London’s Design Museum once again plays host to some of the brightest young minds in design as four recent graduates are invited to get disruptive.
Now in its seventh year, the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence program offers four up-and-coming designers the opportunity to take over one of the institution’s galleries and freely experiment with their practice. This year’s theme is disruption; as museum director Deyan Sudjic explains: “disruptive innovation interrupts established ways of thinking, diverges from traditional practices and proposes new, unexpected ideas.”
The four chosen designers this year are James Christian, Ilona Gaynor, Torsten Sherwood and Patrick Stevenson-Keating. Each of them has developed a bespoke project in response to the theme. James Christian is disrupting housing with his re-examination of Victorian dwelling models, which he will use to project a series of hypothetical contemporary housing systems in comic book form. Torsten Sherwood is interested in the power of play, promising a new type of building toy that offers would-be young architects a more dynamic method of den construction than the standard wooden brick. Ilona Gaynor wants to reappoint the courtroom as a television studio in order to ensnare the visitor in a Miss Marple-style narrative. A variety of maps, models and other props encourage the audience to questions the vagaries of our complex judicial system. Lastly, Patrick Stevenson-Keating wants us to evaluate our measurement of value in an investigation into finical technologies; provocations include a new currency and a working cash machine.
The Designers in Residence programmes aims to give practitioners at the start of their career the space and support to develop a project free from constraints. Each resident is offered a bursary, commissioning budget and the production costs required to realise their new commission. Entry for Designers in Residence 2015 opens in September 2014. Designers in Residence: Disruption
Design Museum, London
10 September – 8 March
designmuseum.org
