So, it’s the London Design Festival at the moment. I deliberately moved back to London in time to be able to catch some of these shows and events, but really didn’t expect there to be such an overwhelmingly huge amount of stuff happening… and because I’ve had other stuff on I’ve only been able to sample a selection so far.

On Friday I headed to the offices of the Design Council near Covent Garden for a talk on transformation design by RED (see their paper [PDF] from earlier this year). Actually seemed to be more “service design meets participatory design” rather than a revolution-in-the-making, but interesting nevertheless. Then eastwards to Brick Lane and the Truman Brewery for various free exhibitions including [re]design (whimsical and enjoyable, very producty) and designer’s block, which was quite patchy I thought, although I enjoyed the short films in the Oculas and meeting folk from Designers Are Wankers.

Come Monday it was time for the Insight: Innovation through Inclusive Design symposium at RCA, an opportunity to hear about what the HHRC research associates had been doing for the last year – and for some of us maybe consider whether or not to apply for one after graduating.

Right after that was the private view for the Human Frame exhibition, featuring work discussed during the day. I was particularly pleased to see Anab’s work in its final presentation (see pic below), given that I ended up making my world “acting” debut (i.e. with dialogue) in one of her videos, and doing some last-minute electronics hacking for her as well. Anab was lovely to work with and shooting the video was great fun, but I also learned quite a bit watching her working (award-winning film-maker that she is).

I also enjoyed presentations by interaction design alumni Ré and Toke from RADARstation, Florian and Stuart (aka rAndom international) on PixelRoller, and by Cris Bilsland. Had to miss Maja’s presentation unfortunately, due to presentations being in two parallel tracks, but the consensus seemed to be that this was a much better format than previous years, when researchers had been given five minutes to present a year’s work (gak!).

[ And then in the best tradition of British students I ended up down the pub, chatting to several year's worth of interaction design alumni -- easily the highlight of the design festival so far. ]

I’m supposed to be totally immersed in writing my dissertation just now (only one week to hand-in), but one more exhibition I’d like to catch is the Digital Wellbeing Labs show in Chelsea – particularly since they recently got props from Tom Igoe in his WMMNA interview. Although the term “digital lifestyle” just makes me cringe and think of ultra-cheesy billboard ads for Samsung and the like in S.E. Asia, I’m really interested to see what these guys are doing in terms of presenting digital products and (dare I say) Computational Objects in a non-gallery setting.

[ update: Chris O'Shea blogged and snapped DWB's opening last week. I see S&W have been making some more availabots... Good stuff! ]