Going 3D

Autumnal table at Hill House — *Autumnal table and chair at Hill House*

*My headphones put to good use – the thumb is her father’s*

Eduardo Paolozzi's Head of Invention outside the Design Museum — *Eduardo Paolozzi’s Head of Invention outside the Design Museum*

A delightful visit to see the Elkingtons of Little Rissington on 3-4 December, dropping in to seer the Palmers of Icomb at the same time. Then off to Paris for several days via the Eurostar for a meeting of the EcoVadis Scientific Committee: fascinating. But Paris wreathed in pollution, with alternate number plates banned for the day.

Otherwise the past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blizzard, with a torrent of meetings, flurries of Skype calls, various planning sessions for 2017, the landing by Volans of a very major and wonderful project for next year, the spinning out of a fair few blogs, and a progressive working through of a series of books.

They have included Robert Harris’s Conclave (with a wonderful sting in its tail) and now Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life & Others, which in clues the Story of Your Life story that seeded the new film Arrival, which we saw and I immensely liked last week.

Weirdly, I also enjoyed the new Design Museum a couple of days back, where we had a Volans away evening, though not for the sort of reasons the management presumably had in mind.

Ever since I have since been trying to work out how the Museum could be turned into a truly magnetic draw. The overall feel is passive. Even the gently quivering industrial robot in the Fear & Love Exhibition had suffered a “stroke” and had lost its ability to interact with passers-by. The best idea, at least as far as I was concerned, where the 3-D printed death masks (have been experimenting with a new 3-D OLED TV this week), but somehow they looked like a bunch of things found in Left Luggage.

It’s over 30 years since I visited Paul Watson’s anti-whaling ship Sea Shepherd II in Alexandria, Virginia, so I was pleased to see an exhibit honouring the Seas Shepherds. But again it all seemed a bit of a jumble.

Here’s what the exhibition has to say on the subject: “The graphic designers Metahaven, based in Amsterdam, present a film about the marine wildlife conservation group Sea Shepherd. The film Love Letter to Sea Shepherd, accompanied by a series of highly graphic flags, is a work of advocacy in support of organisation’s anti-whaling activities, but also a meditation on forms of intelligence that we barely understand.”

Having listened to Roger Payne’s hydrographic recordings of whale song for decades, and then the Arrival soundtrack of assorted heptapods last week, I confess the Love Letter would have left me little the wiser had I not known what I was seeing and meant to be experiencing.

After dinner, escaping from the building proved to be quite a challenge, with the main doors shut and nothing to show you had to go through a small door that looked like a staff entrance. Well designed the experience sadly wasn’t.

Struck me in passing that it is exactly 30 years since we did The Green Designer Exhibition at the Design Centre, where in writing the catalogue I waxed lyrical about the “Green Consumer” – and then decided it might be an idea to do a Green Consumer Guide.

No such inspiration at the Design Museum, yet, but maybe I’ll give it another go in a couple of months. In retrospect, probably the best think of all was watching a pair of young girls in jeans racing along the upper floors and skidding along the polished wood on their knees. Not quite what the designers intended, perhaps, but in the spirit of the right sort of future.

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