Eco Home exhibition

The exhibition of the year, for anyone with a professional or personal interest in sustainable design, is the Eco Home exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in London’s Shoreditch. Eco Home opens this week and runs until February 2010. It’s curated by architect and author Oliver Heath who is doing a great service to the design industry at the moment by finding a way to articulate advances in sustainable product design in an accessible way for public consumption.

Reee chair at the Geffrye Museum

The exhibits are spread across four rooms and one of them is given over to a life-cycle analysis of the Reee chair. The Geffrye Museum team wanted to show an example of the development, production and take-back of a single product so visitors can get an idea of the thinking that goes into creating deliberately innovative eco-friendly objects for the home. They have done a great job of illustrating and explaining the process of making a Reee chair.

There’s a thoughtful and inspiring selection of designs on display, each with an explanatory information plate beside it. I’m quite used to seeing these designs around and in fact I know a lot of the designers personally, because of the work I do. But you may not be familiar with them and you certainly won’t have seen all these products together before.

According to Oliver, the Geffrye and John Lewis (which is supporting the exhibition) this is the shape of things to come. Don’t miss the Wattson energy meter demonstration or the hand-crank energy generator that shows you how much muscle power it takes to light an old-fashioned bulb compared to a CFL or LED.

Here’s a gallery of images I took at the Eco Home exhibition opening on Tuesday evening (thanks to the Geffrye for the excellent food and wine by the way – a brilliant evening)

Visit the Geffrye Museum’s site to find out more about the exhibition. Here’s an excerpt from the press release…

We are now being encouraged to think about saving resources like water and electricity and turning to renewable sources. People are also beginning to consider the impact of industrial production methods and responsible sourcing. Eco Home will investigate how so-called ‘green’ issues have entered our domestic spaces, using both products that are already well established in the marketplace as well as futuristic prototypes.

Visitors to the exhibition will go away better informed about some of the issues around design and consumption which affect home life. At the same time they will be able to see that eco-friendly can also be chic and that aspiration towards good taste and design can go hand-in-hand with trying to help conserve the planet’s resources. In fact, ecological design is now at the cutting edge of home design, with traditional products becoming ever more stylish.

Make sure you visit the exhibition and the rest of the gorgeous Geffrye Museum displays. The museum is on Kingsland Road, on the way to Dalston from Shoreditch. I use the 149 bus or the 35 bus: the 149 drops you outside the front door and starts at London Bridge. The Geffrye is at the end of a row of wonderful Vietnamese restaurants, worth the journey on their own if you like that sort of thing.