London Design Festival 2023: Our highlights

This year, LEGO partnered up with online design publication It’s Nice That to create the LEGO Piece Garden, a space for immersing yourself in the creativity of LEGO.

“The space felt tactile and calming when we visited, there were moss-covered mounds which were dotted with vibrant LEGO flowers and flower wall where guests could display the flowers made in the workshop,” says Claire Money, designer, StudioXAG.

The workshop allowed people of all ages to have a moment of pause and escape from their day to flex their imagination and build something creative. Each flower made was bespoke to the individual, even if two people received the same brief card, their creations would be completely different – just like nature.

StudioXAG’s in-house Green Team were super excited for this one. Material Matters took over all four floors of the Bargehouse along the Southbank to showcase a huge range of innovative and sustainable materials.

Two of our designers, Yi-Hwa and Eleni, explored displays of hemp and potato starch furniture, a playful installation that highlighted the impact of UV radiation in purple hues and a whole floor curated by Isola Design featuring inventive creations from cremation urns handmade from natural materials such as charcoal and coffee to a biofabricated lighting collection that is grown using hemp and mycelium.

“I was also intrigued by the recycled aluminium by Norwegian brand Hydro who had collaborated with a designer to make a material that uses 95% less energy than when producing it for the first time – and it looked great!” says Yi-Hwa Lin.

StudioXAG’s co-founder and creative director Gemma’s top highlight was Dan Tobin Smith’s installation, the Letter C Collapse from his Alphabetical Series.

As you walked from left to right, the glass bottles were inverted by a dark screen, unveiling the letter C amongst the shapes. A big reveal using design techniques can create big WOW moments and we love a surprise.

Designers Alice and Annabel visited the Are You Mad recycling centre in Soho, where the team displayed objects and furniture made from local plastic waste. Everything in the store is made of their own plastic experiments, all housed in beautiful, colourful scaffolding.

They were taken into the workshop where they saw the new materials Are You Made are creating, with new types of plastics they can recycle and what exciting storytelling they can bring to their products going forward, using CD’s and DVD’s to create beautiful shiny pieces.

“It was really interesting to learn about how the different plastics could be mixed together to create new colours but that it is also possible to dye the plastic with pigments to create wacky patterns – watch this space!”

A staple of the London Design Festival, the London Design Fair in Truman Brewery showcased a whole range of products and materials, including a new exhibition featuring reused or repurposed materials. The collection allowed visitors to see materials in their raw form and then as a finished product within the exhibitors space.

There was also a concept space, You Can Sit With Us, a pinnacle message of inclusivity and identity. The collection of chairs are made from a group of established and emerging designers using a wide selection of disciplines and materiality, such as wood work, waste fashion material and paper pulp.

Amongst a maze of stalls, we also found a beautiful use of natural materials, showcasing the flexibility that cork can take, creating a large-scale impactful space and an installation for Flora & Fauna using cardboard and clever cardboard engineering.

Designers from the XAG team also visited the V&A’s Harnessing the Possibilities of AI talk featuring a panel of: Ali Eslami, a research scientist at Google DeepMind; Kadine James, Global Head of Generative AI Artificial Rome & Founder artistic director at Immersive KIND; and Ben Ditto, Creative Director at YAYA labs, previously CD at Dazed Beauty.

Each practitioner discussed how they work with AI in various ways and the leaps and bounds that technology has made from AI models recognising images of horses back in 2005 to what software such as midjourney and Dall-E can do now – it really got us thinking about what the next few years could hold and how we could incorporate them into our own practice.

Kadine in particular is working on how AI can reimagine the highstreet and what the future of a concept store could look like. She believes “these tools enhance our practice, they are not going to take over or make things instead of us.”