The Design Museum

A summer placement at The Design Museum creating a material map and more…

AGENCY
The Design Museum

ROLE
Illustrator, Researcher, Architectural Designer, Graphic Designer, Writer

DATE
June 2022 – August 2022

Design — Placement

Over the summer of 2022 I was selected by the Future Observatory team to work at The Design Museum which was, yet another, incredibly influential part of my development as a practitioner. Here I worked with the Future Observatory team where I had varied roles. My main brief was to create an environmental audit which could be accessible to all.

Therefore, I decided to illustrate a material map of the stories behind each component within the “Restore” exhibition. This was very enlightening and allowed me to sharpen my research skills, illustrative skills and create something very meaningful to be taken home with the visitors of The Design Museum.

Restore

DESIGN RESEARCHERS IN RESIDENCE

The Restore exhibit is a free display of design research responding to the climate crisis by this year’s Researchers in Residence.Design Researchers in Residence: Restore holds the work of the 2021/22 Design Researchers in Residence
– four thinkers based at the Design Museum working on research projects in response to the climate crisis. The display shows some of their findings and proposals through objects, films, drawings and more. This year’s residency theme asks: rather than making something new, how can design respond to what’s already there?

Restoration often means the act of mending an object: a salvaged piece of furniture, a decaying image, a cracked screen or a rusty bicycle. Over the course of their residency, these design researchers have expanded the concept of ‘restorative’. This exhibit celebrates design that reclaims and reuses; re-frames and renews; reconsiders and re-imagines.This idea of restoration and mending is a very present theme in my work and will be for the major project, I have mainly been looking at care, repair and maintenance as conceptual topics to frame the understanding of sociopolitical power dynamics and identity.

However, here at the Design Museum I understood the importance of celebrating this care, not only for the reason of identities and subjectivities, but for climate justice. Our Western culture is so set on overbuilding with issues of care being brushed away as the lesser valued and “dirty.”

It was important to be ecologically aware, but to also ensure that my findings were accessible to all discourses, ages and environmental understandings.

Interviews & Writing:

Design Exchange Partnerships Interview Article:

The Future Observatory host 15 Design Exchange Partnerships funded by AHRC for various research projects. Each project brings together a research and a non-academic partner, such as local councils and businesses in response to the climate crisis.

For this task I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with Carolina Vasilikou, University of Reading, and Yiorgos Papamanousakis, Urban Transcripts. The interview was incredibly eye opening and luckily, completely related to my interests for the upcoming Major Project.

A lot of their work was based around how they could get the public to meaningfully engage in change towards design and policy, Throughout the space of a 45 minute interview I learned so much about participatory exchange between the designer, the citizen and the community.

My favourite moment of the interview was listening to their experiences with members of the public, Dr Carolina explained that, while playing the game, students she had known and taught “transformed in front of her”, they displayed characteristics she didn’t know existed.

Finding methods of allowing people to open up and translate their thoughts and feelings is incredibly important in the future work I’d like to conduct. Speaking to Yiorgos and Carolina was wonderful, they were incredibly open minded people who had formed a strong practice and relationship that gave their work a certain richness.

Find the full interview here:

https://futureobservatory.org/news/they-transformed-in-front-of-us

During my time working for the Future Observatory team we also selected furniture for the museum studios. We ventured to sustainable design shops such as ‘goldfinger’, where they craft bespoke furniture using responsibly-sourced timber.

Visualisations produced by Haines & Davidson.

The Design Museum — Community Garden

During my time with the Future Observatory team I also conducted research for the currently unused outdoor space in order for it to potentially become a community garden.

The proposal was partially inspired by the mansion blocks along the square. Thereby, the facade illustrates a modern interpretation of the mansion block. These visualisations were produced by Haines & Davidson from the model myself and the team created.