Creatives cutting loose in British Design Awards

Like a jumble sale of design, the Brit Insurance Design Awards is an addictive exhibition of nearly 100 works from the worlds of design, architecture, graphics and fashion. Chairs, dresses, lamps, websites, magazines, books, buildings, an urban beehive and a BMW concept car compete for attention and the prize.

The show is billed as a survey of the best but it’s tough to generalise about what that means. Environmental sustainability is one theme but while the exhibition includes compostable packaging for a pair of sustainable underpants, it also embraces a three-metre-long experimental sculpture made of aluminium — possibly the world’s least eco-friendly material. And you wouldn’t want to wear your diaphanous Christopher Kane frock while lounging in Studiomama’s armchair built out of wooden pallets.

But there are coherent trends. The "supernormal" school of design, inspired by the prosaic stuff of everyday life, is represented by the Palindrome concrete and timber furniture and a Herman Miller office chair.

More detectable is the puritanism of designers’ responses to climate change and economic and social crisis. The fashion exhibits don’t even go there. But from product designers we get preachy edutainment videos (The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard, which tells us that products all begin with "extraction, a fancy word for the exploitation of natural resources, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet") and agitprop like Kennardphillipps’ Cafe of Equivalent$, trying to convince us their profession can make a better world.

The show is worth a visit, if only to guess which innovations will endure (the brilliant Folding Plug, Min-Kyu Choi’s redesign of the British electrical plug) and which will be soon be obsolete. By the end, I felt designers still know more about changing our daily lives than they do about leading us towards brave new futures.
Until 6 June. Information: 020 7940 8790; www.designmuseum.org.Winner announced on 16 March.

British Design Awards
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London, SE1 2YD