Event of the Week: London Design Festival highlights
Eh? London Design Festival? In a science column? Well, good design is important in everything, including labs and medical wards. The Royal Institution, in association with the Design Festival, bring the point home at 'Imagine: Healthier by Design' at the RCA tomorrow. A panel of designers and medical practitioners will assemble to debate, for example, how the patient's life can be made less stressful through good ward design.
Another sciency highlight of the festival we forgot to mention last week is the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition over at the V&A, with more than 60 examples of the great man's scribblings. (We might have missed it out of our listings, but we did give you a coded warning about this one a long time ago.)
Now. Here's our challenge for the Design Festival. Isn't it time the humble white lab coat got a revamp? Come on. It's been essentially unchanged for a century. How about sprucing it up with a bit of colour, like they did in the cricket a few years ago? Or maybe a chemo-sensitive dye as an umissable detector of noxious fumes. An ipod-friendly breast pocket. Litmus sleeves or Geiger-counter lapels. The white coat is almost literally a blank slate waiting to be reimagined. So, London Design Festival, that's your mission for next year's show - reinvent the lab coat for us.
Elsewhere
Couple of events, as always, at the Dana Centre this week. Tomorrow’s gig, sounding like a long-lost character from the He-man cartoons, is called ‘Senster’. And it sounds awesome:
Can sound kill? Come and find out in Senster, part lecture, part concert and part performance art. Experience the spooky and surreal worlds of sound Senster presents as artificial life takes to the stage, together with acoustic oddities and cutting-edge digital arts. In a dark story drawn from Europe's folk tradition and the Cold War, follow the tendril on an amazing journey through 2D and 3D space and listen to the eclectic mix of music performed for your delight.
Then, on Tuesday, we have ‘Randomness and Certainty’, which apparently is ‘a time-based new media work exploring how context affects meaning’. What? Sorry, our brains just can’t handle descriptions like that. Reading further, it appears to be some kind of audio-visual montage, where scientists talk about how science affects their understanding of life. But the sound and vision do not match up, thus scrambling the context. Sounds messy to us, but these sorts of things often have to be seen to be appreciated.
Where and when
Leonardo da Vinci, V&A, £10
Senster, Thursday, Dana Centre, 7pm, FREE
Imagine: healthier by design, Thursday, Royal College of Art, 7pm, FREE
Randomness and Certainty, Tuesday, Dana Centre, 6.30, FREE
