Designing the future

Shahidha Bari looks at British design pioneers Enid Marx, Edward Bawden and Charles Rennie Mackintosh with curators Alan Powers and James Russell and design historian Eleanor Herring. 2018 New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen visits The Future Starts Here at the V&A.

Alan Powers is the author of a new book Enid Marx:The Pleasures of Pattern and is curating an exhibition at the House of Illustration in London Print, Pattern and Popular Art which runs from May 25th to September 23rd 2018

James Russell has curated Edward Bawden which runs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from May 23rd to September 9th 2018 and he is the author of The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden.

Eleanor Herring is interested in making, writing, teaching and talking about design with as broad an audience as possible. She is the author of Street Furniture Design: Contesting Modernism in Post-War Britain.

The Future Starts Here runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until 4th November.

Mackintosh 150 marks the anniversary of the birth of Glaswegian architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Exhibitions include Making the Glasgow Style at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum until August 14th. His Oak Room will go on display when the V&A Dundee opens in September. Plus a new Mackintosh interpretation centre opens at The Mackintosh House, a series of film screenings is at The Lighthouse and exhibitions at Glasgow School of Art and other venues.

Lisa Mullen is the Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and one of the 2018 New Generation Thinkers in the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod