Disegno #28 by Disegno

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★☆☆☆☆ Words Oli Stratford

I’m not at all convinced by 2021. After the problems with last year’s edition, I’d hoped for a complete redesign, but early testing suggests the new OS is a re-skin at best. Actually, I’m not sure they haven’t just put the old one in a diﬀerent box. Where to even begin? We all know that the Trump feature rendered the last four versions more or less inoperable, so like many users I was encouraged by the late arrival of the Biden beta in the 2020 version. Not a long-term solution, admittedly, but a much needed patch nevertheless. Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that Trump has not only been included in 2021, but some sloppy coding has seen it corrupt the Capitol files. It’s a gamebreaking error and one that makes you wonder what was happening in the backend to let the two become so entangled in the first place. Needless to say, the virus issues haven’t been resolved. We’re assured that anti-virus software is coming soon, and early test versions seem encouraging, but no definite word as to when it’s going to be rolled out across all users. It’s a shame, as the ongoing malware issue means that 2021, like its predecessor, remains a rather static proposal. For home desktop use only, then. Introduction

I’m also a bit worried by how much the new software seems to be hooked into Amazon, Google and Facebook’s platforms. Fine if these were optional plug-ins, but the whole thing appears to freeze if you disable them. They’ve been doing this for a few years now and it’s not great. I wasn’t expecting the 2021 edition to be open-source or anything, but the option to log in with your Prime or Facebook account is perhaps a bridge too far. What’s more, it still runs hot. We’ve been promised for a while that the developers are looking into compatibility issues with the new generation of greener hardware and trying out diﬀerent power sources, but 2021 seems to have come too soon for this. To be honest, it only seems to work properly when running on coal. That can’t go on forever though – the poor fan is struggling as it is. I have to say, I’m disappointed. After the problems with 2020, this was a real opportunity to get the series back up and running. Although delivery was prompt, I suspect it could have done with longer in development. So far, it’s done nothing but crash or else log me into Zoom whenever I try to do anything. One star, would not buy again.

Contents 49

Observation Bell Chair A total chair design, pallet and all

101

Observation Botanicals by Glithero Reimagining downtrodden weeds with a fresh glaze

Illustration Ultra Cold Chain A race against temperature and time

102

Gallery Assalam Alayki Ya Myriam: A Prayer Myriam Boulos documents pre- and post-explosion Beirut

Essay Lightning Rods Communicating the Covid vaccines to a hesitant public

122

Observation SaltyCo Making textiles from saline crops

Photoessay Dented, Knocked, Scraped A reflection on travel in 2020

123

Observation Yo-Yo Machines Long-distance communication, charmingly simplified

Anatomy A Dirty Secret Tackling waste streams in the glasses industry

History Enzo Mari was a Universe Students, friends and collaborators remember the late designer

137

Roundtable Welcome to Contemporaries A conversation about the gentrification of Dumbo

Review Do We Still Love Our Bookshops? The design of how we buy books online

Review The Real Feel The challenges of designing furniture over Facetime

Introduction ★☆☆☆☆

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

Timeline November 2020 to January 2021 in review

Interview A Moment of Crystallisation Omer Arbel’s alchemy with copper and glass

Review Of Fashion and Gatekeepers Can fashion shows retain their sheen of exclusivity online? Report The Only Thing Left to Design is the Foot On the future of the television set

140 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue 144 Observation OB-4 Radio revived

L AUFE N 1 8 9 2 | SWI T Z ERL A ND

Contributors Mösco Alcocer is a Mexican artist living in New York. He is co-founder of the Brooklyn-based bookshop and espresso bar Head Hi. p. 27 Lorenza Baroncelli is an Italian architect, researcher and curator. She is the artistic director of Triennale Milano. p. 123 Myriam Boulos was born in Beirut in 1992. She received her masters in photography from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in 2015. p. 102 Stephen Burks runs the design studio Stephen Burks Man Made. He is the only African-American to win the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s National Design Award in Product Design. p. 27 Choreo is a collaboration between photographers Roman Häbler and Lars-Ole Bastar, who operate and experiment in the fields of art, design and architecture. p. 26, 49, 101, 122 and 144 Maria Cornejo designs sustainable fashion in Brooklyn. She was born in Chile, and lived in London, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo before founding her brand Zero + Maria Cornejo in 1998. p. 27 Martino Gamper loves chairs and is currently thinking about how to define the new decade. p. 123

Francesca Giacomelli is a designer, artisan, curator, and archivist for the Enzo Mari Archive. p. 123

Cat Rossi is a design historian trying to make sense of the design present. p. 123

Ebon Heath creates typographic sculptures that shift letters from the two-dimensional page into three-dimensional space. p. 27

Leonhard Rothmoser is waiting for the end of lockdown to open his exhibition Projecting Age 2 at gallery Von Form in Munich. p. 50

Fahim Kassam saved Disegno’s blushes by providing a last-minute portrait. p. 18

Felix Chabluk Smith was thinking about learning American Sign Language during the lockdown, but didn’t. p. 64

Dean Kaufman is a Brooklyn-based photographer who has wandered many a street for many a year. p. 27 Malika Leiper is currently working on a multimedia documentary project about contemporary Cambodian architecture since 1990. p. 27 Alexandra Hodkowski makes big ideas happen. She is a co-founder of Head Hi. p. 27 Rab Messina is (im)patiently awaiting her new Dutch residence permit. p. 72 Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. p. 123 Anna Ploszajski is a materials scientist and writer trying to sneak science into the public eye using storytelling. p. 18

Katie Swenson is an architect-turnedwriter, who has taken to walking alone through the empty city. p. 27 Corinna Sy works in the field of eco-social design. She co-founded Cucula – Refugees Company for Crafts and Design in 2015. p. 123 Alfred Tarazi was born in 1980 and lost his parents in the ruins of Downtown Beirut in 1992. They are still looking for him to this day. p. 102 Matthew Turner is the author of two books, Other Rooms and, more recently, Loom. p. 137

The Quarterly Journal of Design #28 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com

Founder and publication director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnomagazine.com

Deputy editor Kristina Rapacki kristina@disegnomagazine.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Commercial executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@disegnomagazine.com

Creative producer Evi Hall eleanor@disegnomagazine.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Editorial intern Helen Brown

Cover The cover features ‘N.4: La Pantera’ from La Serie della Natura by Enzo and Elio Mari for Danese, 1964. Contributors Johanna Agerman Ross, Mösco Alcocer, Omer Arbel, Lorenza Baroncelli, Myriam Boulos, Helen Brown, Stephen Burks, Choreo, Maria Cornejo, Martino Gamper, Francesca Giacomelli, Evi Hall, Ebon Heath, Alexandra Hodkowski, Fahim Kassam, Dean Kaufman, Malika Leiper, Rab Messina, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anna Ploszajski, Kristina Rapacki, Cat Rossi, Leonhard Rothmoser, Felix Chabluk Smith, Oli Stratford, Katie Swenson, Corinna Sy, Alfred Tarazi and Matthew Turner. Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Arcoprint Extra White 110gsm. The cover is printed on Arcoprint Extra White 250gsm. All of the paper used in this issue is from Fedrigoni UK.

Thanks Many thanks to Amelia Walker and Alice Evans at the Wellcome Collection and Library for their expert assistance; Damiano Gulli at Triennale Milano for his phenomenal organisational skills; Pooja Jagpal for all her help with shipments; Choreo for a successful shoot, despite logistics being hampered by Brexit and Covid; Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks for organising a wonderful conversation; all of our TV interviewees for their generosity of time, and in particular Erwan Bouroullec and John Tree for providing further ideas and introductions; and Zosia Sztykowski for alerting our deputy editor to the chilling movement that is Pastel QAnon. We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and helped make Disegno #28 possible. Not least to Madam Mim, the Abbey Road longhair whose coat is looking particularly glossy these days.

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belongs to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first. Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnodaily.com Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com The Crit Disegno has launched a new fortnightly design podcast – The Crit. Find it wherever you get your podcasts from. disegnodaily.com/podcasts/the-crit

German Design 1949 – 1989 Two Countries, One History

An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Wüstenrot Foundation

#VDMGermanDesign #VitraDesignMuseum www.design-museum.de

Masthead

Supported by

20.03. – 05.09.2021

Vitra Design Museum

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NOVEMBER

removal. It’s an overdue change.

for the many pre-existing September

Not only is the new design nicer,

design fairs), but who knows in

America votes

replacing its predecessor’s bland

practice? “We’ll be there,” promised

The US presidential primary was

tricolour with a white magnolia amidst

the fair’s president Claudio Luti,

a fraught election (to put it mildly),

vertical stripes, but it also has the

but the important question is will

seeing the highest voter turnout

distinct advantage of not being

we? [Virus allowing, yes, ed.]

since 1900. Joe Biden’s victory was

overtly racist. Design done good!

considerable: he won the electoral college by 306 votes, and secured the

Al-Nouri reborn?

highest popular vote in US history.

The recent history of Mosul’s al-Nouri

That record, however, found a close

Mosque Complex is one of tragedy. The

runner-up in… Donald Trump. Adding

12th-century mosque was the site from

to the deep division laid bare by the

which ISIL declared its caliphate

result was the outgoing president’s

in 2014, before destroying the complex

cynical refusal to cede, and continual

during the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul

(fraudulent) claims of election fraud.

to prevent its recapture by the Iraqi

The general din around this distracted

army. This desecration and destruction

Images courtesy of the National Museum of American History (photo by Frank Blazich) and UNMAS (photo by Lorene Giorgis).

many outlets from reporting the fallout

was terrible, so UNESCO’s announcement

from various state elections, which

Trial success, logistics nightmare

of an open competition to “reconstruct

had also taken place on the same day.

“Today is a great day for science

and rehabilitate” the site is welcome

California’s passing of Proposition

and humanity,” said Pfizer CEO Albert

news. No doubt there will be wrangling

22, for example, granted app-based

Bourla on 9 November, when the company

over what form this rehabilitation

transport companies such as Uber and

announced that its Covid-19 vaccine,

should take, but let’s pray it can

Lyft an exemption from classifying

developed together with BioNTech, had

prove the “strong signal of resilience

their riders as employees, reversing

proven more than 90 per cent effective

and hope” UNESCO has called for.

a progressive 2019 bill. It was a win

in third-stage trials. Moderna and

Fingers crossed, then, that entrants

for the gig economy, but a loss for

Oxford/AstraZeneca soon added to the

can show a little more restraint than

worker’s rights.

good news with the results of their

they did with some of the proposals

own vaccine trials, which also showed

swirling around the Notre Dame

higher rates of efficacy than many

restoration (we’re looking at you,

had dared to hope for. But questions

rooftop swimming pool) – al-Nouri

remained: for how long do the vaccines

has suffered enough already.

grant immunity? Can the vaccinated still pass on the virus? And, finally, where can we get hold of lots of dry ice in a hurry? The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines need to be stored at very low temperatures (the former at -70°C, the latter -20°C), requiring that a complex “ultra cold chain” be set up ahead of the rollout.

