Design Festival


design process, as with their ‘Make for London’ campaign, PF’s work was scrutinised more and the output in terms of products and enjoyment was greater. Perhaps PF’s most intriguing and elaborate production was an entire flat-packed interior for Café Sonja in Vienna. Using intricate designs and the full potential of the laser cutter, 7 tables, 22 chairs, 1 counter top and 8 reflectors were made and flown to site then assembled ready for Vienna Design Week.


Mechanical/Materials ‘The Power of Making’ exhibition at the V&A was absolutely heaving with people and it was also packed full of displays from traditional crafts to state of the art machines that can make other machines.


The Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop in Teshie, Ghana design and sculpt wooden coffins into all manner of shapes and sizes, from Coke bottles to hotrods. On display was a lion with all the intricacy you would expect from a very expensive ornament, crafted into a casket. The Design Coffins are symbolic of African artistry and are either made from a light wood Wawa or a heavier African mahogany Limba, depending upon whether they are destined for overseas.


Hexapod robots by Micromagic Systems are built from kits containing laser cut body parts, servos, motors and control electronics. However, these insect-like robots are not just toys and small milling tools have been attached to their heads enabling them to act as robotic CNC machines. The Hexapods were building parts from plastic billets with incredible accuracy and they even cleaned up afterwards.


One of the most interesting things about engineering design is materials and I was lucky enough to get my hands on some brand new smart materials at the 100% Design expo at Earl’s Court. Particularly impressive was Bare Conductive’s Bare Paint, the first nontoxic, electrically conductive paint available to consumers. The water soluble paint is designed for anybody with an interest in electronics who wants to paint circuits onto almost any surface including textiles. Co-founder Roger Ashby demonstrated to me how you can create textile keyboards, paint-able electronic instruments and a touch sensitive lamp with the circuit painted directly onto the base. Even the business card I was given has a circuit on it, silk-screen printed with Bare


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Paint. Bare Conductive has already won a string of awards including two Editor’s Choice awards at Maker Faire New York 2011. I’m sure these small pots of carbon based, black paint will become a shimmering household name in years to come.


Architecture/Structural The most grandiose installation I saw during the festival was the Timber Wave, a stunning three dimensional latticework spiral, built from oil-treated American red oak. This project began 18 months prior in 2010 when the London Design Festival and American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) asked Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A) and Arup to produce a design demonstrating the strength and beauty of American red oak, an abundant timber, underused in Europe.


I spoke with Alice Blair, Andrew Lawrence and Lee Franck from Arup about the challenges facing a self supporting, 12 metre high timber frame which brings the V&A entrance out onto the street.


Q. With a strong motivation for the use of timber, how did the initial design process go?


A. The thing about wood is it’s easy to machine and red oak is dense and strong, so the structure was really to show off the material.


AL_A had the idea of wrapping something around and the concept design was ready in March 2011. So if you have this complex shape twelve metres high, how do you actually make it stand up? We created a strong scheme that uses the bent timber elements (about 600) to make an efficient structure, which is non-obtrusive, so we could then play around with the shape much more freely.


Q. Would you say with the brief being quite firm, that the design process was more rapid than usual?


A. I think everything was pretty much accelerated. We normally work on buildings and this was different, with a fixed deadline (opening day) and a container arriving with


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