What to see at London Design Festival 2023

With new destinations Battersea, Fitzrovia and and Dalston to Stokey, the annual London Design Festival returns from 16-24 September, spanning a record 13 districts to celebrate the best this creative capital has to offer. Here’s our picks of what to discover over the impressive city-wide programme.

London Design Fair

Based within the iconic Truman Brewery in Shoreditch, London Design Fair (21-24 Sept) is the event for exploring cutting-edge design, brands, makers, pavilions and galleries. Throughout this year’s edition, attendees can expect a comprehensive lineup of industry talks as well as the latest sustainability offerings from lead designers.

For this year’s concept space, creative duo 2LG will present a series of new pieces that re-imagine existing connections in the design world. Entitled ‘You Can Sit With Us’, a 14-seat dining table will feature different designers showcasing their work, with the centre designed and fabricated by Smile Plastics.

A comprehensive speaker programme features Mix Interiors managing editor, Harry McKinley, taking to the LDNdesign Talks Stage at 12:30 on 21^st Septmeber to ask, ‘are we still designing dangerously?’. McKinley will be joined by director of Citizens Design Bureau Katy Marks, principal at White Arkitekter Michael Woodford, and artists and designers Simone Brewster and Adam Nathaniel Furman. The five will question if originality is dead, where the line is on being overly reliant on ‘safe’ ideas and if the future demands radical new perspectives.

Trade tickets are free and available to book now.

londondesignfair.co.uk

Spirit of Place

Designer and educator Simone Brewster will present ‘Spirit of Place’ at Strand Aldwych, an installation of five large-scale sculptural vessels. Created in collaboration with the world’s largest cork producer, Amorim, the family of objects will range in size up to 2.5 metres, representing the company’s cork forest at at Herdade de Rio Frio in Portugal. This is Brewster’s first time working with versatile and sustainable material: “we’re not using cork to its full potential. If we use it for more architectural purposes, we’re essentially helping fight against some of the key issues of our generation, like global warming.”

Aura

At St Paul’s Cathedral, London Design Festival in association with Artichoke will present ‘Aura’ by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena, marking the tercentenary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death. A live installation, Aura will transform the music, sounds and voices present in the cathedral into a pulsating, three-dimensional line of light projected at an architectural scale.

The Localist Café

In Shoreditch, ‘The Localist Café’ by Six Dots Design will create a working café, inviting visitors to enjoy a coffee and a bite surrounded by design pieces by over 40 UK creatives and makers from across the UK, supported by Buckley Gray Yeoman.

Design enthusiasts will be able to experience an eclectic mix of objects from the likes of Common Design, Matan Fadida, and Fred Rigby Studio – from chairs made in Peckham, cutlery made in Walthamstow, and crockery made in Elephant and Castle.

Nice to Meet You Again

Artist Morag Myerscough has partnered with MINI to unveil an immersive installation at Shoreditch Electric Light Station. Head to ‘Nice to Meet You Again’ at Shoreditch Electric Light Station for a programme of talks that delve into the installation – celebrating the power of human connection, the circular design movement and the future of urban design.

Global Design Forum

An extensive programme of thought-leadership returns to V&A Museum, this year hosting daily keynotes on topics including regenerative futures, new possibilities in digital design, identity and inclusivity, and design to shape behaviour and connecting communities – with speakers including Jonas Pettersson, co-founder of Form Us With Love and Jaimus Taylor, founder of Greater Goods.

Out of this world

In the new Fitzrovia Design District, Charles Burnand Gallery will present ‘Planet Rock’ – a futuristic reinterpretation of everyday materials featuring new works by Dawn Bendick, Labaye/Sumi, Den Holm, Matthew Nunn, and Studio Furthermore. Imagining a future where people no longer look to plastics and man-made polymers, Planet Rock explored what the design landscape could look like where society is ‘forced to be creative through re-appropriation and re-cycling.’

Old stool, new tricks

Tokyo-based architect Daisuke Motogi’s research project and exhibition ‘Hackability of the Stool’ will be on display inside the Vitra and Artek Tramshed showroom in Shoreditch, London. Developed by the designer and his studio DDAA Lab, visitors can expect to see 100 iterations of Alvar Aalto’s iconic Stool 60.

A pinnacle in modernist design, Aalto’s archetypal wooden stool was deemed ‘the perfect choice’ due to its wooden materiality, easy assembly process and it being stackable. Now, Artek’s simplistic three and four-legged stool has been overhauled in various creative ways. A chessboard, xylophone and vinyl record player are just some of the items used to transform the stool while other modifications include removing part of the leg or seat, resulting in charming and distinctive shapes

Sweating the small stuff

For residents of London, the Thames River is the most essential source of tap water for 70% of their lives. At Bankside Design District, ‘Microplastics in the Thames River Project’ is a data visualization design project based on a plastics dataset created by data visualisation designers Lu Zheng and Jinxiu Chen. The project exploreds microplastic pollution in high-density areas along the river over six months, using the Thames as an observation point and a location for collecting samples. These objects were remade in resin, which retains all traces of the microplastics in our lives.

Material matters

Returning to all five floors across the iconic OXO Tower Wharf at Bankside Design District, Materials Matters will showcase the latest innovative materials and insight from leaders in design and architecture. Acoustics partner The Collective has worked with MCM to produce this year’s talks space called ‘Metamorphosis’. This acoustic installation is made solely from waste EchoPanel® PET offcuts, using layers and colours to blend into one another from various positions in the room, offering each visitor different forms and perspectives. Highlights from an ample talks programme include a panel session led by The Furniture Practice, with a focus on the furniture industry, and the challenges and potential of data to drive sustainability.

All together now

Brompton Design District has commissioned All in Awe to develop an installation at Egerton Gardens in response to Brompton’s theme ‘Conviviality – The Art of Living Together’, curated by Jane Withers Studio.

Across the festival week, All Together will bring groups of local residents together to participate in making the installation itself and in charity-led community activations. The result will be a temporary monument to the subject of loneliness, drawing attention to this common problem, as well as an antidote – engaging local communities and providing a space for interaction and togetherness.

This year’s Districts are Bankside, Battersea, Brompton, Chelsea, Dalston to Stokey, Fitzrovia, Greenwich Peninsula, Islington, Kings Cross, Mayfair, Park Royal, Shoreditch and Southwark. Find out more about this year’s festival and plan your visit at londondesignfestival.com