The Design Museum and Swarovski are collaborating with a new generation of designers, challenging them to examine the future of memory in the digital age.
The end of the analogue era is changing the nature of our relationship with objects and even with time. Digital Crystal asks some of the most exciting talents in contemporary creativity to explore ways in which we can recover that lost connection with things as we debate the changing nature of memory in the digital world. The resulting exhibition will showcase new commissions by exceptional international designers in response to one of the most interesting philosophical questions of the modern age.
Over the past decade Swarovski's design and architecture commissions have served as an experimental platform for leading figures in international design to conceptualise, develop and share their most radical works. Swarovski has also invited some of those designers, including Ron Arad, Yves Behar, Paul Cocksedge, Troika and Fredrikson Stallard to take part, reworking existing pieces in response to the brief.
Eight years ago, before Twitter, when text messages were the way to communicate, Ron Arad's Lolita chandelier used cutting edge technology to display text messages in LED pixels on a spiral crystal chandelier - very much in the vanguard of the digital age. Today a new generation of designers is challenged to embrace the meaning of digital in 2012.
Photos: Courtesy of Design Museum