Power of Making, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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This exhibition will be of interest to anyone who has ever sat back in a chair with a heartfelt sigh, pulled on an item of clothing through stifled yawns or endeavoured to get from A to B without too much fuss and bother.

In short, its subject is the making of objects that often play useful roles in our daily lives – shoes, bicycles, suitcases. It shines a light on such objects and their makers, and invites us to contemplate what it is exactly that these people do, and how we should evaluate what they offer us.

The fact is that craftsmen and craftswomen – for that is what all these people are – get too little attention and far too little praise. Think about that word "craft", for example. It doesn't much resonate, does it? It doesn't bounce very high when we throw it to the ground. We would say the same of words readily associated with it, such as "skill" and "technique". None of these words cuts much mustard beside a word like "creator", which sounds almost symphonically exhilarating by comparison.

The sad fact is that object-makers are under-loved, and yet without their talents we would live such woebegone lives. So what does an exhibition need to do in order to prove to us that these talented people are both under-appreciated and very special indeed?

It needs to do exactly what this exhibition, which is organised in collaboration with the Crafts Council, succeeds in doing. This exhibition encourages us to look at ordinary things as very special objects indeed.

It does this by ringing the changes on the predictable. It takes an object – a Delftware vase or a chair, for example – and it shows us an exciting, singular variant upon that theme.

There is a chair here called a Branca, for example, which is designed by Sam Hecht. Why does it strike us as so graceful and so curiously, winningly natural in its appeal to us?

The design of this chair, the curiously graceful and shapely interlocking of its parts, seems to mimic the way that branches grow. It helps to remind us how that chair began life – as a tree.

To 2 January (020 7942 2000)