We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who came down to visit us and our 10 exhibiting designers at Designersblock during the London Design Festival. The event was a great success! Just in case you missed it, we’ve created this short film which pieces together all the highlights from the week.

Read all our coverage of Designersblock.

Visit our 10 designers’ ARTS THREAD portfolios:
Chris Stoneman
Emma Lundgren
Hannah Coxeter
Malene Rasmussen
Nadine Spencer
Ornella Stocco
Rosie Thompson
Sarah Birnie
Satoru Kusakabe
Tim Pryde

Ruth Blackford

Kingston University’s MA graduates staged an exciting showcase of their work at Tent, London during the London Design Festival in September. The work on show was diverse and innovative, covering numerous disciplines including Architecture, Fashion, Illustration and Animation, Design Product & Space, Curating Contemporary Design, and Production Design for Film and Television. ARTS THREAD selects a few highlights.

Illustration MA graduate Ruth Blackford’s final project caught our eye. Inspired by the exploitation of workers in the garment industry, she states: “The reality of life in a garment factory is a far cry from the workers’ rights stipulated by law or the ethical commitments proclaimed by the big brands and retailers. My experience working as a textile designer for fashion has given me insight into this subject. Using my textile skills, I was keen to raise further public awareness of the conditions suffered by the workers and draw attention to the public’s demand for cheap clothes and the refusal to acknowledge unethical practices.”

Chenbin Wu

Chenbin Wu’s distinctive illustration work also drew us in. Inspired by traditional Chinese literature and symbols, Chenbin has blended Eastern and Western references together. Her intricate dragon images incorporate a range of materials such as Chinese symbols, fragments of maps and airmail envelopes. Other images featured funny, surreal fish/human hybrid creatures, depicted riding bicycles, running with umbrellas and firing crossbows. Other work included a 3D fantasy landscape in paper where pyramid mountains, burning trees and fairytale castles were set against a cosmic backdrop.

Chen Ying Gao

In the Design Products and Space area, Chen Ying Gao’s Rickshaw Shower project really impressed us. Tackling one of the problems encountered by the 3.6 million migrant workers in Beijing, this project offers a simple solution to the lack of bathing facilities that are available to the workers. Chen’s low-tech mobile shower can be easily connected to a standpipe. The idea is an admirable one; to improve the harsh lives of the migrant workers, by providing a cleansing, refreshing shower and ten minutes of welcome ‘self’ time.

Kingston University MA Fashion / Han Gu

The MA Fashion area of the exhibition was striking and offered a chance for visitors to get up close to some of the beautifully crafted work that had been showcased on the catwalk at the Freemasons Hall during London Fashion Week.

Han Gu’s final collection included a beautifully simple dress with an intricate, decorative collar and belt. Another favourite was Stephanie Jayne Price’s elegant collection in black. However, one of the most outstanding exhibits was Stephanie Nieuwenhuyse’s ‘Biomimicry’ project, which utilised discarded plywood. The designer had meticulously cut and pieced together pieces of wood to create a superb, sculptural, articulated bodice for a dress. Stephanie has also successfully applied her technique to shoes and belts. This clever, creative work merges fashion with craft to stunning effect.

Stephanie Nieuwenhuyse, ‘Biomimicry’

Kingston University MA Fashion on ARTS THREAD

Public Resonance, Samuel Weller

For London Design Festival Yamaha Design Studio teamed up with Design Products students from the RCA to produce Resonance. This exhibition showcases their joint developments in enabling ‘greater intimacy’ between the performer and their audience.

Resonance is a taster of ‘how musical instruments and live performance will look and feel in the future.’ On display throughout the store, this exhibition relied on interaction, giving a different and unique experience.

Public Resonance is a project by Samuel Weller, who has taken a very literal approach, to allow a performer to actually ‘resonate’ with their audience. Samuel has taken street furniture and exploited their various vibrations with a ‘portable percussive tool kit.’ The idea continues with architecture and public transport, allowing artists and audiences to collide wherever, whenever.

