Well, apart from the neat and successful West London, let’s go to weird and spooky East London where all the artists live. Designersblock is held in 3 buildings which look like a warehouse or some industrial kind of club. On the other hand “100% design” was completed as good design, this is pretty roughly-planned, Self-complacency, sometimes downright crazy, although you can really be impressed to see young cutting edge designers enjoying their creation and loving their own products a lot. This is art for art’s sake, not an attempt to commercialise their work.

Hulger, P*Phone

These “P*Phone” look like the classic type of receiver from the 80’s. I asked a question: “What are you going to do with it?” The designer asked me to hand over my mobile then he attached this receiver to my phone. Hulger laughs at the mobile phone manufacturers who work constantly to shrink phone size and add many functions that people may not need. It is so nonsense, illogical and unnecessary, but you can’t stop smiling, can you? In addition it is actually good design. Look at the nice colors they have. You can get this receiver at Beams in Japan.

Stuart Haygarth

Apart from the last one, now we are in a room with romantic light. You might think that some things beautiful and colorful are surrounding a light bulb by Stuart Haygarth at the center to make such dreamy gleam and shadow. OK, let’s get close. Now you can see each things are bottle cap, wings of darts, a syringe. Things that you never even imagine to be able to create this beautiful thing, actually makes up this perfect sphere giving new meanings to something banal and overlooked is one of his strategy.

James Tooze, Batch

Last one to introduce is a bit goody-goody I thought as a exhibitor of Designersblock which is a design team James Tooze from Brighton. Three different size desks are pretty tricky. Lower two have holes for e leg of other desks so they can be united in strange way. If you don’t feel like getting them together, just put them apart and well maybe put some flowers for the holes, what you think?

Thorough this week, I had been really facing to what is called design, and what I thought lovely is that more than just looking good, design have potential to make us smile, give us a little bit of surprise, imagination and convenience, and also meeting many many designers who talked about it to me with their eyes sparkling. I so recommend you to come to London Design Festival 2006 and walk around this design loving city with official guide book in you hand.

London Design Festival 2005
Date: September 15th – 30th, 2005
https://www.londondesignfestival.com

100% design 2005
Date: September 22nd – 25th, 2005
https://www.londondesignfestival.com

Designersblock 2005
Date: September 22nd – 25th, 2005
https://www.designersblock.org.uk