Old and new: Exhibition shows how craft and industry are merging

Displacing the old polarity between the industrial and the artisanal, the show, which runs from 3 July to 25 October, demonstrates how industrial designers are increasingly using technological expertise to achieve the visual style of craft-made objects.

'Machines are now able to pleat, fold, smock, layer and do all of those things,' curator Lidewij Edelkoort, trend forecaster and former chairman of Design Academy Eindhoven, told Disegno magazine. 'We are heading into a period when hand and machine will become one. That’s what we’re trying to say with this exhibition.'

This new hybridity is not a backlash against machines, but about the integration of industry and craft. The result is splendid, with delicate chairs made of rope, curving stools of pleated leather, and lamps of elegant, earthy textures. Clearly, hybridity breeds beauty, strength and texture.

The Convergence Economy embodies a new kind of hybridity in which boundaries fade and cross-fertilisation of spaces, products and ideas becomes the essence. The Gathering exhibition is carving out a new identity and role for design in a world in which old and new don't clash, but make each other stronger.