Explore Things We Use at Mary E. Black Gallery

The Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design presents Things We Use, an exhibition on product design. Curator Peter Zimmer is a product designer, entrepreneur and avid cyclist who has been based in Nova Scotia since 1969. Through his exhibition, the Mary E. Black Gallery offers an opportunity unique in Nova Scotia to explore the rationale of design.

Product design is an applied art in the service of commerce: it does not exist as a pure research or artistic exploration.

The Things We Use exhibit includes a selection of knives, chairs, vessels and bike racks. The curator uses these objects to explore with the viewer some of the ways designers think about the whole process of bringing a notion forward into the world as a dozen or a thousand or a few hundred thousand very similar things. The exhibit looks at some of the forces that constrain the designers' imaginations and the reasons for success or failure in the marketplace where the products have been launched.

The gallery will also host a public forum, The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, in association with the exhibit. Bike users, landlords, property managers, city regulators and planners and architects are all invited to discuss Halifax's bike racks and parking spaces on Thursday, Oct. 25, at 5 p.m.

Things We Use runs Oct. 5 through Nov. 10 in the Mary E. Black Gallery, Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, 1683 Barrington St., Halifax.

The gallery is open Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call 902-424-4062 for details. Admission is free, with donations welcome. The gallery is a program of the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, which has worked for 10 years to promote and develop craft- and design-related industries in Nova Scotia.