Ron Arads designs have a singular ability to pack a punch line. Witness his Well Tempered Chair, 1986, an overstuffed English club chair whose contours are sketched with four folded sheets of tempered steel, his squirming 1993 Bookworm shelf for Kartell, or his crumpled-lid trash can in polished stainless steel from 2006. All three are featured in a new retrospective — his first in Britain — on view through May 16 at London’s Barbican Art Gallery.

Curated by Lydia Yee, “Ron Arad: Restless” places the multi-hyphenate designer-artist-architect at the center of three decades of creative ferment in London, starting with the late seventies, when he graduated from the famed Architectural Association, to the founding in 1981 of his Covent Garden studio One Off, where he produced punk-inspired assemblages of found furniture with his partner, Caroline Thorman, through to his sculptural collaborations with partners like Alessi, Capellini, and Vitra in the 1990s and 2000s. (Although trained as an architect, the ultra-prolific Arad has only recently completed his first building, the Design Museum Holon, which opened this month in his native Israel.)

During the show’s run, the museum’s programming will turn the galleries into an appropriately Arad-esque hive of activity, with tours, talks, and parties organized around the designer’s own idiosyncratic tastes  — ranging from hats to Ping-Pong to wordplay — and all guaranteed to keep the proceedings suitably off-kilter. A speed-dating event on April 15 will put the 1,050 LED lights implanted in Arad’s Swarovski-crystal Lolita chandelier, 2004, to use displaying text messages from potential love connections. Intellectual links, meanwhile, will be forged in panel discussions featuring guests like Katharine Hamnett, Peter Saville, Simon de Pury, Pae White, and White Cubes Tim Marlow.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Arad has updated his now-classic Well Tempered Chair in clear polycarbonate. The Well Transparent Chair, 2010, produced in a limited edition of 100  and priced at £5,000, is on view at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London. The chair’s appearance is as candid as its engineering — in Arad’s words, “What you see is what you get—there is no illusion.” Only clever allusion.