It’s so long to Salone Salone is postponed; Salone is

Death (of an) industry

cancelled; Salone is indeterminate;

In mid-November, the world’s largest

Salone is moving date – it’s so hard

fur auction house, Kopenhagen Fur,

to keep track of Milan’s Salone del

announced that it would begin winding

Mobile these days. After the eventual

down its operations, ceasing entirely

Flagging up a problem

cancellation of 2020’s event, Salone’s

by 2023. Why? There were no mink left

Mid-November saw Mississippi replace

organisers came out in November with

in Denmark to fleece. Earlier that

its official flag with a new design,

a clear vision for 2021. The Salone

month, the Danish government had

the “In God We Trust”, and thank God

would move to from April to September,

ordered a total cull of the country’s

for that. The previous design, of which

allowing the “acute phase of the

mink population, after a novel strain

variants had been in place since 1894,

pandemic to subside” before the fair

of Covid-19 was identified in the

incorporated the Confederate battle

returned in the autumn “to kickstart

country’s fur farms. That strain,

flag in its canton – the last of the

design at [a] global level”. Sounds

Cluster 5, was found in a number of

US state flags to retain the symbol,

good on paper (although that kickstart

humans too, with fears arising that

having resisted years of calls for

may prove to be a kick in the teeth

it could intervene with the efficacy

Timeline

of vaccines. The cull that followed

appointment of architect Piero Lissoni

that fashion’s growing cultural

was a grisly, messy spectacle, the

as its new artistic director, bringing

influence would create lucrative

details of which we will spare our

the number of creative directorships

opportunities beyond its own borders.

readers. Suffice to say, Denmark’s

of Italian design brands currently

It seems best to leave the last word

mink fur exports – previously some

held by Lissoni to eight. Now, far be

to the man himself. “I wash with my

of the biggest in the world – are

it from Disegno to criticise, but one

own soap,” Cardin summarised. “I wear

unlikely to recover, and perhaps

man's consolidation of more directorial

my own perfume, go to bed with my own

that’s no bad thing.

positions than there are days in the

sheets, have my own food products.

week does not seem healthy for Italian

I live on me.”

design – where does he find the time,

DECEMBER

for one thing? Lissoni may prove an inspired appointment, but at a time

He who shall not be named

when design is crying out for greater

The architect Philip Johnson was many

diversity of voices, his professional

things. A Pritzker Prize winner and

success is fast becoming hegemonic.

influential MoMA curator, sure, but also a card-carrying antisemite, white supremacist and fascist sympathiser.

A tortured process

Ah. This was the problem highlighted

In 2014, the American Institute of

in December, when a group of artists,

Architects (AIA) rejected a petition

architects, and academics urged the

calling on it to censure members

Harvard Graduate School of Design

who design solitary confinement cells

(GSD) to limit its infamous alumnus’s

and execution chambers. According

association with the Thesis House –

to the AIA’s response, architects bear

a building designed by Johnson

no liability for what occurs in the

that is now owned by the university.

spaces they create. In late 2020,

Fortunately, the GSD replied with

however, the organisation performed

aplomb. “Johnson’s influence runs deep

a U-turn, presumably realising that

and wide, and across generations, and

it wasn’t terribly convincing to argue

yet he is also just one figure among

that a federal prison might just as

the entrenched, paradigmatic racism

easily be used as an Ikea, and who’s

and white supremacy of architecture,”

to say what might happen once the

the school’s dean Sarah Whiting said.

architect hands over the keys?

“Undoing that legacy – of the field,

Henceforth, all AIA members will

#MeToo

not only of Johnson – is arduous

be “required to uphold the health,

In late 2020, #MeToo returned to

and necessary, and as a school and

safety, and welfare of the public”,

prominence within fashion, as a

community we are committed to seeing

with “spaces for execution, torture,

series of men and women, predominantly

it through.” Henceforth, the GSD’s

and prolonged solitary confinement”

models, came forward with allegations

“Philip Johnson Thesis House” will

running contrary to those values.

of sexual assault by two powerful

officially be known as 9 Ash Street.

Better late than never, we suppose.

industry figures: Gérald Marie, the

It's a modest start to the wider change

former European president of Elite Model Management, was accused in

the campus will be much the better

Pierre Cardin (1922-2020)

September, while claims against

for nevertheless.

Farewell to Pierre Cardin, a fashion

designer Alexander Wang, the former

designer who is gone but certainly

creative director of Balenciaga, broke

not forgotten, not least because he

in December. While both Wang and Marie

put his name on everything in sight.

deny the allegations, the claims of

A pioneer of 1960s space-age design

serial sexual assault are disturbing

and an early adopter of pret-a-porter,

and demand immediate investigation.

Cardin had a keen sense of where

Regardless of what happens next,

20th-century fashion was heading

it seems clear that #MeToo still

and quickly seized upon the business

has much work to do. Fashion, like

opportunity afforded by licensing.

so many other industries, is very

Cardin lent his name to anything

far from a safe space.

and everything – from sardines and pottery, through to pickle jars

Jobs for the boy

and miniature golf sets. It may

Shameful revelations

In December, the Milanese furniture

not have been pretty, but Cardin

“WTF?” wrote Deborah Berger, a former

brand B&B Italia announced the

was astute in his realisation

product manager at insulation firm

Images courtesy of the Harvard GSD and Archives Pierre Cardin.

Whiting describes, but one that

The original

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Celotex, when she discovered that

JANUARY

These aren’t currently calculated

the firm she was working for had

upon purchase, so are being levied

manipulated fire tests to play down

The calm after/before the storm

by couriers upon delivery. Think

the combustibility of its materials.

After the horrors of the Capitol

of it as an £80 bailout for your

Berger had recorded her inimitable

attack, it was a relief to see Joe

nice Italian shoes. Meanwhile, a

reaction on an internal Celotex

Biden's inauguration go ahead peaceably

number of UK businesses facing trade

document – one of several revealed

and without major incident (assuming

disruption and extra charges have been

as part of the UK’s Grenfell Inquiry.

you don’t class the deployment of

unofficially advised by the Department

Over the course of the winter, the

25,000 members of the National Guard

for International Trade to set up

inquiry heard testimony from a number

as a major incident). Delivering his

subsidiaries or move business to

of former and current employees of

inaugural address, Biden spoke of

the EU. Makes all kinds of sense!

Celotex and fellow materials company

a future in which Americans “can see

Kingspan that made for grim listening

each other not as adversaries but

– a litany of cases in which safety

as neighbours”, an optimism difficult

tests had been rigged to return

to share when few of the US’s internal

Unpresidented

favourable results and materials

faultlines shave been addressed. Still,

“We love you, you're very special,”

marketed misleadingly. Particularly

the relative serenity of the event was

Donald Trump told his supporters in

damning was an internal email chain

a welcome respite. Hours later, Biden

a Twitter video posted while they were

at Kingspan about the company’s

issued an executive order recommitting

violently storming Congress, an event

claims that its Kooltherm K15

the US to the Paris Climate Accord,

in which five people died. “But go

plastic insulation, which was used

a move then attacked by insurrectionist

home.” After Trump fanned the flames

on Grenfell, was non-combustible.

foghorn senator Ted Cruz as being

while pretending to douse them,

“All lies mate,” read the chain.

“more interested in the views of the

Twitter shut down @realDonaldTrump,

“All we do is lie in here”.

citizens of Paris than in the jobs

swiftly followed by Facebook. The

WTF indeed.

of the citizens of Pittsburgh”. Well,

race was on: Google and Apple removed

the maturity was nice while it lasted.

Parler, a platform popular with the right wing, from their app stores,

We're leaving on a jet plane

while Amazon cut off web hosting

It was with much excitement that

services to the same platform. Many

Architects Declare launched in May

were relieved to be free of Trump’s

2019. The alliance, whose founding

toxic presence, but the power and

signatories included Foster + Partners

reach of a handful of tech companies

and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), put

should give everyone pause.

forward 11 principles for architecture practices to commit to in an effort to combat the double threats of climate change and biodiversity loss – to date,

The CIA [The Cool Icon Agency]

almost 1,000 firms have signed up.

With all the authenticity of a suburban

A paradigm shift for the industry?

dad assuring you that they’re very

Not quite. One of the commitments was

into hip-hop, January saw the CIA.

for signatories to “evaluate all new

reveal a trendy new graphic identity: a website with infinite scroll, paired

contribute positively to mitigating

Teething problems?

with a sleek new logo based on graphic

climate breakdown”. Awkwardly, this

11pm on 31 December 2020 marked

waveforms. Part of a wider recruitment

sits rather uncomfortably with some

the official end of the transitional

programme designed to address the CIA’s

signatories’ ongoing projects, in

period for Brexit. From then on,

severe lack of diversity in leadership

particular Foster + Partner’s private

the UK was really, really out of

positions, the redesign attempts to

airport for a luxury Red Sea resort,

the EU and its customs union, four-

rebrand a federal agency by shedding

and ZHA’s work on Western Sydney

and-a-half years after voting to

any sense of it actually being

International, Australia’s future

leave. Sovereignty at last? Maybe.

a federal agency, instead donning

largest airport. Architects Declare

But also border chaos, Kafkaesque

the aesthetic of a media agency in

reasonably argued in December that

paperwork, and rotting produce at

Shoreditch that might let you have

the firms were simply failing

Britain’s ports. “Teething problems,”

a beer at your desk after 5.30pm on

to comply with the declaration,

prime minister Boris Johnson assured

Fridays. “New Year. New Look,” tweeted

in practice as well as in spirit.

the nation confidently on 13 January.

the CIA, presumably forgetting that

Foster and ZHA’s response? They

But unforeseen issues keep cropping

it’s a foreign intelligence service

walked out.

up, the latest among which are VAT

and not a 22-year-old influencer

payments slapped on some British

showing off its new bangs.

customers buying goods from the EU.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

projects against the aspiration to

* MRS. NOTE desk by Defontes // CARBON chair by Homel // RAVAL table lamp by Creativemary // HAT vessel by &blanc THE HAT AND THE DRUM hand-tufted rug by Ferreira de Sá // AVANY floor lamp by Castro Lighting // AUTHOR PHOTO frame by Magyk ELIPTICA bookcase by Corque Design // MINHO guitar by Malabar // Photo shoot at Casa Allen, Porto, Portugal

Associative Design ‘The Best of Portugal’ Global Showcases. Featuring an expertly curated mix of contemporary and luxury Portuguese design and innovation.

A Moment of Crystallisation

Interview Anna Ploszajski!Photographs Fahim Kassam and Bocci

As the pixelated image sharpens into view, a smiling Omer Arbel condenses onto my screen, framed by some steeply sloping white wooden rafters. I imagine the rest of this loft might be a sleek converted workspace, a cosy cubbyhole perched, perhaps, above a roaring hot and dimly-lit workshop where glowing metal and glass flow freely. We are separated in both space and time – I can see cold morning light diffusing through a skylight in Arbel’s Vancouver HQ, while my own windows are smothered by curtains on this drizzly London evening. Yet despite the distance, I find that I easily fall in step with Arbel’s effusive and easy-going conversational style, as he introduces me to the works we have planned to discuss today. They are anonymously numbered 19, 28, 76, 84, 93 and 113 – the title schema a hallmark of Bocci, the design company that Arbel co-founded in 2005. But this sequential ordering is misleading, he tells me. “I’m trying to create an ambient cloud of ideas rather than a linear narrative,” he says, waving his hands above his head. “I’d like you to focus on the intuitive understanding of the two materials, rather than the sequence.” These two materials are copper and glass, although Arbel’s full body of work is by no means limited to this pairing. For 20 years it has spanned colourful resins, metals, concrete, woods, porcelain, polymers, plants and lighting across the fields of architecture, sculpture, invention and design. “Many of the connections between the projects are very tangential and occur as a consequence of coincidence,” he says of the particular material studies that have occupied his attention recently. Sharing his screen, the words “copper” and “glass” appear on a black background, with a heart in between them. “I’ve obtained a degree of intimacy with both these materials,” he says. The text is replaced by flames licking the circumference of a dark, squat cylinder: work 19. “It introduces our approach, which is to invent a process, not a form,” he says. The process in question is sandcasting copper alloy to create a highly-polished circular vessel, which glows from the centre of a coarse, chaotic halo that is itself formed by the blackened, oxidised copper allowed to overspill from the mould. “I like to think of this as the purest thing I’ve ever done because my only decision has been to determine the diameter of the circle,” he says. “And even that was governed by the flow rate of copper at different temperatures.” The next work, 28, describes Arbel’s early experimentation with glassblowing – manipulating glass with heat to tune its malleability in selected parts of a vessel, while also creating a vacuum to subsume these hot regions, in what he describes as a “controlled implosion”. Contrasting forms are produced when a hot dollop of coloured glass is sucked inwards in this way, and the results are illuminated and hung in clusters to create a bubbly multi-layered effect. “When I first discovered this process, I thought I’d invented something completely novel, but it turns out that this is a common method in glassblowing,” he admits with a selfdeprecating chuckle. These individual material studies come together in 76 and 84, the first confluence of the two materials in Arbel’s work. Drawing on the idea of coaxing hot glass with a vacuum, 76 sees white glass sucked through a fine

Interview

The 28 blown glass pendant, suspended on copper tendrils. The piece is created by manipulating the temperature and direction of airflow into blown glass.

