Drawing on the collections of the V&A and the Lahore Museum, this presentation considers the museum object and its ramifications for modern design. It is part of a wider interdisciplinary V&A project that investigates dynamic relationships between past, present and future as evidenced in key artefacts and sites of material culture. How have people imagined their futures through the techniques of making? How can heritage and the past differently inform the future? How might museums use their collections in new ways to shape their conversations about the future with their visitors - in the case of the V&A to fulfil its mission to ‘inspire design’? The research is situated within the growing disciplines of futures studies in relation to visual and material cultures.
About Sandra Kemp: Professor Sandra Kemp is a Senior Research Fellow at the V&A. She has worked at a succession of leading institutions, including the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, and Southampton; the Science Museum, the Wellcome Trust, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. She founded the Research Department at the Royal College of Art. As RCA Research Director from 2001-2008, she nurtured interdisciplinary industry-related research and its commercial exploitation in areas including design, material science and computer science.
Her V&A role includes developing international research collaboration between museums and galleries, universities, industry and government agencies on how such organisations use the past to shape ideas and provoke debate about the future. She is currently co-ordinating V&A research for a forthcoming exhibition and related publications on John Lockwood Kipling, in partnership with the Bard Graduate Center, New York.