On 27th
June, Year 12 girls took a trip to the Design Museum in London as part of their post-AS Activities Week. After a gentle stroll along the Thames,
passing HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge and the Shard, we were able to look at
cutting edge design from around the world.
For example, the entries in the ‘Designs of the Year 2013’ competition
included a ketchup bottle with a non-stick coating to make pouring easier (we
have squeezy containers now anyway!), to the Olympic Cauldron, to adjustable
prescription glasses for poor countries.
Even odder
was the ‘UK Micro Kingdoms’ exhibition, where the UK is divided into four, and
presumably you live in the region that most suits your lifestyle. So, if you want all the power you could ever
use free, then you would have to live on a train that is constantly on the move. It has to keep moving because it has an
on-board nuclear power station and most people do not want to live near one for
long.
The main
strength of the Design Museum, I think, is that it asks you to think about
everyday life in an unusual way and that it asks you to look again at objects
that are so familiar to us that we do not necessarily appreciate the excellence
of their design. One such example might
be the UK system of road signage, to which a corner of the museum was
dedicated. The problem is that they will
all become museum pieces once we are all been transported in self-driving
vehicles, which know their way around.
L Casey
(Sixth Form tutor)