Product, Range and Distribution: Disobedient Objects

The Uni recently did a trip to Disobedient Objects at the V&A. I found the exhibition really useful in relation to our new design practice brief. "From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition is the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrates how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design."


It was extremely interesting to see how everyday objects could have such symbolic power. As well as how much impact the designs had bearing in mind they weren't expensive to construct.

Street Sign

The street sign used after the Argentina dictatorship to mark out members homes who had murdered up to 30,000 people. The road signs symbolise the deaths of the detainees who were pushed out of military planes into the ocean. A really simple but hard hitting graphic style. The use of yellow and black have a strong contrast, people view them as warning/caution colours.

This really summed up the exhibition; it was all about solidarity. You could really see how the designs pulled people together and cemented the movements.

Silence = Death
The pink triangle was established as a pro-gay symbol by activists in the United States during the 1970s. Its precedent lay in World War II, when known homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear inverted pink triangle badges as identifiers, much in the same manner that Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Wearers of the pink triangle were considered at the bottom of the camp social system and subjected to particularly harsh maltreatment and degradation. Thus, the appropriation of the symbol of the pink triangle, usually turned upright rather than inverted, was a conscious attempt to transform a symbol of humiliation into one of solidarity and resistance. By the outset of the AIDS epidemic, it was well-entrenched as a symbol of gay pride and liberation.



In 1987, six gay activists in New York formed the Silence = Death Project and began plastering posters around the city featuring a pink triangle on a black background stating simply ‘SILENCE = DEATH.’ In its manifesto, the Silence = Death Project drew parallels between the Nazi period and the AIDS crisis, declaring that ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ The slogan thus protested both taboos around discussion of safer sex and the unwillingness of some to resist societal injustice and governmental indifference. The six men who created the project later joined the protest group ACT UP and offered the logo to the group, with which it remains closely identified.

Badges Against Apartheid

Badges made to support the struggle against the apartheid. Badges were created by South Africans and liberation groups forced into exile, as well as by international solidarity groups. The badges acted as a form of solidarity allowing people to show their views and support.

Book Blocs

In Italy students protested to server cuts in education. They created shields to look like books which would push back the police batons strikes. It created a great metaphor of the police actually striking out against education.