The Design Museum in London is currently hosting an exhibition of designs nominated for the award of Design of the Year 2014. The range covers everything from architecture, graphics, and communication to product design, illustrating how the creativity of designers affects everything we experience.
The organisers have also included an exhibit “In The Making” where familiar products have been interrupted mid production and put on display. A tennis ball is displayed as a green carpet with a range of oval shaped holes, the familiar shape of an Apple laptop, its corner radius is just starting to emerge from an aluminium billet and the everyday aluminium drinks can which is unrecognisable as a flat disc at the start of its manufacture. There are many other examples, and the anonymous nature of the exhibit creates an air of mystery to the uneducated eye.
The key thing that this particular exhibit shows us is the importance of manufacturing to the design process, and that the ability to appreciate and understand manufacturing makes it possible to move a design from an idea to its final form.
To come up with a drinks container as an actual shape, that is sized to fit the hand and that contains the required volume is only possible by extensive co-operation with manufacturers. The drinks can is pretty much taken for granted these days, so you may not consider it an innovative product development, but consider how finalising its size and design must have involved ergonomic models and studies and similarly process and technical studies by manufacturers to understand what they can do and what they might have to learn to do when stretching a flat disc of metal into its final shape.
There are numerous interesting product designs in this exhibition, and most visitors will find something they think is cool, creative and imaginative. By including the manufacturing exhibit, the organisers make it possible for visitors to get a wider appreciation of design and the problems that designers face. A number of interesting info-graphic souvenirs are available that give more information about the manufacturing processes on display.
I have two favourites from the exhibition. Firstly, “The Bradley Timepiece” is a watch, designed for blind people, using a ball bearing on the face for minutes, and one on the watch perimeter for hours, and is proving highly popular amongst sighted people offering a discreet time telling experience and something attractive for the wrist . Also the “Tracy Neuls Bike Geek” shoe for cyclists which is exhibited as a fashion object uses technology very cleverly to create reflectivity, highly important to urban cycling commuters, and a deep dying process to the leather to create a shoe that resists showing up pedal, and bike shed scuffs. These show how wearable technology is being taken up by consumers when it offers a clear benefit and attractive appeal.
The exhibition is open until 25th August 2014 so don’t miss out!
To read more about the work I do in design engineering at Cambridge Consultants follow this link.