In The Making, Design Museum

Have you ever wondered how a pound coin is made? Or how your shoes were manufactured? Or how much work went into the 2012 Olympic torch? This Spring acclaimed interior designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby unveil the stories behind the objects that make up life’s fundamental fabric in In The Making: a new exhibition at the Design Museum. 

Over twenty everyday objects, from fluted horns, marbles, whistles and cricket bats, have been selected by the duo and presented frozen in an unfinished state, revealing what they look like half way through manufacture. It’s a kind of hush-hush tour from the drawing board to the final product: an exposition of production secrets that good design doesn’t usually let you see. To Barber and Osgerby, this idea is curiously beautiful.

You may well be familiar with Barber and Osgerby’s work without even realising it. Over the years the Barber & Osgerby studio has collaborated with top-end interior design labels such as Vitra and B&B Italia to produce, for example, the revolutionary Tip Ton Chair , launched in 2011 and today found in nearly every upmarket London office or home. 

The Tip Ton isn't part of the exhibition, but three of the pair’s designs are, including, most famously, the iconic gold-plated 2012 Olympic Torch, which won the Museum's Design of the Year Award two years ago and whose secrets this exhibition divulges. The exhibition also lifts the lid on Barber and Osgerby’s recent Royal Mint commission to design a £2 in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. The design, which features a dramatic head-on image of one of the iconic trains emerging from a tunnel, went into circulation last year.

It’s possible that what underpins Barber and Osgerby’s exhibition is something close to Karl Marx’s theory of the object ‘fetish’: the tendency to overlook the making-of process that goes into the objects we use every day, and arrive at the conclusion that our cars and iPhones have their own kind of mystical life. Barber and Osgerby address this idea by inquisitively turning things inside out, revealing the inner organs and concealed intricacies of our daily used objects. 

Think of it as a kind of anatomy lesson, only of the material world.