This year’s display of work by students at New Designers and the RCA SHOW an encouraging clutch of new ideas that are heading in the right direction

Thank God for graduate student design shows this time of year (well, when I was writing this). And thank God for the hopeful energy and fresh thinking they show us. Thank God, also, for the Royal College of Art SHOW(we’re supposed to use ALL CAPS for this, I learn, in direct contradiction of the received stylistic wisdom that all lower case is cool) and for New Designers. The lazy – or time-poor – show goer can see a great deal at these two venues, and be reasonably well assured that they have seen most of what matters.

After many years of doing this – it was student design, I must confess, that got me into this game in the first place – I have started to allow myself to be lazy. Or, if you prefer, to be disciplined with my allotted viewing time. This means that, like most visitors, I have to rush round and give about two seconds to the poor hardworking students’ project that they have lived and breathed for a year. It also means that this year I completely avoided architecture, knowing full well that any project worth its salt would demand pretty much the whole afternoon of study and conversation.

At the RCA I concentrated on the IDE course, or Innovation Design Engineering, which if I’m not mistaken used to be called Industrial Design Engineering, an epithet that made much more sense but didn’t carry the necessary buzz word.

Vehicle Design also caught my attention, plus I spent a bit of time in Design Products. A couple of years ago I was shocked and angered by how little attention was apparently being paid to sustainability at the RCA, one of the world’s most prestigious and respected design colleges.

I’m glad to say, there’s no reason for such disappointment this year – even at New Designers, where the undergraduates have also in recent years displayed little will to engage with this most complex and challenging of subjects (or, perhaps more tellingly, their lecturers have displayed little will to implant said will in their charges).

But this year, design education seems somehow, on the evidence of my whiz round the Royal College and the Business Design Centre, to have moved its sustainability awareness index up by a great deal more than one notch. Almost everywhere I looked was a very encouraging level of mature and subtle thinking about not only sustainability in its raw green sense, but the social, personal and even spiritual issues that go along with it.

In fact, few projects had sustainability as their raison d’etre; the need for sustainable living, working and playing was taken as a given and the projects seemed, by and large, to be exploring from that basis new ideas and proposing new solutions for a naturally sustainable – by which we mean ethical as well – way of life.

Examples: (forgive me, I’ll quote a few, and there isn’t room to explain everything in detail, or publish pictures of all) Edward Rose on the RCA IDE course’s TakeMe Home project, which enables users of the London transport network – especially buses – to navigate complex journeys with the minimum of hand-held technology or prior knowledge. (‘The things that interest me most,’ says Rose, ‘is working with technology but putting it to use with real public benefit.’); Anirudha Venkata’s cycle helmet, using cheap and easily available eco friendly materials (cardboard); and Adam Paterson’s exploration of the global distribution network for products manufactured with components from all over the world and then redistributed to consumer outlets.

‘Millions of products are sent across the world every hour of every day,’ says Paterson. ‘How can design be used to remove, reduce or facilitate these journeys?’ Right on Adam, says I: this is what design should be doing for us in this day and age. We’ve accepted the need for sustainable living; now we have to really think hard to redesign our systems.

Maximo Riadigos’s ‘Biodegrade’ project, is another one which deals with ‘soft’ issues like our perception of/relationship with waste. ‘If waste is such a valuable resource,’ asks Maximo, ‘how can we redesign our relationship with it?’

Quick look at Design Products at the RCA, especially Platform 6, taught by MichaelMarriott and Luke Pearson. There was some seriously challenging (read ‘incomprehensible’) stuff here, but I guess on Michael and Luke’s ‘platform’ the students found themselves influenced by the profound understanding of craft and process – and love for materials – held by both these estimable designers.

My fave was Seongyong Lee’s ‘tubular aeroply’, which I thought was more interesting than the little stools he made with it. It is essentially using the same angled rolling process with 0.8mm ply that makes cardboard tubes. You end up with incredibly light and incredibly strong tubular components made of – as long as you have the adhesives right – proper sustainable materials. This is a process looking for a product, and it will surely find one. Or more.

Last word before we move on, about the RCA threesome whose website is designoutwaste.com, Adam Paterson (again), Matthew Laws and Rich Gilbert. Their trio of toasters, designed to focus attention on the different routes by which we may overcome the manufacturing conundrum – we must make stuff but must also make it go away more easily and speedily than ever before – has already caught the pundits’ attention.

The Realist uses already current ideas of manufacturing for disassembly, complete with a new snap-fit mechanism that makes disassembly easier not just for this product, but a whole range; The Pragmatist is made of modular components which are disassembled by the consumer and sent back for repair or replacement (Paterson, Laws and Gilbert claim this saves a product from landfill nine times over); and The Optimist is made of recycled aluminium but heavily engineered to last and also to be disassembled and actually repaired by the consumer. It also has a counter to tell you how many times it has been used, a contribution to the idea of a ‘product life story’ which enables the user to develop a relationship with the product itself.

Seriously thoughtful and insightful design approach to the problems that face us all, and my hot tip for the next round of awards.

It also brings us neatly to some of my personal highlights at New Designers. With my own background in furniture design and making, it has always been my habit to look at furniture first. This year I barely gave it a glance. Interesting thinking is just not happening with people who haven’t yet asked themselves: ‘Do we really need another chair’? Which makes it all the more curious that we start with a chair – from Guido Garotti, at Sheffield.

His oak-seated, metal-framed, suedebacked piece was not all that good looking in the conventional sense. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that Guido had been thinking about that long-term relationship with a product, ‘emotionally durable design’.

His chair is full of little tweaks and moves that make it possible for the user to customise, alter, adjust, refine, according to their own taste. The sort of chair that we may indeed need, because over time it can be three or four or more chairs, all in one.

I saw a lot of comparatively sophisticated eco thinking; Frank Kawecki (Coventry)’s ‘eco car’, for example, has a finish with green algae embedded in it, which actually put oxygen back in the atmosphere when it is parked. And the ‘social enterprise’ stream was very strong. Becky Barber (Plymouth) was notable here, the self-appointed MD of ‘booenterprise’, which has set up a whole system of designing and manufacturing radios and other consumer items in Madagascar, where her parents have lived for 26 years, for sale in the West – but also for sale on the island itself, where the price is subsidised by the selling price here. Shades of the award-winning Magno wooden radio by Singgih Susilo Kartono – though that, as Barber points out, is mainly for sale in the West, while her idea goes farther.

New Designers was also crawling with bicycle design ideas. Two top mentions: Chris Holloway, at Brunel, whose expanding Link chain ring gives gears without the chain having to jump from cog to cog or mechanical controls Derailleur users will be familiar with; and Kyri Apostolou, from Middlesex, whose Mutant Bikes idea is actually far more about social enterprise than it is about bikes.

It still entails the ‘design it yourself’ theme that seems to be springing up everywhere, but essentially it concentrates on the consumer who can’t afford a bike any other way. Start with a frame then add components, all of which are held in stock, all of which are recycled, repainted, refurbished; but you the would-be owner have to go down there and get your hands dirty, building it with Apostolou and his team. Far-reaching social connotations, and just one of the many encouraging ideas from 2010. At last, we seem to be going in the right direction.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.