London Design Tour

House of MinaLima

Our first stop was a fun one. Eduardo Lima and Miraphora Mina worked together on the Harry Potter movies for over eight years, designing the graphics for every part of the wizarding world, from public service posters to book covers to shop fronts. By the end they had amassed such a huge amount of it that a selection has been put on display. It’s essentially a big shop – anything you can see, you can buy – but entry is free and they’re happy for people to wander about and admire the three floors-worth of prints in what was formerly a rickety old house, now painted pink but still with its slanting staircases.

None of us are huge Potter fans but it’s impossible not to appreciate the effort and imagination that has gone into tiniest details of every design, particularly on things like packaging. Labels for sea salt and flour, hairpins, amusing blurbs written on the backs of the books (Albus Dumbledore likes ten pin bowling.  Who knew!). And foiling! Foiling everywhere!  Chris and I now really want to make something with foil on it, just because it’s pretty. My personal favourites included a pentagonal box of chocolate frogs, which claimed the contents were made of 70% Croakoa, and a book cover with a 1950s thriller look to it, entitled ‘When Muggles Attack!”

You can also see how the designers drew from different real life sources as both the films and plot developed. A room of front pages from the wizard newspaper The Daily Prophet begins in a fun mash up of vintage British design elements, then take a turn for the Medieval when a new director takes over in the third film, before swinging back to a more considered middle ground for the later movies. As the tone of the story becomes clearer and the wizarding world and government becomes darker and more oppressive, you can see clear influences from the Soviet propaganda of the 1920s and 30s appearing. The House’s first floor currently features art from the new film ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them’, which is set in 1920s New York and they obviously had a lot of fun adapting their designs to this classy vintage setting. It’s thoughtful details like these that make us designers really happy.  Definitely worth a look if you’re in the area.

You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970

Our next location was the V&A’s exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? We were going on the recommendation of a friend and expecting maybe a few rooms of posters and some hippy outfits. What we got was an extensive tour of the late Sixties, moving from the anti-establishment feeling that drove many of the movements through product design, fashion, consumer design and advertising, photography, literature, civil rights activism, and music. There’s the Moon Landing clip, of course, and the Beatles uniforms from the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band, but also the very first MasterCard, looking strangely unfamiliar and small in it’s display case, a newspaper clipping advertising men’s wigs for covering up your long flowing New Age locks at your suit-and-tie day job, and art from London-based underground movement ‘Gandalf’s Garden’ (and I think we can all guess what they grew).

The curators have collected a huge amount of artefacts and it’s offered in a fairly face-value way, with conflicting items likes a skimpy Barbarella outfit displayed next to a copy of Germaine Greer’s ’The Female Eunuch’, or protest posters of the Black Panthers leader Bobby Seale alongside pamphlets on Martin Luther King’s peaceful activism, leaving you to resolve the tensions for yourself. And the music! It was such a prominent part of the era and the V&A make the most of it, dedicating at least two of the spaces to record covers, lyrics sheets, stage costumes, and footage. The usual headset tour is offered with this exhibition but instead of a verbal description of the objects you’re given a soundtrack that cleverly changes songs to match what you’re looking at. The whole effect is very immersive, if a little isolating. The V&A have done this before with their David Bowie exhibition but it was the first time I’d experienced it and I have to say it was a great idea.

Another great idea was the bean bags. The penultimate room is themed around the music festivals of the Sixties, particularly Glastonbury, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight festivals, and to get across the scale of these events the main feature of the room are massive cinema-sized screens projecting film that was recorded live at these festivals. There’s astroturf underfoot and, yes, beanbags, encouraging you to get into the atmosphere and sprawl out across the floor, which we did. You’re best off removing your headset in this room, as it has it’s own audio, and seeing legendary artists recorded live on such a massive scale is really something. I watched The Who play ‘My Generation’ (which I admit I’d never really understood until then- after all, it wasn’t my generation) and then Jimi Hendrix, filmed so close up that his head and torso filled the entire screen, perform a blinding solo rendition of ‘Star Spangled Banner’. Was it a bit over the top? Yes it was. But did I enjoy it? Yes I did.

Seeing the cultural flotsam of the decade all laid out for you, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons between that decade, still pretty recent, and our own if what we’re seeing in culture and politics now is the tail-end of the revolutions we’ve already had or a new turn of the wheel. In fact the end of the exhibition encourages you to do just that, and wonder what was left after the promised Utopia failed to emerge, for all the progress that was made. After over an hour of being swept along by the constantly shifting mix tape, chaotic blend of stiff establishment, raucous protest, swirling psychedelic art, and the ten foot high head of Jimi Hendrix, I actually came out of this one feeling physically affected: overwhelmed, dazzled… basically I was spaced out. It took me twenty minutes of walking through London to come down from it. But I think the hippies would be okay with that.

The Design Museum

And of course no designer’s trip to London would be complete without inspecting the new Design Museum, which only opened at the end of November. Our considered opinion… it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Calling your collection The Design Museum gives it a really hard job to do. It has to cover not just branding, graphic design or web design, which are our specialisms, but all design. The very concept of design. The idea that design isn’t just making things that look nice, but the act of solving problems in every area of society. That means product design, signage, furnishings, technological development, materials manufacture, publishing and print, typography, clothing, design for healthcare, architecture… all of these are up for grabs. The list really is endless. What I’m saying is that the task they’ve set themselves is basically impossible, so they shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t managed it.

The top floor’s free permanent exhibition ‘Designer, Maker, User’ has taken on this ridiculous challenge and the result is cursory and jumbled, but with some nice moments and genuinely well chosen objects. You can see they were trying. Displays that really could have been expanded to fill an entire room all on their own have maybe a few metres of wall space each and there’s not a clear progression or narrative to the exhibition. According to Morag Myerscough, the exhibition’s designer, this was deliberate as she wanted visitors to view the designs in a layered rather than linear way, but in reality it just comes off as cluttered. Once you’ve focussed in on an individual item it gets a little easier.

What makes it all stranger is that the building itself is all about space. When you first walk in from the clean-cut white courtyard, you’re presented with a huge sweeping ceiling and some really pleasing angles in the walkways that lead you up to the top. There is a lot of space to be had, and they clearly know how to use it, so it’s just a bit confusing that the permanent exhibit, while engaging, is so cramped (or that the internal signage led Jo to confuse the lift for the toilets. Watch out for that!) For the average visitor who just wants to know “What even is Design?” this is a perfectly fine introduction to the topic but for those after a little more meat, you’re better off going downstairs.

The first and ground floor are the temporary exhibitions, and Fran and Jo went to explore ‘Fear and Love: reactions to a complex world’. This turned out to be pretty good, with memorable displays including some fuzzy woollen yurts (Love?), a robot arm named Mimus that can see you and follow you round the room (Fear?) and a feature on gay dating app Grindr (as with most dating resources, probably some combination of the two). There was also scope for some well-considered discussion on how solving one issue using design. In the instance of Fibre Market, creating mixed-fabric garments in an endless spectrum of colours and patterns can actually create new problems – the difficulty of separating those garments back into their original materials for recycling or reusing, creating massive waste – which design then needs to address in turn.

All in all, an interesting visit, and we wish we’d had longer to look around.  There are some features that are worth a look, and the general idea is definitely a good one. But it’s as they say; the Devil, and it seems the Design, is in the details.

Images from Minalima and Goop