If you’re in London at the end of the month, check out the Digital Crystal exhibit at the Design Museum.

ice crystals, via flickr

The Guardian explains the premise:

It is, Deyan Sudjic believes, one of the biggest challenges facing designers today: “What do we do now that the digital world is destroying the physical object?”… [M]aterial objects were almost becoming “an endangered species” in the digital world. “But as a species we are programmed to want to leave things behind, to remember people through things and that is why we have asked designers to think about other ways than the obvious ones.”…

That dilemma, in societies where we don’t really need wristwatches and where we have fewer printed photographs in our albums and books on our shelves, is addressed in a new exhibition at the Design Museum being staged in conjunction with Swarovski.

From the Web site:

For this exhibition, the Design Museum and Swarovski are collaborating to challenge designers to explore the future of memory in the fast developing digital age. Working with some of Swarovski’s previous commissions, alongside a new generation of designers, this exhibition examines the changing nature of our relationship with objects and even with time. Digital Crystal asks some of the most exciting talents in contemporary creativity to explore ways in which we can recover that lost connection we have with things, the result is 15 unique installations giving you a glimpse of the future of memory.

I think that we underestimate the difficulty of creating art that has anything really useful to say about technological or scientific issues, but this exhibit sounds like it’s worth seeing.

crystal palace pub (bath, england), via flickr

But read Abigail Sellen’s work on lifelogging while you’re taking the Underground to the Museum. Get off at Tower Bridge and walk across the Thames. The Museum will be on your left.)