Designing the future

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Shahidha Bari looks at British design pioneers Enid Marx, Edward Bawden and Charles Rennie Mackintosh with curators Alan Powers and James Russell and design historian Eleanor Herring. 2018 New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen visits The Future Starts Here at the V&A.

Alan Powers is the author of a new book Enid Marx:The Pleasures of Pattern and is curating an exhibition at the House of Illustration in London Print, Pattern and Popular Art which runs from May 25th to September 23rd 2018

James Russell has curated Edward Bawden which runs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from May 23rd to September 9th 2018 and he is the author of The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden.

Eleanor Herring is interested in making, writing, teaching and talking about design with as broad an audience as possible. She is the author of Street Furniture Design: Contesting Modernism in Post-War Britain.

The Future Starts Here runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until 4th November.

Mackintosh 150 marks the anniversary of the birth of Glaswegian architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Exhibitions include Making the Glasgow Style at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum until August 14th. His Oak Room will go on display when the V&A Dundee opens in September. Plus a new Mackintosh interpretation centre opens at The Mackintosh House, a series of film screenings is at The Lighthouse and exhibitions at Glasgow School of Art and other venues.

Lisa Mullen is the Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and one of the 2018 New Generation Thinkers in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello, I'm Shah Hadabari.
0:33.6	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
0:42.3	If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
0:49.3	And while you're there, please rate and review us. It will help other people find us too.
0:53.3	This is the BBC. Hello, have
0:58.2	nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, declared the
1:04.0	radical Victorian designer William Morris. And beauty and utility were also the principles of
1:09.7	mid-century modern design. In today's
1:12.0	program we discussed the artists and illustrators who literally designed the fabric of post-war
1:16.9	Britain and we reflect on the legacy of Charles Rennie McIntosh 150 years after his birth.
1:23.6	If all that makes you want to settle into an elegant Ames chair with your feet up on a G-plan table,
1:28.3	spare a thought for us collectors of cast-offs and bric-a-brac.
1:32.3	New generation thinker Lisa Mullen examines junk shop Gothic, the uncanny life of inanimate objects.
1:39.3	We dusted Lisa off and sent her to the VNA too to find out about utopian technologies at their show,
1:45.6	The Future Starts Here.
1:47.6	We're starting with the past, though, because the question of how to design useful and
1:52.1	beautiful things in an age of technological transformation was also one that preoccupied
1:57.4	artists Edward Borden and Enid Marx in the early 20th century.
2:02.1	Their work emerged just as the machines of mass production had begun to blur the boundary
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.