Featured Article No1
Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010
Paranoid pandas, hi-tech cars, a lump of Surgu and one rather nifty plug are all items up for the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010. Oh. and don’t forget Plato’s Atlantis, Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer ’10 collection hidden at the back of the room.
From the wide and varied landscape of architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport design the Brit Insurance Designs Award Year 2010 offers a cornucopia of ideas to stimulate those creative juices. In fact there are 100 items in one room. It’s an amazing feast for the eyes and the mind, a fantastic celebration of design diversity picked from all over the globe. This is the third year of The Brit Insurance Designs Award and it’s turning out to be the Oscars for the design world.
BMW are the big boys that hit you first. It’s in your face, it’s shiny, and yes it’s a car. But this is a car with a difference. It has a rather spectacular hi-tech fabric skin finish that stretches over a moveable wire frame, this enables the car to change shape.
From one hi-tech fabric skin to the futuristic underwater world of Atlantis. Alexander McQueen has breathed life into a world dominated by alien features and reptile patterns in his Spring Summer 2010 collection Plato’s Atlantis. The vibrant colours and sculptured couture is striking.
Along the same utilitarian lines is a lump of Sugru, just what you need in your toolbox. Sugru is a silicone based putty which hardens over a couple of hours to leave a waterproof, durable, soft to the touch and rubber like texture. It can mend, and stick things together, as well as patch up holes. What more could the art department need?
Probably the most humble piece in the collection is, a plug, yes a plug, a very simple and very ingenious plug. Min-Kyu Choi’s folding plug is an innovative reinvention of an everyday object. It folds down to just 10mm in width. It’s so elegant and clever. This piece of product design is going to more than lighten our laptop load; it’s going to change our lives.
In fact 200 Panda eyes are watching you. Pandamonium is an installation created by Jason Bruges Studio for the WWF. 100 rotating pandas detect any human presence and automatically track your movement. Their positions change according to a live image feed from a thermal camera mounted overhead. This is a really intuitive and interactive design.
A bench? Thomas Heaterwick Studios have created the world’s largest extruded piece of metal in the form of a contorted aluminium bench. Extrusions is stunningly beautiful, it’s a work of art, one of the most elegant pieces in this collection. You will want to sit on it, but you can’t because someone is watching you.
This is a just a small selection of the designs Anthony Gormley and his panel of judges have to selected a winner from. This is an inspiring collection of contemporary design that reflects the economic, ecologic and social climate of this last year. Looking at a collection reiterates the importance of creative thinking and design in all of our lives.
And the winner of the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010 was Min-Kyu Choi’s folding plug.
The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year are on show at The Design Museum, London until the 31st October 2010.