Rapid response: news and design

Museum’s collecting shows how designed objects reflect the way we live today.

Rapid Response Collecting is a new strand to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collecting activity.

Objects are collected in response to major moments in history that touch the world of design and manufacturing.

The display, which will constantly change, will show how design reflects and defines how we live together today.

Currently ranging from Christian Louboutin shoes in five shades of ‘nude’ to a cuddly toy wolf used as an object of political dissent; from the world’s first 3D-printed gun to a pair of Primark jeans or a piece of lift cable, each new acquisition raises a different question about globalisation, popular culture, political and social change, demographics, technology, regulation or the law.

Displays complement the museum’s permanent collections. There are many temporary displays around the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A), and they range in size from a single case to a room.

The objects, however, have only recently been acquired and are part of the museum’s new approach to collecting contemporary design and architecture, a new strategy that aims to help the  the V&A engage with important events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture and technology.

The long-term result will be a permanent legacy of objects in the collection; future visitors and researchers will have access to material culture in the 21st century.

Kieran Long, Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the museum, said: “The V&A has always strived to understand social history through objects of design, art and architecture, and with this new strategy we are bringing that social commitment to bear on the contemporary world.”

Objects in the opening display will include a sample of KONE UltraRope, a new lightweight lift cable. A new material which will enable lifts to travel 1000 metres in a single run, potentially transforming city skylines as buildings get slimmer and higher.

The world’s first 3D printed gun, ‘the Liberator’, designed by Texan Law student Cody Wilson, has up-ended discussions about the benefits of new manufacturing technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online, and continues to make the news.

A pair of jeans from Primark, acquired soon after the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1129 workers, will also be displayed.

The factory made clothes for a number of major western brands including Primark, and the jeans are an example of the fast fashion that characterises the Bangladeshi textiles industry, but they are also material evidence of the Rana Plaza disaster.

Corinna Gardner, the V&A’s Curator of Contemporary Product Design at the V&A and Curator of Rapid Response Collecting, said: “Much of the commentary in the media around the Rana Plaza disaster was about international labour laws, building control in Bangladesh and the responsibilities of global corporations and of consumers.

“But at its heart was a material thing: a pair of jeans that you can buy on any British high street.

“By bringing these designed objects into the museum we can explore contemporary issues and events that can seem remote or abstract.”

Then there’s Eylure’s Katy Perry approved ‘Cool Kitty’ false lashes.

They may be available in your local chemist for less than £5, but these false eyelashes, endorsed by the American pop star Katy Perry, are works of extraordinary craftsmanship.

They are made from real hair, knotted by hand on to the pieces of string which form the basis of the eyelashes.

The V&A’s pair are gift from Gethin Chamberlain, an investigative journalist who has written about the women who make the eyelashes in Indonesia.

“It’s a product that connects a very low-income woman working in pretty poor conditions to one of the most famous women in the world,” Gardner said.

This collecting strategy was shown for the first time through an exhibition at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

Long and Gardner invited Shenzhen citizens to choose an everyday object that could tell a visitor something important about present-day Shenzhen.

“These objects together tell a story about that city in this moment and offer a broader, more wide-ranging portrait of one of the most interesting, fast-changing cities in the world today,” Gardner said.

One of the objects on show was a bra without underwire.

“Shenzhen is the electronic manufacturing hub of the world and many of the factory workers are female,” Gardner said.

And she explained that security checks on the way in and out of the factory usually involve a metal detector, so workers choose to wear non-underwired bras in order to avoid beeping on the way through and having to undergo a physical search, where there is a high rate of abuse.

“For me, the idea that a non-underwired bra is a valued currency in Shenzhen is a design narrative that tells you about the sexual politics of manufacturing in that city,” Gardner said.

One of the benefits of this new approach is that the museum preserves objects that have little value in themselves and would therefore otherwise disappear.

“Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people,” said Long.

“The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years’ time, you wouldn’t find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast.”