V&A British Design

V&A, British design 1948-2012 innovation in the modern age, is running at the Victoria and Albert museum and celebrates British innovation and design from the 1948 "austerity" Olympics to the 2012 Olympics. The exhibition was split into three rooms with each room presenting designs from a certain period in time between 1948-2012 like a kinda of physical time line. The range of different designed products was pretty vast. In the first room, from the earlier dates, there was lots architecture, interior design, furniture, decorative print and textiles. Some of this was quite interesting, but especially some technical drawing from and architect the were of Milton Keynes, one and aerial view and another a view of a proposed shopping centre, those looked like any digital mock we would today with trees and shoppers walking around they were hand drawn and the detail was amazing considering done by hand. The second room had some very contemporary furniture/art installations and a lot of fashion design. This was mainly clothes designed for catwalk or famous pop stars of the 60's 70's and 80's. They were a bit disappointing to be honest as they especially the catwalk clothes seemed like anything you might find in a modern catwalk show, but very well made and some extremely detailed. There was some interesting photography in this room again of pop stars of the time and popular models, it seemed as this room and age was very concerned with mass celebrity, unlike the first room that had a much more hand made feel to it. The final room focused on modern design form things like Concorde, the Ipad/Iphone, computer graphic design and again some architecture. Some of the computer graphics stuff was interesting as they showed the change in graphics in one game that has had a series of editions over the years, watching the change in sharpness, colour, fluidity and detail was amazing. The final room had a bit of a clinical feel to it i guess this was done purposely as it was all white and glass surroundings, while the first room was furnished with lots of light coloured wood and the second being  lot darker and with fabric lining it. Over all i found the exhibition a little disappointing but still interesting to go and see, it made you realise how much design has changed and how the signs of the maker have seemed to disappear to be replaced by clean, smooth shapes.