Hasta La Ideas

100 was a popular number at London Design Festival this year. 100% France showed off new work from its young designers at 100% Design, LDF’s answer to New York’s ICFF. Meanwhile, across town in Shoreditch, 100% Norway created a special exhibition as part of the design shows at Tent London, where they haven’t made an appearance since 2006. The group’s London-based curator, Henrietta Thompson, and co-curator, Benedicte Sunde, selected works by 22 designers, most of whom are up-and-coming young Norwegians fresh out of design school with a few iterations on classic regional designs thrown into the mix, like the Popcorn chair by Sven Ivar Dysthe and the Garden chair by Peter Opsvik (above), which visitors were eager to climb up into to view the show from its tree-like seat.

After a five year hiatus, Norway seems anxious to show how, according to Thompson, “after spending years in the shadows of its rightfully much lauded neighbors creatively, it has now fully emerged as a significant global player in its own right.” This is not to say, however, that 100% Norway wishes to push a cultural stereotype or point of view wholly separate from their fellow Scandinavians. “That notion is redundant,” Thompson said, especially “as national borders become ever more blurred with designers completing their education all over the world.” What the exhibition does reflect is Norway’s history of craftsmanship, its ideals of “modesty and purity,” and its focus on the quality of materials and the simplicity of the object. In that way, Norwegian design isn’t any different than Scandinavian design in general, and the very excellent work on display is evidence enough that Norway is no shrinking violet, but is entirely capable of standing tall amongst its Scandinavian design brethren and potentially even leading the pack. Take a look at our five favorite pieces from the show.

“Mono sofa” – Anderssen & Voll for LK Hjelke

Two of the founding members of former design studio Norway Says, Torbjorn Anderssen and Espen Voll, broke out in 2009 to establish their eponymous studio, which has gone from “strength to strength,” launching products for manufacturers such as La Palma, Established & Son, and Muuto. The Mono sofa, their latest product, was recently awarded the prize for Design Excellence from the Norwegian Design Council.

“Bunadspledd blankets” – Andreas Engesvik for Mandal Veveri

Meanwhile Andreas Engesvik, the third founding member of Norway Says, hasn’t done too shabbily for himself since the studio disbanded. He’s created a wide range of products for Iitalia, Muuto, Ligne Roset, and Asplund. His Bunadspledd blankets are inspired by bunads, a 19th century national costume for both men and women with over 400 variations that differ by region.

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Although not technically part of the London Design Festival at all, the proximity of the Science Museum to all the designerly action in South West London this month, has resulted in many a festival goer straying over to the Google Web Lab exhibition that promises—a smidgen ambitiously, we soon discovered—to ‘bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life’.

Keen to fill our minds with the secrets and web wizardry of everyone’s favourite internet Goliath—dreaming of the multi-millions our future tech start-ups would make, when endowed with this supreme knowledge—we bounded down to the dimly lit basement and entered ‘the lab.’

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What with the realities of urban life, the design of municipal benches is subject to any number of creativity restricting limitations—leaving our city landscapes lined with fairly generic, sturdy, functional and all just a little uninspiring public seating.

Teaming up with the London Design Festival organisers this year, renowned British manufacturer Established & Sons have commissioned a series of one off benches for the V&A’s epic John Madejski Garden space, specifying only the material each designer must use in their creation.

On a sunny day of festival going we snuck in some cheeky shots of revelers testing out the designer seating on display.

AL_A architects, creators of last years V&A doorway installation “Timber Wave” teamed up with Catalan ceramicists in Barcelona to produce their layered tile seating.

A magnificent, monolithic, mock-marble slab of bench from the guys at Industrial Facility.

Portuguese designer Fernando Brizio contributes a very Iberian pig hoof shaped bench made from his country’s finest cork.

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For the second year running, the V&A museum and its supporters have used London Design Festival (and perhaps the inevitable few too many glasses of bubbly that surrounds it) to gather some funds for the innovatively named ‘Design Fund to Benefit the V&A’.

The little extra dosh is set aside to enable the museum to purchase stand out examples of contemporary design—or, in other words, some very attractive, if obscenely expensive, bits of furniture— acquiring the design icons of the future, if you will. Amongst their haul this year was this worryingly delicate ‘SOFA_XXXX’ by Yuya Ushida that is, in fact, an expandable and contractable seating solution for cramped living conditions. Also on display was the organic form of Dutch designer Joris Laaumann’s ‘Bone Chaise’ complete with the (almost more interesting) wooden cast for the chair.

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To celebrate BE OPEN‘s Sound Portal installation in Trafalgar Square during London Design Festival and to wax poetic on the nature of sound, Wired Magazine Associate Editor, Tom Cheshire, hosted a panel to discuss the future of sound and how our “sensory systems can help us design more innovative products that enrich our everyday lives.” In addition to Lauren Stewart, a neuroscientist currently doing research on musical nueroplasticity, and the composer Matthew Herbert, Tom Dixon was set to start off the discussion on sound design, though through an error in the briefing he received he prepared ten minutes on how he designed a vibrator instead.

Bone, the vibrator commissioned by two women who, after working together for Tesco, decided to create a brand that introduced gallery-worthy products into the design-deprived adult toy industry. They approached Dixon, who described himself as “a British man, so I’m not used to talking about sex at all. But there was something about the project I couldn’t turn down.” He observed that most sex toys “are so far removed from the pleasure and sensuality of the act.” By Dixon’s estimate, 50% of sex toys are based on the male phallus, which 70% of women think is “an ugly object.” Once you surround that object with more ugly design, from the packaging, materials, graphics and photography, you have a product category ripe for redesign.

Instead of silicone and plastic, Dixon proposed that given the intimate nature and proximity to the body, a sex toy should be more like a piece of jewelry, an object that’s not only hygienic and a pleasure to touch, but precious as well. The consumer sex toy market hovers around the £15–£35 price range, so why not make a more expensive object in a market mostly devoid of luxury items? Getting back to the panel’s focus on sound, Dixon also found the motors used in most sex toys are far too loud. “In a time when your senses are heightened, the motor only becomes that much more distracting.” Thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones, miniature, motorized vibrators are not only reliable but readily available as well.

For Dixon’s first model he paired a cell phone vibrator and a watch battery in a sterling silver vibrator worn like a ring. However, even with Kate Moss’ celebrity endorsement, the 10-minute battery life rendered it a commercial failure. But Dixon was determined, so for his next model he moved away from jewelry and turned to sculpture for inspiration, thinking now that a vibrator should be treated more like a tool and less like a toy. He used a more powerful yet completely silent motor that can be recharged with a phone charger, and he gave the elegant sculptural form a weight that lends it a material quality reflected in its £120 price tag. And instead of plastic blister packaging, Bone is nestled into a beautiful and anonymous-looking dark box. Though this was most certainly not the talk Wired and BE OPEN intended to elicit for their panel, it was actually a great introduction to discussing the senses in general before honing in on sound and its pleasurable and pervasive effects on the body and mind.

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