Asian innovation to the fore in show of year’s best designs
An astronaut’s boot grown from fungus and human sweat, urban micro parks, earthquake-resistant homes – the Design Museum of London highlights the best new innovations, many from Asia
David Bowie’s space boot? What else could it be?
This was, after all, the final frontier: the last room in the Design Museum of London accommodating the “Beazley Designs of the Year 2018” exhibition. And the undoubted star of this section was a boot, created with Mars in mind; and rather than being manufactured, it was grown. From fungus. And human sweat.
“How does that sound?” asks design critic and guest curator Aric Chen, eyebrow raised, as he conducts an individual tour. “Here the designers [OurOwnSkin, with Officina Corpuscoli] are exploring the boundless possibilities of mushrooms and how we might grow what’s needed on a long journey to Mars … just by being gross.”
The idea underpinning the “Growing a MarsBoot” project is that if any of humanity’s much mooted missions to Mars were launched, room for essential supplies would be extremely limited. Enter mycelium – which also stars elsewhere in the exhibition as a load-bearing building block – the vegetative part of a fungus that develops tough, branchlike networks. The same method used to grow a MarsBoot could allow astronauts to produce all manner of provisions from only a few original spores.
All the exhibits are competing for prizes, and there’s much more to the 11th iteration of the Beazley awards than just mushrooms, magic or otherwise. They have been nominated, Chen says, by “invited editors, curators, journalists, critics, designers and manufacturers – meaning design experts – from around the world”.
