We’ve been working with the Design Museum in London for a couple of years now, looking at future strategies for their Collections. More recently in addition Daniel has been curating not 1 but 2 exhibitions due to open there this summer. Now we’re just counting the days until the first, Super Contemporary, “celebrating the fearlessly progressive spirit of London’s greatest creative minds, past and present”, opens to the public on June 3 (and our lives get a lot less hectic).

For Super Contemporary (in spite of my pleading to be more sensible) he has commissioned 15 pieces of new work from London designers including Thomas Heatherwick, David Adjaye and Industrial Facility as well as a series of personal maps of London from for example Airside, Michael Marriott and Imagination. It’s really unusual to have all new work for a design exhibition of this scale (which usually would focus on existing material)… And the proof will be in the pudding, or actually in the Design Museum from 3 June til 04 October. More here and elsewhere soon I spect.

In the meantime there’s a cool tool, also commissioned as part of the exhibition, which invites the design or close-to-design community to map their collaborations and locate themselves in the London design landscape. Check out The Collabregater. With a name like that how could you resist?

The British Council asked Daniel to guest curate the traditional British Council showcase in Milan Furniture Fair this year.

We put our heads together and steered them out of an exhibition and into a ‘new media experiment’.

The resultant project is a daily news sheet, map and website: The Incidental. It offers an information channel and platform to visitors, exhibitors and special guests via Twitter, Flickr, paper, pens and bicycle couriers. See an explanation of how it works here. A whole host of the most interesting people possible have contributed to the development and execution including Matt Jones, Schulze & Webb, Abake, Oscar Narud and Damian Barr.

The press release says:

It’s an admirable excursion the British Council have taken into uncharted territory. At best it will be the must-have document of this temporary coming together. At the very least it will be a fascinating demonstration of the possibilities and limitations of social networking technologies when pushed to engage real time in the real world with tangible outputs.

Even if you’re not in Milan you can contribute or observe…. Have a look – and then let us know what you think?