It would be good to know more about what worked and how well. Some of the movements represented were spectacularly successful, such as the suffragettes, gay rights, Solidarnosc and the anti-apartheid campaigns, whereas protests against what is now called neoliberalism, their themes remarkably consistent over the decades, don't seem to have got very far. You wonder to what degree design played a role in both successes and failures. There is, finally, an unintended consequence of the proximity of artistic and political radicalism – it's possible to blur one with the other and be too easily satisfied with something that looks as if it is changing the world, when it's not. The Eclectic Electric Collective made us a cobblestone for the exhibition. This is an issue with this material, because quite often it is destroyed in the process of protest. The show begins with a teacup emblazoned with the emblem of the Women's Social and Political Union, campaigners for universal suffrage in the 19th century. Besides luring conservative journalists who might otherwise have dodged an exhibition about protest, it makes the point that activism is neither new nor clear-cut. Many members of the Suffrage movement maintained links to the Nazi-sympathising British Union of Fascists, but for curators Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood, the show is not about taking sides. They reject the “rigid geometric scheme” of the modern Left/Right binary, recognising the story of political dissent is much older.

We start in the 70s and the rise of neo-liberalism; among the earliest objects in the show are Chilean appliqued textiles produced by women in workshops during the Pinochet regime. These documented the social realities of the disappearances, the tortures, the economic hardships. These worked on a number of levels. A group of women artists who, in 1985, set out to expose racism, sexism and corruption in the art world News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates. Dezeen Awards China A talking head on a large TV screen at the end of the gallery remarks that “When we look at history, it’s all too often written from the perspective of the victors.” And this is key to why this exhibition is so surprising, especially at the V&A. Like most of the institutions of South Kensington, the V&A is a product ofthe Great Exhibition, a rather unquestioning celebration of the world the Victorians builtus, with little sense that life could be different, and little reflection of the various groups and alternative ideas for society that were steamrollered over – sometimes literally –to get there.This cannot work in all situations obviously, says van Balen. In Palestine, for instance, where the threats are real -- using humour is not exactly a straightforward thing, when battling a cause that can so often turn deadly. He points, however, to a movement in 2010 when Palestinians dressed like Na'vis around the release of James Cameron's film Avatar. Painted in blue, they compared themselves to the repressed Na'vi people. "That creative interpretation was very powerful because of the storytelling involved," said van Balen. We didn’t go ahead with this idea in the end, and everything in this particular display case would sit on its own bespoke Oriented strand board (OSB), which is a material that appears frequently in the final exhibition. The exhibition's approach to identifying and procuring objects is in line with the "rapid response" curatorial process introduced by the V&A recently, which has seen it acquire objects including Katy Perry eyelashesand the world's first 3D-printed gun. Bike Bloc Graphic Poster, Anonymous. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum

Some exhibits employ the charm of something woven or crafted, such as the arpilleras, the appliqued textiles made first in Chile and then in other places, that commemorate people taken away by ruling regimes and other atrocities. With these, the labour and care taken in making them commands respect and disarms aggression. Andy Dao and Ivan Cash's Occupy George overprinted dollar bill, 2011. Photograph: courtesy Andy Dao and Ivan Cash

Each section panel is printed on a unique material all of which are cheap, mundane and most-importantly used in the making of the objects on show: fabric, stainless steel, cardboard, plastic, tarpaulin and OSB board. In the same section of the show we have “bloc books”, painted shields in the form of giant works of literature and philosophy made by students protesting at education cuts. When they demonstrated, the students were effectively being defended by culture, and by striking the shields, the police not only invoked the destruction of books but were also forced into a performance without realising it. Bavarian sociologist Max Weber defines a state as any community which effectively commands a monopoly on violence. For Weber, the so-called “grassroots” and “establishment” exist across a single spectrum of power struggles. Arguably the designs in this exhibition are neither objects of disobedience nor obedience, but simply objects of agency tuned to their creators’ circumstances. The curated shoe-slingshot is ultimately as much a designed object of social control as the un-curated tanks it is used against.