Insert here: London Design Festival gets intimate with insertable design

The members of East London-based design collective Heirloom studio were researching the design of medical objects for a catheter design project, when they realised they had quite the collection on their hands.

This marked the beginning into a deep dive into objects that are conceived to be inserted into the body, whether for medical need or pleasure, and culminated into an exhibition to coincide with London Design Festival 2025. Titled 'Out of Orifice' and with an identity and posters by Studio Frith, the small display takes over the studio's office in Mile End.

Out of Orifice: design that goes inside of you

The 36 objects - ranging from catheters to inhalers, retainers and dummies all the way to grills, earbuds and butt plugs - give a magnificent overview of the extensive potential of design and its very tangible impact in our everyday life. It is obvious from looking at the group how important good design is for the world to function on a very detailed, intimate scale.

'The orifices of our bodies are the thresholds at which we meet the outside world,' reads a text from the collective introducing the exhibition. 'They are places of entry and exit; input and output; consumption, emission and exchange.

'These are the gateways between our interior and exterior universe. Some take in the materials we need to live, some are outlets for waste, some are erogenous zones, and some are all three and more.'

On the oval table, the objects are arranged from the medical to the pleasurable, with an emergency Nasopharyngeal Airway as the first item you encounter, all the way to a lollipop at the end. Curiously, the medical objects are all in shades of white and light blue, or teal, while the objects designed for pleasure are pink (a perineal massage wand) or bright fuchsia (a vibrator).

'Blue is a psychologically calming colour,' explains studio member Yemima Lorberbaum. 'These are objects you either choose to use, or have to use. This led us to notice how ones you choose are always looking quite fun, and wondering why can't we inject some of that in the objects you have to use? It has been a positive experience for us as a studio to explore this language, and we have loved how people have reacted and what conversations these objects have sparked.'

Shown on a neutral stage, however, the objects, even the most intrusively medical ones, end up appearing quite friendly, perhaps thanks to their no-nonsense, streamlined design.

Accompanying the exhibition are a series of colourful posters by Kerr, typographic exercises where some of the objects instructions are taken in isolation: 'Chew thoroughly', 'Stop at resistance', 'Lubricate if needed', they read.

Dubbed by the studio 'an eclectic catalogue of insertables,' the small display is cheerful as it is educational - both for visitors and the studio themselves.

'The fun projects [we do] and the functional ones inform each other, you can't design in isolation,' continues Lorberbaum. 'But the objects we put in our bodies end up being the more humane'

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