Timeline

Pauline Deltour (1983-2021)

The designer Pauline Deltour first appeared in Disegno back in 2018 with Monimalz – a connected piggy bank that she had designed for La Poste. Recasting the coin container as a digital object, variously styled as a cartoon whale, panda and monkey, Monimalz was a perfect example of Deltour’s design: rich in charm, wit and beauty, but also precise, rigorous and immaculately detailed. Throughout her career, which began at Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design before she left to found her own Paris studio in 2011, Deltour was able to weave together these disparate strands within her work – a combination she described as “severe and delicate” – to create objects of extraordinary richness. Her death in September took away one of design’s brightest young practitioners; it is testament to her talent that her legacy within the field was already secured.

The colossus of backlogs

While the start of the pandemic may have been marked by shortages, a year and a half on it has become characterised by an over-accumulation of stuff – albeit often in the wrong place at the wrong time. September saw record queues of shipping containers at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, which handles around 40 per cent of all container imports to the US. In the “before times”, it was rare for more than one container ship to be left waiting for berth; at the backlog’s initial peak, 73 were awaiting the opportunity to disgorge cargo. It's a backlog created by a pandemic-prompted buying boom, mixed in with fewer port workers and lorry drivers (thanks in part to Covid outbreaks), all adding up to produce a bottleneck on a colossal scale. It’s just one manifestation of the international supply chain crisis, which looks likely to continue as the global north heads towards the bloated holiday season. Stuff, it seems, it here to stay.

Fair play

We are still very much in a pandemic, but after a year of Covid calendar chaos, it seems that design fairs couldn’t wait to return. In September, Paris hosted Maison et Objet; Milan, the Salone del Mobile; and London brought back its own Design Festival, all of which invited overseas guests to attend in-person. With vaccination schemes in place for wealthy countries and testing systems that support international travel, the fairs bounced back after their year in the wilderness, albeit in altered, leaner formats. Salone, for example, was reduced from its pre-pandemic pomp, but did introduce a novel system whereby members of the public could attend the fair and buy products directly. Given that anecdotal reports suggest attendees enjoyed this less full-throttle fair experience, perhaps opportunities to browse, rather than be bombarded, could become a permanent fixture. Netflixers around the world collectively went crazy for Squid Game, a South Korean drama that premiered in September, transposing the country’s very real personal debt crisis onto a fictional secret gameshow where players compete for a cash prize – imagine a cross between The Most Dangerous Game and Battle Royale. Just as captivating as Squid Game's gut-wrenching interpersonal drama and stomach-turning gore, however, was its set design, with art director Chae Kyoung-sun creating nightmarish playgrounds-on-acid for the bloodbaths to play out on. “All spaces in the game world are built in sets,” Chae told Variety. “The art teams had to think like a designer who created the games.” Basic shapes, bright colours and childhood nostalgia featured heavily, with Chae also peppering her sets with hidden secrets, such as the mysterious games being spelt out by the tiles of the dormitory. But some of the symbolism remained an inside joke. The pink ribbons gift wrapping each black coffin? Those were inspired by Chae’s love of Kpop girl group Blackpink. With more than 111 million viewers around the world entranced by the show’s aesthetic, will pastel colour palettes hit different now?

OCTOBER

Paris. London. Milan. Springfield?

Everybody knows that The Simpsons has been in decline for years, but in October the long-running cartoon shook off the cobwebs and returned to the forefront of pop culture. Partnering with Balenciaga, the show created a special 10-minute episode that replaced the brand's traditional catwalk with an animated cavalcade

of the Parisian fashion house’s recent designs, dutifully modelled by some of Springfield’s finest. The plot was delightfully schlocky (creative director Demna Gvasalia gamely sending himself up as a preposterous couturier determined to bring eleganza to a fashion-deprived Springfield), but also steeped in warmth, nostalgia and cartoon goofiness. This was a smart skewering of fashion’s pretensions, but also a celebration of its craft (the animated garments looked beautiful, even when wrapped around the exaggerated proportions of Homer and company) and a welcome reminder that even this most rarefied of design fields can still be fun, of the zeitgeist, and welcoming to those who sit outside its exclusive ecosystem of catwalks and soirees. At the time of writing, the film has been watched on YouTube close to 9m times – however briefly, Balenciaga has made The Simpsons relevant again.

