New Looks: Designs like mamma makes

When function and form meet humour, design takes on a role beyond being practical.

The New Italian Design exhibition, curated by the Design Museum at La Triennale di Milano, is at The Lookout at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

The space overlooking the ocean is filled with the work of 133 designers giving an overview of contemporary Italian design.

Surrounded as we so often are by the architectural ugliness of malls, office parks and plain domestic and business technology, it is refreshing to see how these designers use imagination to create functional and amusing objects.

Take the storage unit by Adami Massimiliano, which is built by assembling various plastic objects in polyurethane foam.

Like the light shade by Gonata Gato, it is quirky and cleverly repurposes waste.

The Water Pot by the DRK Group is a toothbrush holder designed around a tap.

Simple? Silly? Actually, it's genius.

Another example, less useful and more philosophical, is the Chinese Look.

Designed by Studio X, it is, according to the catalogue, a critique of the paranoia that leads Western people to powerfully watch the advent of a Chinese future.

It is both jewellery and "an instrument of correction that allows looking at the world with 'Chinese' eyes".

Included in the exhibition are 189 designs for products; 28 for graphics; 28 for objects linked to the body, such as jewellery, handbags and accessories; seven for research; 32 for food; and four for interior design.

The scene that emerges is rich and multifaceted.

It starts with furniture and touches on new forms of communication, from food to web design, from fashion to textiles, and from jewellery to multimedia, all the way to interiors and object design.

The exhibited works - which number 288 - range from self-produced prototypes to large-series products, from works of art to merely industrial artefacts.

• The New Italian Design exhibition runs until October 25