Review: Super Contemporary

Sam Eichblatt vis­its 'Super Con­tem­por­ary' at the Design Museum, and muses on the real­it­ies of the Lon­don Design Festival.

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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