Fear and love: the Design Museum taps a fractious design landscape
‘Fear and Love – Reactions to a complex world’ is one of the new Design Museum's inaugural exhibitions. Herein, chief curator Justin McGuirk has invited 11 leading designers to respond to the open brief of creating an installation to open debate about how we approach and interpret design today.
Harking back to the first exhibition held by the Design Museum in 1989 – titled ‘Commerce and Culture’ – McGuirk sees a change from the value we once placed on industrial products, now taken for granted in the UK, where it's easy to forget that every single manmade object has an origin and a designer.
Today, society is defined by a feeling of uncertainty towards the future, as shown in designer Madeline Gannon’s jerking robot arm, Mimus, which detects movement in the gallery with a certain aggression. Hussein Chalayan’s wearable devices project out hidden emotions, exploring increasing cases of anxiety in a society perhaps driven by these behaviour-obsessed devices themselves; while architect Andrés Jaque’s Intimate Strangers examines how network culture is changing our relationship to our bodies and our partners. Perhaps all technology is created around a central fear that we will never find love.
From self-love to selflessness, several projects take an outward-looking approach to design. Arquitectura Expandida, an activist architecture collective, has created Potocinema, an installation showing a series of videos by young people in a school which they built in the poorest part of Bogota. Abstract design collective Metahaven advocates the marine wildlife conservation group Sea Shepherd via a video work; and clothing designer Ma Ke, rejecting the detrimental ‘fast fashion’ tag, displays clothes which have an ethical approach to the land and rural traditions in China.
In response to Brexit, OMA has designed a living room filled with objects from the 28 EU member states, suggesting how domestic life has been formed through EU trade, highlighting the fact that, despite our all-consuming desire to be connected, it is clear that we are in fact more disconnected than ever.
The installations demonstrate the increasing polarisation of inward-looking and outward-looking perspectives (selfish vs selfless), the plethora of confusing meanings of the word ‘social’ (social network vs social activist) and an increasing obsession with reading and communicating our emotions. The exhibition opens up questions about how design could be destroying our lives, from increasing pollution in China to perpetuating self-love. The new Design Museum has tapped into these two contemporary emotions and their uneasy juxtaposition.
INFORMATION
‘Fear and Love – Reactions to a complex world’ is on view until 23 April 2017. For more information, visit the Design Museum website
ADDRESS
Design Museum
224–238 Kensington High Street
London W8 6AG
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Harriet Thorpe is a writer, journalist and editor covering architecture, design and culture, with particular interest in sustainability, 20th-century architecture and community. After studying History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Journalism at City University in London, she developed her interest in architecture working at Wallpaper* magazine and today contributes to Wallpaper*, The World of Interiors and Icon magazine, amongst other titles. She is author of The Sustainable City (2022, Hoxton Mini Press), a book about sustainable architecture in London, and the Modern Cambridge Map (2023, Blue Crow Media), a map of 20th-century architecture in Cambridge, the city where she grew up.
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