That title just seems to be trying too hard. Like Cool Britannia or Britpop, it is the kind of tag that can only end in ennui. It also, curiously, reveals nothing abut the exhibition.

Eccentric utility: ‘Chandelier’, Thomas Heatherwick’s gathering of lamp posts

The brief for the Design Museum’s new show was to come up with interventions in London’s cityscape that would lighten or enhance the everyday experience of the streets. London is rich in the kind of mini-icons that lend themselves to tourist tat, but these have also created a quirky urban micro-landscape that encompasses lipstick-red pillar and telephone boxes, the stripy tarpaulins of market stalls, bollards converted from cannons and benches supported on sphinxes. But it is a landscape to which the past few decades have, incredibly, contributed absolutely nothing of real value or beauty. “Super contemporary” in London means CCTV cameras on obscenely swollen steel columns, it means hideous black bins with nasty municipal logos, it means concrete and plastic pod toilets and clusters of blank and mismatched steel junction boxes.

A brief as vague and fantastical as this one should have thrown up a cocktail of the fun and the functional – and so it has. Among the most intriguing is Industrial Facility’s minimal post-office, a booth that fits into the footprint of the classic phone box and embraces a few basic postal services via a digital connection with an operative who appears as if behind a counter. A riposte to the decline of the post office network and an urbane addition to the streetscape, the booth also addresses a number of issues from the redundancy of the phone box (or rather its replacement as a colourful advertising site for prostitution) to the privatisation of the public realm.

Architect David Adjaye’s delicate bus shelter is another delight, a slender glass structure with a roof etched in emulation of a canopy of foliage. Thomas Heatherwick’s gathering of lamp posts into a sculptural cluster (“Chandelier”) is funny and economical, using off-the-shelf utilitarian products in an eccentric, useful way.

‘Rain it in’, Paul Cocksedge’s vision of staying dry during rain

And then come the more self-consciously visionary efforts. El Ultimo Grito’s elevated garden to bring tourists face-to-face with Lord Nelson atop his column in Trafalgar Square is an archetypal one-liner. Paul Smith’s contribution is a rabbit-shaped bin whose ears light up when something is thrown away. Which is all you need to know. Fashion’s other representative here, though, Wayne Hemingway, has designed a booth for designers. A simple shelter with a section that slides out like a drawer to expand the space, this is a neat and unpretentious idea that addresses London’s image of itself as a young design capital.

The most ambitious proposal is Paul Cocksedge’s delightful notion of using a field of static electricity to bend rain away from a person or place, beautifully illustrated with a gent on a bike, the downpour deflected around him. It not only evokes those wonderfully absurd ads in Victorian magazines for unlikely patented devices but also envisages a use of technology that would radically alter the experience of the drizzly city (although the technology seems to me at best hopeful). Barber Osgerby’s London Ear (an exquisitely absurd structure that amplifies selected sounds) and Nigel Coates’ vision of Battersea Power Station as a place of pleasure are enjoyable too.

There is much nonsense here, but also glimpses of real intelligence. A few of these designs genuinely address issues of life in London. But it would have been good to have seen more serious products, more utilitarian but not necessarily less beautiful or ambitious. In spite of London’s high opinion of itself as a design capital, this is still the city where a prince can stymie a modern intervention and where corporate blandness stalks the streets. Super contemporary?

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