Arts & Culture
In bed with Tracey and Carol
Published 15 November 1999
Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams sees Ms Vorderman's ideal home
How should we live? Like Tracey Emin, surrounded by rumpled bedding and soiled knickers, empty vodka bottles and pill dispensers? Or like Carol Vorderman, whose gadget-infested three-bedroom semi suggests a very different lifestyle of brisk efficiency with technology everywhere mother's little helper.
Of course, these are just domestic simulacra. For all I know, Emin's real home is awash with sensible shoes and pension plans, and nothing like her controversial Turner Prize entry on display at the Tate. Vorderman's ideal home is at the Design Museum, and she insists it's nothing like her actual home which looks "like a home really, with furniture and photos and junk, and piles of magazines I haven't read, but I will, I will".
The room sets are Vorderman's way of giving shape to the request to go shopping with £30,000 of Sir Terence Conran's money as the latest contributor to the Conran Foundation Collection, an annual award created in order to build up a picture of evolving design and changing taste at the turn of the century. Previous contributors have been people known in design circles, but often not by the general public. One time, the museum went so far afield as to select one of its own trustees. The goodies these design luvvies chose may have represented the ultimate in contemporary taste, but they did little to draw visitors.
The remedy is quite obvious: Get Someone Off The Telly. But who? Angus Deayton? Jonathan Ross? Why? Peter Snow? Too mad. And anyway, they're blokes. Design needs to be demasculinised in order to draw visitors. Jilly Goolden? Those outfits. Please! Charlie Dimmock? Maybe next year.
Vorderman is a good choice, a presenter both of Tomorrow's World and of programmes about hi-tech home makeovers, an attractive figurehead for information technology and mathematics. Here, in short, is somebody who knows how to dress and what half of three-quarters is. She is also the sort of person manufacturers of technology love, what they call a "lead user". She'll buy the latest gadget even though it is sure to fall in price within a few months(she can afford it). She'll even enjoy the struggle to make it work ("That's part of the whole culture, isn't it?") and then she'll tell everybody (millions of viewers in her case) how marvellous it is.
The semi shows how designers are - or are not - meeting the needs of our more flexible, teleworking lives. Vorderman looked through office furniture catalogues for inspiration, finding more conventional-looking furnishings ill-adapted to new tasks. Her haul contains few things that she would really buy. "I'm not spending £30,000 showing who I am. That's not how I took it. I wanted to take a three-bedroom semi and show how the things that increase efficiency in the office could be applied to the home."
Vorderman forbore to choose a car, which meant that her money went further than some previous contributors'. But she clearly enjoyed the wanton consumerism built into the idea of the Conran Foundation Collection. One essential is a leather computer case, £550 from Alfred Dunhill. Her own case, she says, cost £12.99. Thankfully, there was still money left over for a Crayola art set, one of the few unwired items on the list. The only sensuality came in a few yards of crepe de Chine chosen to display a series of patterns created by the designers James Bullen and Rhona Nampijja, though even these were computer-generated. The patterns themselves were coolly technocratic, rather reminiscent of the 1950s fad for dress prints based on X-ray diffraction patterns.
In our walking, talking, number-crunching future, it's all the neat little items we'll trail around with us, clattering in our wake like the oysters following the walrus and the carpenter, that make me wonder. Vorderman's choice includes a Nokia 8810 mobile phone, one of the little shiny ones like a cigarette lighter, a Ricoh RDC 4200 digital camera, a Lyra digital music player, a Palm Pilot V, and of course the indispensable Sony Viao PCG C1F - all items with which I'm sure you're familiar, so I won't trouble to tell you what they do. How did we get by without them?
It's not the fancy gadgets that have the highest price tags. A wardrobe designed to fit to the height of a typical ceiling, allowing two racks of clothes to be placed one above another, the top one levered out within reach when needed, is a clever and necessary idea in principle. But constructed to standards little better than an ordinary flat-packed wardrobe from Habitat, it certainly wasn't worth five grand. Carol's cheapest buy was a packet of baby wipes from Boots (£2.49). At last, a sign of humanity? No. They're what the modern cybermum uses to wipe down her computer. The fetish of technology could not be clearer. Suddenly, Tracey's bed looks very inviting.
The Conran Foundation Collection 1999 is on display at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 until 5 December
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