Complexities, subtleties and idiosyncrasies

Design awards are invariably a little silly and subjective, fruitlessly comparing clearly incommensurate works within a field that lacks any clear metric for determining value. Even so, sometimes they manage to get things spectacularly right. In mid-October, the illustrator Mohammed Iman Fayaz was named the recipient of the CHF 100,000 Hublot Design Prize. A member of the New York art collective Papi Juice, Fayaz was selected for his work producing posters for nightlife, protests and fundraisers supporting LGBTQ+ people of colour. Posters are a traditional design medium, and one that can be easily overlooked, but Fayaz’s work stands apart for its social purpose and activism, anchoring his illustration in a desire to serve and reflect his community. “He really has documented an extraordinary community of queer [and/or] trans people of colour who at times are very vulnerable and at others are happy and joyous,” said the critic Alice Rawsthorn, a member of the Hublot jury. “I think he’s caught their complexities and subtleties and idiosyncrasies, and that’s such a difficult thing to do.” It remains subjective, of course, but Fayaz is a more than worthy winner.

Shaking up the skyline

October proved a sad month for starchitects, with the Chinese government announcing a policy that limits the height of new skyscrapers in small cities. Towers in cities of a population of 3 million or fewer are to be restricted to a maximum height of 150m, with this height cap following a July ban on skyscrapers over 500m tall (unless special government dispensation is acquired). Seen together, the policies amount to increasing restrictions within a nation where architecture has spent much of the 21st century striving for iconicity (viz: tallness/weirdness). It’s a sensible move for various environmental and safety reasons, particularly given the May 2021 case of a 71-storey, 300m-tall skyscraper in Shenzhen, which began to tremble in high winds, triggering a rapid evacuation. The cause? A 50m mast atop the building which has since been removed. After decades of racing to break records in the country, the international building community may have to say goodbye to the high of supertall skyscrapers.

A global snow day

Six hours of Zuckerberg-free silence. In early October, a series of faulty configuration changes on routers at a data centre in Santa Clara managed what legislators around the world have been hitherto unable to: take down Facebook, along with its sister apps Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus. As engineers rushed to fix the issue (apparently hampered by the fact that their entrance passes to server areas are lopped through, you guessed it, Facebook technology), organisations around the world went into meltdown, with the apps and platforms through which they conduct much of their business rendered useless. There is a lesson in this about the dangers of allowing one company to control so much of the world's communications infrastructure, but it's not one that Zuckerberg and company seem ready to learn, with Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri downplaying the issue as “a snow day”. Well, as charming an image as that may be, it doesn't do much to grapple with the underlying precariousness. For instance, just imagine if Facebook tried to do something completely mad, like entirely colliding physical and digital reality in some kind of “metaverse” that ran exclusively on those same stricken routers. What then…?

FKA Facebook

So, remember that social media company accused of using addictive algorithms to push divisive content to radicalise people or destroy their mental health for profit? I think it was called Facebook, or something? Anyway, here comes Meta, a social media – sorry, social technology – company that is going to (allegedly) revolutionise the way humans communicate with friends, family and co-workers via the metaverse. What is the metaverse, you cry? Well, it’s the brave new world of augmented and virtual reality, where you can layer fantastic digital landscapes over your grey

everyday, kind of like a reverse Matrix. Fun when it was Pokémon Go, maybe not so fun when it’s getting fired in VR for unionising, or having to don a silly headset so you can listen to your racist relatives spout conspiracy theories in surround sound. The new Facebook Meta logo features a squashed möbius strip, presumably to remind you that you can never escape the infinity loop of content. How meta.

Bitcoin bites both ways

Late in October, El Salvador developed a (crypto)currency conundrum. As of June 2021, the country has accepted Bitcoin as legal tender – a move hoped to prove democratising in a nation with a low uptake on bank accounts, but high levels of smartphone ownership. Despite these good intentions, the Salvadorian government was forced to disable a key function of its Chivo Bitcoin wallet app after traders discovered a loophole in its design. Bitcoin is tied to real-time market fluctuations and is, therefore, notoriously volatile; transactions become tricky when the price of your lunch could change in a matter of seconds. To resolve this, Chivo included a “freeze” function, whereby the price of a transaction remained the same for 60 seconds such that payments could take place without sudden variations in price. Crypto traders, however, realised that if you compared the frozen price with the real-world price when exchanging Bitcoin for, say, US dollars, you could buy or sell Bitcoin at a profit based on the difference between the two. Cheeky. The great democratisation through Bitcoin may require a little more design work yet. A room without a view

