Bright Young Things

If you were not lucky enough to catch the Royal College of Art’s Design Show, we are afraid you missed another top year from the leading postgraduate art and design school, but not to worry - we at Relay have picked a few highlights for you here on Platform.

As ever, the Department of Communication Art and Design (www.cad2009.rca.ac.uk) produced a vast range of talent. Presented together with an intelligent and stylish exhibition design, which took the form of a colour coded directory. Designed by Jack Gilbey and Jaakko Tuomivaara, using a typeset by graduate Alistair Webb, it reflected the true diversity of the department.

We also particularly liked the designs by Povilas Utovka including fonts Marc and Monika (below).

More excellent print based projects came courtesy from Yoonna Choi including a new publication ‘Place Practice and Ten Dialogues’– an exploration of ten artists negotiating new and foreign environments measured through their work and creative output.

Felix de Pass produced ‘Desk’ – an extruded aluminium and solid wood frame desk with concealed tracks onto which various accessories can be attached – ‘folded sheet aluminium drawers, cable management solutions and privacy screens can all be fitted allowing the elementary desk to adapt and meet the varying needs of the user and situation’.

Meanwhile Min-Kyu Choi displayed the flat-pack plug, an ingenious design transforming the bulky standard UK plug into a practical compact form, taking the slim-line MacBook Air as the standard to be met.

There is also a multi-plug version, allowing three plugs the space and power of one standard UK plug – Check out You Tube for a short film.

Good environmentally and conceptually driven design came from Nitipak Samsen, who produced A.T.R.E.E.M. (Automated Tree-Rental for Emission Encaging Machine). A system allowing users to rent trees to offset their carbon footprint, making intangible CO2 manifest in terms of grams and minutes. Clever, politically minded design.