Photo: Stacking Chair designed by Anna Castelli-Ferrieri for Kartell.

National identity is explored through objects that define a nation such as the phone box, road signage, the post box, the London 2012 logo and the Euro. The story of the development of the London 2012 logo tells how for the first time in the history of the Games, the Olympics and Paralympics embraced the same logo. The logo was created to be a ‘design for everybody’ – the exhibition will reveal the design process and thinking behind this symbol of Britain as a world stage and allow audiences to interact with it.

Photo: K6 Kiosk designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, photographer Luke Hayes.

The dominance of plastic in our lives is examined with examples of luxury through to everyday plastics from the last 75 years, from small household items to the first examples of plastic furniture in the 1960s. Recent uses of plastic include high profile designers such as Issey Miyake using recycled PET from plastic bottles to create fabrics used in his designs.

Photo: Jasper Morrison Handlebar Table, 1983, image courtesy of Phillips de Pury.

A section on Modernism provides a snapshot of a remarkable and dynamic period of design in Britain, shown through iconic pieces of furniture, products, textiles and architecture. The section will feature works by Marcel Breuer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Erno Goldfinger, whose name Ian Fleming spitefully immortalised as a Bond villain because of personal antagonism

Photo: Apple iMac designed by Jonathan Ive, 1998-9.

Jasper Morrison’s Handlebar Table, which was recently added to the collection with the support of the Art Fund, will go on display for the first time in a section looking at collecting. Another section will profile a single iconic design – the Anglepoise lamp - telling how an experiment by a car engineer with an obsession with springs resulted in an invention that was to become one of the most copied, parodied and collected in the history of design.

Photo: LAR Armchair designed by Charles Eames, 1948.

A display of fashion from the 1970s to the 1990s will throw a spotlight on six occasion outfits from a personal wardrobe of over 400 items belonging to fashion collector Jill Ritblat. The outfits chart the shift of style through a life in society, and champion the exquisite balance of form and function in the pieces themselves. Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum says: "Design matters at every level. It is what makes daily life a little better; it is about the big economic changes that the world is going through. It is about the designers and the manufacturers, but it is also about the users. It is a unique way of making sense of the world around us."

Photo: Sella Stool-Achille and Pier Castiglioni, 1957. 

And for the most curious among you here are 10 things you didn’t know about the Design Museum Collection: 

1. It wasn’t supposed to exist. Between 1982 and 1986 the founders of the Design Museum, Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran, staged the Boilerhouse Project in the basement of the V&A which predated the move to Shad Thames in 1989 and was conceived as a pioneering pop up museum documenting modern design. 

2. The Design Museum Collection now includes over 290 chairs, 24 televisions and one nappy. 

3. The Design Museum Collection will be a permanent and free to enter exhibition when it opens in the new Design Museum in High Street Kensington in 2015. 

4. There are over 3,000 objects in the collection which include furniture, lighting, domestic appliances and communications technology. 

5. The Design Museum Collection is currently held in two locations, one close to the museum for smaller objects and a larger warehouse for objects including the red telephone box. 

6. The biggest item in the collection is a bus shelter, designed for Adshell by acclaimed industrial designer Kenneth Grange. 

7. The Design Museum Collection recently acquired an AK-47 firearm, first developed in the USSR by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947. 

8. The collection includes Robin Day’s 1963 Polyprop chair. It is estimated that some 14 million chairs have been sold and continue to be sold at a rate of 500,000 units a year. 

9. Upcoming acquisitions include a Russian cosmonaut spacesuit. 

10. The oldest piece in the collection is the Thonet No.14 chair designed in 1859 by Gebrüder Thonet.

Photo: Vase designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, 2001.

Design Museum Collection: Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things, from 30 January 2013, http://designmuseum.org