OUGD505 - Product Range Distribution - Rapid Response Collecting at the V&A Museum

While I was in the exhibition I had a look at the Rapid Response Collecting section, which was a collection of items that have had big influences or become big things in modern society over a short period of time.

"The Museum collected objects in this gallery in direct response to important moments in the recent history of design and manufacturing.

Many of the objects have been newsworthy either because they advance what design can do, or because they reveal truths about how we live today and we might live tomorrow.

Design is a mirror to our society: what we buy, how things are made, how we solve problems. The things in this gallery are evidence of social, political, technological and economic change, and they show that objects mean more than their sometimes modest material value.

The gallery will change frequently as new objects are collected. The dates prominently displayed in each case tell you exactly when we acquired each object." 




Flappy Birds

"Vietnamese programmer and game designer Dong Nguyen coded Flabby Bird in a weekend. He released it on 24 May 2013 as a free-to-downlaod mobile phone app.

Flappy Bird was slow to again popularity, but thanks to its addictive game mechanic it soon became a viral sensation. Tapping the screen makes the bird flap its wings and points are scored by passing between vertical pipes.

By January 2014. Flappy Bird topped the Apple and Google Play charts with in-app advertising revenue estimated at $50,000 per day. Despite this success, Nguyen announced on 8 February 2014 via Twitter: 'I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore'. This was Nguyen's response to abusive Twitter messages from frustrated players and his own concerns that the game was proving too addictive. Following its removal hundreds of unofficial clones and tributes appeared online"
















3D Printed Gun

"Texan law student Cody Wilson founded Defense Distributed to 'defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constiution'. He created designs for guns and gun components that can be downloaded by anyone anywhere in the world and printed out on a 3D printer.

Wilson fired the world's first 3D-printed gun, The Liberator, on 6 May 2013. The invention of this so-called wiki weapon sparked intense debate. It transforms the way we think about new manufacturing technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online.

Design drawings for the handgun were downloaded over 100,000 times after they were released online on the day of firing. The files were seized by the US government a few days later and Wilson was ordered to remove them from his website. Wilson says of his work that he 'never thought of it in terms of design'. The design and distribution of The Liberator is for him a political act."

False Eyelashes

"These eyelashes are available in any high street pharmacy, part of an industry estimated to be worth £110 million per year in the UK. They are also a key part of the aesthetic of the pop star Katy Perry, whose image as a bright-eyed girl-next-door has led to endorsements for many beauty products. The lashes are made by hand-sewing individual hairs on to a piece of string. The job requires considerable skill and excellent eyesight. They are then cut into a range of styles and packaged.

In 2013, articles in national newspapers detailed working conditions in the false lash industry. Eylure contest the claim main in the articles about its own supply chain. Eylure is a British company which outsources its production to the Royal Korindah factory in Purbalingga, Indonesia. The factory employs 3,713 workers who are paid the minimum wage for that region of around £50 per month. The lashes cost around £6 per pair on the British high street."


Lego Set

"This lego set is made up of three female scientists: an astronomer, a chemist and a palaeontologist.

The Research Institute was proposed by geoscientist Ellen Kooljman via the toy manufacturer's crowdsourcing platform Lego Ideas. An adult fan of Lego, Kooljman wrote on her blog that many Lego sets showed 'a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures'. Launched as part of the first six Lego ideas sets on 1 August 2014, the Research Institute sold out within days.

The twitter account @legoacademics created by archaeologist Donna Yates uses the set to create scenes of academic life. For Yates the point is to show women scientists facing up the frustrations of working life: 'that's part of the excitement surrounding the Lego set and the account - not just the academics jokes, but the fact that these are female academics in normal academic situations, being normal scientists'."

Stamps

"This is a set of stamps celebrating the illustrations of Tom of Finland. His artworks first appeared in 1950's American beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial, a fitness title clandestinely aimed a gay men. From the 1970's his drawings entered more mainstream gay culture and have since become along the most recognisable examples of erotic art in popular culture.

The stamps were issued by the Finnish postal service on September 8 2014. Department store Halpa-Halli refused to stock them, and an online petition called for their cancellation, insisting that 'traditionally stamps have shown themes that are aesthetically beautiful and culturally vulnerable. Strong homoerotic themes in stamps are not either'.

Nevertheless pre-orders for the first day covers sold out, purchased from 178 countries. Yle, the Finnish public broadcasting service, tested Russia's widely condemned 2013 anti-gay propaganda laws with them, sending stamped letters to Moscow and St Petersburg.

Soft Toy

"On 7 December 2013 an IKEA toy wolf like this one became an object of political dissent. It was thrown at CY Leung. Hong Kong's most senior political official, in an act of anti-government protest. Within days the wolf sold out in Hong Kong's three IKEA stores and ran low in Taiwan and mainland China. A Facebook page sprang up and prominent public figures shared photos of themselves holding Lufsig via social media.

Leung is known by his opponents as 'the wolf' because his name is similar to the Chinese character for wold and because is is accused of favouring mainland Chinese interests over those of the former principality of Hong Kong. When translated into Mandarin Chinese, the name Lufsig is innocuous, but when pronounced in Cantonese (the main language of Hong Kong), the toy's name sounds like a profane term for female genitalia."