What inspired Samuel? The busking community and the fun spontaneity of street performers.

Human Speaker, Nic Wallenberg

The Human Speaker is another very literal interpretation by designer Nic Wallenberg. Nic’s device is a collar which when worn turns the person’s mouth into a speaker. Playing on the vibrations from your throat, you can control your music with your mouth and lips. With each collar producing two musical notes, when multiple people wear the collars, group interaction is encouraged to produce a more diverse composition.

Touch the Sound, Lingjing Yin

What if our body became the acoustic container of our memory? One of the many questions that inspired Lingjing Yin’s project, Touch the Sound, which ‘explores how the human body can be used as a mediator between sound touch and emotion.’ Lingjing’s development of stylish hardware and software allows the changes in a person’s electrical charge to be recognised, thus producing musical notes. Touch the Sound has even been taken a step further, now developed for the use of autistic people.

RCA Design Products

Samuel Weller
Nic Wallenberg
Lingjing Yin

Kinetic Frenetic, Lola Lely

A new Fendi store opening on Sloane Street celebrated London Design Festival by inviting RCA Design Products students to create a series of window and in-store displays, which pay tribute to British design.

The displays aimed to signify the innovative uses of Fendi craftsmanship, incorporating cast-off materials along the way. British designer Simon Hasan, who has previously worked with Fendi and is an RCA graduate himself, guided the project.

Kinetic Frenetic – Craft and the Futurist Machine is a fun, playful installation by Lola Lely. Inspired by the Italian art movement ‘Futurism,’ Lola wanted to produce a piece that ‘celebrates the art of craft, the motion of industry, progress and the future, whilst respectfully acknowledging the past.’ The window display is enjoyable to stop and watch, taking in the detail, as the Kinetic machine runs on cogs and pulleys, scrap metal and leather cut-offs.

Starting with a Blank Canvas, Meret Probst

Starting with a Blank Canvas is a vibrant, eye catching window display by designer Meret Probst. Inspired by the coloured leather of Fendi, the canvas starts out blank, then drips of coloured dye have been slowly released from hanging domes. These run down the canvas and onto a selection of bags, transforming its original beauty into a ‘decorative and ever-changing picture.’

The Anatomy of Fendi, Samuel Weller and Imme van der Haak

In store, a beautifully authentic display of Victorian glass bell jars by Samuel Weller and Imme van der Haak resides on the lower floor. The duo have taken the partially concealed and silhouetted element of Fendi’s designs and created The Anatomy of Fendi, an exciting voyeuristic peek at the construction and unseen detail that goes into the handbags. The designers have deconstructed the Fendi bag and displayed them as sculptural pieces; fitting so naturally amongst the shops displays and yet telling a story of their own, these bell jars are a favoured piece.

RCA Design Products
Fendi

Sophie Woodrow

Ceramic highlights at Origin this year ranged from uncanny realism to shameless fantasy.

ARTS THREAD was charmed by Sophie Woodrow and her collection of bizarre white porcelain creatures. Pulled directly from her imagination, Sophie created these magnificent sculptural pieces using the age-old technique of coiling and pinching. Inspired by the beauty and variety of animals, the surreal creations are intended to reflect on the separation between human culture and the natural world.

Penkridge Ceramics

Serving as a sharp contrast to Sophie’s surreal designs, Penkridge Ceramics presented some stunningly realistic ceramic and pewter fruit, vegetables and horse chestnuts. They were so convincing that we wondered what a grocer was doing exhibiting at a craft fair! On closer inspection we realised that, through attention to detail, highly skilled development and application of glazes, the designers at Penkridge had achieved the impossible and recreated natural objects so that they are pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.

Charlotte Sale

Glass artist Charlotte Sale, of the BBC’s ‘Britain’s Next Big Thing’ fame, is one of only a few female glass blowers in the country. Her high quality, dynamic vessels are incredibly tactile and available in a range of vivid colours. Now selling at Liberty’s she has come a long way in a short time since graduating in 2009 from the Royal College of Art.

