This month’s LDB brought in installations, prototypes, and designs from 37 countries and featured 30+ talks with over 100 leading designers, design critics, and practitioners to explore the theme of ‘Utopia by Design.’ These (often whimsical) installations used design to reconcile each country’s past, present, and future, exploring issues as diverse as smart cities, the environment, global migration and the refugee crisis, postcolonial legacies, and food systems.
Below are a few of the highlights from the event, which ends today. And read our review of the Biennale here.
The London Design Biennale also marks the first time India has put forward an installation in a major international design event. India Design Forum Founder Rajshree Pathy made sure that their presence at the event would be as dramatic as the country itself.
The design of 'Chakraview’ employs the chakra system—a philosophical journey that begins with desire and consumption, moves to emotion, then speech, and finally to enlightenment—as a metaphor for India’s cultural, spiritual, social, and economic progress since independence. Six colorful silk tapestries hang above a mirrored floor, bathing attendees in the color and chaos of the space. A separate, blue, womb-like audiovisual room connects attendees to the seventh, most spiritual, chakra.
The installation also references imagery from the Eames’ 1958 India Report, produced after the three months Charles and Ray Eames spent touring the country, looking at the potential and importance of design in postcolonial India. The exhibit asserts that design is not just about developing aesthetic solutions, but indeed solutions to social problems facing India today.
Thank for sharing: metropolismag.com
