New Design Museum opens

The Design Museum opened the doors to its new Kensington home last week (Thursday 24 November) with an inaugural exhibition titled ‘Fear and Love’.

The opening exhibition presents 11 installations by some of the most innovative and thought provoking designers and architects working today, including OMA, Hussein Chalayan, Kenya Hara and Neri Oxman.

These newly commissioned works explore a spectrum of issues that define our time, including networked sexuality, sentient robots, slow fashion and settled nomads.

The exhibition shows how design is deeply connected not just to commerce and culture but to urgent underlying issues – issues that inspire fear and love.

Justin McGuirk, chief curator at the Design Museum, said: “When the Design Museum opened in 1989, the first exhibition, Commerce and Culture, was about the value of industrial products. Three decades later, we now take that value for granted. Fear and Love goes further, and proposes that design is implicated in wider issues that reflect the state of the world.”

Now based at the former Commonwealth Institute, the museum was first established in the basement of the V&A by designer Sir Terence Conran and journalist Stephen Bayley.

The museum was moved into a converted banana warehouse at Shad Thames in 1989. Plans for the museum’s relocation commenced following Deyan Sujic’s appointment as director in 2006.

For more information about the Design Museum, go to: www.designmuseum.org