19 uses sandcasting to produce “overspill”, a byproduct of the process that is usually removed, but which Arbel instead preserves as a record of the piece’s unique production.

copper mesh to form spindly tendrils, all of which are trapped in a transparent glass bubble. The 84 is the same, except the air pressure is paused before the tendrils form, so that coloured glass deliciously bulges through the grid-like mesh. The finished pieces form vases and lighting arrangements, the light glinting off the intricate protuberances inside. Crucially, these experiments proved that glass and copper could be safely worked together; that their coefficients of expansion (the extent to which a material expands when it is heated) could be well-matched. But what if copper could be melted into a glass vessel? asks project 93. “There’s a molecular bond that occurs when they’re both hot,” Arbel tells me. “The glass-facing copper doesn’t oxidise, but the inward-facing copper molecules do, and so you get the same elephant-skin, dark black, charcoal texture that I loved with 19.” The chaotic dribbling of yellow-hot copper down the inside surfaces of the vessel produces a completely unique piece each time. “You couldn’t match them even if you tried!” The finale of the series to date is 113. “Every strong trajectory must lead to its opposite,” he grins. “For years I’d been trying to match the two coefficients of expansion and explore consequences of that on a formal or aesthetic level. Now, I wondered, what if I deliberately tried to do the opposite?” The pieces start out the same as the 93s, except this time when the materials cool, they shrink in a catastrophically mis-matched way. The consequence is the shattering of the glass layer, explains Arbel. “The materials reject each other and what you’re left with are these copper shadows of the glass form.” With the echoes of the pinging, clinking and twanging of shattering 113s still resonating in my ears, my inner materials scientist can’t wait to quiz Arbel more about these works. I started by asking him about the drama of these processes. Anna Ploszajski One theme that I picked up in your work was the timescales

involved in its processes, because when copper and glass become hot they have very diﬀerent timescales. When you’re casting copper it’s all quite urgent – you need to get it out of the furnace and into your sand-cast mould, or get it into a form really quickly before it cools down. Whereas when you work with glass, it’s much slower and more sensual. It can be quite dramatic if it heats too much and then starts flopping everywhere, but it’s a slower rate of movement. How do you manage to control both of those things when you work with the materials together? Omer Arbel That’s an insight for me. I hadn’t actually considered it before, but you’re right – there is a completely diﬀerent order of magnitude of urgency. I guess the only pieces that require a calibration or a moment of meeting are 93 and 113. The act of pouring is a punctuated moment in an otherwise drawn-out process, which is quite a beautiful way of thinking about it. In the studio, there’s a kind of slow build up as the glasswork is being made patiently, with sensitivity. And then, when the moment’s right, everything happens all at once. The copper gets poured, the glass shatters, it’s quite dramatic. We just love it. There’s a performative aspect to the work that, as time goes by, I celebrate more and more. At first, I regarded it as just an obvious consequence of the process. I didn’t realise that the

The 76 introduces a vacuum to a strata of hot white and clear glass with copper mesh between the two. The vacuum pulls the white glass through the mesh, leaving tendrils of it suspended inside the clear glass.

performance of the procedure is actually an almost sacred aspect of this piece. If I’m the composer and I create a score, then the glassblowers and the metal casters are the musicians – it’s such a beautiful collaboration because they bring so much of themselves into the work. Imagine how a different musician might perform the same work; the same notes, but a completely different emotional backdrop. Anna As well as that, you’ve got the physical materials, which would be instruments in your analogy. The way that those materials will flow is completely unique. It’s not quite random because it’s guided by the shape and temperature and so on, but it’s not 100 per cent controllable where that copper will flow or how the glass will be led by the vacuum. Omer If I establish a criteria, I say, “Okay, what’s important is that there are no mistakes. Every single thing we make is interesting as long as it follows these particular loose guidelines.” That’s a very abstract idea and then there’s the moment where that abstraction becomes a very particular object – that’s what I meant when I use the word “sacred”. It seems very important to me that, in its concept, the piece could be any number of forms. An infinite number of possibilities is present in the glass shop every time one of these things begins its making process, and then it transforms into a highly specific and particular object that can never be repeated. That is actually true about everything in our world when you think about it. Even things that appear identical are not – we just can’t perceive the differences. Anna That’s sort of quantum mechanics – Schrödinger’s cat. There’s an infinite number of possibilities, but then you open the books, or you cast the copper, or you blow the glass, or whatever, and it crystallises into its final form. There’s a funny mirroring of art and science. Omer I speak about Schrödinger’s box a lot. I just described it to my daughter the other day, although I had to invent something else because she didn’t like the idea of a dead cat. It is a mystifying concept in a very basic way, which we can celebrate as humans. We can be present for that moment of the collapse of the wave function, and we know from quantum mechanics that observation effects that moment of crystallisation into a specific object. It is all quite alluring to me. Anna It’s interesting that even if there’s an accident in your workshop, it’s treated as something to be looked at and thought about, because that’s exactly what scientists do in their labs. There is no null result, because if there’s an accident or something goes differently, then maybe that could be a new avenue of research. We actually saw that with the coronavirus vaccine trial in the UK, where they accidentally gave one cohort of patients the wrong dosage, but it turned out to be the best combination. It’s always worth going down those avenues. As scientists, we are often so reluctant to publish a negative result or an accident. We don’t like to say, “Oh, I didn’t mean for it to go like that.” It sounds like you don’t think the same way. Omer I’ve said in past interviews that failure is my constant companion, but I want to change that now because it’s not failure. Even the word “failure” is the wrong word. There are no edits, in a sense, in any of our work. Even ideas that have never come to light remain in the studio on the shelf until they do come to light, and sometimes that takes years.

Interview

84.3 is a series of scans taken after slicing through 84.2 vases, a design that suspends a bubble of coloured glass within a copper mesh basket that is dipped into hot clear glass.

That’s why we have them around all the time – to be able to see them as we’re walking through or doing something else. You never know when it’s going to click, be it through a new piece of equipment, or a new person with a different skillset who comes into your orbit, or a different context. Something changes, and these past “failures” breathe a new life. So, it’s not only true that within each project we accept every single iteration of the procedure as valid, it’s also within the practice as a whole. There are no bad ideas. They’re just not ready yet. Anna Or they haven’t been combined with the right idea. Omer Exactly, or the right person, or the right leap in terms of material knowledge. That’s another reason why I feel more and more comfortable with the numbering system that I established quite a long time ago, because it gives an equivalence to every idea. Not a single one of them is better than the others. It also implies that none of them end, you just keep going. Anna Let’s talk about this specific combination of materials, because copper and glass are very different personalities in material science. One is a metal that goes through a crystallisation process such that at one temperature it’s a liquid, and then you lower it by 1°C and suddenly it’s a solid. Whereas, glass is weird. Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? It goes through a strange morphing transition over hundreds of degrees before it goes from a solid-y type thing to a more liquid-y type thing. Even those processes of heating and cooling manifest so differently in these two materials. I’m interested in how you manage to wrangle them together. Omer A huge amount of the craft of glassblowing is exactly that – on an intuitive level understanding the amount of heat in the glass, knowing exactly when to reheat it, and having a perception of how much heat is in different parts of the object. The part that attaches to the punty, which is the metal rod or blowpipe that you use to insert air, is always hotter than the extreme end of the glass because the metal absorbs more heat. And the thicker parts of the glass absorb more heat than the thin. There’s this balancing act that every glassblower performs which is almost completely intuitive. It’s the way that ballet dancers perform without actually knowing what their body is doing. So, on that level I rely entirely on the intuition of the glassblowers for the work with glass. For copper, as you say, it has a brute force aspect to it. In one minute it goes solid, so there we just heat it and hope for the best. It spills everywhere like water and then immediately solidifies. That’s the other thing: copper flows freely when it’s hot, literally like water, while glass is kind of syrupy. It has the consistency of honey, with this slower, more meandering quality, whereas copper is very direct. The interesting thing that’s happened in our glass shop is that the glassblowers have started to incorporate that intuitive quality to working with copper. You alluded to that moment where there’s too much heat in the glass and it starts to flop over – that sometimes happens at the moment where it comes into contact with copper, because there’s so much heat that passes from the copper into the glass, which liquefies immediately. For these particular pieces, that’s the moment where we have to watch out, but it’s actually a direction I’d like to explore and introduce in future work.

Interview

Above: the 113 being created in Bocci’s Vancouver glass shop. Previous page: the 84.2 vase being produced at Bocci.

Anna Could you get the copper to burn through the glass or melt it

completely away? Omer Yeah, and what kind of form might that result in? Interestingly, when copper is hot and comes into contact with a liquid like water, there’s almost an explosion that occurs because the water immediately evaporates and pushes outwards if it’s in the centre of the copper. I haven’t been able to do it, but I dream about somehow freezing that explosion as it’s happening – to have a stable object that captures the moment of explosion. We were actually doing some research in a foundry which uses cast iron to make very large machine parts for logging or shipping. They were showing us one particular sand mould, which was probably 1.5m in every direction, and they highlighted a particular “failed” casting where a mouse had been stuck inside the mould. Anna Oh my God. Omer Right. When they were flooding it, the mouse was completely evaporated and an explosion occurred. Luckily they were safe because there was a good 200mm of sand cover all the way around, but the form of that explosion was captured in that sand. We haven’t been able to replicate that effect, but I would like glass to take the place of sand in that set of parameters. Anna I guess you’d need to choose a different liquid to water; something that was going to evaporate but then freeze really quickly. Copper and glass have matching coefficients of thermal expansion, but are you interested in exploring any other types of material property, matching or mismatching? Omer I’ve been trying to explore how glass will fuse with objects that have a different coefficient of expansion as well – it’s just a question of how stable those fusions remain as the piece cools. That’s exciting because there’s a tremendous variety of iridescent colours that are possible with different metals and different kind of inclusions. There’s one trajectory in the practice where we make what I call “soup”. The obvious one that we’ve tried is a copper/glass soup, which is around 35 per cent copper, 65 per cent glass. We just mix them and see what happens. With that soup, there was a blue-green quality as it fused, but I’d like to go further. I’ve started throwing different kinds of metal in with the copper to make alloys. So you rely on the copper to marry with the glass, but you also get these weird inclusions that make beautiful colours or strange forms. That’s interesting. I’m also fascinated by electricity and am working with that as a way of fusing glass and metal through the heat it generates. The form is so beautiful because it follows the electrical current. These are just ambient experiments – none are conclusive yet. Anna One of the things I was wondering about is the brittle-ductile transition. It’s basically what we were saying about glass – how it starts as a brittle solid and then, as you heat it, it becomes a viscous liquid. Solid copper doesn’t have that, although some metals, like steel, do. Steel is quite ductile at room temperature, but if you cool it down to freezing temperatures, it goes brittle. I’ve read articles about how that could have been one of the reasons why the Titanic sank, because the steel was too cold and so literally smashed like glass when it hit the iceberg. Copper doesn’t suffer from this, so I’m interested in how that

113 sees a copper alloy poured into a blown glass shape. As the piece cools, the glass shatters, leaving a copper shadow of itself.

