It is impossible to review the London Design Festival without mentioning its scale. With more than 400 events stretching across the capital from Decorex in Syon Park in the west to the edgier Shoreditch Design Triangle in the city's east end, it is only possible for a person to scratch this nine-day event's surface.
In its early years the problem with the LDF was that you could travel for miles just to see a small installation, spending valuable time stuck on the underground rather than actually seeing things. This has been alleviated by the creation of nine separate design districts — each with a distinct identity — that contain clusters of activity in their own right.
Then there are the big shows — the aforementioned Decorex, 100% Design at Olympia, designjunction in the recently regenerated King's Cross and the confusingly monikered London Design Fair at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. Between them they run a gamut of contemporary design, ranging from the luxurious Decorex to the more obviously contract furniture-driven 100% Design, with designjunction sitting somewhere in between, and the London Design Fair on the crafty end.
Meanwhile, rather than merely acting as a marketing umbrella for a slew of independent shows and events, the organizing team of the festival, led by Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans, also arranges its own talks and installations, primarily at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This year it also launched a project at Somerset House titled Design Frontiers, a group show featuring more than 30 designers who are, according to the official blurb, “renowned for shaping and leading their respective disciplines: from automotive to fashion, product design to graphics, digital to performance.”
If that gives you some sense of its size and structure, inevitably the next question is if there was anything worth seeing. Inevitably the answer is yes, but visitors had to hunt harder than they might have liked. Part of the reason for this is the big, anchor shows had distinctly average years. 100% Design is the exhibition that kicked the festival off when it launched more than 20 years ago — its heritage is impeccable. However, a sparky talks program couldn't disguise that the show is beginning to creak. With one or two exceptions — Knightsbridge Furniture and Joined + Jointed spring to mind — the quality of exhibitors wasn't high enough, the whole thing feeling like it lacked any curatorial direction or, indeed, much in the way of quality control. Sadly, a show that changed British design culture looks as though it's struggling for breath, which is a bit of a shame.
The London Design Fair was teeming with designer/makers in a sort of Occidental bizarre. It got so visually cluttered and confused it was sometimes difficult to see the work at all. However, beautiful iron kettles from the Oigen Foundry provided a quiet highlight. Designjunction, in its second year at its new home in King's Cross, attempts to cover an array of bases — from office furniture manufactured by the likes of Humanscale to giftware — in a series of pavilions spread across a single site. Gateways, an installation produced by Turkishceramics and architect Adam Nathaniel Furman was particularly striking, and it was good to see Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble, ceramic studio Granby Workshop and Kickstarter launch their new SPLATWARE range of table products. Overall the show was solid without containing the surprises it did when it first launched in 2011.
One of the highlights of the festival came from one of the biggest exhibitions. The Corinne Julius-curated Future Heritage stand at Decorex, which annually presents a cluster of the best up-and-coming designers and makers on the U.K. scene, was a delight with pieces from the likes of Adam Blencowe, Thor Ter Kulve and Marlene Huissoud.
Outside of the big shows, Nolii launched a fistful of neatly thought out mobile phone accessories designed by LAYER, while petanque boule furniture designer Sebastian Cox joined forces with researcher Ninela Ivanova to create furniture and light fittings made from a combination of mycelium (that's fungus to you and me) and timber at Design Frontiers. Visitors to the Jasper Morrison Shop on Kingsland Road were treated to a beautifully minimal exhibition devoted to the petanque boule, curated by Typologie magazine. Vitsoe showed a rather nostalgic collection of Braun products designed by Dieter Rams from the personal collection of Tom Strong in its West End store.
In the Brompton Design District Ineke Hans was presenting furniture she had created with People of the Sun, a Malawi-based organization which aims to create sustainable businesses in the country. Perhaps most pertinent was her second installation in the same building that brought to conclusion a series of salons she has organized in London over the past two years looking at the future of the furniture industry. While she hasn't drawn any hard or fast conclusions, it seems the current model of manufacturing is set to change as a combination of technology, environmental concerns and rapid urbanization transform the way we work and live. You fancy in the near future the contract furniture world will need to get lighter on its feet.