Labubus to the burkini: V&A unveils updated design exhibitions for the 21st century | Victoria and Albert

What do the first-ever baby monitor, Nigeria’s 2018 World Cup paraphernalia, a streaming device from the 1980s, the smashed parts of Edward Snowden’s computer, a “Please Give Me a Seat” badge and a Labobo device have in common? They are all included in the V&A’s Design 1990-Now galleries, which will reopen to the public this week.

The galleries, which extend across two rooms on the upper floors of the museum, house a collection of antique books. The presentations cover six different themes including housing and living, crisis and conflict, and consumption and identity, not in strict chronological order.

With 250 galleries, including 60 new additions, this can mean different takes on a single topic across the decades, as is the case with the Women in 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 inspection, and a pair of fast-fashion jeans like those made in the factories in Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza building that collapsed due to a structural failure.

The exhibits also show how history repeats itself, using designs decades apart. This is clearly evident in a poster calling for “no more racist murders” after the death of teenager Rohit Duggal in 1992, which was displayed next to a poster commemorating Eric Garner, a black man who was killed by a white police officer in 2014.

There are 11 pieces acquired from the Rapid Response Programme, a scheme that allows members of the public to suggest contemporary pieces for inclusion in the museum’s collection. On display here are stamps of Snake Island, which has become a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, the “Medal of Life” awarded to those imprisoned for environmental work, and Lapopo.

Corinna Gardner, senior curator of design and digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum, worked on the update. “The ambition of these exhibitions has always been to believe that everyone who enters these spaces wakes up in the 21st century,” she said in a preview. “So how do we build our understanding of today through the past? But perhaps we also think about a collective sense of what the future might be like that we might all want, and the role that design plays in that? They are physical objects through which we navigate our place in the world.”

The new vision for the things we live by is everywhere – the IKEA lamp, for example, which is part of its large-scale manufacturing division. “It was designed to be as compact for transportation as it is beautiful in the home,” Gardner says.

An Apple home computer from 1977, and an accompanying ad touting the joys of working from home, illustrate the beginnings of something that has now become a mainstay. “Having a computer at home was new at the time,” Gardner says. “There is an idea that this pair [pictured in the advert]One can assume he is working away while his wife prepares dinner in the back.”

The backstory of familiar or newsworthy creatives can be fascinating. The first ever baby monitor, designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1937, was inspired by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby five years earlier. The spread of plywood as a commercial material dates back to Charles and Ray Eames making a splint out of plywood to stabilize soldiers’ legs during transportation during World War II.

The burkini was created in 2004 after designer Aheda Zanetti noticed her niece struggling to play netball while wearing a hijab and a long-sleeved shirt. Meanwhile, the modest section of carbon fiber rope is the innovation that allows a building like the one-kilometre-tall Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia to operate elevators serving all floors.

The final section focuses on data, communications, and design over the past 25 years. This is where Edward Snowden’s laptop – borrowed from the Guardian’s archives – is on display. “The archivist called it ‘something we need to hold on to, because it’s so fundamental to our history,’” Gardner says. “The sense of competition in the public sphere, the digital public sphere, is evident in this object.”

Labubu is here too – surrounded by antique books and the librarians who care for them. It’s an example of how design can sometimes disrupt the familiar environment we live in every day. “One of my favorite moments while reinstalling these exhibits was the laughter of the librarians as they looked down at Lapopo,” Gardner says.

It’s this feedback that the V&A wants from its reworking of the exhibition – whether from staff, regular visitors or school groups of children and teenagers who might be surprised to see labobos, football shirts or iPhones in the exhibition. “Design museums, traditionally and historically, have been about celebrating excellence, and they do that very well,” she says. “These exhibitions are very much intended to be discursive…. The ambition is to be really expansive and open about this question of what design is.”