V&A Design Museum Begins "Rapid Response" Curating

Everything is better right now.

Image via Victoria and Albert Museum / Cody Wilson-Defence Distributed

In a time where information and public sway moves nearly faster than imaginable, curators at the V&A Design Museum in London of radically transformed their strategy in order to respond quickly to daily world events. The hope is to begin collecting objects that garner international significance much quicker than would be possible with traditional curatorial practices, to respond to the rapid-fire pace of news, information, and global events in an age where objects of design accrue meaning almost instantaneously. 

So far, three of the objects acquired under the new strategy include a set of false eyelashes once belonging to Katy Perry, the first 3D-printed gun, and a pair of jeans manufactured near the
Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which collapsed this year, killing 1,129. The museum’s senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital Kieran Long spoke to Dezeen about the new strategy, saying the benefits include being able to acquire things that otherwise would be lost to the shuffle of time. The jeans, for example, as he told Dezeen: “Knowing that they were made in that factory, however, gives them a particular relevance and tells us something about contemporary manufacturing and about building codes in Bangladesh, about western consumerism, about lots of issues.” 

RELATED: Top 10 Craziest 3D-Printed Creations (So Far)

[via Dezeen]

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