You have to admire the self-confidence of Charlie Munger, the billionaire donor and designer of Munger Hall, a proposed hall of residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which will provide dormitories for 4,500 students. The scheme, Munger told Architectural Record, is based on Le Corbusier's Unité d’Habitation, but will improve upon it in every respect. “The whole thing didn't work worth shit,” Munger said. "I've fixed that.” It's nice that Munger believes in himself, because his design has already prompted one member of the university's design review committee to resign in horror, explaining that they were “disturbed” by Munger Hall. One glaring problem is that 94 per cent of students living in the hall will have no natural light in their dormitories. This, Munger argues, is completely fine. Students will instead have digital windows, inspired by the "Magical Portholes” on Disney cruise ships: basically TVs that screen footage of the outside world. Munger, for one, is sold. “[We] will give the students knobs, and they can have whatever light they want,” he gushed. “Real windows don't do that.” I mean, you have to give him that one. Real windows definitely don’t do that.

A sticky delegation

At the time of writing, the eyes of the world are turned skeptically, hopefully, expectantly towards Glasgow and the outcome of its COP26 summit. With representatives gathered from around the world, it’s a pivotal moment in averting climate collapse. So it left a bitter taste when we learned that the biggest delegation represented at COP26 is, in fact, the fossil fuel industry. That's right, those guys. Global Witness, an NGO that investigated the UN’s participant list, discovered that 503 delegates are lobbyists of the oil and gas industries. That’s larger than the country with the largest delegation, Brazil; larger than the combined representatives from the eight countries worst affected by climate change in the past 20 years; and double the size of the UNFCCC's official indigenous delegation. Considering the fossil fuel industry’s long and inglorious history of suppressing and lobbying against climate research, you would have thought that the world would have had enough of them by now. Who keeps inviting them to these things?

The history of futures yet to come

The long shuttered Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building (AIB) on Washington’s National Mall has finally reopened, having first closed for structural reasons way back in 2004. Hurrah! The museum hopes to bounce back with FUTURES, a building-wide arts and science exhibition exploring possible options for humanity’s next steps. It’s an exciting, forwardlooking show, and one that may prove a shot in the arm for a building very much tied to the Smithsonian’s past. Originally named the National Museum, the AIB has, over time, relinquished parts of its collection to spawn other Smithsonian institutions: the National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum. At this point, you wonder if the future was the only subject matter left for the AIB. Its path beyond the inaugural exhibition is as yet unannounced, but we can’t help but wonder whether the AIB will commit itself long term to

being a “home for the futurecurious”(as its homepage tagline currently styles itself). If so, let’s hope there’s still enough future to go around.

Masters of green design

With concern over climate change (rightly) at an all time high, designers are increasingly under pressure to deliver sustainable projects. Step forward Cambridge University, which is responding to the crisis with a new Master of Design (MDes) degree. The course is aimed at equipping students to address issues such as achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, as well as “societal and environmental issues, including poverty”. Whether these things are actually design issues is suspect, but the course’s combination of the arts and sciences (it is a joint venture from the university’s architecture, engineering and materials science faculties) is welcome. It also aims to address an interconnected issue: the lack of diversity in design. Fewer than 40 per cent of applicants to Cambridge’s engineering and architectural design courses are women, so the university has decided admissions will look beyond simply taking those with top grades from male-heavy subjects such as physics. So far, men of science have done a pretty poor job as stewards of the environment. Perhaps it’s wise to let others have a shot before it’s too late.

Tulip fever breaks

Pour one out for Norman Foster, whose outré design for a 305.3m high tourist attraction in the City of London was finally kicked to the curb in November. Back in 2018, Foster + Partners unveiled its vision for a bulbous glass pod offering panoramic views of the city, ringed by a perimeter of gondola rides and perched atop a supertall concrete column. Dubbed The Tulip, it was set to sprout from the back garden of the Gherkin in the city's crowded business district. It was the proposal that spawned a thousand photoshops, with internet wags pointing out that it looked more like a sex toy than a family-friendly day out. The Tulip got through local planning, but was blocked in 2019 by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. There were fears, however, that the government's Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities (another cringe 2021 rebrand) would ultimately decide to level-up London with this crime against eyeballs. Fortunately, the Tulip was pruned at the final hurdle, with the planning inspector slamming its “very high embodied energy" and “unsustainable whole life-cycle”. A small green win for the books.

the new lighting family by stefan diez