var linkwithin_site_id = 519459; 
designjunction, now in its second year, showcases a selection of international design brands set against the intriguing backdrop of a 1960’s Sorting Office on New Oxford Street. You can still see the brightly coloured metal spiral chutes down which bags of mail would have been transported. As part of the five-day design show in parallel with London Design Festival, The Designers in Residence Scheme from Northumbria University are exhibiting an ongoing project titled Tools for Everyday Life. They say of the project: “Recognising an increasing desire for us to reconnect with the physical world and the objects within in it, this project explores both the design language of utilitarian products and the value of making skills.”
One of my favourite of the eleven proposals comes from Trevor Duncan and his ‘Pencil Works’, simply because they hark back to my days as an architecture student when good stationery was something to seriously covet. Duncan celebrates the most ubiquitous every day tools, but he has adapted the humble pencil for secondary uses by the way of additional components. For example, each pencil is fitted with a threaded brass ferrule to clip on a tool from the series, be it a scalpel blade or a spirit level. They are so beautifully made, but at the same time extremely functional and adaptable, depending on the work at hand. But, at £1800 for the full set, I doubt architecture students will be forking out the cash for something supposedly for the ‘everyday’.