Lilly's Lightbox Company

Upcycling is a concept ARTS THREAD comes across more and more and at London Design Festival we found it applied in many varied ways to furniture. At Origin, we found Lilly’s Lightbox Company, run by Berliner Felicia Strehmel. Incorporating her passion for photography, Felicia uses individual drawers from reclaimed antique chests of drawers to create light boxes that feature her photographs. The result is a lovely retro, nostalgic aesthetic.

Visit the Origin website for more information on this year’s show. To discover more about these designers:

Sophie Woodrow
Penkridge Ceramics
Charlotte Sale Glass
Lilly’s Lightbox Company

Farvash Razavi, 'Scale of Existence''

This annual travelling exhibition of emerging Swedish talent is now in its eighth year. The 2011 showcase at Designersblock continues the initiative set up in 1998 by Svenk, Form and the Form/Design Center. Chosen by a jury each year, this year’s project manager is Karin Wiberg; the show celebrates innovative youthful creativity.

Looking at possible concepts for jewellery of the future, ‘Scale of Existence’ by Farvash Razavi is a project that explores how decorative adornment can also be functional. Silver wire is encapsulated in a delicate film, partly made from cellulose and aceto bacteria, infused with ‘healing’ vitamins. The pieces have the ability to accelerate healing by helping to repair damaged skin on contact.

Märta Mattson, 'Rebirth'

Märta Mattson’s jewellery concept, ‘Rebirth’ was another highlight. Bugs encapsulated in Perspex were sliced in two; the ‘specimens’ innards replaced with sparkling golden crystals. The project was based on the contrasting, simultaneous emotions of attraction and disgust.

Lies-Marie Hoffman, 'Homage to the Elm trees'/ Maria Johansson, 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind'

‘Homage to the Elm trees’ by Lies-Marie Hoffman is a beautifully simplistic bench made by slicing though the trunk of an elm – celebrating its beauty by keeping the character of the tree very much intact.

More bold simplicity came from Maria Johansson’s brass archive spike in the shape of an over-sized drawing pin. Called ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’, the exaggerated proportion is partly intended to make the documents and bills impaled on it seem much smaller.

Lukas Dahln/ Maria Sandberg, 'Biotopia'

Lukas Dahln’s fun lighting concept was also a favourite. A glass ‘balloon’ light is ‘caught’ effectively in the simple wooden stand.

Finally, Maria Sandberg’s ‘Biotopia’ project has resulted in a great, hand tied carpet created from wool and nettle yarns. Maria uses “materials that reduce the use of chemicals in both the indoor and outdoor environments”. Her personal vision of utopia is, “of future sustainable textile design, where nature and high technology live in symbiosis – where humans, robots and animals help each other in the textile process, in a futuristic, green industrial garden”.

For further information – and to see the other designer’s projects – visit the Designersblock website.

Julia Parry-Jones

Origin, the bustling selling fair run by the Crafts Council, is a must-see on the London Design Festival calendar, offering the wares of 200 diverse designer makers. This year, it is arguably the jewellers stealing the show, with a diverse mix including established and emerging designers, traditional and cutting edge techniques, classic and playful styles…and everything in between.

A highlight was Julia Parry-Jones’s collection ‘Bowerbird’, a beautifully intricate narrative range inspired by the courtship habits of the bowerbird which hunts for treasure found in its surroundings – usually brightly coloured, shiny objects and sticks – to hoard in a specially-made structure to attract a mate. The jewellery echoes the eclectic nature of the bowerbird’s discoveries, even treasures yet to be discovered, by using a varied range of materials – from the silver birds themselves to semi-precious gems, hardwood objects and vintage finds.

Helen Noakes

Helen Noakes captures the imagination by suspending tiny creatures and figures in resin and silver. The bold pieces reflect a sense of playfulness and narrative that we are seeing become more and more popular in jewellery design and, perhaps, design in general.

