37 visions of Utopia by design unveiled as first London Design Biennale opens

The first ever London Design Biennale will open to the public for a three-week take-over Wednesday, the organizer said Tuesday.

Installations, artworks, prototypes and designs from 37 countries and territories have come together in an entertaining and inspiring exploration of the role of design in our collective futures.

"The London Design Biennale celebrates design as an international language, which everyone can understand. It does not recognition boundaries or borders. It is always seeking to make the world a better place," Sir John Sorrell, president of the London Design Biennale, told a press conference Tuesday.

According to the organizer, each exhibit is a response to the Biennale's 2016 theme "Utopia by Design", chosen as part of Somerset House's UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility, to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's text.

The resulting commissions are richly varied, including fantastical imaginings of future cities, homages to unrealised utopian proposals of the past, and innovative solutions for issues in 21st-century life.

Shenzhen's Urbanus, which will represent China to participate in this year's Biennale, will bring an installation called "Shenzhen: New Peak" to address the problem of the megalopolis with a proposal for a series of towers that are small cities in themselves. Visitors can explore an outsized model of these megastructures.

The organizer said visitors will interact with brand new work by world-leading architects, designers, scientists, writers and artists in a broad, vibrant exhibition that includes large-scale kinetic sculpture, immersive digital installations, culinary pop-ups, performances and VR renderings of the future.

Underlying much of the Biennale are a number of pressing, universal issues that designers around the world are seeking to address, among them sustainability, migration, pollution, political unrest, water and social equality.

Dr Christopher Turner, director of The London Design Biennale said: "When we set our inaugural theme, Utopia by Design, we hoped to engage with some of the most fundamental issues faced by humanity today. How might the critical and optimistic imaginations of designers transform our future world, and how do perspectives differ across the globe?"

He said the response has been extraordinary.

The London Design Biennale 2016 will run from Sept. 7-27. Endit