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Remember the Genesis Device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn? The thing that explodes on a grey, barren moon, its shockwave leaving a trail of lush green natural beauty. Well, Conran was just like that, except the fallout was original 501s, cappuccino, jazz and Lucky Strike cigarettes. The Conran revolution has shaped our attitude to design ever since.





I'm on the first floor of the Design Museum in the midst of Thomas Heatherwick's collection for the Conran Foundation. It's £30,000-worth of novelty design culled by Heatherwick (but paid for by Conran) from pound stores, duty free shops and specialist equipment suppliers around the world. It's an array of beautiful and anonymous design: welding masks with warthog faces, glass rifles filled with wine, Pop Tarts, a cardboard coffin...

Wonderful, charming, clever, witty and optimistic: these mini ecstasies of design are moments when design's ambition outstrips its material presence - where a kind of cheapskate alchemy makes more out of less in a way that would make Mies van der Rohe spin in his grave. They show the paucity of imagination, parochial tastes and prosaic predictability of designers.

Upstairs there is an exhibition of houses by Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons would have loved Heatherwick's weird objects. They wrote things called 'And Now We Collect Adverts' and hung around with the Independent Group when Richard Hamilton cut up John McHale's American magazines, Edouardo Paolozzi lectured on the anatomy of Donald Duck and Reyner Banham wrote histories of architecture that ended with highways and movies. The group's interests celebrated and critiqued popular culture; they thought that the popular and the mass produced belonged alongside high culture.

After the Independent Group, after Pop, after Punk, there is a rich tradition of the ordinary and the everyday as high art. So you wonder what the real point of Heatherwick's exhibition is: to challenge the hegemony of taste? To critique design's relationship to function? Billed as 'ideas' and described as 'ingenious', it slowly transpires that the point of this exhibition is just as vague as these empty PR words.

While the collection is fantastic, the curation is naive. Similar ventures like Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's Folk Archive, Jim Shaw's thrift store art collection or the Venturis' Learning from Las Vegas show how difficult, deeply perplexing and rewarding the serious study of ephemeral things can be. Through its good-natured naivety this exhibition avoids all kinds of difficult issues. Because it ignores the context of high design connoisseurship, it lets these beautiful objects down, leaving them as curiosities. Like the show, Britain is inarticulate about design – unlike literature, music, comedy, cooking, all of which are discussed publicly and in some depth. Just like the climax of Changing Rooms, the British open their eyes to design, blink, open their mouths and are completely unable to explain what they see.

Which is understandable. Because design is strange. In the twenty-first century it doesn't need to be beautiful or functional; it's more like a branch of metaphysical poetry. It needs to tell us something about the world: kitchenware that speaks of existential angst, vanity units that probe the mystery of love, executive toys that ponder mortality. Design is a way of talking that is so mute it becomes eloquent.
There are three great traditions of British design: Moral (Hawksmoor, Ruskin, Morris, Unwin and Parker, the Smithsons), Stylistic (Inigo Jones, Wren, Lutyens, Pawson) and Technological (Paxton, Brunel, Rogers, Foster). The beauty of Heatherwic'ks objects suggests a crashing together of these distinct ideologies in ways that should pull the blinkers off designers to reveal gigantic vistas of unexplored territory. It's just a shame that they are presented in a way that looks like a quirky dead end.

Sam Jacob

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