Design Museum

Designers In Residence

The Designers in Residence exhibition was only small but there were a couple of appealing pieces in the collection. Above is Freyja Sewell's experiment with starch bound wool, a by-product of the british carpet industry, Sewell had a collection of different objects working with the wool, this, the Plexus Lampshade is one of the more successful ones.

These pieces are by designer Lawrence Lek, he uses digital design techniques including CNC and laser cutting. This use of bent plywood to create organic forms from modular components produced some interesting pieces including a stool and a pavilion. Each piece of plywood is soaked in wood and bent into shape, which then holds its shape when it dries. 

Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum

The Swarovski collection at the Design Museum was an eclectic collection from a variety of designers, some of the pieces I found garish and chintzy, but others were amazing and one was my favourite piece I saw in London.

This piece by Yves Behar is called Amplify is a large grouping of oversized 'crystals'. The piece is designed to resemble a traditional chandelier, but consists of singular crystals illuminated by LED's concealed within each crystal. The shape of the shades are designed to refract as much light as possible and cast a rainbow coloured projection on the surroundings.

Paul Cocksedge created this piece, the green lasers are reflected and cast by specifically cut crystals and smoke is pumped into the enclosed room periodically to reveal the lines of the laser beam.

This was my favourite piece in the Swarovski collection, it was created by design group Troika and is called Hardcoded Memory. The piece is not only beautiful but it also has an interesting concept, the piece is intended to create a very low resolution portrait, and is a comment on how when there were only physical photographs and personal recollections images of the past faded away and became distorted, whereas now virtual media and photographs make it virtually impossible to forget anything.

Hardcoded Memory uses 850 custom-cut Swarovski optical lenses to project four portrait photographs using LED lighting, information about the images is contained within the mechanism, these digital memories are hard-coded into the display apparatus. 

Before reading the information provided about this piece, curiosity urges the viewer to play with the discs on the back of this projection apparatus, under the impression that this will affect the image projected on the gallery wall, as I walked up to the piece I watched at least 3 people playing with the discs on the back, and so did I, with what I thought was little affect. After I left the exhibition I did further research on the piece and realised that the image that was supposed to be projected onto the wall was very different to the one I viewed, suggesting that peoples curiosity was altering the image every time they played with it, although not intentional it does link well with the concept of image distortion, either way I thought it was a intriguing piece.