We've now published all the movies from our Dezeen Live series of talks with designers and critics, including Li Edelkoort, Asif Khan and Sam Jacob, that we filmed at 100% Design during the London Design Festival last September. Here's a recap in case you missed any.

Wednesday 19 September

Tom Hulme, Katrin Olina and Sam Jacob joined Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs for the first of four sessions of talks at 100% Design, and Dezeen Music Project provided music by east London band Strong Asian Mothers.

Above: IDEO UK design director Tom Hulme advocates that "designers should be more entrepreneurial".

Above: architect and writer Sam Jacob takes the audience on a rapid-fire journey from a prehistoric standing stone to the Argos catalogue and USB cigarettes.

Above: Icelandic designer Katrin Olina describes how she translates characters from her imagination into drawings, animations, products and interiors.

Thursday 20 September

Thursday's speakers included designers Asif Khan and Dominic Wilcox, curator Daniel Charny and music by Reset Robot.

Above: designer Asif Khan explains how soap bubbles, rubbish bins and a neighbour's flower bed have all provided inspiration for his work.

Above: curator and writer Daniel Charny explains why making, hacking and fixing represent the future of design.

Above: designer Dominic Wilcox shares his thoughts on 3D printing and presents some of his "fun, crazy" projects.

Friday 21 September

Designers Philippe Malouin and Benjamin Hubert and critic Beatrice Galilee were Friday's speakers, accompanied by three tracks from American designer and producer Glen Lib.

Above: designer Philippe Malouin describes how the Olympics has changed Hackney.

Above: industrial designer Benjamin Hubert argues that designers should focus on building their own name as a brand.

Above: curator and writer Beatrice Galilee proposes that architecture and design exhibitions need to be about more than just "sticking furniture on plinths".

Saturday 22 September

On the final day of Dezeen Live guests included restaurant founder Shamil Thakrar, designer Clemens Weisshaar and trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, with music from Indian record label EarthSync.

Above: Shamil Thakrar, owner and founder of London restaurant Dishoom, laments the disappearance of traditional Irani cafes in Bombay and explains why he's setting them up in London.

Above: German designer Clemens Weisshaar argues that cutting edge software from race car engineering and hypersonic aircraft will underpin design in the future.

Above: interiors and products will need more tactile designs as the use of computers and screens makes us crave a sense of touch, trend forecaster Li Edelkoort predicts.

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"The more screens we have the more our figures are afraid we’re going to disappear," she says. "I feel it already in my fingers that they want me to touch lots of things so I don’t loose contact with touch." Edelkoort therefore predicts that textiles will be increasingly important in interior design, supporting the increasingly nomadic lifestyle that mobile technology permits.

"You can be in the middle of the desert and people will think you’re in New York," she says, "So you become anonymous and you don't care anymore where you are. I think that sort of freedom which is going to be created will make us want to have lots of textiles, lots of rugs, we will have portable tables, portable sinks, portable lights like lanterns."

This nomadic attitude could also alter our social relationships, she suggests. "This liberty we have now in work and play will reflect also in the other parts of life, so eating, sleeping, entertaining, we would be more nomadic about that, not always sitting at the same table with the same partner."

Edelkoort proposes grandparents and grandchildren as "the new couple of the future," as people live longer and choose more freely who to spend their time with. She thinks that "individualism is over and so people care much more about family, even if it’s chosen family and friends," leading to a more compassionate society. "It’s all about a society which is, let’s say, softer, more rounded, more textured."

Above: image by Michael Baumgarten

Edelkoort begins the talk with an image showing the hands of a child and elderly person. "There is a falling away of the generation gap, whereas grandparents are very young and young children are very old," she says. "They hang out together for a while... it means that you can be a baby your whole life, or you can be already old even when you’re born. I think that age is now going to be more of a mental thing than a physical thing actually."

Above: felt cushion by Peta Lee and designs by Coral Stephens

The next image represents nomadism and shows textiles with portable furniture. "We have all our devices we can work and stay wherever we want," says Edelkoort. "This new feeling of freedom, which is fairly recent, is only now starting to modify the brain I believe."

Above: Mine Kafon by Massoud Hassani

Her third image shows Massoud Hassani's device for seeking and destroying landmines, based on a wind-powered toy and made of bamboo and plastic components. "It’s a mine killer, but its completely organic and very cheap," Edelkoort says, adding "it’s very beautiful how a childhood toy can become now such an amazing device."