“When they were flooding it, the mouse was completely evaporated and an explosion occurred.”

material’s stability, its ductility, can remain despite temperature changes, whereas the glass is a lot more shape-shifting. Omer That takes us to the process of annealing [a heat treatment that increases a material’s ductility, making it more workable, ed.]. Copper wouldn’t need to be annealed, whereas glass absolutely does. Anna You can still cold work copper a bit – if you were to work a copper bar back and forth, it would start to become a bit more brittle as a result. So if you annealed it, it would soften again, but it wouldn’t be as catastrophic as glass needing annealing. Omer Annealing is another super fruitful avenue. If you take glass and cool it down very slowly, what happens on a molecular level is that the tensions built up in the glass are released over time instead of all at once, so that the piece doesn’t shatter. That’s how we overcome that inherent brittleness of glass. Copper doesn’t need that. But I guess when I look at those two works, 93 and 113, that’s actually what we’re relying on. The discrepancy between those two materials and the way in which they behave is what we’re relying on. In the case of 113 it’s easy, because we just let the materials do their thing, but for 93 there’s a process of annealing that takes days because we’re trying to bring the cooling of the two materials to a sweet spot where they can occur together. There, the malleability of the copper is our best friend because the glass moves quite a bit. But one reason I wanted to talk about copper and glass is because I feel like there’s a long way to go with it. For the first 15 years of our practice, my trajectory has been to invent processes. I invent a process, the process iterates, and every iteration is unique. The process occurs at many scales – at the scale of an object, a piece of sculpture or installation, a component of a building or even an entire building – and that’s been very satisfying, but there is a kind of laboratory aspect to this trajectory which limits the poetic potential of the work. There is still a tremendous amount of control that we’re exerting on these pieces, so one way that I’ve thought about imbuing meaning in the works beyond the performative moment of the universal turning into the particular, is to apply this way of thinking to natural phenomena. The one that I’m focusing on now is lightning. The idea is to pass an electrical current through a canister of glass dust with the metal inclusions that we’ve learned about over the years. But the source of that electrical current would come from a bolt of lightning. That’s quite far-fetched from a safety perspective, but it could produce fulgurites, which is where lightning strikes silica and makes forms that correspond to the path of the electrical current. What I would like is that these objects have a correspondence to actual natural phenomena. This would be a physical embodiment of a particular lightning bolt you see flashing in the sky; the particular amount of energy in that lightning bolt and its path through a sand matrix. It’s poetic in a diﬀerent way to my other objects because it corresponds to something that actually occurred in “nature”. But the resources required to do it are much greater and, in this particular case, it’s dangerous. We’re outside of our own little playground, but it’s a direction I’d like to pursue. I believe that the meaning of those objects could be a lot more layered and nuanced, and maybe emotional, if they used natural phenomena as their impetus. E N D

Interview

The 93 melts copper into a glass bulb, with the glass-facing copper retaining its orange colour because it does not oxidise, while the interior side turns to charcoal tones.

Words Evi Hall

Image by Choreo.

Yo-Yo Machines by Goldsmiths’ Interaction Research Studio!“It’s almost like feeding a houseplant,” says Bill Gaver, co-director of the Interaction Research Studio (IRS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. “You want to keep it alive.” Looking at the studio’s latest project, you understand what Gaver means. There’s something endearing about the flimsy but self-assertive YoYo Machines. One features diminutive LEDs glowing within a jellyfish-like casing atop spindly wooden legs; another, the flick-flack of a cardboard dial giving a friendly wave; a third, a souped-up jam jar with wires spilling promisingly from its lid. Another set of these DIY machines might look entirely diﬀerent, however, jerry-rigged out of whatever materials and household ephemera lie at hand. The Yo-Yo Machines are lo-fi communication devices, designed to be made by the user at home. Light Touch, for example, lets you send an LED pulse to its paired device, which will slowly fade over time. Select a colour for your device’s “send” light, and its sibling device elsewhere switches on a “receive” light in the corresponding colour – perhaps at your grandma’s house or a far-flung friend’s. Speed Dial and Knock Knock have similar functionality but with movement and sound, with instructions to make all three (a fourth is in the works) housed on the Yo-Yo Machines website. Here, the IRS oﬀers directions on how to build the internal hardware; how to set up the firmware; suggestions as to types of casings; and even a shopping list for where to buy components. When creating Yo-Yo Machines, “it’s not only the design of a product, it’s also the design of a recipe that goes with that product,” says Dean Brown, an IRS researcher. “You have to put the same kind of quality into how [the product] is disseminated and presented.”

The team see Yo-Yo Machines as oﬀering a type of “lightweight peripheral communication that’s more emotional than information-based,” explains Gaver. “What we miss is not just the experience of talking to people in the room, but the experience of sharing a studio, seeing somebody busy across the way or knowing somebody is in the room next door. It’s all that background stuﬀ that isn’t recreated very well by Zoom.” Yo-Yo Machines are “reassuring, without being demanding”. It’s these self-build, lo-fi elements that make Yo-Yo Machines more appealing and personal than slicker, information-heavy audio-visual platforms. While the devices are limited to one form of stimulus each, they’re relatively low cost and accessible. The team estimates that components for a pair should total around £25, and casings can be made from whatever materials you have lying around. Rather than replicate a conversation, Yo Yo Machines are more like a nod, a wave or a wink. Their appeal is that we can reach out and send some basic emotion, continually “going back and forth,” says Gaver. “It’s that notion of saying ‘Yo’, ‘Yo!’ to each other.”

Welcome to Contemporaries Introduction Malika Leiper Photographs Dean Kaufman

With the romanticism of a wiser woman looking back on a fleeting youth, Joan Didion once described New York City as the “shining and perishable dream itself”. In her 1968 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, Didion retraces the beginning and end of her relationship with the city that never sleeps – an eight-year aﬀair that transpired with the “deceptive ease of a film dissolve”.

Roundtable

Beginnings and endings have been at the forefront of our minds lately as we reflect upon our newly-formed relationships to this city and to each other. After a long hot summer that oscillated from lockdown to protest, on 15 October 2020, Stephen Burks and I opened the doors to Contemporaries in the Brooklyn waterfront neighbourhood of Dumbo. Neither a gallery, nor a storefront, nor a studio, Contemporaries is a hybrid – a storefront studio project that uses creative methods to explore what it means to be of and in our time. We stumbled upon 192 Water Street on an afternoon bike ride in late January 2020. A 100-year-old tea warehouse – where Contemporaries now occupies the ground-floor commercial space – the building was converted into expansive lofts in 2012. The threebedroom penthouse is currently listed at nearly $5m. During the industrial boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when New York City produced more than 50 per cent of the US’s total manufacturing output, the neighbourhood of Dumbo was home to a host of paint, steel wool, and coﬀee companies. The industrialist Robert Gair, inventor of the corrugated cardboard box, once owned such vast holdings in the area that it was referred to in the 1880s as “Gairville”. Today, however, Dumbo is one of the most expensive property markets in New York City, with its highest concentration of resident billionaires. This twist in the fate of the waterfront industrial zone was sealed in the 1980s, when David Walentas, a property developer and founder of Two Trees Real Estate Development Firm, is alleged to have first heard the word “Dumbo” at a party. A catchy acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”, the neighbourhood was at that time a desolate area of derelict warehouses and factories, overgrown vacant lots, and pioneering artists in search of high ceilings and light. One of those artists was Steve West, the owner of Stephen and my favourite neighbourhood dive bar, whom we met on Contemporaries’ opening night. Steve moved here in 1989, working odd jobs including one at the MoMA where he was an art handler for the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He, along with other creatives such as the experimental filmmaker Matt Bass and collagist and painter David Auzenne, came to Dumbo to take advantage of the space and cheap cost of living. What they didn’t realise, however, was how the cultural production they were responsible for would later be appropriated by speculative real estate and development

forces. By the early 90s, Two Trees had purchased around 2.5m sqft of Dumbo for $12m. Is the dream of New York perishing? It seemed for some time that the possibilities of New York were caving in on us. As we were conceiving of Contemporaries, articles in CityLab, Dezeen, and The New York Times began to predict the impending obsolescence of urban lifestyles. This came as no surprise given that public transportation was being suspended, telecommuting began, and beloved cultural institutions closed. Our friends with the means to do so packed up their brownstones and moved upstate, while the cries of outrage and calls for justice in response to George Floyd’s murder forced storefronts from Midtown to SoHo to board up their windows for fear of violent looting. Before the pandemic struck, when international travel was alive and well, you could spend an afternoon in Dumbo among its throngs of tourists, posh residences with pristine views of the Manhattan skyline, and waterfront amenities without realising just how recently this urban dreamscape was created. Like the glass-enclosed merry-go-round that sits on the East River in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the nostalgia for an old New York is omnipresent, hyper-stylised, and entirely fabricated. Step outside the boundary of Dumbo’s historic designated neighbourhood, however, and you find three Housing Authority buildings dating back to 1952. The median household income in the Farragut, Ingersoll and Whitman houses is roughly $17,000; by comparison, the median income for the district as a whole is approximately $83,000. Beyond the crude figures that account for this wealth gap is the palpable sense that Dumbo has turned its back on its neighbours. Just around the corner from these buildings, the shadow of 728 apartments under construction looms large. “Coming soon | Front & York,” the sign reads. Once completed, the project will add 1.1m sqft to Dumbo’s residential holdings, along with a private park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the landscape architects responsible for the design of the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Cognisant of this divide between pro-development forces and longer-term occupants of the neighbourhood, our vision for Contemporaries was to cultivate a creative community in Dumbo that could use culture at the street level as a means of engaging one another during a time of isolation. Our model was simple. We would open our 28

onto the walls of the space. A quote by the philosopher and activist Cornel West, “Justice is what love looks like in public”, greeted visitors as they walked through the doors and engaged in conversations surrounding architecture’s ability to heal communities, and what it looks like to confront pain and come out the other side with joy. Nevertheless, the realities of social gathering forced us to reconsider the viability of the storefront as a typology for the future. The Contemporaries Holiday Design Market, our third and ongoing activation, brought together some of our favourite brands in a kind of popup shop for contemporary design. We had high hopes for the project, which were quickly thwarted as the colder weather and increasing rate of infections across the US moved people into deeper isolation. Traditional brick and mortar retail has been in decline since the emergence of e-commerce giants like Amazon, but this period has delivered what some consider to be a fatal blow to the sector. As people become more comfortable shopping online, we have to be aware of what is lost in the process. Of course, we believe there is more to retail than the exchange of goods and services. For us, objects must be encountered, touched, and used to avoid the waste of quick returns. The challenge becomes, how do we express that need to others? Opening this space has allowed us to re-engage with the city in new ways, but the question remains as to how we, creatives in America’s largest city, where the benefits of development are reaped by the few, can continue to create beginnings in the face of endings. How do we feel free, curious, and generous during a time that seems to lack these capacities?

doors to our community, oﬀering a space to gather and help heal the deep wounds that were opened during this moment of crisis. Our inaugural installation and event, A Radical Window, exhibited historic posters, prints, and design objects from the collection of Archiviste XX, founded by the artist and designer Henrik Ansat. From the raised fists of Angela Davis, to the May 1968 Paris student protests, and even the Sottsass Valentine portable typewriter, we sought to examine the most

How do we feel free, curious and generous during a time that seems to lack these capacities? pressing issues of our time through the lens of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Much like today, these explosive decades saw racial justice, sexual equality, and freedom of expression being negotiated publicly. This was the era of the Vietnam War, the Pop Art and Free Love movements, the Swinging Sixties, and the height of the Black Power struggles. It was an incredible project to kick oﬀ with, but also a sobering reminder of how little things have changed. We were at Contemporaries when we heard the shouting and horns honking in celebration of Biden’s victory in one of the most volatile elections in American history, the results of which continue to be contested. Even as I write this, America is deciding how it will respond to the violent takeover of the Capitol building by Trump-supporting white supremacists. For our second activation, These Are The Gifts, we invited architect Katie Swenson to be an authorin-residence at Contemporaries. Having recently experienced profound loss after the sudden death of her fiancé, Katie channeled her energies into writing In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Kindness, while also finishing another book chronicling 20 years of community-based design initiatives, Design With Love: At Home In America. Both were published in the fall of 2020. With a clean lick of paint, and the help of a new assistant, Chummeng Soun, we began taking apart the pages of her books and spray mounting them

To discuss these issues, Leiper and Burks hosted a digital roundtable in January 2021. Present on the call were their contemporaries, business owners, designers, and artists from in and around Dumbo: Maria Cornejo, the fashion designer behind Zero + Maria Cornejo; Alexandra Hodkowski and Mösco Alcocer, co-curators of the Contemporaries Library and the founders of the Head Hi bookshop espresso bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Katie Swenson, senior principal at MASS Design Group and inaugural author-in-residence at Contemporaries; and Ebon Heath, a graphic designer and artist who has a studio in Dumbo.

