Director of London's Victoria & Albert Museum talks on leveraging digital moments

It requires some cheek to comment that London's Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum, "has always been vulgar because it even exhibited the list of wedding presents accepted by the Prince and Princess of Wales in April 1863" or admit that "we (at the V&A) like people spending money in our shops" or point out that the new Sackler Courtyard at the museum – the world's largest all-white porcelain open area with 11,000 hand-made tiles – "doesn't look quite as white". What's amusing is that these quips came from none other than the V&A's director, Tristram Hunt, and on public platforms – a talk on museums going digital at the Tata Lit Live 2017 and another at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL), an institution that shares the same parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and was called the V&A till 1975.

Hunt's punchlines and towering 6'3 frame, "which gets to 6'2 by evening", thanks to exhausting directorial duties, ensure he has a captive audience. Even his unusual name like 'Tristram', which, he says, "comes from the 18th-century English writer Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that is all about why you should never name your son Tristram" – is a cause for fascination.

Then Hunt is a historian, author of nine historical novels, and a broadcast journalist for BBC Four. He was also the MP of Stoke-on-Trent Central (2010-17), before he gave up the seat on January 13, 2017, to assume his role at the V&A. Though Hunt's never had any prior experience working in a museum, his background with history, including a PhD from the University of Cambridge in urban history during the Victorian era coupled with the politician's gift of the gab, has pulled him through.

It's the politician's instinct perhaps that makes him slide in facts in his speech that would pander to the Mumbai audience. For instance, claiming that a favourite at the V&A is the life-size wooden semi-automated 'Tipu (Sultan)'s Tiger' that is which when played emits the dying cries of the English officer. Or displaying a video of embroiderers in Jaipur that raked in one million views on Facebook to assert how tech-savvy the V&A is.

Particularly interesting was his talk on the new obligation of museums to collect and preserve our digital culture. "V&A is the first museum to start collecting and exhibit photography. It seems quite natural when we became the world's first museum to connect on social media platform to preserve and store collections."

The V&A was also one of the first to launch a website, back in 1996. Now with 1.2 million objects from its collections accessible online, it's already gearing up for a redesign in an attempt to surpass its existing reach of 14.5 million. "How do we go further than the museum being a backdrop for that Instagram moment or Facebook profile photo? How do we use and leverage digital moments to have a deeper and rich conversation?" are questions, Hunt says, are often reiterated at the V&A. As an important 21st-century museum, Hunt says they are doing their bit to define clear guidelines for new age technology. For instance, who owns the copyright, the original owner or the museum, in case of 3D printing or digital replicas of objects? "In December, we will bring together rules and guidelines and then take it forward with the UNESCO."

With a director as sprightly as Hunt, things are bound to stay fun."Our user research shows that visitors don't want to consume more content on their phones or download an app they may use once. Instead, visitors are more likely to capture memories, not discover more wall-texts. So we developed a new mobile game called V&A's Secrets Seekers for families. Anyone with a smartphone can play a series of challenges that helps discover the museum better. It has got many young families to enter our museum."

Hunt's A-game plan, however, is what V&A's founders had envisaged with the Great Exhibition in the 1840s – teaching design. 

Thus the £100,000 that the V&A bagged on winning the prestigious UK's Art Fund Museum of the Year 2016, is being used to train teachers and students. "We were not set up as a fine arts gallery to retreat from the world but established to promote design and innovation. And design, at the moment, is not taught enough in English schools and so we've begun focusing on 20 schools in Coventry, known for its long history of cars, and Blackburn for its long history of textiles." This objective will also be served by the museum's biggest exhibition next year that will explore the craft and design of video games. Then there's the V&A's recent design collaboration with the China Merchants Group (CMG) in China's Shekou, Shenzhen, and the upcoming V&A Museum of Design Dundee in 2018, as the first V&A ever outside London.

Hunt's first brush with the V&A was as an MP in 2011, when he successfully cajoled the museum to permanently house the collection of the English potter, ceramist and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Hunt, who has written a well-regarded biography of Engels, 'The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels' is now working on Wedgwood's biography, portraying him "as the Steve Jobs of the 18th-century for marrying great design and technology to forefront the Industrial Revolution." Despite being an author many times over, fiction writing, Hunt says, "terrifies" him because "I plan every chapter, plot point, the history, my argument, supportive evidence, before I get down to writing."

With the V&A though, matters are perforce somewhat loose, given the constant flux museums operate under. "One phone call bringing an interesting proposition can make an existing plan go for a toss. A degree of flexibility is needed so you can chop and change."

Lastly, it requires some boldness to admit that as the director of the V&A you are yet acquaint yourself with its entire collection. "I mean, it has about 2.3 million objects! But I'm learning."