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By Jessica Goodfellow, Media Reporter

November 19, 2016 | 3 min read

Design Museum is using its relocation to Kensington as an opportunity to show the world that design isn’t an elite interest, that it is around us everyday, and serves an increasingly important social purpose in “making the everyday world a better place to be".

This is the view of Gravity Road’s founding partner Mark Eaves, who was charged with crafting a marketing campaign that communicated the increasing role design plays in everyday life, to appeal to a broad audience beyond design aficionados, while ensuring its existing audience was not alienated.

It’s important for a museum expanding its space three-fold to Kensington’s cultural quarter - joining the likes of the Royal College of Art, V&A, Science Museum, Natural History Museum and Serpentine Gallery - to bring in more footfall.

It’s why the tagline of the campaign positions the new Design Museum as the museum “that never closes”, to highlight how design is something that surrounds people’s lives every minute of the day, in everything they do. This goes beyond the traditional definition of design as “just something rather nice that happens on the surface”, said Sir John Hegarty, a trustee of the museum and BBH co-founder, but goes far deeper and impacts lives in a thousand ways.

“The museum is about ensuring that we engage with people and explain the greater role of the function and purpose of design in the modern world,” he said.

This includes communicating the social purpose of design, shown in the campaign through examples like the BMW i8, a sports car that points to the future of sustainable motoring, the Adidas Ocean trainers which combine great design with recycled materials, and the lifesaver syringe which changes colour when it has been used.

“The impact and social purpose that design can have is becoming more evident than ever. Increasingly even the big mainstream brands are starting to have more energy around how design is making the everyday world a better place to be. Before it was quite hidden,” Eaves said.

The emphasis on the social purpose of design in the campaign is largely to appeal to a younger generation that is increasingly interested in social good. Hegarty believes there is a growing awareness among the new generation that “we can't go on consuming the way we have been consuming” and, instead must design things “that have a greater purpose”.

Despite having strong criticisms about data trumping creativity, Hegarty understands the importance of technology as evidenced by the film’s use of drone technology to capture uncapturable shots of the museum as going “hand in hand”.

“If you look at architecture technology has always played a profound part,” he added, “They are perfect bedfellows.”

That said, both Hegarty and Eaves believe the digital generation crave doing something that is not looking at screens but becoming a part of something, the “uncopyable nature of live experiences”, and is where they see the Design Museum resonating with young people.

“People spend all their life looking down at their phone, when they go into a museum they look up,” Hegarty mused.

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