Above: Teresa Toys by DMOCH

Next is a set of building blocks for children comprising rounded wooden pieces and small leather balls. "This is to teach babies how to feel form and how to create buildings and skylines, and it’s like soft toys instead of the square toys," she explains. "Of course, already the babies have their screens so this is to counterbalance the screens."

Above: photo by Thomas Straub for Madé for View on Colour

The final image shows a mask incorporating bones and introduces the 2013 Arnhem fashion biennial (MoBa 13) that Edelkoort is curating on the theme of fetishism. "There is a moment in fashion where there is this super need to be very fetishistic. There is animalism, there is children’s behaviors, there is of course bondage, there is lace, there is fur, feathers and so on," she explains. "I'm going to investigate why."

Edelkoort concludes with the idea that "trend forecasting is like archeology but to the future", explaining how she looks for little fragments in current culture to predict what's coming next.

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place at design exhibition 100% Design during London Design Festival this September.

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, included three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. We've been posting all the movies we filmed on Dezeen and you can watch all the movies from Dezeen Live here.

The music featured in the movie is a track from Business Class Refugees by Indian record label EarthSync. Listen to more songs by EarthSync on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our stories about Li Edelkoort »
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See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

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In the movie, Clemens Weisshaar, one half of design duo Kram/Weisshaar, introduces the computer-controlled X-51 hypersonic test missile, which is designed to fly at several times the speed of sound.

"There are physical objects out there, including every Airbus aircraft, that wouldn't fly anymore if you switched off the computer systems," he says. "Software becomes an integral part of a physical object [...] and that’s not even the future, it’s now."

Above: the X-51 hypersonic test missile

He then talks about an Audi race car created by engineers with whom he recently collaborated on a high-tech, ultra-lightweight chair.

"Those guys, they think completely differently – they really think of energy as investing energy in an object to make it very light, but then you need the return on the investment by saving energy afterwards," he says. "Only if you break even and actually save energy after 100,000 kilometres on the road, only then is it worthwhile doing it. Otherwise, it’s a waste."

Above: an Audi race car

Weisshaar also criticises as "naïve" the idea that making furniture from wood is always the most sustainable option, and adds: "Design students these days tend to think that everything they can make with a cordless drill is amazing. That’s also naïve.

"The age of mass production hasn't stopped – we’re more and more people on this planet, so we can’t customise products for everybody."

Above: Istanbul

Showing a slide of the Istanbul skyline, he comments on the Multithread furniture he showed at the Adhocracy exhibition during Istanbul Design Biennial, which has metal legs produced in a new 3D printing process.

"Now there’s technologies where you can actually melt on metals straight away and print metal objects straight away. That’s what we’re using – it’s called selective laser melting," he says, adding that 3D printing with plastic has largely produced trivial objects like ashtrays and egg cups. "We don't do the much-hyped 3D printing of plastics [...] now there’s technologies where you can actually print usable objects."

Above: diagram of a lioness' muscles and skeleton

He then shows an image of the muscular and skeletal structures of a lioness, explaining: "There’s so much chemistry, engineering, bio-engineering going on that nobody really understands it, not even doctors or biologists [...] the big challenge of the 21st century is to control entire systems, complex systems, and understand all of it."

Above: software analysing forces acting on furniture

The final slide depicts a computer program analysing the forces acting on a piece of furniture, which Weisshaar used to prototype pieces such as the chair for Audi.

"We take engineering code that lets us calculate the forces acting within an object, and we're bringing that into design software we’re writing," he explains. "We want to use it to see things that the eye can’t see [...] in many cases you make assumptions, you think there’s a lot of strain on the joint there, but it’s not, it’s somewhere else.

"We’re using [this technology] for tables and chairs now because we think that tables and chairs really deserve this kind of attention," he adds.

Weisshaar's other work with designer and computer scientist Reed Kram includes computer-designed concrete stools and pedestals and eight robotic arms installed in Trafalgar Square.

Dezeen Live was a series of talks between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a selection of designers and critics that took place at design exhibition 100% Design during London Design Festival this September.

Each of the four one-hour shows included three interviews as well as music from Dezeen Music Project. We've been posting all the movies over the past few days and you can watch all the movies we've featured so far here.

The music featured in the movie is a track from Business Class Refugees by Indian record label EarthSync. Listen to more songs by EarthSync on Dezeen Music Project.

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Above: Miles Davis and musicians recording Kind of Blue

"India doesn't value it's traditions much," says Thakrar, "[in Britain] we do look backwards a bit more for meaning. I think for us to rescue the tradition of these cafes is pretty precious."

