In London, designers play with the future

The Design Museum in London is helping five young designers with innovations in art

Anyone who thinks the future looks grim should go immediately to the Design Museum here, where five young designers in residence have worked for the past seven months on ways to make life better.

The programme’s theme this year was “Support,” and the designers’ ideas on the subject have ranged from creating robots to establishing permanent addresses for the homeless. In turn, the programme helps the designers.

“We work with designers at the start of their careers, supporting them and providing a platform for them and helping forge their careers,” said Margaret Cubbage, a museum curator who has been responsible for the programme for the last seven of its 10 years. To qualify for it, designers had to have left school within the last five years and been working for at least one year.

The five selected designers have been using a 710-square-foot studio at the museum — the first time it was available, thanks to the museum’s move a year ago from south of the Thames to larger quarters in the Kensington neighbourhood.

They received advice from lawyers, business people and other designers. Through the Arts Council of England, they each received £6,000 ($8,000) for their projects’ production costs and an additional £8,000 for future use. And, with no bosses to please or formal deadlines to meet, they have been calling the shots.

Their final projects, which range from products to concepts, are on display through March 31 — although all five say they hope their efforts will continue to grow. The next group of designers in residence is to move into the studio in April.

Soomi Park, 36, has created a robot — but not just any robot, an “embarrassed robot,” she said.

Park has a master’s degree in digital media design and is working on her doctorate in media and arts technology at Queen Mary, University of London, an institution that has been researching robots. She has seen that the emphasis is on making robots move and look like humans, “but not on how they behave, on complex emotional reactions like embarrassment.”

Throughout her residence, Park has invited museum visitors to stop peering through the studio’s floor-to-ceiling windows, step inside and participate. She has been asking: “What does an embarrassed robot look like?”

And then, helping themselves from a box of coloured pens, masking tape, feathers, balloons, Play-Doh, scissors and glue, the visitors have created robots of their own, reflecting their ideas about embarrassment and what causes it (unzipped pants, being late and so on).

Park’s own creation was considerably more sophisticated, with a dome-like head of silicone that turns pink with embarrassment, and generates heat. A fan circling the head then engages to cool the robot, or turns outward to cool embarrassed onlookers.

“I want to support robots, to help them fit into society,” she said. “And I want to support humans as well, helping them live with robots.”

Not every project is as tactile. Research by Chris Hildrey, 33, has shown that it is almost impossible to qualify for governmental or organisational services once a person is homeless. At the root of the problem: the lack of a permanent address.

“Without an address,” Hildrey said, “a person cannot access any social security benefits, including housing, jobseeker’s allowance, child tax credit, income support, et cetera. Nor can they open a bank account, get a driver’s license or join a library — the latter also providing public internet access. With no address history, there is also no financial history, preventing any future access to credit.

“As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar says: ‘Without an address, you live outside the law. You might as well not exist.’ ” However, Mr. Hildrey said, there actually are thousands of unused addresses in London, or in any large city — for example, those of abandoned buildings or empty stores. A proxy address could be permanent, and have “no stigma attached to it,” he said, “unlike using the address of a homeless shelter.”