RCA 16: Design Products MA
The Royal College of Art presents the next generation of creative talent from its MA degree course in Design Products. Artsthread went along to bring you some of the highlights.
The exhibition displayed a broad range of work as the students reflect on the relationship between contemporary design and the challenges that real-world issues bring.
Jan Libera’s City Trailer for London is a simple cargo trailer borne out of the realisation that many city car journeys, which relate to the transport of goods, could be made by cargo bikes. Libera has made his trailer compatible with the Santander Cycle docking stations around the capital. The aim would be to improve the quality of life within large cities by reducing congestion and both noise and air pollution.
Shoey Shoes is an example of how waste from one industry could be engineered to create a useful product within another. Thomas Leech has looked at using leather off-cuts from the fashion industry to develop a range of children’s shoes; effectively seeking to solve one problem, waste materials from one industry, to solve another. The shoes are manufactured for disassembly so that they can be easily recycled and re-used.
Spector by Fiona O’Leary is a fabulous idea and could be, and hopefully will be, an essential tool for designers or in fact anyone looking to capture inspiration instantly. The Spector is able to translate printed fonts and colours into digital information and send this data immediately to your computer via Bluetooth. So if you see a typeface you like, or a colour you fancy then Spector, with one click of a button, will collect and transfer the data linking with programmes such as InDesign, Pages and Word.
Jane Kim investigates the way cutlery design varies within different cultures and attitudes towards eating and dining. Exploration of Cutlery, Kim’s project, is an attempt to redesign cutlery whilst looking at these attitudes. The prototypes include utensils produced from Sycamore, 3D printed samples and nickel plated cutlery.
We were also delighted with Karen Hu’s Teawith – Electric Kettle and Feast – Portable Cooker.
Image credits for main image: Clockwise from top left: Jan Libera, Jane Kim, Thomas Leech, Fiona O’Leary, Karen Hu.
This review was first published for Arts Thread 19th July 2016