis, the Italian design movement that unleashed leopardskin and zebra-striped formica and multicoloured wonky shapes upon an eager 1980s. "I can't believe no one else thought of it," she says. "It's so timely, with the whole Eighties revival fashion thing."