Brendan Cormier, chief curator of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new sites—Storehouse and V&A East—aims to showcase the diversity of human creativity across time and culture.

The Storehouse, a vast repository in East London, houses hundreds of thousands of objects, from historical bicycles to modern design pieces, allowing visitors to explore connections across art, design, and daily life.

V&A East, designed by Irish architects O’Donnell & Tuomey, features a striking honey-coloured concrete lattice and is part of London’s cultural quarter in the Olympic Park.Both sites are largely free to the public, encouraging accessibility and engagement.

Permanent exhibitions, such as Why We Make, juxtapose objects from different eras and regions, like 19th-century maps and contemporary works by artists including Beyoncé and Kehinde Wiley, inviting visitors to see themselves in the story of design.

Cormier emphasizes applied arts—the creative thought behind everyday objects—and frames curation as a way to foster understanding of broader social and cultural systems.

His career trajectory, from urban design in Toronto to curating internationally, illustrates the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in rethinking how museums communicate creativity.

For Canada, where there is no dedicated design museum, his work highlights the importance of cultivating public fluency in design and its role in shaping society.