Nature-led futures explored by the Design Museum

An art-led exhibition exploring whether a more nature-friendly future is possible has opened at the Design Museum, and it’s very artistic but also not particularly practical.

Finding ways of developing man-made things in a less environmentally damaging way – and eventually, even a friendly way – is a critical task and exceptionally important. Awkwardly, this is not a science or commerce-led exhibition, but one by artists and conceptualists.

There’s a lot here that sounds very nice indeed, until you think, can it be scaled up to a commercial product? It’s all very well making headresses from windfall objects, but if a retailer says, “Amazing, can we have 5,000 of them?” then the answer will be, by their very design, going to be “no”.

Likewise, with a lot of the artisanal items on display. We all want these handmade, low-impact products, but few of us earn the salaries that would be necessary to afford them.

This is the issue I have with the exhibition: it’s worthy, uplifting, idealistic, and almost totally impractical.

An organic wall covering for buildings is a good idea – but would likely be ripped off after a few years when the building maintenance team get fed up with trying to stop it falling to bits in the UK weather.

While I can say the exhibition can act as a catalyst for thinking about humanity’s impact on the environment, I personally found the lack of practical applications somewhat frustrating. There were some, such as making glass more visible to birds to prevent them from flying into it, but most of the ideas were too outlandish to be realistic.

Show me the good stuff that’s actually making a difference, or at least has been designed to be commercially viable if they can find buyers.

I want to see the sort of things that could appear on the shelves of the local supermarket at realistic prices. The sort of thing that I can walk out of the exhibition saying “I shall switch to that product when I go shopping tonight”. Novel materials that are both biodegradable and practical for storing orange juice won’t excite the artists, but I would be bouncing with excitement if I saw that in the exhibition and was told a major supermarket has just agreed to switch to using them.

That’s uplifting and motivational and makes a practical difference.

Sadly, while the exhibition is aesthetically interesting, I didn’t leave feeling that I had learned anything substantial about what anyone is doing to make a practical difference to the world.