Meet the designers

OMA / AMO is an international practice, co-founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975. Where OMA operates within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism, AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. In 2004, AMO designed a coloured ‘barcode’ flag, combining the flags of all EU member states.

Hussein Chalayan MBE was born in Nicosia, Cyprus and educated both in Cyprus and England. After graduating from Central Saint Martins with a BA (Honours) degree in Fashion in 1993, Chalayan formed his own fashion house showcasing his twice-yearly collections in highly curated shows that engaged with politically, socially and technologically challenging subjects. He has twice been named British Designer of the Year – in 1999 and 2000– and received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2006. He is design consultant to Parisian heritage brand Vionnet, and is the head professor of the fashion department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Madeline Gannon heads ATONATON, a research studio inventing better ways to communicate with machines. In her research, Gannon designs and implements cutting-edge tools that explore the future of digital making. Her work blends disciplinary knowledge from design, robotics and human-computer interaction to innovate at the edges of digital creativity. Gannon is completing a PhD in Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is developing techniques for digitally designing and fabricating wearables on and around the body.

Kenya Hara is a designer born in 1958. Seeing design as the universal wisdom accrued by society, he works in diverse forms of design strategy and communication. Besides working as the artistic director for Muji and Tsutaya Shoten in Daikanyama, Tokyo, Hara also sees exhibitions as central to his work. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century, Haptic: Awakening the Senses, Tokyo Fiber ’09: Senseware, House Vision and Neo-Prehistory: 100 Verbs. He is a professor at the Department of Science of Design at Musashino Art University, and his book Ex-formation, collecting together ten years of work with his students, was published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2016. His books Designing Design and White have been translated into multiple languages.

Neri Oxman is an architect and designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor and associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and directs the Mediated Matter design research group. Her work looks to nature for practical design solutions across scales, from the micro scale to the building scale, where technology and nature live in harmony. Oxman has been named in Icon magazine’s list of the top twenty most influential architects to shape our future, and selected as one of the 100 most creative people by Fast Company.

Andrés Jaque is the founder of Andrés Jaque Architects and the Office for Political Innovation. He has developed a series of architectural experiments intended to explore design from a political perspective, including ‘IKEA Disobedients’ (2011), which was the first architectural performance ever included in the collection of MoMA (New York), and ‘Superpowers of Ten’ (2015), a performance based on the narrative and ideas of Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film Powers of Ten. He is professor of Advanced Architectural Design at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and visiting professor at Princeton University School of Architecture.

Since 2010, Bogotá-based architecture collective Arquitectura Expandida has explored self-building processes, both architectural and social, within public and community spaces. It works as a think tank, devoted to research around community building and the right to the city. The projects involve citizens, communities and other collectives interested in the cultural, social, political and infrastructural management of the city. The interventions assume various scales, scopes and durations, but always address the immediate needs of the community.

In 2005, the Chinese Government announced its plan to urbanize half of the country’s remaining 700 million rural citizens by 2030. In the same year, Joshua Bolchover and John Lin set up Rural Urban Framework (RUF), a research and design collaboration based at the University of Hong Kong. Conducted as a non-profit organization providing design services to charities and NGOs, RUF has built, or is currently engaged in, various projects in diverse villages throughout China and Mongolia. Their research explores the links between social, economic and political processes and the physical transformation of each village. Their projects integrate local and traditional construction practices with contemporary technologies.

Metahaven was founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. They first collaborated on a speculative visual design for the Principality of Sealand, an unrecognized mini-state on a former military structure in the North Sea that tried to reinvent itself as an internet-hosting platform. This led to the publication of Uncorporate Identity (2010), a book that, according to the New York Times, ‘questions the purpose and value of design in a neurotic and treacherous era of geopolitical instability’. Its successor, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013), examines internet memes as a contemporary tactic of political protest. In 2011, Metahaven created a collection of scarves and T-shirts in support of WikiLeaks that has been widely published.

Ma Ke is one of China’s most influential designers. In 2006, she founded the Wuyong Design Studio. Today, Wuyong has become a social enterprise, committed to the continuation and innovation of traditional Chinese handicrafts. In 2008, Ma Ke became the first Chinese designer to show at Paris Fashion Week, and her work has subsequently been shown around the world. In 2014, she opened the Wuyong Living Space in Beijing, for handmade products that encourage harmony with nature. A film featuring Ma Ke’s work, by director Jia Zhangke, was awarded the Best Documentary Award at the sixty-fourth Venice Film Festival.

Christien Meindertsma explores the life of products and raw materials. Through design, she aims to regain an understanding of processes rendered invisible by industrialization. For her first book, Checked Baggage (2004), Christien purchased a container filled with a week’s worth of objects confiscated in Schiphol Airport after 9 / 11. She meticulously categorized and photographed all 3,267 items. For her second book, PIG 05049 (2007), she used photographs to document the extensive array of products generated from the various parts of a single, anonymous pig. This book reveals lines that link raw materials with producers, products and consumers that have become invisible in a globalized world. Her work has been exhibited in MoMA (New York), the V&A (London) and Cooper Hewitt (New York).

Fear and Love: Reaction to a Complex World runs from the 24 November 2016 – 23 April 2017. The ambitious opening exhibition presents of eleven new installations by some of the most innovative and thought-provoking designers and architects working today.

Exhibition ticket prices:
£14 adult
£10.50 student/concession
Free for members