London Design Festival. Day #3: West

The best thing about the London Design Festival this year was the small group shows, and they were found in abundance in west London. Best of all, they were accompanied by a swarm of visitors – so for the first time west London managed to create a sense of Milan furniture fair-like excitement, despite the perpetual rain.

First, we started at Translations where a group of Royal College of Art graduates presented new work. Oscar Diaz's Tyvek Flatland lamp was our favourite; the designer stole a technique used to seal padded envelopes: "I like the fact that the edges become somehow the structure," he says. Roger Arquer presented a vase with an elegant but useful funnel extruding from its neck, for replacing rotten plant water, and Simon Donald added a useful attribute to an everyday item by building an ashtray inspired container around a pencil sharpener to catch the shavings.

Donald had more good ideas on show at the Variability exhibition down the road. His neat Nightlight candlestand incorporates a hole on one side for keeping matchsticks, and a rough surface on the other for lighting them. Upstairs in the same building, a show of conceptual work around the theme Objects with a Void was a word of mouth hit. Particularly fun was Study O Portable's Fuzz; the designers painted layers of coloured ceramic resin around a wax vessel to build a form, sliced it in two, and scraped the wax out to create containers. Besides the mysteriously organic shape of the object, the best bit is the exposed layers of coloured resin. We also liked Hiroko Shiratori's beautiful Plate Table made using off-cuts and Max Lamb's Prisms – a series of steel objects with a void that are as useful or useless as your imagination allows.

Apartamento magazine's FoodMarket was a pretty smoky affair – the organisers didn't foresee the problems of cooking underground without an extractor fan – but it didn't stop us hanging around. We liked Jochem Faudet's Shelve systems for growing plants in front of windows (great for city dwellers), and Peter Marigold's light made out of a bulb, fork and sweet potato had a naivety that pulled at the heartstrings.

Down the road Studio Toogood took over an old NCP garage to present its debut collection of furniture all made using traditional craft techniques by local artisans, and an original series of ironmongery cast from scraps and animal bones, in production with architectural hardware manufacturer Izé. The Royal College of Art was also worth a visit; the school put together a selling exhibition of work that it hopes to get into shops (the brainchild of the school's new head Tord Boontje). We were most excited to see some of the more experimental pieces like Marc Owens' Avatar suit get a go on the shop floor.

Lastly, we couldn't leave west London without a visit to the Victoria and Albert museum, where the London Design Festival is camping out for the week. Stuart Haygart put together a striking installation on the stairs using disused picture frames. But Noam Toran and Onkar Kular's show 'I Cling to Virtue' was one of the favourites of the festival. The exhibition uses rapidly prototyped objects, film and artefacts to narrate the rise and fall of the fictional Lövy's – an eccentric east London family of mixed descent. Using objects that vary from the banal (a pair of rubber kitchen gloves), to the nightmarish (a force-feeding tube), the duo tells part of the story, and leaves it to you to fill in the gaps. Anna Bates