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Yesterday I took time out of my hectic schedule of violently ingesting coffee and desperately trying to make some sense of the editors as they converse in a code called the King's English and went instead to the Royal College of Art Summer Show 2008. As a product design student, my primary interest was in the design and product specialist areas. The RCA has a long history of producing some of the finest designers in the country, including James Dyson and Sam Buxton and I was curious to know how this year's crop would stand up to their forebears.
Product design plays an often undervalued role in society. According the Causes of Poverty website, half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. I've already written on this site about the XOXO Laptop, which has been so efficiently designed that it can be produced and distributed to over 100 million people who would otherwise be cut off from an increasingly digitised society. One might think that this critical area of global disfunction would be an issue that young designers are addressing. Depressingly, very few are. I wandered around, looking for great innovation. Alas, someone had decided to design 'Mr Whippy'. This dubious invention has a microphone that analyses the inherent emotion in your voice. And the more upset you are...the more ice-cream it produces. Apart from consuming vast quantities of electricity, which we can increasingly ill-afford to waste, it was a commercially non-viable solution to a problem that doesn't exist. This, as far as I can see, typified the very worst type of egotistical, gimmicky design.
Although there wasn't an idea of such simple genius that you stand in astonishment that you've never thought of it before, there were at least some signs of intelligent thinking in evidence. Someone had flattened the end of an umbrella handle, so that it didn't slide when propped against a wall. The vehicular design section was also impressive and showed that concerns about the environment are being taken up at the grass roots.
David Gonzales' hydrofoil was particularly interesting. 'The Tortuga' (anyone have any ideas why it's so named?) has a no-moving-parts propulsion system and creates zero carbon emissions. It does so by using "an electric current that passes from one side of the hydro conductor to the other through conductive seawater, creating a magnetic force that pushes against the hydro conductor's magnet. The seawater is driven backwards and the ship is pushed forward. As the ship moves ahead, a current continually flows through a constantly repelling field to drive it onward." Complicated, but when one accounted also for its pioneering aesthetics, it is truly a 21st Century design, elegant and individual.
I realise that, as the consumer age draws to a close, the final vestiges of wasteful 'cool' are being given their last hurrah, but it was a shame that more people weren't looking to produce things that were USEFUL and NECESSARY. I was disappointed. Still am. You should still go, though. Art and design is all a matter of conjecture, so go and form an opinion. It's healthy.
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