I Love Things: V&A/RCA History of Design MA symposium 2024

This year’s V&A/RCA History of Design MA graduate symposium at the V&A, I Love Things, was a sell out. Through the event and accompanying publication, graduating students presented their dissertation projects, which range from the intensely personal to the monumentally public. Discover the many fascinating stories that can be told using a design historical lens: from Caribbean dress cultures to New York brides, from seventeenth century pageantry to the twentieth century Polaroids, from English sacred wells to cinemas in colonial Bombay.

Head of Programme Dr Sarah Cheang and Dr Yuko Kikuchi Head of Academic Programmes, V&A, introduce the programme and the work of this year’s students.

Design historians love things. Things are everywhere, in every part of society, in every moment in history. As historians, we use things to illuminate the world, teaching us about cultures past and present.

The unique partnership of the V&A/RCA History of Design MA was created in 1982 to foster a postgraduate experience that is centred on things, through the collections-based expertise of the museum and practice-led experimentation of the art and design college. As we have grown, so too has our field.

As well as mass produced and elite material culture, we range across topics as varied as craft cultures, spatial experiences, nature and the human body as part of a designed world that deserves our attention. The things we love now even challenge definition; things that are perhaps long vanished, perhaps culturally marginalised, perhaps born digital. We need the skills and passion to work with these things too.

V&A/RCA History of Design MA students come from diverse academic backgrounds; from art history, literature, law and history degrees to practise based backgrounds in fashion, textiles, illustration and graphic design. On the programme we combine rigorous scholarship with experimental methodologies and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Our students develop fundamental skills for undertaking historical research through artefact analysis, as well as a wider understanding of the purpose and significance of object-led research.

Located between the V&A and the RCA, our students have access to a world leading collection of art, design and performance, spanning over 5,000 years of human creativity, as well as expertise in practice and research from the world’s leading art and design university. Students develop approaches and methods for writing design histories informed by current debates and new directions, as well as an understanding of the public facing elements of the discipline. The primary output of our students’ time with us is their independent research project; a 12,000 word dissertation, exploring an aspect of design history entirely of their choosing.

The 2024 V&A/RCA History of Design publication I <3 Things is framed by three key areas that explore the dramatic and deeply felt connections between humans and things emerging from students’ work. The themes of Identity, Technology and Experience unite a wide range of topics with differing historical and geographical foci. Although the historical periods range from the sixteenth century to the present, all of them present a contemporary subjective point of view and reveal the connections that underpin their focus.

Identity is one of the most interesting issues in the twenty-first century as we live and experience postmodern and postcolonial times. Empowered and articulate, the feminist critical approaches in so many of the dissertations this year meaningfully deliver a message of equity, often alongside a gender-race intersectional mission and visions of a more sustainable world.

The objects studied range from banners of the suffrage movement, to the clothing worn by the Windrush generation on their journey to England, and Harajuku street fashion seen on the pages of FRUiTS Magazine.

Technology has always been an important aspect of design and design history. It is closely linked to the way we produce and consume, and shapes our culture. It changes the way we live and communicate and has an impact on the value systems we use to make ‘distinctions’ in taste and rationalise our lives. Our students’ work addresses how technology not only drives change, but also changes living experiences of cultures of many kinds.

Projects under this theme considered topics such as the advertising and marketing of menstruation products, transfer printed ceramics in late eighteenth-century England and a critical analysis of British tabloids.

Experience is at the core of our interaction with the designed world. This work touches upon the excitement of doing design history studies that cut across science, engineering and culture, and delves into human experience to understand the deep significance of the material world in people’s lives.

Our students have investigated subjects such as experiences of colour and light in the Georgian domestic interior, how the idyllic pastoral was used to advertise mental wellbeing in turn of the nineteenth century Anglo-America, and the role of museums in presenting a contemporary history of sustainable fashion.

As the 2024 symposium and publication demonstrate, our students not only love things, but have ideas about them that produce tangible and highly engaging results. The students feel their intellectual and ethical responsibility to do justice to the stories that are interwoven with objects and collections.