Malika Leiper How was the cafe today? Alexandra Hodkowski It was good. January is oﬀ to

we had a rehearsal studio, and threw crazy parties and did all those early 90s things. When I left the city in 1996 for graduate school, it was starting to get so expensive – too much to raise three kids. But my children are grown now, so I moved back to New York. I live in Dumbo, with its incredible views of the East River and Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. In the 90s, the city was not as open to the water as it is now. Dumbo is a little bit like a bowl, once you enter it, it’s hard to climb out. It draws you down into the space. Coming here during the pandemic, you see that almost everything is closed. It was bold for Malika and Stephen to open Contemporaries, to create a public gathering space at this time. In our old lives, if you had a gallery opening and 10 or 12 people came, you might be disappointed. But now, the intimacy of gathering has changed that dynamic, and it’s somehow thrilling to have a place to meet new people, share in art and design, and to come together. Stephen Contemporaries for me was about action. It was about doing something in a time when we all felt paralysed and were tired of feeling like nothing was happening. We came out of a very volatile summer, marching in the streets like everybody else, and wanted to take action. Alexandra We also started Head Hi thinking we need a place for dialogue. We need a place for inspiration and a place where organic conversation leads to networks and relationships and ideas and friendships and community. One of the things that we think about a lot is what community means, because it can mean so many things. “I want to build community.” OK, well, we have the community of residents; the community of people who drink coffee; the community of people who like books; the community of people who come in from the city or work in the neighborhood. Community is so many different things on so many different levels, but we like those different communities and the tensions they create. We were excited when Malika and Stephen approached us and told us what they were doing, because it’s hard to find a design space in New York where you’re not necessarily required to buy something. They’re inviting you to think about design in a different way to normal. Stephen Contemporaries is very uncommercial. Malika In what is now an incredibly commercial neighbourhood, as Mösco was alluding to. Ebon Heath Wait until all these new buildings open up – it’s going to get real commercial on you. I’ve been in

a good start, and people are drinking more coffee than ever. Maria Cornejo Where’s your coffee shop? Alexandra We have a shop called Head Hi, which is a bookshop and espresso bar. It’s technically Fort Greene, but it’s right on the border of Navy Yard and Dumbo. Stephen Burks Maria has got a fabulous studio in the Navy Yard, although she thinks of it as a storage room. Maria It’s an archive room. I’m only there a couple of times a week and I’m mainly at Bleecker Street, where we have our main studio. But now with the pandemic, I really like working by myself in the archive – not having to wear a mask and social distance. I can get lost in there. Stephen How many of us are working between multiple neighbourhoods? Malika and I were talking about our triangle, which is living in Boerum Hill, with the storefront in Dumbo, and then having a studio in Clinton Hill. That’s our little triangle, and we don’t really have to go outside of that much. Maria Well, I’m still taking the subway between neighbourhoods – for me being on the subway is part of feeding my brain. It’s people, clothes, moving, young people. It’s energy. You can’t live in a bubble if you’re a designer. Stephen I’ve always had this love/hate relationship with New York. The brutality is real and it’s both thrilling and depressing at the same time – so ugly that it’s beautiful. But it still captivates me. Mösco Alcocer It’s a city that’s always changing and because it’s changing so often, it challenges you. You cannot just say, “This is it.” New Yorkers are people from all over the world, and everybody’s pushing. There’s an exchange every day, even if you don’t talk to people. If you’re in the subway, there’s all this information that you’re receiving. In our neighbourhood by the Navy Yard, there’s really not much going on, so we saw the opportunity to open a space. It’s a difficult location, because it’s not Nolita, it’s not SoHo, it’s not Park Slope – it’s an industrial area, literally in the middle of nowhere. Dumbo used to be like that – hip, quiet, with a lot of artists, and no stores at all. And it was a really cool neighbourhood. It’s still a cool neighbourhood, but in a very different way. It’s part of the drastic changes that happen here. Katie Swenson I moved to New York in 1990 as a modern dancer, and had a wonderful loft on the Bowery where 36

Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper outside of Contemporaries.

Dumbo since the winter of 1994 when I got out of RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, ed.]. It was beautiful back then. In my building there were woodworkers, and craftsmen, and industrial spaces. I was the gentrifier; I was the college kid coming in displacing workers. It was super quiet and there was something quite peaceful about it. I thought it was a hidden gem because my view was onto the water, whereas if you go to any other city around the world, any major city, the waterfront is always the first to be developed. It’s only in the past 20 years that New York City’s

had any benefits, whether employment or opportunities or changes to their public landscape in many years. The Tech Triangle ignores those NYCHA communities, which haven’t gained any equity from all the success. There are so many buildings being built in downtown Brooklyn, and massive funding where they’re giving out $50,000 to public art projects [the Downtown Revitalization Initiative, ed.] but without any sustainable element and without any connection to the community. I just found out recently that they didn’t award anything to the many local artists who applied. Stephen As Malika was mentioning, there’s a border there – it runs along Front and Jay, and it’s a divider between public housing and very expensive condo development. Then there’s a new condo project going up in Dumbo – Front & York. Ebon That’s nearly 800 units coming in, with no public access and no community engagement on the street front. Urban planners are devils. Maria Aren’t they supposed to provide public services? Ebon They’re supposed to, just like they’re supposed to provide affordable housing, but do they? There’s a private park in the middle of that complex that none of the neighbourhood will have access to. Katie At MASS Design Group, we’re designing a senior housing building for an RFP [request for proposal, ed.] at a NYCHA site called Kingsborough Houses, in a neighborhood in Crown Heights called Weeksville – one of America’s first free Black communities. Weeksville has a wonderful community centre that highlights the history of the community, offering classes in how to trace your own history and heritage. It’s a neighbourhood that is really fighting back against gentrification and homogenisation. Over half a million New Yorkers live in NYCHA neighbourhoods. From a design perspective, they have some planning flaws, but also have a lot of benefits, such as a campus feel with beautiful large trees. But they’ve suffered from a terrible lack of investment, and little upkeep of the public spaces. Investing in NYCHA campuses is one of the most important things the city could do – a way to ensure that the affordable housing we have is also a great place to live. Ebon Weeksville is amazing, but it also has an inconsistent history when it comes to its engagement and relationship to community. A lot of great people have come through there, but that place has almost crashed many times because there hasn’t been investment in those Black institutions that lots

“Dumbo was beautiful back then. It was super quiet and there was something peaceful about it.” —Ebon Heath waterfront has been developed. But now they’re building all around me, and I got no more friends in the neighbourhood, and there are few people of colour. I could talk more about that in regards to a public art proposal that I’ve recently submitted, which explores the modern day redlining that’s still happening in Dumbo [a discriminatory practice by which mortgages are denied to people of colour to prevent them buying in a particular neighbourhood, or from renovating existing properties, ed.]; and how so much equity is not reaching the community living in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority, ed.]; and how the success of the Tech Triangle is only benefiting a very few (mainly white) people. Malika So if anyone’s not familiar with it, the Tech Triangle was a 2013 initiative from the Mayor’s Oﬃce of New York to facilitate the growth of the tech sector in Downtown Brooklyn, the Navy Yard, and Dumbo. Dumbo was also designated a historic district in 2007. There are some serious competing development forces at play in the neighborhood. Some advocates of historic preservation would say it preserves Dumbo’s character and keeps its history accessible to the public, but others read the historic district boundary as a modern evolution of redlining. Ebon Dumbo and the Tech Triangle have two or three of the biggest public housing communities in New York: Whitman, Farragut and Ingersoll. They really haven’t 38

of people like to talk about. Where’s the hope for Weeksville? It’s an incredible first – a free Black settlement in New York – but last I heard it was falling to pieces. Stephen We recently watched the Jane Jacobs documentary, Citizen Jane, where she essentially started a revolution that saved Washington Square Park and most of SoHo from “urban renewal” – the process whereby Robert Moses, the city planner, would come in and literally wipe out large swathes of what he treated as ghettos. A person who lived in Connecticut, who didn’t understand why New York City and the tenements of the early 20th-century worked, came in and decimated blocks and blocks of New York City, and is responsible for many of those public housing projects of the 1960s that we all know so well. But here we are 60 years later, and these places that were considered urban ghettos have now changed so much. This part of Brooklyn used to be completely undesirable. Malika Then in the 1980s David Walentas and Two Trees started coming in and buying up Dumbo.

Ebon Two Trees are devils. In the beginning they

used to try to take percentages of people’s businesses in exchange for free rent, and they had all these ways to get into the neighbourhood, like Smack Mellon [a non-profit arts organisation that Two Trees provided a space for, ed.] and Jane’s Carousel [a restored 1922 carousel installed in a Jean Nouvel structure in Brooklyn Bridge Park, ed.], but then they forced out the artists. It was the beginning of how developers exploit artists to make a neighbourhood cool and now there are no more artists in the neighbourhood. I’m only still here because I happen to be in a building that’s not owned by Walentas or Guttman [Joshua Guttman is a New York property owner who has been accused by a number of his tenants of operating as a slumlord, ed.]. Stephen Do you have any friends, any fellow artists, who are still in the neighbourhood? Ebon Not from back in the day. They all got shut out. There’s a couple of musicians, some older generation artists who were already invested, and the women at Superfine [a restaurant and cultural space, ed.]

