Festivals help make public issues in an area of practice - and this year's London Design Festival, 15-25 September makes visible tensions within current design practice between the commercial and the experimental, design as outcome and design as process, the issue of sustainability, and the relationship between design as conceived of by designers and its various publics - investors, users, consumers, commissioners, manufacturers.
Of particular interest to me are the Financial Times Business of Design talks next week including one on investment in design and another in the role if design in retail. The talks organized by Blueprint include some people I'd love to hear speak - all architects: Peter Cook from Archigram, Zaha Hadid and Amanda Levete from Future Systems. The team at RCA Innovation are putting on two shows, both at the RCA as well as talks and events.
What's missing for me - and this may be an artefact of the sign-up system for festival partners - is attention paid to emerging areas of design such as service design, interaction design, and experience design, which, reliant on intangibles, are often harder to communicate.
