Into the body: The Wellcome Collection

June 30th, 2007

The vast, nine-storey home of the Wellcome Collection, the Wellcome Trust’s new £30m public-facing venue, is littered with objects of art, culture, science and history. In a suite of exhibitions designed by Gitta Gschwendtner and Coombe Architecture, with graphics by Kerr Noble and Nick Bell Design, these subjects overlap and intertwine one another, serving up a polymath’s view of medicine, the body and health.

Sited on London’s Euston Road, the building is cultural repository, medical library, debate forum and social space, with its café, bookshop and a clubroom designed by Isle Crawford. It’s founded, so the blurb goes, on the attributes of the trust’s originator Henry Wellcome as pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector, and, with free entry, it represents something of a civic front for the independent medical charity.

The open ground floor foyer, carved by Hopkins Architects from Septimus Warwick’s original 1930s design, holds sculptures of the human body by Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn. It is an immediate demonstration that the trust – by far the largest organisation of its kind in the UK – is a purveyor of cultural spheres above and beyond its £450m per year scientific and pharmaceutical funding. In fact, a subject no narrower than the history of the human condition seems to be the conceptual gel for this venue, with its sweep from medical history to religious art via technology and psychology.

In design terms, this presents something of a challenge. Gschwendtner, who gave shape to the venue’s two permanent exhibitions, Medicine Man and Medicine Now, says the distinction between artworks and scientific objects – and the degree to which it is made explicit – are important in discussions between designers and curators. In Medicine Now, an exhibition of contemporary medical issues, Gschwendtner’s design sets out a clear demarcation by placing all artworks inside red cube ‘sub-rooms’ in the 350 sq metre space, to avoid misinterpretation.

The exhibition focuses on the period after Wellcome’s death in 1936. Gschwendtner’s bright, contemporary space includes a number of a simple white ‘sound seats’ which play a directional beam of audio revealing more about the exhibition’s issues, including the body, malaria and obesity, and genomes. An interactive by Ico Design Consultancy explores biometric data collection, creating a unique ‘Bio-ID’ symbol for each user, where graphic elements are adjusted for eye colour, fingerprint, height, pulse and age. A second Ico interactive maps users’ facial features to a range of personal and lifestyle factors, throwing up average faces for different demographic groups. Here, interactive installation becomes almost live scientific research and experiment, continuously generating a database of the facial characteristics of the venue’s visitors.

Medicine Now is held together visually by Kerr Noble’s graphic system – the ‘human quality’ of white Houschka letterforms set against white back-lighting, says consultancy director Frith Kerr. As part of the project, Kerr also had a hand in a spot of history-making: the consultancy typeset the entire human genome sequence for the very first time. Its 3.4 billion units of DNA code translate into 118 volumes, each a thousand pages long and set in tiny, 4.6 point type.
Gschwendtner’s design for Medicine Man, the second permanent exhibition, is a very different experience. A darker, walnut-panelled room, dotted with drawers and cupboards, aims to reveal Henry Wellcome’s prodigious collections in a Victorian library atmosphere. Visitors are greeting by a ‘Wunderkammer’, or wonder cabinet, of Wellcome’s huge glassware collection, while elsewhere objects are grouped in a more contemporary, thematic manner. Kerr Noble’s labelling system here is layered - more detailed information is revealed by rifling through drawers and opening doors.

Alongside these permanent spaces, the Wellcome Collection’s head of public programmes Ken Arnold has set aside the largest, 650 sq metre space on the ground floor for a more dynamic, changing exhibition schedule. The Heart, the first of these shows, slides more fluidly between art, science and historical objects than Medicine Now, tracing the changing cultural and medical relationships with the body’s most symbolic organ. ‘It’s not a parading of how art and science can be brought together, but a contemporary exhibition approach which doesn’t stop at boundaries between disciplines in order to explore the subject,’ says Arnold.

Designed by Coombe Architecture, the spare, white environment and VBK Lighting Consultants’ low lighting lend The Heart an almost brooding atmosphere, suffused with the sound of a gently pounding heartbeat somewhere in the background. Hopkins Architects’ exposed piping, painted black in the open ceiling, complements this slightly unsettling feeling, although the industrial canopy may not prove so effective for every theme.