Mandana Oskoui’s more classic range features her elegant signature lattice form based on patterns found in rocks and minerals. She uses traditional jewellery making techniques, applied to different metals and plays around with the positioning of the 3D form in her designs – in some pieces it functions as a clasp, allowing the wearer to create different looks with one piece.

Mandana Oskoui

One stall causing a bit of a buzz, and for good reason, was Nina Fuhrer and her gorgeous collection of knitted winter-wear, made from high quality materials such Merino wool, cashmere and mohair. Scarves resembling geese and foxes and hats with knitted goggles stitched in, were proving popular for their sense of playfulness. Nina manages to reinvent winter accessories and injects equal measures of fun and elegance into her designs.

Nina Fuhrer

Textile artist Jill Flower likes to see how experimental you can be in the textiles field. Currently working with recycled paper and stitching, she creates decorative circular wall hangings based on Elizabethan ruffs, along the theme ‘The Circle of Life’. They are made from intricately stitched paper that reflect the seven ages of man, as in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’. Paper is taken from publications that match certain times in a man’s, woman’s and child’s life – for instance for the men, it’s comics, lads mags, the FT, gardening publications, crossword pages and obituaries. Small toys, buttons and other relevant paraphernalia are stitched into the design. These caught our eye for being totally original and for their elements of fun and surprise. Jill is able to take private commissions that can be completely personalised.

Jill Flower

Origin runs at Old Spitalfields Market until 28th September. Watch this space for more highlights from the show. For more information on the designers:

Helen Noakes
Nina Fuhrer
Jill Flower
Julia Parry-Jones
Mandana Oskoui

Daeil Seo and Suhyeon Kim 'Happylight Saucer'

The Cross Cultural Design Project at Designersblock pretty much does what it says on the tin. A group of Korean design students were challenged to respond to a brief set by Pi Studio at Goldsmiths to highlight the scope of design that spans more than one culture, whilst also asking how design can unite different cultures.

We loved everything about the ‘Happylight Saucer’, including it’s name, designed by Daeil Seo and Suhyeon Kim. This crockery collection brings together the British tradition of ‘taking tea’, with an idea based on a Korean proverb – literally meaning ‘names and natures do often agree’. Traditional Korean symbols engraved onto the white crockery are designed to light up, making the process of ‘taking tea’ an even more pleasurable experience.

Sunmoon Na and Yoonhee Lee 'Respect Your Meal'/ Sooji Kim and Doohyung Kong 'Reborn Tie'

Sunmoon Na and Yoonhee Lee’s collection of rests for Western cutlery, ‘Respect Your Meal’, brings the tradition of resting spoon and chopsticks on porcelain supports to the Western dining culture by offering rests developed for the shapes of knives and forks.

Sooji Kim and Doohyung Kong’s sleek and stylish ‘Reborn Tie’ brings together British and Korean formal wear traditions – the bow tie being central to Korea’s traditional style and of course the regular British tie. ARTS THREAD can really see this one taking off!

Juhee Han and Miyeon Kim 'SLAP bag'/ Guetae Kim, Jihyo Shin and Seula Woo 'Kissing Birds'

Juhee Han and Miyeon Kim’s ‘SLAP Bag’ is an ingenious multi-purpose product with a design based on a traditional Korean toy called ‘Ttakji’. The bag opens up to become a picnic mat, a concept inspired by the different approaches to areas of grass in urban areas – in Korea these areas are restricted from public use, in Britain we are encouraged to use green space.

The ‘Kissing Birds’ by Guetae Kim, Jihyo Shin and Seula Woo reflect the tradition of giving wooden geese to newlyweds as a symbol of a long happy marriage. When the beaks of these birds touch, they emit a lovely warm glowing light.

The project looks at how different design practices, traditions and styles can inform one another, and how an understanding of the differences and similarities between cultures can provide inspiration in the design process. This approach can surely lead the way in terms of innovation, as well as develop relationships between cultures through design.

For more information on Designersblock check out the website.

Goldsmiths, University of London

To contact the designers:
Sunmoon Na sd2114168@nate.com
Yoonhee Lee uniqueunice@naver.com
Suhyeon Kim ksn8934@naver.com
Daeil Seo sdihoho@naver.com
Sooji Kim lucid_eye@naver.com
Doohyung Kong DesignerKD@hotmail.com
Guetae Kim mario.gyu@gmail.com
Jihyo Shin & Seula Woo kanuez2@gmail.com

Beyond the Valley: An Interactive Print Journey, V&A

Design brand Beyond the Valley took over the Clore Study Room in the V&A to present an ‘Interactive Print Journey’, a show inspired by an interest in the way new technologies can be used in interiors and fashion design. 

The public were invited to try their hand at design by interacting with a range of richly patterned prints designed by Kristjana S Williams and Kate Bonhote by using an iPad and an app called Granimator. Users were able to add detail in the form of creatures, floral motifs and gold leafing to a base design before uploading their final creations to share with friends via social media websites.

Although the opportunity to get seriously creative was perhaps a little limited, the questions the project raises about the future of interactive design are important. The prints themselves – Ink Forest, Branches, Master and Giant Parrot – featured in wallpapers, textiles and a range of lovely George Smith furniture, are really quite special, brimming with colour, detail and delightful creatures.

In the design industry, emerging digital technologies are opening up opportunities for anyone and everyone to get involved in design processes, however superficial the level of interaction might actually be. This installation appeals strongly to the public’s ever-growing desire to take part and be creative. There is certainly a move towards user-involvement, interactivity and knowledge sharing happening – and projects such as this explore what this might mean for the design world in the long run.

For more information visit Beyond the Valley’s website, or the V&A website, and you can check out the Graminator to view what the public came up with.

Ontwerpduo/ Kranen & Gille

As interest increases in the field of lighting design, the Crafts Council and Nokia Design present Lux Craft at Origin, a collaborative exhibition that explores the potential applications of light in design. Ten designers were chosen out of 280 applications for their originality, innovation, quality and craftsmanship, defined by Nokia Design as the ‘mastery of the design process’.

Traditional materials feature as much as contemporary with bone china and hand-blown glass alongside Perspex, Styrofoam and some interesting combinations in mixed media installations. Interpretations range from practical solutions to purely sculptural forms.

The exciting thing about Lux Craft is how varied the backgrounds of the designers are – textiles, science, architecture and sculpture all have a place in the discipline of lighting design. It seems to allow for much experimentation – with some interesting results!

Dutch company Ontwerpduo presents ‘Light Forest’, a suggested system of ceiling lighting that can be manipulated and changed depending on the space. It has a distinctly industrial feel but with a certain sophistication and delicacy offered by the copper interiors of the lamps. A welcome alternative to office strip lighting we think!

Kranen & Gille’s submission, which resembles a collection of suspended globes and smashed eggs, involves energy saving light encased in delicate plaster shells, the idea being that the plaster forms need to be destroyed to reveal the light within.

Tsai and Yoshikawa/ Richard Wheater/ Loop. PH

Tsai and Yoshikawa’s dynamic organic form contrasts with the synthetic modern materials it is made from – perspex, neoprene and UV paints.Both RCA postgraduates (in Sculpture and Textiles) have successfully collaborated on some noteworthy site-specific installations where a passion for bright colour and extravagant structures prevails. ‘I’m Electric, You’re Electric’ by Richard Wheater turns the common perception about neon glass on its head by showing its potential as a modern creative and industrial material. He has used neon elements with both handblown glass and found objects.

‘Vortices Lace’ by Loop.PH is an example of this London studio’s urban interventions via light, which aim to reinterpret spaces and living environments, encourage community engagement and champion the use of craft in technological design. The conical lattice form connects textiles, light and architecture for one purpose.

Luxcraft runs at Origin until 28th September at Old Spitalfields Market, Brushfield Street, London.

For more information about the participants visit the Lux Craft website.