Design Night: London

How many senses do we have? Vision, hearing, smell. Maybe more...? The Design Museum has helped us to exploring all of them in one night.

The Design Nigt is an event well known around the world. The edditions of it have taken place in Tokyo, Paris, San Francisco. In this year, for a very first time we could enjoyed it in London. The idea of the show is to brings people together to discover how technology and design are transforming the world.

As a first point of the evening I was invited for a tour around 'Fear and Love' exibition. The exhibition is a reaction for a complex world. It is trying to show us that design is not anymore only the weapon to change the world. Now, it becomes to be a tool, which help us to understand always changing reality. Thus, design is a heart of many of pressing issues of our times. 'Fears and Love" connects eleven diverse designers from around the world. We can exploring their instalations which inspires both anxiety and optimism. The exibition presents a spectrum of attitudes to design and how it affects our lives. The exhibition made a big impression on me so I would like to stop here and present you some work from there.

The first instalation which I would like to present you is work of OMA/AMO named 'The Pan-European living Room'. it is an answer for a referendum which was in UK in June 2016. How we all know, the topic of it was to leave the European Union by GB. The instalation present support for Europe and idea that Europe is made by cooperation between designers and manufactures, and between trading nations. The room is furnished with pieces from each of 28 member states. On one wall is a vertical blind - invented in the 1950s, when UE was first being formulated - a product that requires all parts to work in unison. It bears the barcode flag that AMO designed for the EU in 2004, which represents all the colours in the flags of the member states, running from west to east. Behind the blind is an image of Rotterdam, where OMA/AMO is based, after heavy bombing during World War II - a reminder of Europe's disunited past.

The second work which I would like to show you is a robot named 'Mimus' made by Madeline Gannon. This installation responds to a commonly cited social fear: that robots are taking work from humans. The World Economic Forum predicts that robots will take five milion jobs over the next five years. Nevertheless, Madeline decided show robots as a companion species. Mimus is a industrial robot that's curious about the world around her. If she finds you interesting, Mimus may come in for a closer look and follow you around. You can check out how I was playing with the robot in the movie below.

The next interesting instalation is 'Fibre Market' made by Christien Meindertsma. Have you ever wondered what happen with the clothes, which we stop use? Everywhere around us is many information about plastic and paper recycling. The fabrics usually are turned to materials of low value, such as carpet liner or movers' blankets. One of the reason why it is so difficult to recycle clothes is because there been no easy way to sort them by fabric and colour. Christien Meindestma has been working with the first generation of machines that can do that. The installation presents 1,000 woolen jumpers that been thrown in recycling bins and then organised by Christien, by fabric and colour. The designer wants to show how fabric can retain their value. But the instalation has second meaning. During the recycling process Chrostien has met many problems. It has happened because the fabric declared on clothes label was not accurate to their real composition. The background for the instalation is a wall full of samples where we can find brands which sell 100% wool jumper that contain 50% acrylic.

The Design Museum has prepared more exiting atration. One of them was inspiring speach of Dave Clarke - designer in VOX company. We also had opportunity to join workshop and make our own seed ball or just for a short moment be transfer to another world by virtual reality. Definitely, the most popular was possibility to create the chocolate lollipop of our head. The interest of it was so big that unfortunately, I didn't have opportunity to get mine.

Whole evening was passing with good music, food and wine. An atmosphere was very friendly and everyone could feel welcome, thanks to crew members who find time for everybody to answer the most bothering questions. I look forward to next edition. You can be sure that you will meet me there.