Designs of the Year 2013, Design Museum - exhibition review

The Shard, the Olympic Cauldron, a foldable wheel and 96 other innovative design and architecture projects compete for this annual design prize
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Marcus Field30 April 2013

Reinventing the wheel, it turns out, is not something that people attempt very often. When the London design studio Vitamins sent its idea for a folding wheel to the patent office, it imagined the application would sit in a long queue of other wheelie submissions. In fact, new wheel designs are relatively rare and a patent was swiftly granted.

The ingenious Morph Wheel, together with its framed patent, is now one of the 99 items shortlisted for the 2013 Designs of the Year that go on display at the Design Museum from tomorrow.

Morph is a classic example of how design can triumph over everyday adversity in a simple and beautiful way. While previously wheelchairs may have been bulky to transport or store, their oversize wheels can now be removed and folded to fit into a bag, boot or storage rack. Genius.

Each year the Design Museum asks its panel of industry experts to nominate inspiring ideas such as this to compete for its awards, which are divided into seven categories: fashion, digital, product, graphics, furniture, architecture and transport design. Prototypes and concepts are eligible too, and this openness to experimentation makes the resulting show an exciting and instructive snapshot of everything that is going on in design today, much of it in the febrile colleges and studios of London.

Alongside Morph, other practical solutions to everyday problems on show here include the Liquiglide ketchup bottle, conceived by a research unit at MIT in Boston, USA, which is lined with a substance that stops the sauce from sticking. Then there’s a nifty little camera by the US company Lytro, which doesn’t just take a 2D picture but captures the whole light field and therefore allows you to refocus your photos later. Sometimes it is not high-tech solutions that are needed but the simple act of bringing order to chaos: the new Gov.uk website, for example, combines all the Government’s content into a single site that is as neat and functional as the London Underground map.

There are several heartwarming products on display that illustrate how good design can contribute to the alleviation of suffering in developing countries. ColaLife is a project by British aid worker Simon Berry, who noticed that Coca-Cola managed to get its products to the remotest regions of Africa where medicine rarely penetrates.

His response has been to design mini-aid kits to cure diarrhoea, a big killer of children, which fit neatly around the bottles in Coke crates. Already 15,315 of these kits have travelled into rural Zambia and saved countless young lives.

Other clever ideas for bringing things we take for granted to those less fortunate include the cool- looking spectacles for children by the Centre for Vision in Oxford. These glasses can be tweaked by the wearer by adjusting the amount of fluid in their double-glazed lenses until they focus clearly. Little Sun, meanwhile, is an enchanting solar light for off-grid areas co-designed by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, creator of the mesmerising Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003.

Concern for the environment remains high on the design agenda, and one of the most resourceful entries this year is for the Sea Chair, a stool created by graduates of London’s Royal College of Art using waste plastic recovered from the ocean. RCA students are also behind the Well Proven Chair, a seat made from a mix of resin and woodchips, a by-product of the furniture industry. On a much larger scale, French architects Druot, Lacaton and Vassal  have improved the lives of residents in a run-down Paris tower block by retrofitting the building with a new facade to bring increased warmth, light and space.

For those who might find all this a little too hair shirt, there are also plenty of high-end designs up for awards. These include Prada’s  Fifties-inspired Spring/Summer 2012 collection, Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, and Renzo Piano’s skyscraper, the Shard. 

There are those rare occasions when design is allowed to step away from functional concerns and enter the world of dreams. In this category is Thomas Heatherwick’s magical Olympic cauldron, which enchanted millions across the world last summer with its mesmerising metaphor of a petal for each of the 204 competing nations at the London Games. The same mind-altering properties were present in Random International’s Rain Room at the Barbican, an installation that drew queues of hundreds eager to experience the captivating effects of simulated rain as it responded to their movements.

How do you weigh the value of such uplifting exhibits against one another? Fortunately, we visitors can just relax and enjoy this engaging show. But the challenge for the judges is to pick a winner in each category, and then an overall champion to be announced on April 17.

The outcome is difficult to predict but as achievements go I think the successful reinvention of the wheel must be pretty hard to beat.

Designs of the Year is at the Design Museum, SE1 (020 7940 8790, designmuseum.org) from March 20 until July 7. Open daily, 10am-5.45pm. Admission £11 (concs available).

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