London Design Festival 2011

Ok so no post for a while, which I can put down entirely to Freshers Week which has been great but has also just finished, I may go into that in detail in a later post. But anyway the result of that was that I was unable to put up this post about the design festival when I went on the first day on 17th Sept.

The Festival runs officially from 17th-25th Sept (some aspects run for longer) and is spread across the entirety of London. In a way this is good as it shows all of the diversity of London, but is does make it quite a trek and difficult to do much in one day. The festival provides guides, both online and on the day and I used these to navigate my way around.

The centre of the design festival is the V&A museum and here I went first. The two exhibitions I saw here were the very impressive 12m high timber wave outside the main entrance and the Power of Making exhibition, showcasing some of the unusual projects created by designers and craftsmen around the world using various methods such as CAD/CAM and traditional skills, including a Gorilla made of coat hangers. I also took note and sketches of the items on display that appealed to me.

I also visited the natural history museum for a small exhibition on material structures, to be honest it was a little disappointing.

 

In Covent Garden there was also a small surprise, a greenhouse made out of Lego. While it was again a little disappointing due to its size, it was quite fun.

Finally I also visited the Aram Shop, which has on sale and available for trying out many classic and iconic designs, including the Ron Arad Bookworm, the Verner Panton Chair and Gerrit Rietveld's Red Blue Chair, which I sat in and must say is more comfortable than it looks, but still not very.

All in all I had a really good day, despite the rain at the end and got some good inspiration that should help in the course ahead.