V&A Design Exhibit London

The V&A's involvement in the London Design Festival 2016 was a major cultural highlight of that autumn. The London Design Festival ran from 17 to 25 September 2016, featuring an extensive programme of over 400 events and installations held across the capital. The V&A served as one of its key venues, hosting a wide range of free, public-facing programming. Among the standout pieces, French designer Mathieu Lehanneur installed a work from his Liquid Marble series in the V&A's Norfolk House Music Room — a sculptural piece in which a slab of marble was shaped to resemble a pool of water, blurring the boundary between material and illusion. A particularly exciting strand of the V&A's 2016 festival offering was the Digital Design Weekend. Now in its sixth year, the Digital Design Weekend brought together over a hundred artists, designers, engineers, and technologists to celebrate contemporary digital art and design through interactive installations, labs, and performances, all exploring engineering, making, and collaboration. Highlights included the Silk Leaf by Exhibition Road Engineering Julian Melchiorri — the first man-made biological leaf prototype harnessing natural photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen — as well as the GyroGlove, a device that stabilizes hand tremors using gyroscope technology.