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Devlin practices across the worlds of art, opera, music and technology. She is known for creating large-scale performative sculptures and environments that fuse technology and poetry. Her luminous fluorescent red Please Feed The Lion sculpture roared AI-generated collective poetry to crowds in Trafalgar Square in September 2018 for London Design Festival. The Singing Tree, a collective choral installation at the Victoria and Albert Musuem, merged machine-learning with sound and light in 2017. The 2016 Mirrormaze in Peckham, London, and 2017 ROOM 2022 at Miami Art Basel both explored reflective labyrinthine narratives and geometries.
She has conceived touring stage sculptures for Beyoncé, U2, The Weeknd, Adele and Kanye West, and collaborated with celebrated theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli on an interpretation of his book The Order of Time, read by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, at BOLD Peckham in 2018. Devlin’s work was the subject of a documentary in the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design, and in 2021, she designed the UK Pavilion at Expo Dubai.
"We live in an age of hyper resonance, the consequences of which are both exhilarating and devastating. Everything we design and everything we produce resonates."
Es Devlin, Artistic Director
Devlin explains, "Everything we design and everything we produce resonates. Each idea we generate has the power to reach a mass digital audience undreamt of by previous generations, while the lifespans of the physical products we create often endure long beyond our own. Whether in the social media feeds of millions or in the bellies of marine animals, our ideas and our objects stick around.
In our global, digital era, design can instantly permeate borders and bridge cultures. It can positively alter behaviours and transform societies. Attitudes can evolve and lives can be improved when new ideas resonate and are adopted by extended communities.
At the same time, we are living through the ravaging resonance of mineral mining on our climate and data mining on our democracies. Ours is a period of profound social inequality combined with unprecedented algorithmic application of our personal data, often herding us towards digital echo chambers and ever more siloed communities
Designers across the world have been engaged for decades devising responses to these phenomena: developing renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, smart products and textiles, intelligent architecture, and potent graphic design and digital messaging, as well as physical and virtual experiences and environments that shift our emotions and alter our points of view.
Designers, thinkers, artists and makers have the power to influence and amaze their audiences into profound shifts of perspective, using the mass networks available to them to resonate ideas and practices to help build a more sustainable future.
However, we also face the intractable dilemma that we often find ourselves using resources to talk about the overconsumption of resources. Let’s face this challenge head on and commit to a sustainable legacy for each new work created for London Design Biennale.
As a community of designers approaching shared global challenges from culturally diverse viewpoints, the collective resonance of our ideas and our actions has the power to be truly transformative."
Designed to continue the conversation, this memento aimed to spark new ideas and inspiration, which hopefully grew beyond the 2021 Biennale.
The 1000 boxes included cards to build your own cathedral of creativity, an acorn to plant your ideas and a sketchbook to record them, stickers to keep asking the important questions and art prints to contemplate how design can change the world.
500 projects, over 50 countries, 6 continents. We called, and you answered. The Design in An Age of Crisis Gallery sees the response to the global OPEN CALL issued in 2020 by Chatham House and London Design Biennale that invited radical design thinking from the world’s design community, the public and young people.
The exhibition is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Explore our four categories below.
London Design Biennale presented four Medals to the most outstanding contributions to the exhibition in 2021. The Medals, handmade by London-based jewellery partnership Shimell and Madden, celebrate cultural exchange and recognise the work and achievement of designers through four categories. Three Medals were awarded by the event’s International Jury and one Medal was voted for by visitors to the exhibition.
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