A presentation by Cambridge Analytica, portraits generated from DNA and a Facebook drone sit beside each other in a new design exhibition that opens to the public this weekend at London's V&A.

The Future Starts Here marks the first time the influential museum has dedicated a display to the topic of the future. It is also the first major exhibition produced by the V&A's Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team.
The exhibition features more then 100 designs of today picked by curators Rory Hyde and Mariana Pestana because they suggest what our near future might look like.

Designs by major companies ? like Facebook's Aquila internet-providing drone, and Foster + Partners' model for carbon-neutral Masdar City in Abu Dhabi ? sit beside smaller projects created by start-ups, communities, activists and artists. Bio Works' Bento Lab home DNA lab, Hydroswarm's ocean-mapping drone and designer Jalila Essaïdi's tree antenna network are examples of the latter.

Some of the objects come straight from recent news headlines, including the iconic pink pussyhat from recent protests in the USA and a video showing how Cambridge Analytica used personal data to target advertising.
"I like to think of the show as presenting what I sometimes call probable futures against possible futures," Pestana told Dezeen.
"Probable futures would be those that have the financial backing of large corporations, for example, and that have the advantage of being spread very qui...