Dreaming out loud is like talking out loud, when you do it people notice you. This is what’s happening at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Lennart Booij has curated an exhibition that brings together 26 designers that are ‘designing for tomorrow’s demands’. Most of the projects on offer do ‘dream out loud’, but while some grab your attention others leave you feeling flat and a little lost as to why they’ve been chosen. The work exhibited highlights the ‘social design’ trend that’s present in the industry right now, design is taking on a new form and identity in the 21st Century and is departing from the traditional object to socially charged statements. Design Exchange wanted to investigate these declarations and see if lab grown meat, distilled coca cola and bio-printed organs really do ‘face the problems of our time’.
Next Nature Network delivers an interesting proposal of a lab grown in vitro meat cook book, now this really does make you stop and think. Intensive farming and our appetite for meat is a huge problem for our health and the environment, so anyone proposing a solution is very welcome. This cookbook is a must for any future conscious consumer as it details bizarre recipes with lab grown flesh and oysters. But the one place this project is brought back to reality is in the fact that the last lab grown meat was a burger that cost €250,000 to produce. Hopefully the technology will catch up with the creativity to reduce the cost, but it’ll take time, so now we’ll just have to settle for the soon to be the ‘traditional meat’ burger.
Another project that caught our attention was Helmut Smits’ ‘The Real Thing’, an installation that ‘has us consider for a moment how our mindless consumerism affects the world in which we live’. And that is exactly what it does, it makes you stop and really think about what Coca Cola is. This piece distils Coke to extract the pure water, it turns out that it takes 3 litres of water to make 1 litre of Coke, a terrifying reality. This is especially poignant as it emerges that a Canadian town is fighting Nestlé over rights to their own water source; Smits’ work resonates today and faces us the stark reality of how much power these corporations really have.
With all this future forecasting in one room it would be easy to say this exhibition is a complete success, but there are a few projects that don’t fit. One of these is by the omnipresent Dutch designer Hella Jongerius and her studio for the Dutch Airline KLM. The studio has created an interior for the airline’s new business class cabins, this seems completely alien and a rather strange choice. It doesn’t ‘dream out loud’, they’ve just delivered on a brief set by KLM, one which is very much based in reality. There are some interesting points to it, such the cradle to cradle carpet, a first for the airline industry; but the claim that ‘Jongerius looked for new solutions to create comfort for today’s global traveler’ is a bizarre one. Especially as business travellers account for only 12% of passengers, and while they are improving the business and first class spaces they often shrink economy by squeezing them closer together. This is the opposite way of thinking compared to most of the other work exhibited and really doesn’t fit in with the title social design.
With all this in mind it is worth going to see this exhibition, even if it doesn’t quite deliver on its statements. Dreaming out loud is proposing ideas for a better future, even if they aren’t actually tangible yet, this exhibition is a selection of thought experiments in physical form. It asks questions, and in turn we the viewer must be asking questions as well, questioning whether this selection (in fact all design), stands up to the title of social design or if it falls by the wayside as nothing more than self indulgent examples of designers trying to do good.
Words: Josh Plough
Dream out Loud – Designing for tomorrow’s demands
Runs from 26 Aug 2016 – 1 Jan 2017 at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
