Exhibition by students of the British Higher School of Art and Design "BA (Hons) Product and Industrial Design"; and "BA (Hons) Textile Design" courses
Design is often misunderstood, and many still associate it primarily with style, thus missing the opportunity to derive its benefits. This exhibition aims to show the versatility of design as a phenomenon that extends beyond styling and decoration. Indeed, the ubiquity of design and its influence on people’s lives require better understanding of the subject.
Students invite visitors to muse over the changes design has experienced over time and the role of the museum in the development of the design industry. The display includes a variety of projects united by the three topics: "Invisible design", "Appropriation in design" and "How does it work?"
Invisible Design
Everything that surrounds us is somehow designed. However, we do not always connect the final product with the processes that made it possible. The invisibility of some aspects of products is intentional at times. A user does not have to understand how electricity works to push buttons at the right moment. People can figure it out intuitively, as we all did in the case of fastenings usage. It is made deliberately in order not to distract us from the essence of things. In other cases, the invisibility of processes is manipulating us just as easily as we ignoring it. Specifically, launching on the market and becoming widespread, products followed by a well-thought-out user experience and marketing campaigns. Besides, corporations deflect our attention away from the inequities and sustainability impact of their businesses, making the production of fast fashion brands invisible. For an ordinary customer, these products are popping up in the smartphone apps autonomously without any human intervention or unfairness of any form. In this exhibition, we aim to attract attention to the variety of invisible design and to reflect whether we benefit from such stealth or not.
Exhibitors: Anastasiia Domoratskaia, Olesya Zgonnik, Taisiia Berezhnaia, Nikita Stryuk, Elizaveta Guskova
Curator: Olesya Zgonnik
Appropriation in design
Often projecting new artefacts is based on a variety of forms and features of some even most useless things someone had ever created. On one hand an appropriation is always good news for designers, as it, among all, enables a design to be put to different purposes from those originally intended. On the other hand, an appropriation raises questions of originality and author rights concern. The exhibited items also tell us about reasons of appropriation, aspects of this method today and in future, concern of cultural aspects.
Exhibitors: Ivan Frolov, Margarita Gubaydullina, Evgenia Astafyeva, Evgeniya Alekseeva
Curator: Evgenia Astafyeva
How does it work?
This topic considers design as a large mechanism that includes many components and has its own history. We aim to show how design was formed, how techniques, methods and other processes transformed, as well as how design connects to other spheres of human activity.
"-Why is this object of this shape and is made of this particular material?" Curiosity is what drives design in the first place. The more questions we ask, the more answers we get.
Exhibitors: Vilena Kogan, Angelina Machneva, Yana Sokolovskaya, Aleksandra Avakova, Sofia Kunitcyna, Ksenya Podkolzina
Curator: Angelina Machneva
Open Studios
Free of Charge 