The London Design festival has been running for 11 years now, but this is the first time I have attended the events that dot themselves all around the city. This year the festival was based mainly at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, which is where I headed, thinking I was in for a wonderful day of really good design related exhibitions, chat and inspiration.
“I was sadly mistaken.” What I thought should have been the epitome of creative people coming together to congregate and educate the general public (and other designers) was actually a series of artsy ‘fartsy’ preposterous… nonsense! Child-like illustrations of a fetus, a Caractacus Potts like bee hive that ‘represented the population of London’ and a collaborative magazine creation project that left you thinking “what did I achieve here? Nothing happened!”
About the only thing that actually interested me was the dismantled gun that had been in the news recently, and that was mainly because it was a gun you could print in your own home from plastic.
I found nothing that resembled graphic design. No branding, posters or type. (Okay there was one thing on type, but it was type tasting, which I thought was also rather stupid).
Nothing I saw really inspired me to think that design in London was anything more special than anywhere else in the country.
One thing I didn’t get to see was the Global Design Forum talk. That is something I would have like to have seen. I’m sure there was more design related speeches and interesting items there. I am just disappointed that the V&A exhibitions were rather lack luster in what I would have liked to have thought was ‘proper’ design.
I won’t be attending next year.