Although the permanent exhibitions will remain largely as they are for the next five years, Arnold intends to install a new temporary show roughly four times a year. This changing space, along with the very well-rendered permanent exhibitions, a programme of debates and workshops and the medical library, combine to offer London another impressive scientific and cultural venue that is very consciously presented through design.

This article was written for Design Week, 27 June 2007.

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Profile: Tom Barker, head of Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art

June 30th, 2007

‘I tell my students to be prepared for a long period of really hard work if they want to make their mark in design,’ warns Tom Barker, head of department for Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art. Fair advice perhaps, until it transpires that earlier in his career Barker himself worked 18-hour days - fuelled by 20 huge espressos - solidly for four years. This eventually caused his immune system to collapse and precipitated a heart operation. ‘They don’t need to work quite as hard as that,’ he adds, apparently as an afterthought.

Perhaps it was the weighty presence in Barker’s mind of history’s great innovators that drew forth such a relentless drive. His own portfolio includes the development of technologies for the Millennium Dome’s MindZone, working with Zaha Hadid, as well as overseeing design engineering for the London Eye’s elegant pod capsules. Later this year he will release a book on futuristic technology and materials in design called (after The Doors) Weird Scenes From Inside the Gold Mine. Part of the book is Barker’s exploration of the psychology and cultural circumstances of some of his design and engineering heroes: What, he asks, connects Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and James Dyson?

Partly, the answer is tenacity, a characteristic which Barker has demonstrated in abundance to push his own design innovation – SmartSlab - to its current point of commercial take-off, after more than seven years in development. Drawn by a desire to see a project through from A to B and to be ‘fully responsible for its success’, Barker left behind the consultancy work of his B Consultants group to focus on the development of the SmartSlab digital building block in 2005. SmartSlab has now made Barker a ‘paper millionaire’, although any real cash will be ploughed back into the product and business, he says.

The SmartSlabs themselves are honeycomb-structured modules that combine to create huge digital displays. Content for these screens can be drawn from an array of sources – Bluetooth transfers, web servers, RSS feeds, as well as traditional commercials and television. The strength of the materials allows the blocks to be used as internal or external building facades, walls or even entire city blocks. With computer servers delivering the content, users are also able to interact and affect what happens on the walls before them.

To illustrate their physical structure, Barker rummages through his RCA office for prototype models and then sketches out a diagram on a piece of paper. This shows that conventional screen pixels, which are square, distort images because diagonally adjacent squares are further apart than those to either side. The hexagons of the honeycomb – or hexel, in SmartSlab terminology – are always equidistant. This idea is based on a fly’s compound eye and is the most efficient structure both structurally and optically, says Barker.

But there is more preoccupying Barker than the manipulation of clever materials and engineering structures. If anything, he is more animated by discussion of the content of the screens and the social implications of a fully wired-up, digital population. ‘I am interested in the fusion of digital media and physical spaces. The natural progression for designers who use computers to design spaces and digital content is the digital brick. Architecture as theatre is a trend. If you build interactivity and communications into a structure, it reduces a building’s redundancy,’ he says. But there is an unpleasant corollary. ‘Seeing the world through a screen is killing us as lively, vibrant, messy human beings. We are becoming a screen-based species.’

SmartSlab’s interactive and communications capabilities open a path to what Barker calls the product’s ‘dark side’, where, for example, advertisers could identify passers-by from their mobile phones and spam them with targeted commercial messages. ‘We are grappling with this and hoping that our ethics and licensing contracts will prevent it going down that path. We cannot have an unmanaged digital future. Areas of Tokyo are a complete mess.’

The better alternative, he believes, will be the emergence of ‘living media’. This is content generated from a combination of live, recorded and user-generated sources. It would be manipulated and re-formed by the viewers themselves. At once both modest and proud, Barker describes himself as ‘the bloke who shows up and tries to sell Leonardo a new set of paints and canvases. It is for other people to create the content,’ he says.

This article was written for Design Week, 20 June 2007.

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