Roundtable

who are still holding it down. They bring great energy and are the last frontier of freaky good energy in our neighbourhood. I was late for this call because I had to jump in an Uber back to Dumbo from my laser cutter in Bushwick. And that’s why Dumbo’s so fucked up, because I’ve got to come to Bushwick to get my laser cutting done. Maria Don’t you feel guilty when people like us move into a neighbourhood? When I moved to Mott Street it was a garage, so really I was guilty of gentrifying. And then the rents went up and we could no longer aﬀord it, so we moved. Creative people make an area cool and then we get developers. They lose the spirit of the neighbourhood because the minute the artists and the creative people go, it just becomes about money. Mösco In my defense as an artist, I am not wealthy. I’m talking about literally starving artists, working multiple jobs and prioritising their craft, creating a space and working in a street that is dirty, painting murals in a neighbourhood that nobody has any desire for whatsoever. You go there and you fix it, just as you have the squatters in the Lower East Side, or Berlin, or Paris, or Mexico City who have fixed buildings that were otherwise going to fall down. I don’t think we’re the gentrifiers. Developers have the money, and they have the means and ways to change zoning, which is crucial to developing anything anywhere. If you have the right connections and money, you can change zoning to suit your commercial interests. But I’m not coming into a neighbourhood because I want to transform it. I’m going there because it’s what I can aﬀord. Maria I think we all did that, but the reality is that developers follow creatives because we make a neighbourhood interesting. When I moved to Mott Street, there were no stores on that street and literally two doors down were the mafia. But my landlord went from the rent being $2,700 to eventually charging $15,000 and we just couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not saying that we do it purposely, but the reality is that my space was a creative space that used to host a lot of other artists. It brings an energy, which attracts people with money. Ebon Dumbo was such a slam dunk. With all these other examples of gentrification my parents told me about, like SoHo or Harlem, there was this organic nature to urban growth. Now, the developers are smart. They’re setting us up to fail. They see you

and they’re like, “Yeah, brother, come here, free rent.” Whatever you want in order to be a marketing tool for rich hipsters to displace you with higher rents. To bring it full circle, let’s talk about housing and the glut of development that’s happening in downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo, and the Tech Triangle. With all this Covid and people now being remote, that shit ain’t getting filled up. They’re trying to create Silicon Valley, but it ain’t happening now. So the exciting part is what the hell do we do with all that empty real estate? Stephen We’re in this position where it’s speculative for everybody, right? You’ve been looking at empty storefronts. I’ve joked that we’re reverse gentrifiers with Contemporaries, because we’re coming at the end of gentrification and have found, believe it or not, a storefront in Dumbo that we can aﬀord. It’s not like we’re the first trying to make Dumbo cool – we’re the last. David Walentas came in and bought the entire neighbourhood. Ebon was speaking about how gentrification happened organically in the past. Well, in the new millennium, one person is able to buy a whole neighbourhood. Ebon And he gets put on magazine covers and treated as a success story for that. This is Two Trees as a model that everybody’s trying to replicate and that’s what makes me even more nauseous. It’s not like this is an exception. This is the standard. This is what people are trying to reach. Alexandra I think Ebon’s right, but there are diﬀerent responses. Developers are applauding this Walentas guy, but then there are communities who are totally against it. And that’s New York – you’re going to have a myriad of responses. But the ownership is so powerful, with good lawyers and money, that a lot of the time the community response is not as powerful. Stephen Sad to say, but this is not a socialist country. Ebon There are lots of positive things happening in grassroots communities around the city though. In the Navy Yard, there’s an incredible vocational school that just opened up called the STEAM school. I don’t want to just paint things with a negative focus on development money, because if we zoom in with a smaller lens, and look at people power, normal working people trying to make shit happen with design solutions, then there’s incredible things happening that need to be applauded. I think we get distracted, because developers take the oxygen out of the room. Stephen What’s been exciting for me during the Covid crisis is that the streets have become public again.

Roundtable

I mean, who would have thought that you’d be eating outside al fresco as if you were in Paris and Rome? Maria Art is reclaiming all those boarded up storefronts in SoHo. I mean, I keep taking pictures because there’s so much art going up on the plyboard. There’s some great stuff going on and New York’s got this new energy, which was all of a sudden like, “Fuck, it feels like New York used to feel.” Stephen And it’s local energy because we don’t have tourists, right? Maria A lot of affluent people with secondary homes left in March and they’re not coming back. They can work from home so they’re not coming back. Ebon Dumbo is empty. All the tourists and techies are gone, so it’s really quiet. It’s like the 90s. You want to see what it was like in the 90s? Come during the next lockdown. It’s beautiful. Stephen So this is the potential, right? To be able to do something. We see Contemporaries as a model for how neighbourhoods could take over these empty storefronts. Different neighbourhoods can say, “OK, Contemporaries can work in one storefront. Could it also work in multiple storefronts? Could it be a model for a whole neighbourhood to bring culture back?” Maria I hope so, Stephen, but apparently landlords get major tax breaks if the stores sit empty. Ebon Let’s keep it real though. The one consistent thing about New York is it’s constantly changing. My dad talked about SoHo being prairies and grassland – “You thought you hip? You should’ve seen when I was a kid.” So everyone has their own moment of glory. The same way that our kids have their glory moment and the best New York they’ve ever fucking tasted is right now. Same way our New York and the 90s was the best that I ever fucking tasted. My dad was in New York in the 50s and the 60s, and that was the best New York he ever fucking tasted. There’s always a sense of reinvention, which is why it’s brilliant. Regardless of this specific moment, and all the hardship Rona has brought, this too shall pass. Malika At root, we’re talking about people coming together to try and protect a neighbourhood from being gentrified, or just to show up and support each other. One of the most remarkable things in the summer for Stephen and I was that we observed many of the people during the protests were young white kids calling for Black Lives Matter. Maybe there is a new generation who are willing to show up, and hopefully this solidarity and resilience will continue.

Katie Contemporaries has been meaningful for me

as a way to get connected during the pandemic. But I also think the larger gestalt of what they are doing is significant – highlighting that people aren’t creative in a vacuum. They’re brushing up against each other. And, while there is a lot of online activity now, coming together in person is still the most catalytic. Opening a storefront studio in 2020 is radical. Alexandra We need spaces that are not like Starbucks and that is a part of the reason we started Head Hi. We need people to walk in, ask questions, be curious and not know exactly what it is, but to have a dialogue and see that experimenting is good. The platform that you’ve set forth from the beginning is collaboration. None of us would be here if it weren’t for collaborative experimentation, supporting and showing up, whether it’s showing up on Instagram or showing up in a physical space. We need to do that for each other. Ebon We need colleagues and contemporaries and allies to check in with people these days. Whether you’re talking about arts or wellness or BLM, that’s a necessity. Who’s got your back? Who can challenge you? That’s the basis of structural analysis and dialogue and good critique. If not, you’re just jerking yourself oﬀ. Sorry to end on a rude note – I got no more time for self-censorship. END

The Real Feel Words Evi Hall

“I like concept design, the kind which is so clear you do not need to draw it,” the designer Vico Magistretti is reported to have said. “I have passed on plenty of my projects over the phone.” It’s a thought so crucial to Magistretti’s work that it inspired an exhibition, Projects over the Phone, at the Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti in 2011. Magistretti believed his skills as a draughtsman came second to the importance of discussion in his design process. I’d like to imagine that were Magistretti still alive in 2021, his favoured sentiment of “design is a conversation” would have put him in good stead for the last year. While many in the design industry were distractedly clobbering together work-from-home stations and trying to take ourselves oﬀ mute, Magistretti would have been yammering away, serenely confident in his knowledge that a design is only as good as the conversation and collaboration it inspires. It’s a thought that came to mind when I was introduced to Connected, a design project and exhibition launched by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) during the raft of lockdowns in spring 2020. Connected invited nine international (although, truthfully, mostly European) designers to create a table and chairs for their home oﬃce, asking them to pick from a choice of three American hardwoods. Their pieces would then be developed with the British furniture manufacturer Benchmark through remote working, before Connected culminated as a physical and online exhibition at the London Design Museum in September. AHEC is a trade association that works on behalf of US timber growers and foresters, promoting the use of American hardwood timber to international markets. As one strand of this, the group regularly commissions projects to showcase its timber, creating striking installations

such as dRMM’s Endless Stair (2013), Alison Brooks’s The Smile (2016) and Waugh Thistleton’s Multiply (2018) – large-scale structures that were all presented at the London Design Festival (LDF) to promote the use of hardwood cross-laminated timber using American tulipwood. Like the rest of the industry, however, AHEC watched on in early 2020 as trade fairs across design and architecture – events which it had planned to commission work

I like to imagine that were Magistretti still alive in 2021, his favoured sentiment of “design is a conversation” would have put him in good stead for the last year – a design is only as good as the conversation it inspires. for – were first delayed and then cancelled. Not to be deterred, it changed tack. “We thought, Hang on a minute,” says David Venables, AHEC’s European lead, “we’ve got material that’s been donated ready to go; we’ve got a budget we can’t use for trade shows; and we’ve got the attention of some of the best designers in Europe because they’re all wondering what’s going to happen now. And so we put the whole lot together.” Putting the whole lot together, however, required a diﬀerent format to a typical designer collaboration. “This connectedness of the project focused on the idea of digital,” says Justin McGuirk, chief curator at the

Review

Design Museum, who was involved in the early stages of Connected. “[The designers] were not going to be able to attend the craft workshop, they weren’t going to be able to see their prototypes, they weren’t going to be able to touch them, and they would have to work remotely with craftspeople to get the results that they wanted. It was an experiment in that.” Indeed, “experiment” is a word that Connected’s creators have continually used to describe the project in interviews, as well as appearing in the second line of text on the exhibition’s website. If you visit the exhibition online you’ll see nine wildly diﬀerent table and seating systems. Some are inspired by nature, such as Ini Archibong’s jewel coloured, geometric Kadamba Gate, or Studiopepe’s graphic high-backed seats in Pink Moon. Others are more restrained, such as the monastic Arco from Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska. Making up the rest of the nine designers are Thomas Heatherwick, Maria Bruun, Jaime Hayon, Sabine Marcelis, Studio Swine and Sebastian Herkner. Connected’s end results are good-looking pieces of furniture, but if their creation was an experiment, what were its findings? In some ways, Venables tells me, the definitiveness of lockdown streamlined the familiar design process. “Right from the beginning we knew this form of [digital] communication was the way forward,” he says. “Handheld devices meant that the designers didn’t have to wait until their next visit to the workshop. [Benchmark] could just get on FaceTime [to the designers] and say ‘I need to show you something.’” While the core of the design process revolved heavily around

remote conversations between AHEC, Benchmark and the designers, the sharing of physical samples at key stages remained crucial. Maria Bruun’s Nordic Pioneer design, for instance, features a hinged leaf that runs the length of the desk. “They would make a small section [of the hinge] and send it to me to adjust or approve,” explains Bruun. “I would give my feedback

