Freedom Space by Neville Brody. Photo © Graham Jepson.

I have to admit, I was hoping the Super Contemporary exhibition would be a bit lighter on text and instead invest in some big, simple, self-explanatory visuals. It's Wednesday afternoon in London during the London Design Festival, Fashion Week, a shed-load of related dos, and a barrage of new information has left my brain hurting.

For example, the greengaged.com morning workshop on Monday at the Design Council, explored sustainable design from the angle of the “nice-to-haves”: fashion and travel.  The event curator, Ed Gillespie, who famously travelled around the world for a year sans air travel and now runs socially responsible communications agency Futerra, sat in the donut hole of an illuminated circular table, surrounded by the four speakers. The event was filmed and broadcast live onto a screen behind them, which mirrored all of their movements with a two-second lag, while as they talked the tech guy was bringing up relevant websites and images and arranging them along the bottom of the screen while the audience’s Twitter posts were fed to the top of the screen, which made it OK to be on your iPhone all the way through the event, as the woman next to me ably demonstrated by surfing the ‘net throughout.

It was a brilliant debate though, and happily free of the usual industry burble and buzzwords. It was not only food for thought, but also a sprawling, all-day Vegas-style buffet that took on everything from green semantics and “guerrilla travel” to the big questions about human relationships and what constitutes a meaningful life. Not to mention some cracking analogies from Mr Gillespie: “Sustainable design is like wetting yourself while wearing a dark suit. No-one notices but it gives you a warm feeling inside.”

Back at the Design Museum after that, I just wanted a quick hit of easily digestible design. However, much like London itself, Super Contemporary was a grab bag of grand ideas and whimsy, all deceptively well-ordered by the designers from Bibliothèque, who were also responsible for last year’s Cold War Modern show at the V&A. Essentially, Supercontemporary was fifteen commissions from different designers with a distinctive perspective on the capital, underpinned by a chronological display running around the gallery walls, charting the events and people that shaped London’s creative terrain from 1960 to the present day. (Given the scope of the content, my hit-and-run approach was better suited to the exhibition of work by the illustrator-designer Javier Mariscal upstairs – somewhat unfairly described by my exhibition buddy Matt as “the Spanish Fido Dido”.)

Super Contemporary visual identity. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Super Contemporary contained a number of interactive exhibits along with your standard non-digital ones. Some, like Zaha Hadid’s working model of an “urban landscape tool” – a computer-generated simulation with a touch-sensitive screen allowing visitors to merrily fling proposed buildings around London’s topography like bits of LEGO and watch the effect this had on the surrounding urban fabric – were fun, and with obvious applications for designers and architects.

Zaha Hadid at Super Contemporary. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

However, Ross Phillips’ Head to Toe, which uploaded images of the head, torso and legs of participants at pods located in three different city locations to be scrolled through and assembled again in the manner of the children’s game Misfits, sounded fun but was on the blink.

Two exhibits in particular stood out for their potential real-world uses. The first, the K9 Post Office Kiosk by Industrial Facility, took the Gilbert Scott-designed red London phone booth and turned it into a mini post office. Users would be able to perform basic tasks like paying bills or parcel shipments by speaking to a remote operator via video screen, a solution which, with the average post office queuing time running around 17 minutes in Britain, would be welcomed by many. Giving new purpose to a beloved but underused urban icon is surely also a stroke of genius.

Another intriguing proposal, Paul Cocksedge's Rain It In is still under research but would no doubt take the city by storm if it was actually found to work. In theory, static electricity would be used to 'bend' water away from an object like an invisible umbrella. Two potential uses would be keeping rain off cyclists and keeping play going during Wimbledon, but any place with an abundance of the wet stuff can no doubt generate hundreds more.

El Ultimo Grito and Urban Salon developed the baffling idea of a sky garden over Trafalgar Square. Where does that leave the Square and the National Gallery? It would bring Nelson to eye level, which is nice but surely not what the population yearns for day to day, at the expense of casting one of the city’s grandest squares in perpetual twilight. The last thing London needs is more shade. Invisible umbrellas, yes. Shade, no.

Lord Nelson at eye level? A sky garden over Trafalgar Square proposed by El Ultimo Grito and Urban Salon. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

One of my favourites was a very lo-fi piece by Tord Boontje. While not one of the fifteen designers in the show, he contributed a piece to a collection of designers’ personal maps of London. Boontje’s detailed his personal connection to the southeast London suburb he lived in for ten years with tags commemorating key events such as his marriage and his daughter’s birth, along with his trademark organic features, including dried leaves and flowers. It was also nice to discover one of my favourite designers used to live down the road from me.

Toord Boonjte's map contribution details his personal connection to a London suburb. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

With Boontje’s domestic work in mind, the Guardian–reading killjoy in me wanted to ask why someone hadn’t addressed the social and environmental issues that come with living in one of the world's most complex cities. Ditto London’s feverish consumer culture. Ed Gillespie’s statement at Greengaged, that “the consumer age is over” is all very well, and hopefully the wheels are slowly being set in motion for it to eventually be true, but a quick trip to Oxford Street suggests otherwise. The high street multiples are continuing to multiply like rabbits on Viagra, and to paraphrase Prince, they’re shopping like it’s 1999. Super Contemporary wasn't without a social conscience — Paul Smith's New London Rubbish Bin, a giant bunny equipped with motion-sensor ears that lit up and Tom Dixon's eco-friendly 1949 Bentley with an electric milk-float engine were two examples. However, the Magritte-style surrealist tone rather undermined any serious intent which, unfortunately, made the exhibition seem somewhat behind the curve.

New London Transport by Tom Dixon. Photo © Luke Hayes.

London Transport. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

New London Rubbish Bin By Paul Smith. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Listening Station by Barber Osgerby. Photo © Graham Jepson.

Battersea Gods Home by Nigel Coates. Photo © Graham Jepson.

Image from Mariscal Drawing Life – the Javier Mariscal exhibition at the Design Museum. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Image from Mariscal Drawing Life – the Javier Mariscal exhibition at the Design Museum. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Super Contemporary runs at the Design Museum until 04 October – www.supercontemporary.co.uk

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