Wednesday, 1 April 2009 | Levent OZLER
RCA Platform 10 Present Crisis Shop. Sold Out! at the Milan Salone
For the duration of the Milan Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2009, a team of young design students from Platform 10, one of six teaching units within the College's celebrated Design Products department, will be taking up residence at the prestigious Seves glassblock showroom in the heart of the city.
The fourteen postgraduate student designers will stage a makeshift Crisis Shop, exhibiting a range of crisis products. The shop layout will embody the very nature of a potential crisis - a canopy, attached by suction pads, hooks and grommets will stretch across the glass surfaces of the showroom. Under extreme tension, the canopy serves to communicate a sense of urgency, a material under stress and physical tension.
The Shop isn't about making a commodity out of a crisis but investing in the means to respond to crises at large. One man's crisis is another man's opportunity. All products in the Crisis Shop are examples of opportunities in disguise.
The collective response to this state of alert can be broken down into two clearly defined product categories: those that require an 'Immediate Response' and those that opt for 'Mutations'. The group have deliberately emphasised the 'closeness' in crisis and consequently closeness to the body. Subsequent incarnations frequently deal with this through solutions of wear-ability.
A crisis can also be used as a catalyst for change. Platform 10's intention is to use the disease signified in a crisis as a positive opportunity to create an alternative outcome and a fresh typology in design. The products on offer represent the distillation of the outcome of a long-term interrogation into innumerable crises and their inevitable fall-outs.
Crisis Shop will represent a transnational response to global problems, with the group of designers encompassing eight different nationalities. Crisis as the young designers argue, "represents the very foundation of design as we know it."
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