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Consuming Design -- The Thomas Heatherwick Conran Foundation Collection
By Human Beans

Every year, Sir Terrence Conran gives £30,000 to a designer to spend on 'the things you'd like to live with,' and their selection is exhibited at the Design Museum, London. In recent years we've seen the likes of Marc Newson, Jasper Morrison and Droog indulge heavily on stylish homeware, chairs by named designers and minimalist hifi’s - the kind of stuff everyone understands to be 'design' and exactly what you’d expect to find in a ‘design’ museum.


This year, on the 10th anniversary of the collection, Thomas Heatherwick was handed the cheque and he’s done something quite different with it. Never one to make life easy for himself or his studio, Heatherwick has filled a whole floor of the building with nearly 1000 ‘ingenious inventions’—objects from around the world that have taken the last year to source.



If there is one thing common to Heathwick’s approach—whether he’s designing furniture, architecture or installations—it’s his sheer ambition in scale and complexity. The sculpture ‘B of the Bang’ to be completed this year in Manchester will be the UK’s tallest sculpture. Also scheduled to open this year in London is a river bridge, that, instead of lifting or swinging to let boats through, will actually roll up.


Unlike the usual Conran collection, Heatherwicks’ is not one of ‘high’ design, but a collection of consumer curiosities from around the world. The majority of the exhibits are mass-produced and inexpensive. As a whole they explore the far reaches of consumer culture and the boundlessness of human creativity as expressed through such curiosities as eyelid glue, magnetic paint, a Kebab Catcher, canned plants, a mooncup and a worm cutter.


Adjustable pastry strip cutter, humour for parents, battery-opperated spraying fan and device to adapt hard hat's for winter use.



The objects in the show keep visitors absorbed for hours, yet there is neither grand narrative nor themes to aid understanding. You have to ask, why is this stuff so compelling, and why has it drawn in people who wouldn’t normally come to see ‘design’ in a museum?


Welding masks with character, Stand up urination device for women, Anti-snoring devices and cat-shaped catflap.



Removed from their context and displayed in cabinets at a ‘museum,’ these objects go through a change of status. They are no longer only about cutting pastry or peeing on the move, they tell the viewer stories about value systems from unfamiliar contexts, and they do so eloquently through the universal language of consumption.

In fact this is an exhibition about consumption—and that makes it a lot more interesting than a show about design. Thinking about consumption tells us about people and the way they live their lives in the real world. Too often what's exhibited as ‘design’ only tells us about designers. Heatherwick’s collection says much more about the state of the world today than the latest Vitra furniture ever will (which might explain why the Vitra museum offered to host the show in the future).


Cuddly bacteria and viruses, big lolly, Japanese cleaning booties and ergonomic feeding bowls for tall dogs.



To watch visitors peering into the cabinets of curiosities is to watch a species trying to understand itself, through the products it produced and the markets it’s created. In the same way Victorian explorers stole or shot specimens to exhibit in England in order to understand their expanding world, Heatherwick has plundered the riches of consumer culture to exhibit for us a menagerie of interesting products that tell us about today’s homo-consumer.

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The Thomas Heatherwick Conran Foundation Collection runs until the 21st March at the Design Museum, London and an international tour is planned.

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Human Beans think, draw and write from their home base of London.