Cafes started by Iranian immigrants in the 1920s, which are solely based around the food and are "undesigned", are vanishing as India "rushes towards modernity" and Thakrar says that where there used to be 400, only about 30 are left. "The children of the cafe owners don't want to be cafe owners, they want to be bankers or accountants, so there is an adverse trend there," he says.

Thakrar set up Dishoom in Covent Garden and more recently Shoredtich to bring the food and atmosphere of these cafes to London. "Being in a place that feels undesigned, which takes you to Bombay, we try and create that here," he explains.

The first of five images Thakrar talks about is of Miles Davis and his musicians recording the Kind of Blue album in just one take. "This is an incredible example of art," says Thakrar. "Miles Davis once said 'it's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't', which of course resonates with design and food as well, and we think about that a lot."

Above: Dishoom's pop-up restaurant on London's South Bank last summer

Next he shows Dishoom's pop-up restaurant on London's South Bank last summer, made from recycled materials. "The whole idea of the pop-up was that if you take one of these cafes and walk it down to Bombay's Chaupati Beach in 1965 and it were to take a mild acid trip, what would happen?"

Next up is a set of Tintin canvas prints. "He goes through life naive, he's wonderfully innocent and I think we all should do that," Thakrar says, "particularly when you're thinking about design and food, you should come at it fresh, with a wide-eyed attitude."

Above: Tintin canvas prints

A Caravaggio painting follows and Thakrar describes the similarity between the Italian artist's depiction of flaws and the approach to designing their latest Dishoom branch."We spent a week with our designers recently looking for those Caravaggio-esque bits, finding the parts of these old cafes we could bring alive in a different venue," he explains.

Thakrar ends with a picture of an elderly man in his traditional restaurant in Bombay. "When you take a bite of their food, you're tasting the century of tradition and heritage, which makes the food more than just food," says Thakrar.

Above: Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus painting

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place at design exhibition 100% Design during London Design Festival this September.

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, included three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. We've been posting all the movies we filmed over the past few days, and you can watch all the movies we've featured so far here.

Above: a Bombay cafe owner speaking to his customer

The music featured in the movie is a track from Business Class Refugees by Indian record label EarthSync. Listen to more songs by EarthSync on Dezeen Music Project.

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See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

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Contrasting this year's Venice Architecture Biennale with the upcoming Lisbon Architecture Triennale she's curating, Galilee explains why her approach avoids showcasing architectural models and products in favour of process and debate. "We're not really interested in showcasing things that have happened, and we want to showcase things that will happen: people that will change the future of architecture, who's going to be curating the next city and what's that going to look like?"

This search for the next generation who will shape our world leads Galilee to work closely with critical designers who specialise in experiments and social commentary. "They don't have an aim to be as part of a kind of manufacturing process but they would rather be involved in a discussion," she explains.

Design with a critical agenda demands a critical response and Galilee stresses the need to uncover and nurture creative criticism. "There's a real sense of urgency for a kind of more critical design and a kind of conversation about design," she says.

By way of example, the talk begins with a discussion about the Hacked Lab exhibition that Galilee curated in Milan earlier this year (above), which comprised a series of events centred around new technologies and design experiments. "The idea of the week was to try and find different ways of presenting designers' ideas and try to find things that are not just stuff on plinths," she says. One of the activities involved designer Dominic Wilcox racing a 3D printer in a competition to build a model of the nearby Duomo cathedral.

She goes on to present a photograph taken in Africa (above), a place that she is currently researching, and explains how the narrative of African design is starting to focus on technology and particularly on science fiction. "Science fiction is quite an interesting way of designing in its own sense, city wise and landscapes and so on," she explains.

The Black Book Interview Project, a series of events during the London Design Festival about the "urgent topic" of critical design is discussed next. "[The curators] were really trying to find out where critical design is, who's writing it, who's doing it, why isn't there more of it?" says Galilee, before explaining how designers like Tuur Van Balen (above) are more interested in a "more social or anthropological or scientific kind of narrative".

Broadening the topic to include architecture, Galilee discusses how this year's biennale in Venice contained too many models presented as whole projects and not enough engagement with ideas. "Curators really should be sort of raising their game at this moment and be really trying to challenge audiences and to provide something interesting to say," she adds.

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place at design exhibition 100% Design during London Design Festival this September.

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, included three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. We've been posting all the movies we filmed and you can watch all the movies we've featured so far here.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Mosquito Maps by American designer and musician Glen Lib. Listen to more of his songs on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our stories about Beatrice Galilee »
See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

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critical design" - Beatrice Galilee at Dezeen Live appeared first on Dezeen.