Design

Once again flicking through the trade journals in our collection and recognising an object that we own has enriched our record with a wealth of information. This time I was looking through an edition of British Plastics from February 1955 and I stumbled across a fabulous article about the...

At the end of last year, an MA Architecture student, Jemma Chapman came in to the museum to explore the use of waste plastics. We talked about a variety of concepts and objects including Greenbrick's building blocks. Large blue brick, Greenbrick, AIBDC : 008795.3 Since meeting with Jemma, she has...

The concept of Design for Disassembly was first introduced in the early 1990s. It advocates for the environment by recommending products be designed in such a way that they can be easily taken apart at the end of their useful life, with parts then either reused or recycled. In practice this could...

On a recent trip to the Museum of Design in Plastics, I was reminded of my first visit to LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark. I have been lucky enough to work with LEGO over the past eight years, producing games for their new LEGO sets. My first project was updating the mobile game LEGO City for...

The Merle Norman cosmetics box bag features in the current MoDiP Reuse exhibition as part of the Another Life case, which looks at other uses for packaging in which some products are offered for sale. AIBDC : 009526 Image credit: MoDiP The Merle Norman brand of cosmetics is not familiar in the UK...

Architecture and industrial design are two separate fields of study, but they do share similarities. In essence, both architects and industrial designers are problem solvers and focus on the way people live, but through the lens of different scales and perspectives. Many trained and/or practising...

In 1995 Dyson launched the Recyclone, the first vacuum cleaner to be made entirely of recycled plastics (refer image below). The DC02 Recyclone Image credit: https://www.dyson.co.uk/james-dyson/invention-a-life/07 Initially the cleaners were made from waste materials of the DC01 and DC02...

One of the cases in our current exhibition, Reuse , looks at the problems that black plastics have when it comes to the recycling system and therefore how the material is then reused. When products and packaging made of plastics enter the recycling system, they need to be separated into individual...

The collection of household plastics for recycling through the UK’s Local Authority bin collection service began exactly twenty years ago with the introduction of the 2003 Household Waste Recycling Act. Looking back, it now seems crazy that up until that point, we had all been throwing our plastics...

In the late 1950s, furniture manufacturer Hille approached Robin Day with the idea of producing a one-piece chair shell to add to their range. Up to that point, there were a limited number of materials that could achieve such a design, such as pressed metal, structural ply or glass-reinforced...

AIBDC : 008605 Image credit: MoDiP This bright and sunny, yellow coloured frisbee is in an amazing condition given that it is over 70 years old. That is largely due to the fact that it has been unused: 1600 of these Arcuate Vanes were discovered in a warehouse in 1977, where this example is believed...

Given that it is Nordic Day tomorrow, Thursday 23rd March 2023, I thought it would be apt for this blog to celebrate a lovely piece of Danish design from the MoDiP collections. AIBDC : 008850 and 008849 Image credit: https://www.modip.ac.uk/collections?columbo%5B0%5D=person%3A14306 The Margrethe...