V&A Blog

9 stories

V&A BlogCelebrating 20 years of The Jameel Gallery at the V&A This July marked 20 years since the Jameel Gallery opened at V&A South Kensington. To celebrate, we look back at a year of new displays, live craft and conversation, and ahead to what’s still to...

October 12

V&A BlogCataloguing Wedgwood – step by step Within hundreds of boxes on various pallets inside our V&A Wedgwood Collection store are thousands of objects waiting to be unpacked and shared.

October 5

V&A BlogFraming the game: tennis through the V&A collection From childhood, I have always found the game of tennis fascinating. As a huge fan of the sport, and in particular of Rafael Nadal, I find myself drawn to its drama, the tension, the fitness...

October 5

V&A BlogNew Work: The Long Goodbye by Carrie Mae Weems V&A East Museum New Work commission, The Long Goodbye, by artist Carrie Mae Weems part of the ‘Why We Make’ galleries during a first look at the new V&A East Museum in Queen Elizabeth Olympic...

October 1

V&A BlogA way of looking: our first encounter with the Cochin Ceiling In this guest blog, Ananth Ramaswamy and Devi Seetharam share their first in-person encounter with the Cochin ceiling.

September 29

V&A BlogLost Music Venues – On the road This is one of three blogs written by students on the module Curation and Heritage at University of Liverpool, led by Dr Marion Leonard.

September 28

V&A BlogLost Music Venues – Before the phones came out: how gig photography created the myth of live music This is one of three blogs written by students on the module Curation and Heritage at University of Liverpool, led by Dr Marion Leonard.

September 28

V&A BlogV&A statement regarding Industrial Action at South Kensington, 25 and 26 September 2026 headline: V&A statement regarding Industrial Action at South Kensington, 24 and 25 September 2026 V&A members of Prospect and PCS voted for Industrial action in August 2026 after the V&A and Trade…

September 22

V&A BlogDigital Design Weekend returns to V&A South Kensington this September Digital Design Weekend returns to the V&A from 18–20 September, bringing together artists, designers, technologists, researchers and creative communities for three days of free installations…

September 15

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo