(17 Nov 2016) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4066587 LEAD IN: Designs inspired by the London Underground and Brexit are now on show in the new-look Design Museum in Kensington. The new space is in a Grade-II listed piece of 1960s modernist architecture, three times larger than the Museum's previous home. STORY-LINE: Meet Mimus the mechanical robot who only wants to be your friend. This 1,200kg industrial arm has been programmed to respond and interact with passersby. Mimus is the one of the attractions in the new Design Museum in London. Art critic Estelle Lovatt is one of the first people to get a look around the museum "You know what I think of the new building, and I use the word sit as well, I love the fact that as soon as you walk in you can walk up the stairs and you can also sit on them. That struck me that there's so much humour here as well. You know I love the fact that this piece here behind me, I don't know whether to laugh at it or be afraid of it but it's the interactiveness of this museum that will make it steps ahead of, leap years ahead of the other museums that we go into now," she says. The Design Museum outgrew its previous home on the South Bank of the Thames and has moved into Kensington, a district well-known for its important museums, including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The new building occupies a Grade-II listed modernist site created in the 1960s for the Commonwealth Institute. The restoration of the empty building took five years and required an £83 million investment. Museum director Deyan Sudjic explains the importance of the move. He says: "The design museum is here in its new home in Kensington, new home? Actually the transformation of a building from the 60s. We've moved from a charming converted banana ripening warehouse next to Tower Bridge here to this great piece of 60s architecture brought back to life. We've moved because we think design is to important to leave to the specialists, to the priesthood, we're trying to do here for contemporary design and architecture what the Tate Modern did for contemporary art. Turning something that was seen as on the margins of the wider conversation into something right at the centre. So we have three times the space, 100,000 square feet, we can offer free admission. We have a chance really to talk to a much wider audience why design is important." The Design Museum opens with a striking exhibition called Fear and Love, which challenged 11 designers to react to a wide range of issues that affect the modern world. Dutch designer Christien Meinderstma's installation Fibre Market explores the possibility of recycling our clothes and sorting them into their constituent parts. The work displays mounds of brightly coloured wools. A New York architect has created a space that looks at how social networking is affecting our pursuit of sex. His work explores the phenomenon of the gay networking site Grindr. One of the most topical works in the exhibition is Pan European Living Room. In post-Brexit Britain the piece looks at how our interior design is so closely connected across Europe. It takes a typical living room and furnishes it with furniture, wallpaper and designs from the 28 EU member states. Justin McGuirk, chief curator at the Design Museum, says: "The average European living room, or our idea of the domestic interior, is really a construct of European cooperation and collaboration, trade agreements, designers from Britain and Holland working with manufacturers in Italy and Sweden and so in some senses the idea that one can pull out of that is an illusion." The centre-piece of the room is a vertical blind featuring a barcode design of the EU member states' flags. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/80ddd2b9c9b14bbdfbedb8c1c3d3aca3 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

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