For nine days in September, when the London Design Festival’s distinctive red signage appeared at scores of event locations, the remarkable breadth and depth of the U.K.’s design industry was suddenly made visible. The 14th edition, held September 17 to 25, was a sprawling affair: Hundreds of designers and manufacturers hosted events across the city as five separate trade fairs ran concurrently.

Commissioned projects gave a sense of order to the dizzying array of pop-ups and partnerships, lectures and launches. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the festival’s official hub, several temporary large-scale exhibits were installed among the permanent displays. The Green Room, by London-based product designers Glithero, featured a massive cylindrical curtain of 160 brightly hued cords that dropped down a six-story stairwell; individual strands gently rose and fell over the course of a minute, offering onlookers a new way to visualize the passing of time. In the Tapestry Room on an upper floor, Benjamin Hubert’s wavelike Foil—an animated ribbon of 50,000 stainless-steel mirrors—scattered light across the walls like a giant disco ball.