Meet the London Design Museum's 2015 Designers in Residence

Now in its eighth year, the London Design Museum's Designers in Residence program gives four young designers at the start of their careers an opportunity to further develop their work through research and essential discussions with established practioners, industry experts, residency alumni and various Design Museum departments.

This year's program invited Chris Green, Stephanie Hornig,  Hefin Jones, and Alexa Pollmann to respond to the concept of migration. The open-ended theme entails "a reflection of objects or processes that imply movement, or transition, of shifting and cross-fertilising cultures, or of mobility," as described by Design Museum Director Deyan Sudjic. Designers are offered a bursary and commissioning budget to support the realization of their projects.

The four designers will then debut their work in a public exhibition this September in a Design Museum gallery, using it as a site to provoke engaging dialogue around different interpretations of migration. As usual, a series of public events and talks will accompany the exhibition.

Find out more below.

• Integrating drones: "Chris Green explores the potential of drones and their use within cities as a ‘living’ layer of urban infrastructure. Presenting a vision of what the urban landscape will look like with this new technology, his work considers the design of these autonomous vehicles as well as the ways in which they may connect us in the city of the future."
   
• Transforming furniture: "Stephanie Hornig questions the meaning of home and the role of furniture in increasingly compact and flexible live/work environments. By designing objects with light architectural materials she proposes new alternatives for domestic furniture, where each piece can adapt to different contexts as the owner moves through life."

• Shifting industries: "Hefin Jones uses his background in service design to work with ex-mining communities and towns. He encourages his participants to use design thinking to repurpose traditional Welsh culture and heritage, imagining the role they might play in the future of space travel.  Seminal characters from the coal mining industry are remodelled for this cosmic future in a series of documents, films and photographs which acknowledge the potential tensions and aspirations associated with an entirely new perspective."
   
• Migrating national identities: "Alexa Pollmann’s existing design-fiction 'Indivicracy' imagines a radically transformed version of democracy for a socially-networked future. Delivered in form of a political tale, ‘Indivicracy’ speculates on the cultural highlights of a newly emerged, non-territorial society.  For the exhibition Alexa creates new pieces for a national costume - from shoes and gloves to a personal falcon, as well as a new national dance in which visitors can participate. The collaborative installation suggests unsettlement as an increasingly plausible form of existence and showcases motivations for migration, challenging its often negative connotations."

The DESIGNERS IN RESIDENCE: MIGRATION exhibition opens on September 9, 2015 through March 31, 2016.

Learn more about the resident designers here.