“What was really new was not being able to experience the physicality of the material. We received samples, but it’s still a flat surface. Those elements of being in the workshop were missing.” —Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska or send extra videos of what I wanted for the hinge and how it should look.” These techniques are not necessarily new for designers and manufacturers. “We’ve done quite a lot of it before Covid, because we work with designers from around the world,” says Sean Sutcliffe, head and co-founder of Benchmark. “We did a long project with Space Copenhagen [the Gleda collection, launched in 2017], who came to us maybe three times, but 80 per cent of the work was done using Skype from the workshop.” It’s a point that Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska echoes, albeit with an important caveat. “I don’t think it differs much from the way we usually work as designers with foreign companies,” she says. “What was really new was not being able to experience the physicality of the material. We received samples, but that’s still a flat surface. You work on a 3D program and have all the digital ways to map projects, but those elements of being in the workshop talking to people and experiencing the physicality of the material were missing.” While online platforms may enable you to “get a sense of the shape and the detailing,” says Sutcliffe, “you cannot get a sense of the textures.” Colour, he adds, throws up further complexities: “Everyone’s screens show them differently.” Sutcliffe also identifies the same issue as JeglinskaAdamczewska. “There’s another element, which is really important to designers, which is what the physical presence of something feels like in relation to our body,” he says. “How does it stand or sit

next to our body? We judge everything in relation to the length of our arms, the real feel of it, and that is completely missing.” In remote working, craftspeople have to become the arms and bodies of the designer: seeing, feeling, sitting and advising about what interacting with their furniture is like. Go to Connected’s website and you’ll see videos of Benchmark team members holding phones aloft with the designers peering through the screen at a craftsperson getting up and down from their chair. Speaking to those involved in Connected, “trust” came up almost every time. “It’s crucial that I really understood what the designers are trying to create and why they are trying to create,” says Sutcliﬀe. “Understanding why they are making that decision, and respecting that wish, even if you have to change something else. That leap of faith the designer has to put in a craftsperson when you’re working at distance is a pretty big one.” Working with an established brand such as Benchmark lends this experiment a degree of safety. Bruun’s Nordic Pioneer features details such as turned curved feet and pillowy maple stool seats – technical details which demand and celebrate the craftsperson’s skills. “It was important to me for the piece to communicate very complicated, challenging craft processes,” says Bruun. “As a user, you should not only ask, ‘How should I use it?’ You should also ask, ‘How has this been made for me?’” This ambition led her to challenge the workshop to make the hinge for her leaf from wood rather than the easier to handle brass. It’s a choice that seems to demonstrate the general opinion from both Benchmark and AHEC that decisions over Connected’s pieces were made due to the wishes and ambitions of the designers, not because they were easier to explain over Zoom, through CAD or in a sketch. It’s the kind of relationship that has always existed in design and manufacture. “[Magistretti] believed in the close collaboration between designer and industry,” the manufacturer Enrico Schiﬃni told curator Anniina Koivu in 2018, as part of Vico Magistretti: Stories Of Objects, edited by Koivu. “Magistretti likes the dialectical confrontation with the manufacturers.” Even if Magistretti vaunted conversation and the telephone as design tools, these were placed in

the service of interrogating physical manufacturing processes. An illustrative case of this in Connected is Studio Swine’s Humble Administrator’s chair, which involved a tricky steam bend. “We steam bent [the chairs’ arms] in one big swoop,” explains Alexander Groves of Studio Swine. “It’s one of those things that you can easily take for granted: we see these big sweeps in furniture but they’re often jointed. [Benchmark] kept on saying, ‘It might work, we’ve never done it before.’ But they made a jig and managed to do it. They had a lot of failed attempts before they got the right wood and conditions just right.” One of the key diﬀerences between Connected’s design process and that of Magistretti, for instance, is the relative stasis of the designers in lockdown. Asked by Designboom in 2000 where he worked, Magistretti responded: “everywhere, in bed, on a plane, in my oﬃce. I always have something to write down ideas in, I sketch on newspapers or magazines in airplanes.” Even with the clarity of his concepts, Magistretti still had the promise of seeing his work in person, the energising experience of travel, and the degree of spontaneity and inspiration that comes from this. “Usually when you go and visit a workshop you go there with certain ideas,” JeglinskaAdamczewska explains, “but once you go in, someone can show you something they’ve been trying to do and it can completely divert the course of the

“The leap of faith the designer has to put in a craftsperson when you’re working at distance is a pretty big one.” —Sean Sutcliffe project. It may be something unknown that you wouldn’t think of in the first place. That element I missed.” Explaining a design remotely is not the problem, but the way in which ideas are generated is different. “In normal times the project would have looked quite different,” laughs JeglinskaAdamczewska, “or not, I don’t know!” This shift in relationship between the designers and their objects during the making process finds parallels in a wider readjustment of our connection to furniture typologies seen over the course

Maria Bruun’s Nordic Pioneer table features

Image by David Cleveland, courtesy of Benchmark.

a drop-leaf, with a specially engineered wooden hinge.

of the pandemic. For at least some portion of the fluctuating global lockdowns, many home spaces have been repurposed into gyms, virtual cafés, and for those lucky enough, workplaces. “In a period when many people are working from home and looking at the home in a new light, working in a new way, inter-screen, it was actually interesting to think about how people work in their home environments,” says McGuirk. “The brief was to design your perfect work station. For some [of the pieces] you can see it really is a work station and for others you can see it’s a work station/dining room/meeting table – it’s a multi-functional piece of furniture.” As workplaces increasingly shift to the home, the personal demands that we place onto our home furniture have also shifted. Such changing demands can be seen in Sabine Marcelis’s Candy Cubicle. Sick of her partner’s monitor dominating their dining room table, Marcelis wanted to create a workspace that allowed for

control over this clutter. Candy Cubicle initially appears as an anonymous block of maple, “but when you open it it’s like Ta-dah!” she tells me, referring to the way in which the design cracks open to reveal an L-shaped cubicle with a highly lacquered yellow interior. “Then you close it again and all that working from home is hidden away.” Marcelis mounted her box on wheels made in her signature material, cast resin, to ensure flexibility. The ability to hide and move the workplace around her open-plan loft was a key requirement for her. Lockdowns seem to have highlighted and exacerbated preexisting challenges around constructing private spaces within open-plan homes. “I looked at my family and the way we were living in open structures, and wondered why we knocked all those walls down,” says Bruun. “It’s a way we’ve been living now for a long time – knocking down walls till it’s one big space – because we needed to have as much space as possible to be together.

Review

Then, during this lockdown, having our own personal space became much more relevant. We weren’t able to go to an office or close the door and just have time to ourselves. That’s what I tried to create – a small space only for me.” For Bruun, this means Nordic Pioneer has to define a space for her in the midst of open-plan living. And it’s large. In fact, all of the Connected pieces are large. An observation that was made by everyone I’ve interviewed for this review is that the pieces all came out big, and perhaps bigger than intended. Furthermore, with the exception of Marcelis’s Candy Cubicle, which contains a set of shelves and storage pedestal, all of the pieces take after a dining room or kitchen table more than they do a traditional office or writing desk. A cursory glance at the current Ikea catalogue, for instance, lists around 60 different desk models, with most falling under 150cm in length – only six scaling any bigger than this. Compare

this with the Connected tables, which average out at a bit over 2m in length. Ikea produces flatpack work stations for the mass market, whereas Connected’s pieces are bespoke, installation pieces. The difference in size is perhaps to be expected, but the designers acknowledge the shift in scale as being particular to the project’s wider social background. “In that context of home/work combined in one place, the table becomes crucial,” says Jeglinska-Adamczewska. “It’s the meeting point of all these uses. That’s why I didn’t want to add extra functions, but to make it really large so it could allow all these uses in one place. I saw it as being more like a background for this, rather than a landscape.” Sutcliffe agrees. “I think part of that was because people were thinking, OK, it’s got to be so multifunctional,” he says. “Maybe it’s also because they think, ‘Well in my studio I take up this much space,’ and then [they’re surprised] because our homes are generally a lot smaller.” This changing relationship with furniture in our home, and the demands we put on it, goes some way to explain why wood lends itself well to home office furniture. In a situation in which we are removed from each other, wood, Jeglinska-Adamczewska points out, “brings so much comfort with its tactile aspects, especially now that you’re not allowed to touch anything outside.” These aspects in her work, Arco, are distilled in its intersecting arching forms, which carve out a definite personal space for the sitter. This restrained architectural motif, repeated in the chair and table, was chosen to help set off the complexity of the American cherry’s warm woodgrain. A similar interest in texture and touch can be seen in Ini Archibong’s Kadamba Gate. The table and bench set features a highly glossed wooden seat and tabletop, with brass insets which rise from geometric stacked legs of red oak and cherry offcuts. These offcuts would otherwise go to waste, a nod to Archibong’s interest in the sustainability of the source materials. In an interview with Grant Gibson for LDF, Archibong describes how the legs were designed “in a way that would be fun [for my daughter] – she loves to play with blocks. [I wanted to] create a table where I could have my area to work while she’s building her little micro architecture.”

Connected’s home working stations have been planned with multiple uses: they are designed to be playful, to be touched, opened up, moved around, extended or otherwise explored – Thomas Heatherwick’s Stem even doubles up as a set of planters. The kitchen table has always hosted multiple activities – working, eating, chores, a site for children to start oﬀ finger-painting and eventually graduate to homework – but lockdown has intensified our experience of the home, especially when isolated from one another. We perhaps now also look to these pieces of furniture to provide a degree of comfort and familiarity through their feel and texture, as much of daily life moves into the more alienating

“To just put it on display before having seen it was quite uncomfortable, but when I saw it I was pleasantly surprised. I immediately crawled under the table to study the details.” —Maria Bruun

realm of digital space. If the lockdowns of winter 2020/21 bleed into spring, then Connected’s pieces will certainly need to be hardwearing. We will have to wait to see how Connected’s designs fare in their final use – their eventual homes will be with their creators, but at the time of writing not all have been reunited (or united?). Some did, however, manage to visit the physical exhibition where their pieces had already been installed for public view. “To just put it on display before having seen it was quite uncomfortable,” says Bruun, “but when I saw it I was pleasantly surprised. I immediately crawled under the table to study the details. I couldn’t have predicted that the stool would work that well or that the drop leaf would move without a sound.” It’s this interaction or reciprocity that is missed in the remote designing process, something which you cannot experience until you are in the presence of a piece. “I sat on the armchair and it really embraces you,” Jeglinska-Adamczewska tells me. “It was something I hadn’t really thought of. That it embraces you as much as you embrace it. It’s kind of a nice feeling.”

Connected demonstrates that if you prepare and match the right expertise, designing remotely is certainly possible. Indeed, most of Connected’s participants agreed that in future projects they could sacrifice one to two workshop visits quite easily. Ultimately, however, the reactions of the designers who actually experienced their pieces in the flesh best captures the sentiment of Connected. Humans are bodily creatures. We need to be around one another to understand each other more easily, to interact with objects, and to allow for moments of serendipity and spontaneity which don’t seem to arise on a video call but do in a workshop. We can reduce our flying, our number of meetings, but we should also acknowledge our longing to return to a future where we can hear the soundlessness of a drop leaf table. You can see the virtual exhibition online by visiting connectedbydesign.online.

Image by Choreo.

Bell chair by Konstantin Grcic for Magis!In 1972, the designer Charles Eames made Design Q&A, a short film in which he submitted to questioning by the curator Madame L’Amic. “Design depends largely on constraints,” Eames tells his interlocutor at one stage. “What constraints?” she replies. “The sum of all constraints,” Eames answers. “Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.” I’ve always wondered how useful this advice is in practice for designers to follow, but in principle it describes a rigour that the industry would be well-advised to follow. Take the Bell chair, for instance, a monobloc chair designed by Konstantin Grcic for Magis. “I was very hesitant at the beginning of the project,” says Grcic, who was initially approached to make an aﬀordable stacking chair that could come in at the €50 mark. “I thought, doing a plastic chair, now? It’s the wrong project.” Motivation arrived, however, when Magis introduced Grcic to an injection-moulding company in the north of Italy. “It was a partner who could give us all the constraints,” he explains. “All the information, all

the damage, as to what precisely we had to do in order to achieve a plastic chair of around €50: a certain weight, a certain cycle time on the machine, a certain material. If someone tells you what’s what, you feel more confident.” Bell has been forged in the furnace of those constraints, and is much the better for it. Its rounded shell is welcoming and visually distinctive, but principally developed because it provides greater strength for less material than a traditional chair form, cutting Bell’s weight to 2.7kg. While the desired cost of €50 was ultimately not obtainable, the final cost is not wildly diﬀerent: €65. Furthermore, the design has been produced from industrial waste polypropylene, which can be recycled at the end of the chair’s lifespan, while machine time was also cut to hit the targets that Grcic and company imposed on themselves. “It may not be a 100 per cent ‘green’ chair, but 100 per cent is impossible to achieve – even in other materials,” says Grcic. “Our chair has gone very far using minimum material and minimum energy.” This rigour also extended to consideration of Bell’s distribution. Alongside the chair, Grcic designed the pallet in which Bell is shipped. “We always wanted this chair to be produced and sold in high volumes,” he says, “so we got information from the supplier. A pallet has to be of a certain size, because so many pallets go into a container, which can then go into the back of a lorry. It’s all a logical sequence of actions and part of a system.” This, I suspect, may resonate with Eames’s “sum of all constraints”. Bell is a project that acknowledges the complexity of furniture’s production and shipment, and then tries to act upon the imperatives imposed by these. “At the beginning it was just a typical idea, Let’s do a plastic chair, but we were able to turn that into a very serious project,” says Grcic. “Designing a chair is much larger, you know, than just giving form or shape.” Words Oli Stratford

Observation

Illustration by Leonhard Rothmoser.

