Dreams Engineering - V&A Installation

This large scale installation was built for the Friday Late event in the V&A museum. It was positioned in the pond in the John Madejski garden at the heart of the building. The installation was accompanied by a workshop where visitors were invited to experience the balancing of mobile components to make their own domestic version of the large mobile.

Mobiles are a little marvel of physics; lLooking at them a little abstractly, they are composed of a Concept and some Content.
The Concept is the structure; a manifestation of a perfect balance; the Content is the fuzzy toys or whatnot that are hanging from the ends.
I have made my mobiles all Concept; the structure is everything. This allows me to accentuate the act of balance and show what a little feat it really is.
The mobiles are composed of light wooden beams, wood providing an exceptional strength to weight ratio that balance each other and move on precise horizontal planes.  The entire design process and the hierarchy of it are in plain view: there is the concept of balance, there are the mechanical features that enable it to function properly and on top of that there are motion and colour that create the spectacle.  These components are presented without a single clear narrative; the concept could be Colour with the balancing structure and movement acting to serve it or it could be the concept of motion that is manifested in the form of balancing coloured lines.
The idea here is also the end product and Design task is in creating the components that will best serve the concept.