Design Real

Everyone knows what a 'shoe', a 'hob' or an 'office chair' does. But where these objects spring from or how they come to look as they do, are subjects we rarely bother with. This immaculate exhibition of contemporary design objects, selected by the German industrial design wizard Konstantin Grcic, doesn't exactly provide any answers. Grcic prefers to pose these questions in the most suavely provocative terms imaginable to get the audience thinking. Presented on plinths like rarefied works of art, are mostly mass-produced items that marry formal beauty and innovation with function. (This is not Design Art, but Design Real after all.)

There are chi-chi high-end consumables like architect Zaha Hadid's baroquely sci-fi rubber footwear. The humblest inclusion is a plastic witch's broom used to sweep the streets of Paris, while a wind turbine blade, curved like a Samurai sword, is the most aesthetically graceful. But Grcic doesn't force any rules as to how this stuff should be rated. While a research room offers explanatory material digitally, objects in the gallery are titled simply and forcibly according to type. There's 'armour' for instance: a black motorcyclist's jacket composed of hard plastics that bears a family resemblance to Jacob Epstein's famed robot-esque 'Rock Drill' sculpture. Conversely the actual 'robot' here looks like a giant orange drill. The wonder is that these lucky objects have been plucked from millions of other possible examples. Grcic's gallery presentation is brilliantly economic, revealing design to be as marvellous and mysterious as it is all-pervasive.