In the Making

Featuring twenty-five objects at London’s Design Museum, the British designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have sought to bring to light the transformation from raw materials to finished product.

Every thing around us has been made. All the stuff that makes up our material everyday has gone through the transformation from raw materials to finished product. Yet whether due to our distance from production or the predominance of mass-produced goods that reveal little of their origins, most of us are ignorant of this alchemical process and how our world is made remains a mystery.

View of the exhibition "In the making" at the Design Museum, London

The British designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have sought to bring to light this lesser side of our material culture through “In the Making”, an exhibition at London’s Design Museum. It features twenty-five objects, from everyday pencils and marbles to designer cutlery and furniture, including a B&B Italia sofa and bentwood Thonet chair, that have been frozen at different stages of their manufacture. The exhibition is billed as a celebration of the beauty of production, curated by a design duo known for their close relationship with the making process.

While the exhibition offers a glimpse into the designers’ practice and interests, this is not some cynical showcase of their own work. Instead, “In the Making” puts manufacture from all over the world in the spotlight – quite literally. In a small darkened room on the Museum’s top floor, objects sit on individually lit black plinths, dazzling in the gloom like precious artefacts. The choice and arrangement of objects, and the decision of the moment to pause their making, was similarly conceived with aesthetics in mind, which has led to an eclectic but engaging array of objects strange for their familiarity and incompleteness. A striking fluorescent yellow rug with cut out geometric shapes – actually a length of the felt used for tennis balls – sits next to the straight tube of a pre-bent French horn, while some sort of extra-terrestrial weapon - or rather a cast brass blank for a mixer tap – jostles for attention with the die cut upper pattern of a football boot. Some of the objects are striking for their proximity to their natural origins, such as the wine cork that has simply been punched out of the bark of a cork oak tree, while others have a simplicity that belies the complexity of the finished product – such as the MacBook Pro’s existence here as a single block of aluminium, frozen before it has completed the 85 processes involved in its manufacture.

Also included are recent examples of the designers’ own work: 2011’s Tip Ton chair for Vitra, the Design of the Year winning 2012 Olympic Torch and a two pound coin commemorating 150 years of the London Underground from last year. In the caption for the latter, the designers describe how until they had designed the coin, they had no idea how its two parts were joined. In this context, their own lack of knowledge and long-held fascination with making makes this self-described attempt to ‘demystify’ production for us an understandable and valuable exercise. Yet in many ways the exhibition has the opposite effect. The beauty of the incomplete objects, with their spotlit isolation and minimal captions, only fetishises them further, rendering them curiosities as unknown as the commodities they become. Where is the context of their making: the dirt and dust of the factory floor, the offcuts and the rejects, the machinery and the makers?

The show’s other elements do pull it back from this problem. At one end of the darkened room are three video screens showing short videos of the production process of all the exhibits. Outside are photographs of all the exhibits, this time captured alongside the finished products they had been destined to become. Before they leave, the visitor can choose to pick up the separate leaflets that have been produced for each of the objects displayed, which give in-depth information about the different processes involved at each stage of the object’s manufacture, a brief history of its production and information on the manufacturer.

Lefta: cricketbat. Rght: felt hat. Photo Gyorgy Korossy

The leaflets were created by Build, the design studio responsible for all of the exhibition’s visual elements. They do much to enrich our understanding of the objects, and it is perhaps unfortunate that the viewer is not armed with these whilst viewing the objects themselves, given the richness of their content. Even taken all together, the leaflets, videos and exhibits still do not show us everything about these objects’ manufacture. Not addressed are the economics of making, the labour conditions and the environmental implications of these processes, factors that should be considered when deciding the merit of an object and its making. Despite these criticisms, “In the Making” is still certainly worth seeing. Barber Osgerby have curated an engaging and inclusive show, and there is a value in seeing these objects incomplete: it tells us that we need to ensure that our knowledge of objects, and their making, is not.

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. Photo Alisa Connan

Until 4 May
In the Making
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London

In the Making

Featuring twenty-five objects at London’s Design Museum, the British designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have sought to bring to light the transformation from raw materials to finished product.

Latest on Design

Latest on Domus