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| Candlestick Telephone, 1920; image courtesy of the Design Museum Collection |
London's
Design Museum has just opened its doors to two new exhibitions, both running until January 2012. The first,
This Is Design, opens today, and is an informative display of the museum's permanent collection. Organised into four themes, each object is used to consider the impact of design on both everyday lives and society at large. A highlight for us was a display of three telephones designs, ranging from a 1920 Candlestick Telephone to a 1960s 'clamshell' style.
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| Simon Hasan's boiled leather stools at Designers In Residence |
The second exhibition,
Designers In Residence, continues the museum's tradition of commissioning new and emerging designers to develop work. This year's theme is imperfection: specifically "to consider the idea of imperfection either in an object, environment or experience". Each of the four designers showed a very different response, with the show tracking their work from prototypes and developments to 'final' pieces.
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| Will Shannon's Particle Board Factory at Designers In Residence |
Will Shannon showed an unusual-looking mode of transport which turned out, on closer inspection, to be a mobile furniture factory. A chute at one end is for people to insert their unwanted old furniture into, which they can then watch as it is chewed up into the raw material for chipboard, and moulded into a new piece.
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| Will Shannon's Particle Board Factory at Designers In Residence |
Simon Hasan has continued his investigations into the historical French process of leather boiling, this time combining leather seats with high-shine metal legs to create simple, tactile seats. With the moulds and initial prototypes on display, visitors are able to see how Hasan developed the project and view the design and process choices he has made along the way.
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| Jade Folawiyo at Designers In Residence |
Central Saint Martins graduate Jade Folawiyo's project was inspired by a rusted door she happened to walk past one day. She told WGSN-homebuildlife that she saw this, and wanted to use this unloved surface effect to make something beautiful. A table of material experimentations documents her trials with lemon and a number of other acidic substances, all of which led her to create a collection of pendant lights with surface pattern created by rusting and acid erosion.
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| Jade Folawiyo's surface investigations at Designers In Residence |
RCA graduate
Hye-Yeon Park continues to be fascinated with our perception of time passing, a theme she explored in her graduation project, the
In-Betweening Clock. This time she has created a clock which playfully interacts with its viewer, greeting them with a hello and a wink before deigning to display the time. Most impressive was the explanatory display, which shows her wiring up each component and developing the mechanical aspects of the project alongside the concept.
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| Hye-Yeon Park at Designers In Residence |
Both exhibitions run until 12 January 2012 at the Design Museum, 28 Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD. To read about the Design Museum's third current exhibition,
Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern,
click here.
