Designers in Residence 2014: Disruption

10 September 2014 – 8 March 2015

Discover the design stars of the future. in 2014, James Christian, Ilona Gaynor, Torsten Sherwood and Patrick Stevenson-Keating responded to the theme of Disruption by exploring future housing, judicial system loopholes, construction as play and the financial systems.

Designers in Residence is about more than good design, or even innovation in design. It is about creating time and space in the form of a seven-month residency — and giving four UK-based designers a period of reflection, research and critical rigour away from their normal routine.

In its seventh year, Designers in Residence invited young designers to respond to a brief set by Deyan Sudjic, the Director of the Design Museum. For 2014, this theme is disruption. “More than most, ‘disruptive’ is a term whose meaning is dependent on the context,” says Deyan. “It’s conventionally considered almost a bad thing — difficult pupils, bad neighbours, ill-considered town planning — it is now the most sought after quality in a new product.”

The four works that formed the Designers in Residence exhibition all had disruption at their core, yet each designer took a markedly different approach.

Listen to James Christian, one of the residents, share his thoughts on the theme of disruption:

What was in the exhibition?

James Christian aims to disrupt the state of inertia that afflicts current British housing design by drawing inspiration from past failed housing schemes, while Ilona Gaynor disrupts the judicial system, exposing its loopholes to facilitate the staging of an illegal event. Scrutinising mechanical detail, Torsten Sherwood disrupts conventional building systems to create a new kind of children's construction toy, and Patrick Stevenson-Keating has created several new financial products as a way of highlighting our normally passive role within the global economic system — and how we could use the most mundane of financial transaction as a force for good.

What unites them all is a desire to push boundaries and ask questions of visitors to the Design Museum that neither designer nor audience may have answers ready for.