The shape of waiting at the London Design Biennale
DD30 – Records of Waiting: On Time and Ornament by Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska, and Maciej Siuda
We’re nestled deep in the corridors of London’s beautiful Somerset House, and thankfully, every now and then, we have a wonderful exhibit in the building that gives us a reason to surface. This month, that reason is the London Design Biennale, a global showcase of international ideas, values, solutions, and provocations.
Nations, organisations, and transnational collectives are each given space, or ‘pavilions’, to explore their response to the exhibition's key theme, which changes every year. The theme for 2025 is Surface Reflections.
Ever the predictable data designers, it’s no surprise that our favourite piece is a data visualisation. This is Rows and Columns, after all. Records of Waiting: On Time and Ornament is a collaborative piece in the Polish pavilion that visualises time — not through pixels but through wood, carved by the hands of artisans and school students. Curated by Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska, and Maciej Siuda, the work captures 12 scenarios that involve waiting for something…19 minutes for an ambulance, 13 years to pay off a mortgage, 2 years for gender recognition documents. The installation weaves together two kinds of data, the cold logic of minutes, and the raw emotion of lived time — frustration, boredom, hope.
We’re most impressed by how this piece transforms humdrum bureaucracy into pattern, delay into ornament, and emotion into texture. It shows that we all wait, but we don’t all wait equally.
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