form us with love's prototypa forum explores design ideation and direction

during london design festival 2017, form us with love’s ‘prototypa’ exhibition acts as a forum for physical ideations, as opposed to finished products. hosted at somerset house, a seven-day series of talks, workshops and displays explore the direction of design with a key focus on the clash between craft and machine.

all images courtesy of form us with love

in collaboration with swedish design moves, the grand award of design, formex nova, visit sweden and the swedish embassy london, form us with love’s ‘prototypa’ follows previous exhibitions held in stockholm and milan in early 2017. for london design festival 2017, the platform evolves into a more extensive program, welcoming electronics company teenage engineering, design studio veryday, TID watches, shift design & strategy, beckmans college of design, design flooring brand bolon, and studio dejawu to communicate their own perceptions of design direction, each on a different day during the week.

on the first day, teenage engineering offer an honest conversation around the making of their second generation portable synthesizer, ‘OP-Z’, with engineer thomas howard revealing ambitions, constraints and his disappointment with 3D printers lack of communicative feedback.

on the second day, veryday design consultancy lead an insightful participatory session on how to transition design objects to services through prototyping. setting a brief around the experience of a bus ride for swedish public transport, the workshop participates with reenactments of local trips and sustainable rides to fully exercise imagination and the parameters for designing an experience.

TID watches host a prototyping keynote with designers jonas pettersson and allon libermann, and the brand CEO ole e. bernestål on the third day. the dialogue unfolds both creative and business interpretations of ‘exploring matter’, which is a new prototyping method introduce new materials to a conservative watch industry.

image © designboom

on the fourth day, shift design & strategy discuss a twelve-year-long prototyping journey that realized the handheld ACX power ascender. this product is an easy-to-use, vertical motor-ride designed for accessing lightweight work on buildings, bridges, towers and other high-rise structures.

image © designboom

beckmans college of design conducts a session with graduates and students sara sjöbeck, isa andersson and ida björses on the fifth day, who share the essence of prototyping with an ultimate design survival toolkit. it follows the college’s brief on ‘designing away from the desk’ and in turn, a proposed result of the future of an off-site, constantly travelling, design practice.

image © designboom

on the sixth day, klara persson and petra lundblad from bolon introduce prototypes made using new techniques and materials in order to showcase possible futures of both commercial and domestic flooring. the creatively-led exhibition also explores how best to develop designs within a circular economy.

on the seventh and final day, studio dejawu presents a reflection on prototyping as a translation tool by qian jiang. like a creative journey, the presentation discusses how material choices and techniques also inform his process of balancing influences from east and west.

image © designboom