New Simplicity was an exhibition in South Kensington about simple product design, including projects from Jasper Morrison, Industrial Facility and David Sutton. The exhibition was curated to show how simplicity becomes a tool when designing to certain production processes. An important part of the show covered 3D printing, also known as rapid manufacturing. This is a technology that enables a product to be 'printed' in plastic in a process very similar to the printing of ink as we know it.

In this technique a printer can deliver a finished product, providing that this object is designed in a single piece that does not require assembly. In the future, one will be able to download a file for a product and print it on demand. New Simplicity featured examples of a torch, a pen, a wallet and a lamp shade among others produced through rapid manufacturing.

Our design mirrored this process. A catalogue was printed online through an on demand publisher, and this single object is all the exhibition signage itself. By trimming apart the pages we extracted all captions, title graphics and complementary text that was exhibited in the walls. Therefore a single piece of communication provides the whole set of materials for the exhibition.

The problem this created was that the captions and title graphics were very simple pieces of paper, and we were aware that just laying them around would not make justice to the show. To solve this problem, we incorporated the curator's wish to exhibit the products according to an ergonomics grid that marks the ideal heights for our interaction with objects: 40 cm for sitting, 120cm for reading, etc. Our idea was to stick spine binders to the wall and use them as a holder for the captions. This is also very helpful as it makes for a flexible system. By placing them on the ergonomic heights, we made visible the grid that informed the whole exhibition design.