Article: David Styles | Image: © Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum has loaned forty items to a range of UK galleries and museums as part of the next phase of its DesignLab Nation education programme.
Since beginning three years ago, the collaborative Art, Design and Technology initiative has seen the V&A loan out 114 objects and engage with pupils at 21 schools.
Through DesignLab Nation V&A collaborates with partner organisations to select objects that showcase a given area’s industrial and design heritage. Established to complement the existing school Art, Design and Technology curriculum, the programme is delivered by affiliated professionals from local design practices, with partner museums serving as local hubs for the secondary school projects.
The scheme encourages students to engage with an item relevant to their location, before creating responses to design briefs and exploring the relationships between historic and contemporary design.
The latest DesignLab Nation objects
The 40 objects most recently loaned out as part of the programme include:
Six William Morris prints – Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
3D-printed black titanium Pinarello bicycle handlebars, used by Bradley Wiggins – Coventry Transport Museum
A range of silver objects by female designers including Yukie Osumi, Kyosun Jung, Elizabeth Clay, Carla Nuis, Miriam Hanid, Nan Nan Liu and Ndidi Edubia – Millennium Gallery, Sheffield
Ceramics by Barnaby Bartford and Stephen Dixon – The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent
Doncaster, Ipswich and Blackpool are among the new towns to have received support from the programme for 2020.
V&A director, Tristram Hunt, said improving access to arts resources is schools is “good for attainment, good for job prospects, and good for the creative talent pipeline,” despite creative subjects “being squeezed” and take-up having “dramatically declined over the last decade”.
The latest phase of DesignLab Nation, he claims, “reiterates our reinvigorated mission to support teachers, champion creative subjects in school and inspire the next generation”.
