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| Alongside a mission to ensure that British design and architecture are recognised around the world, we have a valuable role in using our knowledge and global network to enlarge the international perspective and status of design and architecture in Britain. In accordance with this objective, we introduced six designers from countries outside the conventional design world, discovered as a result of our international design programme, to the London Design Festival in an exhibition titled The New World. |
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 The designers are: Nika Zupanc, Heath Nash, Carla Fernandez, Paula Dib, Ana Vaz and Padmaja Krishnan. Each has forged a contemporary design language which integrates yet advances local traditions in form, materials and manufacture. They are as skilled communicators as they are artisans; as committed to social progress as to ideal form; and they personally demonstrate the changing axis of the design world: no longer Europe, the United States and Japan and no longer yoked to the holy-grail of industrial mass production. |
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| From Slovenia, Zupanc’s Clinique d’Amour collection – re-casting folkloric and domestic archetypes in uncompromisingly modern, industrial materials – has achieved critical notoriety “speaking out with strong emotional value” beyond form and function. In South Africa Nash has followed up Other People’s Rubbish – a range of products made from used plastic – by initiating a complete supply chain, from recycling to production, and a new micro-economy in informal settlements and suburbs. |
| Carla Fernandez from Mexico combines the abstract language of a truly original fashion designer with a love of textiles in all their variety and a commitment to the unique weaving skills of rural women in her country. Paula Dib’s company, Transforma Design, creates products with handcrafting communities throughout Brazil; aiming to renew their traditional skills, often passed down by generations of craftsmen, without losing intrinsic cultural and regional characteristics. |
| In India, through her small-scale fashion and textile “laboratory”, Transit Studio, Krishnan is developing a line of “non-conformative, quirky and peaceful” clothing for men and women, as well as a collection of curious and finely detailed handcrafted accessories. Brazilian jeweler Vaz produces handmade creations in which ordinary materials are transformed out of their normal context into spectacular structures. |
| The New World was on display during the London Design Festival in partnership with the Brompton Design Project. |
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