The Design Museum London has chosen OpenStructures as design strategy for their permanent show ‘Future Observatory’. Future Observatory is a national program for design research supporting the UK’s response to the climate crisis. Over the next five years, outcomes of this ongoing program are exhibited in changing displays, hereby using and reconfiguring the OpenStructures based presentation structures that were manufactured locally in the UK.
The Design Museum opted for an entirely novel approach by investing in a modular and extremely lightweight and easy-to-handle scenography that includes not only the display structures, but also reusable light-boxes, signage panels and even storage crates of spare-parts. As a statement, this archive of extra elements for future extensions is placed in the gallery space and staged along-side the exhibits.
The first show of the Future Observatory runs until August 2024 and shows six projects from a wide range such as fashion, food and construction. Amongst them Dunne & Raby with a speculative project on how non-humans creatures view the world and Faber Futures using bacteria dying for textiles.
Acting as both a coordinating hub for the nationwide programme, as well as a research department within the museum, Future Observatory curates exhibitions, programmes events and funds and publishes new research, all with the aim of championing new design thinking on environmental issues. The Design Museum London collaborated with OpenStructures as part of its ambition to redefine what a museum can be: a place not solely focused on the past or the present but one that can help shape the future
Featured works by Cooking Sections, Dark Matter Labs, Dunne & Raby, Faber Futures, HBBE - The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment and Julia King
Photography by Felix Speller
Exhibition design
by OS Studio
London
Nov 2023
