Designing for longevity and a ‘long and happy life’

The show is themed around the idea ‘longevity’, and will see creatives including Music’s Mike Ash and Jon Bland; Dave Sedgwick  (who united Manchester and Barcelona through graphics), Liam Hopkins (Lazerian), Owt Creative, illustrator Helen Musselwhite and even performance poet John Cooper Clarke.

Ever-cheerful Cooper Clarke’s piece, created with Instruct Studio’s John Owens, is entitled Things Are Gonna Get Worse. The project sees the pair laser-etch a poem into Perspex, which delineates the ‘woes of growing old’. ‘Velcro slippers’ and ‘Planet Wasteland’ are both mentioned…

Taking a similarly bleak starting point, Helen Musselwhite and Because Studio’s Loz Ives ask, ‘Have you broken your heart or lost an eye? Perhaps just a fingertip?’

Their piece, Save Yourself, offers replacements for said broken hearts, misplaced peepers etc through a series of different body parts that the pair has created through paper and other materials.

While the secret to a long and happy life may not lie in replacing our organs with cute yet physiologically useless paper appendages, we’re still, perhaps, a fair way off of finding out what that secret is.

Dave Sedgwick and Tim Denton are looking to shed some light, collaborating with a community group of older Mancunians called Chorlton Good Neighbours for their piece, Don’t sit still. Keep going.

The pair asked their superannuated new pals what they thought that secret was, and used the responses to create a series of typographic rubber stamps, which people can use to make their own unique postcards with. These can then be sent to others, spreading the wise words of the older generation.

10 x 10  runs from 15-28 August at Bench Self Made Gallery, 59 Church Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester M4. The exhibition launches the Design Manchester Festival, which takes place in October. (www.designmcr.com)