By Mark HadleyTuesday 12 Jul 2011TV and StreamingReading Time: 2 minutes
Design for Life
RATING: PG
DISTRIBUTOR: ABC2
RELEASE DATE: Sundays, 8:00 PM
If you’re a reality television fan with a flare for aesthetics and interesting concepts, you might want to click over to ABC2 for a look into the nail-biting world of Design for Life.
Design for Life takes ten British students and gives them an opportunity to win a six month placement with the firm run by uber-cool industrial designer Philippe Starck. It’s sort of Inventors meets The Apprentice. Starck may not have Donald Trump’s hair but he has every inch of his arrogance, and he wears it with a style that only the French can manage. Each week he sets the desperate design students a task that will stretch their ability to combine imagination with practicality as they search for the world’s most winning products. But like most perfectionists, from the kitchen to the boardroom, he can be incredibly hard to please.
Watching Design for Life is an amazing insight into the creative process behind the thousands of items that litter shop shelves. Each week students have come up with amazing designs for everything from the intensely practical magnetic cutlery set for the blind, to the incredibly bizarre table lamp that doubles as a self-defense bat. Starck may be every bit as cutting as the television producers hope, but his weekly trials reveal the image of God in every one of his contestants.
In the first chapter of the book of Genesis the Bible examines the creative process that went into making humanity. One of God’s fundamental design features was that men and women would be ‘made in his image’. Now theologians have argued about what this might include for millennia but one thing seems clear: we take after our Heavenly Father when we exercise our creative abilities. However scarred by sin humanity becomes, it’s encouraging to know that we can still see evidence of the Creator’s design in even the most determined unbeliever. The ability to imagine that which is not, and work to bring it into being, is a spark thrown by a greater, divine flame – and it’s on display in the most incredible forms every Sunday night!