Digital Crystal: Swarovski At The Design Museum

Posted by Styloko

Girls are like magpies really, aren’t they? Well, we’re not gonna lie, at Styloko HQ we’re more than a little bit attracted to shiny things. So when we heard that the Design Museum’s latest project was a collaboration with Swarovski, we more than gladly accepted our invitation to the exhibition preview.

Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum, which officially opens to the public tomorrow, challenges some of the most exciting minds in contemporary design to explore the meaning of memory in this fast-moving digital age.

As printed photographs, diaries and other traditional (and unalterable) methods of capturing thoughts and recording experiences become increasingly rare, “it seems all too easy to lose connection with the tangible and the real,” says Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum. But it also creates an opportunity to introduce new, innovative ideas that reconnect us with our past.

The result is a collective of specially commissioned installations by 15 designers, who have explored the subject through their own unique approaches, while using crystals as the focal element of their designs. From Fredrikson Stallard’s Pandora – an ever-changing, digitally programmed installation that uses almost 2000 Swarovski crystals to deliver the unconventional spectacle of a chandelier without using a single shining light – to Ron Arad’s Lolita, an interactive chandelier that can display texts and tweets sent from anywhere around the world, there wasn’t one piece of work that didn’t excite or inspire us.

Not only did we meet Swarovski’s Chairwoman, Nadja Swarovski, but we also managed to squeeze in a chat with a few of the artists who created some of the most innovative and ground breaking ‘digital crystals’ we’ve ever seen. How’s that for a bit of sparkle, eh?

Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum runs from September 5th, 2012 – January 13th, 2013. See our snaps below for more from the exhibition.