What do the first ever baby monitor, Nigeria’s 2018 World Cup kit, an 80s boombox, the smashed parts of Edward Snowden’s computer, a “Please offer me a seat” badge and a Labubu have in common? They are all included in the V&A’s Design 1990-Now galleries, which reopen to the public this week.
The galleries, which run across two rooms on the upper floors of the museum, also house a collection of antique books. The displays cover six different themes including housing and living, crisis and conflict, and consumption and identity, rather than in a strict chronological order.
The ‘Please offer me a seat’ badge. Photograph: Olivia Singleton/V&A Museum
With 250 exhibits, including 60 new additions, this can mean different takes on one theme across decades, as with the women at work section. It features a power suit from 1986 – but also a plastic-lined bra worn by women working on production lines in China to avoid being searched, and a pair of fast-fashion jeans like those made in the factories at the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh that collapsed due to a structural failure.
The exhibits also demonstrate how history repeats itself, by using designs decades apart. This is clear with a poster calling for “No More Racist Murders” after the death of the teenager Rohit Duggal in 1992, which is displayed next to one commemorating Eric Garner, the Black man killed by a white police officer in 2014.
There are 11 objects sourced from Rapid Response, a scheme that allows members of the public to suggest contemporary objects to be included in the museum’s collection. On display here are Snake Island stamps, which became a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, a “life medal” given to those imprisoned for environmental action, and that Labubu.
An 80s boombox. Photograph: Jaron James/Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Corinna Gardner, the V&A’s senior curator of design and digital, worked on the update. “The ambition of these galleries has always been to think that everybody who enters these spaces wakes up in the 21st century,” she said at a preview. “So how can we inform an understanding of today through the past? But also maybe think about a collective sense of what a future that we all might want can be, and the role design plays within that? It’s material things through which we navigate our place in the world.”
Fresh insight into the objects we live with is everywhere – an Ikea lamp, for example, that is part of a manufacturing-at-scale section. “It’s designed as much to be compact for transport as it is to be beautiful in the home,” says Gardner.
The burkini was made after the designer saw her niece struggling to play netball while wearing a hijab and a long-sleeved top. Photograph: Robert Auton/V&A Museum
An Apple home computer from 1977, and an accompanying advert suggesting the bliss of working from home, demonstrates the beginnings of something that is now a mainstay. “A computer in the home was a novelty at the time,” says Gardner. “There’s the idea that this husband [pictured in the advert], one might assume, is working away while his wife is kindly making dinner in the rear.”
The backstory of familiar or newsworthy designs can be fascinating. The first ever baby monitor, designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1937, was inspired by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping five years earlier. The popularisation of plywood as a commercial material dates back to Charles and Ray Eames making a plywood splint to hold soldiers’ legs while in transit during the second world war.
The burkini was made in 2004 after the designer Aheda Zanetti observed her niece struggling to play netball while wearing a hijab and a long-sleeved top. An unassuming-looking section of carbon-fibre rope, meanwhile, is the innovation that allows a building like Saudi Arabia’s 1km-high Jeddah Tower to power the lifts that serve all floors.
The final section focuses on data and communication, and design over the last 25 years. This is where Edward Snowden’s laptop – borrowed from the Guardian’s archive – is displayed. “The archivist called it ‘an object we need to hold on to, because it’s so fundamental to our history’,” says Gardner. “The sense of the contestation of the public realm, the digital public realm, is manifest in that object.”
Nigeria’s 2018 World Cup kit. Photograph: Kieron Boyle/V&A Museum
The Labubu is also here – surrounded by the antique books, and the librarians who look after them. It’s an example of how design can sometimes disrupt the usual environment of our every day. “One of my favourite moments as we’ve been reinstalling these galleries has been the giggles from the librarians because they were looking down at the Labubu,” says Gardner.
Such reactions are what the V&A wants from the reworking of the gallery – whether from staff members, regular visitors or school groups of children and teenagers who might be surprised to see Labubus, football shirts or iPhones in a gallery. “Design museums, typically and historically, have been about celebrating excellence, and they do that very well,” she says. “These galleries are very much intended to be discursive …. The ambition is to be really expansive and open about that question of what design is.”