London has a new Design Museum. And that's great – somewhere to go check out the sofas and lighting and gadgets we so desire. Right? Wrong.

The new Design Museum is an incarnation of the belief that design today is about so much more than just stuff. It's about a way of being in the world, a reflection of its era – and an enabler of times to come. Design thinking is as big a player these days as design doing.

And it's big bucks. A recent report by British industry body Creative England revealed that the creative industries are growing faster than any other in Britain, with design outstripping the likes of advertising, architecture and film. A Department for Culture, Media and Sport report pegged gross value add for the creative industries at £81.4 billion ($133.2 billion).

No wonder London has a new Design Museum. The old museum, opened in 1986 in a former banana warehouse at Shad Thames, down past Tower Bridge on the south bank of the river, was small and difficult to get to. The new Kensington digs are a savvy conversion of the modernist Commonwealth Institute building designed by Robert Matthew in 1962, reconfigured for now by that maestro of British minimalism, John Pawson. Price tag: £83 million.

Pawson's interior refit essentially drops from the heritage-listed copper-clad, hyperbolic paraboloid, which dives and swoops dramatically between the tree tops of surrounding Holland Park. Retaining the vast, full-height atrium, Pawson's touch is deliciously light – he has essentially draped the interior in his signature palette of pale oak, white marble and grey terrazzo, creating what is effectively a blank slate for the permanent and temporary exhibitions within.

"We unanimously selected John Pawson as we felt he was able to bring an old building back to life in the gentlest way, not compromising the original building but able to adapt it for a modern museum," says long-standing Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. The former dean of the faculty of art, design and architecture at Kingston University, editor of Domus and founding editor of Blueprint, Sudjic understands design as being about much more than product.

"For me, design is a way to understand the world around us. It makes technology work, it's a reflection of our culture as well as an economic engine. We see the Design Museum as a forum to explore the impact of the rapid changes that design is bringing to our society. It's a museum that not only explores the objects around us but the ideas that will impact the future of how we live."

Innovative and provocative designers

The inaugural exhibition speaks eloquently to that mission. Titled Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World, it features 11 installations from some of the most innovative and provocative designers and artists of our time, each engaging with issues that demand our attention now: networked sexuality, sentient robots, slow fashion, nomadic populations and the like.

Issues like Brexit, to which Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture responded by installing The Pan-European Living Room featuring a design artefact from each of the 28 member states of the European Union. It all hangs together surprisingly well – testimony to the fact that a coherent design consciousness has been made possible by the very existence of European co-operation and trade.

The background to the installation is a vertical blind formed by an OMA-designed barcode flag for the EU. I wonder if it has an "in tatters" setting?

Conceptual fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has devised a series of wearable devices that detect emotions and project them outwards for the world to see. So you can wear your fear or desire on your sleeve. Spanish designer Andrés Jaque has made an audiovisual installation from dating apps as a means of exploring how our pursuit of sex and love through social media is changing the way we view the city, our bodies and ourselves. Neri Oxman, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's poster girl for 3D printing, has produced Vespers, a series of death masks that revives the ancient pagan tradition of capturing the essence of a person when on their last breath. Björk is a big fan, having commissioned Oxman to design her own Rottlace mask based on the underlying tissue of her face. They're freaky but unmistakable signs of the times.

'When the Design Museum opened in 1989, the first exhibition, Commerce and Culture, was about the value of industrial products," notes the Design Museum's chief curator, Justin McGuirk. "Three decades later, we now take that value for granted. Fear and Love goes further, and proposes that design is implicated in wider issues that reflect the state of the world."

'A laboratory of ideas'

And so, Arquitectura Expandida, an activist architecture collective from Colombia, has replicated a school it designed and built in one of the most disadvantaged communities in Bogotá. Tokyo-based Kenya Hara, the art director of the Japanese "non-brand" MUJI has created Staples, a graphic display about the most common foods we eat, to highlight the roots of our cultural identities. Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke presents her ongoing project Wuyong ("Useless") based on clothes that have a strong connection to the land and traditions of rural China.

"By inviting these designers to create installations with such an open brief, the museum presents itself as a laboratory of ideas, and a place for absorbing how the world is changing," says McGuirk.

At 10,000 square metres, the new Design Museum can now also unwrap much of its permanent collection – which had been on slow rotation at the old Bauhaus-inspired building. The Designer Maker User installation features almost 1000 items of 20th- and 21st-century design from the fields of architecture, engineering, digital manufacture, fashion and graphics. There are road signs and traffic lights and underground maps, Thonet chairs, Vespas, typewriters, Xbox consoles, bibles, £5 banknotes and a Coca-Cola can. There's even an open-ended, crowd-sourced wall, featuring a line-up of 200 nominated objects from 25 countries.

The boffins call this "material culture". Others among us just call it "stuff".

NEED TO KNOW

 Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World is on April 23. Exhibition ticket prices £14 adult, £10.50 student/concession.

Design Museum 224-238 High Street, Kensington, London. Tel: +44 20 3862 5900 or bookings office on +44 20 3862 5937. For more see designmuseum.org