Fear & Love: Reactions to a Complex World

Book excerpt: To accompany The Design Museum's opening exhibition, which explores the anxiety and optimism inherent in contemporary design Fear and Love, published to accompany the major exhibition that will open the Design Museum's highly anticipated new home in Kensington, London, examines the role of design in the twenty-first century. It proposes that, in a rapidly changing world, design is defined by both anxiety and optimism. Organized by five key themes - Network, Empathy, Body, Earth and Periphery - the book explores design's relationship to emotive issues. Eleven leading figures from across the spectrum of design provide a wide-ranging set of attitudes to design in our times: Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, OMA, Madeline Gannon, Metahaven, Hussein Chalayan, Neri Oxman, Christien Meindertsma, Ma Ke, Kenya Hara, Arquitectura Expandida and Rural Urban Framework.