Design Museum – Open Now!

The Design Museum is now open in its spectacular new location. The Mint Team couldn’t wait to visit, and we certainly weren’t disappointed with what we saw.

Following a long search for larger premises to expand its activities, the Design Museum selected the building in Kensington High Street, West London, as its new home.

A unique landmark building from the 1960’s, the building had stood vacant for over a decade. Thanks to John Pawson and his design team, OMA and Allies and Morrison, the building has been transformed to create a world-class exhibition space to promote and celebrate the best of design.

Continue reading to see the new museum and it’s outstanding collection.

The Museum welcomes with a powerful concrete aesthetic, but softened by the warmth of contrasting natural materials.

The towering staircases invite you to move deeper in to the museum, with a great desire to see more and more. On entering the museum, it was a pleasant surprise to see for the first time in the museum’s history it has a free permanent display of its collection; Designer Maker User.

Designer Maker User

Designer Maker User presents the museum’s permanent collection to look at the development of modern design through these three interconnected roles.

The exhibition features almost 1000 items of twentieth and twenty-first century design viewed through the angles of the designer, manufacturer and user. Covering a broad range of design disciplines, from architecture and engineering, to the digital world, fashion and graphics, Designer Maker User is most definitely worth a visit (probably more than one – there’s so much to see!)

Take a look at just a few below…

Left: City of Towers, Zaha Hadid Architect | Right: Anglepoise Lamp, George Carwardine

The City of Towers installation presents research into a new concept for the design and construction of high-rise buildings. They explore the concept of the tower through the lens of ‘Paramentricism’ – an architectural style created by the use of 3D software.

The Anglepoise Lamp was designed by George Carwardine, an engineer who specialised in vehicle suspension systems. Carwardine’s experiments led him to develop a new type of pre-tensioned spring that could be moved in an direction, but remained rigid if held in position. The influence of this finding can be seen in every task light designed since.

Left: Valentine, Olivetti | Right: Apple products 1997 – 2016

Although the Valentine was technically quite mediocre and failed to sell to a mass audience, it still became a design classic. The Valentine was a fun, light-hearted and smooth-operating symbol of the 1960s Pop era, and its use of bright, playful casing for a piece of traditional office equipment was arguably a precursor to Apple’s 1998 Bondi Blue iMac. We owe a lot to Olivetti for their inspiring products, as Apple’s design has become a part of everyday life for many millions across the world.

Clocks Watches Calendars

The museum asks ‘What does design mean to you?’ – this is presented in a Crowdsourced wall exhibiting affordable everyday designs that mean something special. Some were nominated for their beauty, and others for personal memories. It’s intriguing to see what ‘design’ is to the individual.

Beazley Designs of the Year

Now in its ninth year, Beazley Designs of the Year celebrates design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year.

Browsing the exhibition (in awe of such great design) it was a pleasure to see both the Tokyo Tribal Collection and Sediment Vases featured in the exhibition, both available at Mint since LDF15.

The Toyko Tribal collection uses solid oak for the main frames and volcanic sand plaster for the top board finishes, in combination with bamboo rattan hand-woven by local artisans in the Philippines.
The bamboo’s elastic properties make it ideal for such things as back support. In allowing for these various products and materials to converge and function together, the conceptual aim is to create a sense of a small and tightly-knit ‘tribe’, greater and better than the sum of its parts.

Frustrated with the limitations of 3D printing technology, the Sediment Vases were created with process whereby medium and large-scale 3D-printed ceramics are possible, working with materials beyond conventional plastics.  Inspired by natural textures and forms, the objects and their intricate surfaces appear handcrafted, demonstrating a reinsertion of humanity into the man-made machine.

It was also fascinating to see the incredible projects around the world, tackling humanitarian crises. 

The IKEA Foundation launched the flat-pack emergency ‘Better Shelter’ in 2013 to offer an alternative to the tents often used to house displaced people, of which there are now more than 65 million worldwide. Thousands of Better Shelter cabins have since been deployed globally, with many being used for functions other than housing, or grouped together to create larger structures.

Granby Workshop makes experimental, handmade products for homes. Set up in 2015,  the project grew out of the community-led rebuilding of a Liverpool neighbourhood, following years of dereliction and institutional neglect.

The demolition of all but four of Granby’s streets of Victorian terraces during decades of ‘regeneration’ initiatives saw a once thriving community scattered, and left the remaining “Granby Four Streets” sparsely populated and filled with tinned up houses. The resourceful, creative actions of a group of residents were fundamental to finally bringing these streets out of dereliction and back into use.

Fear and Love: Reactions to a complex world

Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World presents eleven new installations by some of the most innovative and thought-provoking designers and architects working today. These newly commissioned works explore a spectrum of issues that define our time, asserting that design is deeply connected not just to commerce and culture but to urgent underlying issues – issues that inspire fear and love.

Here are just a few…

Staples by Kenya Hara

Feeding the planet’s growing population will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. While there are 50,000 edible plant species, the diet of the majority of us is built upon just a few grains. Here, Hara invites us to consider the staple foods that underpin society.

City of Nomads by Rural Urban Framework 

Every year, tens of thousands of Mongolian nomads abandon their way of life to move to the city. This has resulted in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, doubling in population since 1989 and growing thirty times in size. There is limited infrastructure, and it is an unprecedented way of life for them; there is no word for ‘community’ in Mongolian. This installation considers how several gers (felt yurts) may plug in to a central structure for communal amenities and activities.

Fibre Market by Christien Meindertsma

Most of the clothes we throw away end up in an incinerator or as landfill, while the ones that are recycled will be turned in to materials of low value. One of the reasons it is so difficult to recycle clothes is there is no easy way to sort them by fabric or colour. Meindertsma has been working with the first gene ratio of machines that can do this.

Mimus by Madeline Gannon

Mimus is a giant industrial robot that is curious about the world around her. Without eyes, Mimus uses sensors embedded in the ceiling to see everyone around her simultaneously. If she finds you interesting, Mimus may come for a closer look. The installation responds to a commonly cited social fear: that robots are taking work from humans.

A great collection of design is on show, and it seems like a great move by the Design Museum, with such vast spaces available to exhibit. We look forward to seeing what’s on next!