Lightning Rods Words Kristina Rapacki

“There’s no way I’d take that vaccine.” My friend and I were negotiating a muddy footpath on London’s Hampstead Heath. We hadn’t seen each other for several months, and were catching up over a socially distanced walk. She’d had a hard time of 2020, it transpired, and I’d oﬀered that now, at least, a Covid-19 vaccine rollout was imminent. Just a few days earlier, on 2 December 2020, the UK had become the first country in the world to approve Pfizer and BioNTech’s new vaccine for widespread use. 52

There was an uncomfortable pause. My friend wasn’t an anti-vaxxer, she assured me. She was just concerned that the development of the Covid-19 vaccine had been extraordinarily speedy (I agreed it had); that, like the Moderna vaccine, it uses a new and complexsounding mRNA technology (it does); and that, according to rumours she’d heard on social media, it makes young women infertile (on this point there is, let me stress, no evidence). Fuelling her scepticism was also a sense of indignation. Whenever she tried to discuss her doubts, she explained, she got shut down and labeled a conspiracy theorist. I wasn’t particularly keen to get into this argument. My trust in the decision of the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which had approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and which would authorise Oxford/AstraZeneca and Moderna’s vaccines in the month that followed, was evidently more solid than my friend’s. I had no idea of the material she had been looking at online, and was certainly not in a position to explain how mRNA works. “Well, no-one’s going to make you take it,” I said, after a moment’s mud-trudging. That’s true. As of early 2021, the three vaccines are available only to the elderly, the at-risk, and frontline medical and care staﬀ, should these groups wish to have it. As the rollout reaches younger age groups, to which my friend and I belong, the UK government has said that it will continue to be voluntary. “Let’s be clear,” said prime minister Boris Johnson in November. “There will be no compulsory vaccination. That’s not the way we do things in this country.”1 For a population to achieve collective immunity against an infectious disease like Covid, a certain threshold of vaccination coverage is necessary. This threshold depends on the disease itself, as well as the eﬃcacy of the vaccine. For measles, it lies at 90-95 per cent; for polio, it’s around 80. According to the current line from the World Health Organization (WHO), “the proportion of the population that must be vaccinated 1

Going forward, however, border authorities and airlines may require immunisation certificates from passengers (the Australian airline Qantas, for instance, has committed to this), as is already standard practice with other infectious diseases. Certain employers, notably in the health and care sectors, may also be able to mandate vaccination if it can be classified as a “reasonable instruction”, with noncompliance being grounds for fair dismissal. This, of course, smacks a little too much of coercion, and seems unlikely to be widely implemented.

against Covid-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known.” But an October 2020 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has suggested a figure somewhere between 60 and 75 per cent, depending on the eventtual efficacy of the vaccines. Whatever the exact threshold, the route out of the on-off lockdowns and restrictive measures we have suffered in the past year relies, in large part, on broad voluntary uptake of the Covid-19 vaccines. The thing

I had no idea of the material she had been looking at online, and was certainly not in a position to explain how mRNA works. is, my friend’s stance is by no means uncommon. The last 30 or so years have seen an alarming rise in vaccine hesitancy and refusal across the world, to the point where preventable infectious diseases which were nearly eradicated in the 20th century – polio, measles, whooping cough – have had fresh flare-ups in the 21st. In her 2020 book Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away, Heidi J. Larson, an anthropologist and director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, describes “an emerging tsunami of skepticism around one of the most tried-and-true, life-saving health interventions in modern history,” over the course of her 20-year career in public health. Vaccines, with their inherent connection to government policy, public health programmes, and big pharmaceutical companies, have become lightning rods for much deeper forms of public mistrust. With regards to Covid-19, attitudes to immunisation did not look so bad in the UK at first. According to findings published in The Lancet, only 11 per cent of Britons would refuse a Covid-19 vaccine in June 2020. However, this rose to 14 per cent in July. And in September, as the prospect of an eﬀective vaccine was within reach, a UCL study found that 22 per cent of the UK population was “unlikely” to get vaccinated, while a preprint of a Nature Human Behaviour article showed that out of 4,001 Britons surveyed, only 54 per cent would “definitely” accept a Covid-19 vaccine. In addition to this, an Ipsos Mori poll showed that

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those charged with informing the public about the rollout – government oﬃcials, politicians, marketers, and, ahem, journalists – are the professions least trusted to tell the truth. So that’s where we’re at. In addition to the logistical challenge of vaccinating millions in record time – the current goal is for every UK adult to be oﬀered the vaccines by this autumn, making it the largest inoculation programme in British history – there is the non-trivial task of communicating the rollout to a hesitant public. What should the messaging be? How should it look? What sort of imagery would instil confidence in someone, like my friend, who has seen frightening posts about the vaccine online? It struck me that this might in large part be a design challenge.

for instance, are over-laden with text: “KEY FACTS ABOUT VACCINES”, one reads, followed by a glut of text but not too many hard facts: “After clean water, vaccination is the most effective public health intervention in the world for saving lives and promoting good health”; “Source: Oxford Vaccine Group”; “Safe ✓ Effective ✓ Important ✓”. In addition to the photograph of an injection, a small pictogram of a syringe punctuates the upper right-hand corner. Another social media .png features a bottle labeled “Covid-19 Vaccine” and the text, “You cannot catch coronavirus from the Covid-19 vaccine”, which has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that there is other information saying that you can. Why else it would it have to be negated?2 My request for comment from Public Health England and the Campaign Resource Centre didn’t yield any response. (They should, of course, be forgiven for not currently making design journalists their top priority.) But I was curious about the decisions that had gone into producing this imagery. What sort of research had the designers done? Were they aware of, and responding to, anti-vax memes circulating online? What is the current thinking on how best to communicate the importance of vaccines, and has that changed over time? “It’s really hard to find an article on vaccines where they don’t have an image of a needle,” says Heidi J. Larson from the Vaccine Confidence Project when I call her to discuss my questions. “The lack of imagination is kind of shocking to me. I don’t think it’s been helpful for vaccines in general.” In the past year, Larson has focused her efforts on investigating attitudes to Covid-19 vaccines. She was involved, for example, in putting together the ‘Guide to Covid-19 Vaccine Communications’ over the summer, a research project run by the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications in partnership with the United Nations. The guide is now available online in an easily digestible format, with eight core principles highlighted. One of these is ‘Emotions’: “It’s tempting to activate emotions like fear or shame to get people to take a vaccine,”

“Vaccination is one of your most eﬀective defences against Covid-19,” reads a sponsored post in my Twitter feed. It’s a pastel-hued .png with the NHS’s blue lozenge logo in the upper right-hand corner. Above the text, the central image is a schematic shield emblazoned with a green pharmaceutical cross. Bouncing oﬀ it are pink and green pathogens, including two particularly icky-looking ones, all bulbous yellow highlights and tentacular spike proteins. Defence, protection. The aesthetic is somewhat anodyne, but the messaging is solid enough. The text also acknowledges that there are other ways for your body to fight Covid-19. Crucially, there isn’t a needle in sight. The image is part of a package of materials made available by Public Health England’s Campaign Resource Centre in December 2020 for anyone to download. It includes videos and animations for use on social media, graphics like the post I encountered in my feed, fact sheets, posters, and even email signatures. At the point of writing in January 2021, new files are steadily being added as the vaccine rollout continues. Several design teams seem to be behind the materials in the package, with a range of graphic styles employed and little consistency in motifs and emblems used. Most adhere to a friendly cartoon aesthetic, making nothing but abstract reference to Covid-19 as a disease. A small number seem somewhat ill-advised. A series of fact cards showing close-up photographs of needles piercing skin,

For the record, you can’t. But side eﬀects may include a spell of fever and muscle ache – a sign that the recipient’s immune system is responding to the vaccine.

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Images courtesy of Public Health England.

‘Immunize and protect your child’, a poster issued by the World Health Organization in the 1970s.

the guide says. “But fear immobilizes us, and shame is likely to achieve the opposite reaction we’re hoping for. Look to more constructive emotions like pride, hope and parental love to get people to act.” Larson believes that the administration of the first jab in the UK’s vaccination campaign provided a positive image and “Oh, I get it-moment” for onlookers, despite later confusion surrounding delayed second doses and poor oﬃcial communications. “Seeing 91-year-old Margaret Keenan [the first member of the general public to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine] hugging her grandchildren,” she says, “it wasn’t just a closeup of the needle going into her arm, which I think is too often the case. The way it was presented showed the emotion of the relief in the outcome, and what you get out of getting vaccinated.” Images like that of Keenan and her grandchildren matter. In a 2004 paper in the journal Risk Analysis,

“You can use images for building hope and confidence, and you can use them to undermine trust and create fear and anxiety.” —Heidi J. Larson

Paul Slovic, a Stanford psychology professor and expert in decision-making, showed how our emotions are easily swayed by “images and associations” when faced with decisions. This is something Larson has become increasingly interested in in relation to Covid-19. “Recently with my team, I’ve been working more and more on the role of emotions,” she says. “You can use images for building hope and confidence, and you can use them to undermine trust and create fear and anxiety.” One study to come out of this is the Nature Human Behaviour preprint mentioned earlier. In it, Larson and her collaborators at Imperial College, University of Washington, and University of Antwerp organised a controlled trial involving 4,001 people in the UK and 4,000 in the US. “We were trying to assess the real impact of the images and misinformation on vaccine intent,” Larson explains. The team interviewed all 8,001 participants and asked if they would be willing to take the Covid-19 vaccine. The answers came back at around 54 per cent in the UK and 41 per cent

in the US – well below herd immunity. “And then,” Larson explains, “for 1,000 in each country, we showed positive, factual, straightforward information, and for the other 3,000 in both countries, we showed five of the most frequently circulated pieces of misinformation about the vaccines, most of which were largely imagebased with some text.” To give readers a flavour of the misinformation, one post presents Bill Gates as “The Vaccinator”, wielding a blood-filled syringe Schwarzenegger-style next to captions suggesting a coordinated genocide and mass sterilisation campaign. Another shows a technical diagram which wouldn’t look out of place in a genomics textbook, alongside text suggesting the vaccine turns recipients into “genetically modified human being[s].” Those subjected to the misinformation became significantly more wary of accepting a vaccine. The factual communications shown to the smaller groups were fairly inoffensive by comparison: images included a scientist in a lab coat; a syringe and a SARS-CoV-2 pathogen; pharmaceutical vials rolling out on a production line, accompanied by optimistic messages about the #covid19vaccine offering a safe way out of the pandemic. These images neither made people more nor less likely to get vaccinated. “The factual information,” says Larson, “had zero impact.” Should we take those findings as a prompt to ramp up visual rhetoric, then? To feature photographs of Covid-sufferers on respirators, making the risk of going unvaccinated more patently visible? Such tactics used to be more common in historical vaccination campaigns. Consider ‘Immunize and protect your child’, a poster issued by the WHO in the 1970s. Here, a cartoon strip takes the viewer through two scenarios: one in which a mother vaccinates her child against an unspecified disease, and another in which a second mother is shown shouting “I don’t trust your vaccines!” at a smiling doctor with a needle. Then, “disease strikes” in the form of retributive thunder and lightning and the first child, protected by a quasi-religious halo, lives. The unvaccinated child dies. Neutral and factual messaging doesn’t appear to do much to inspire confidence, but the general consensus in public health strategy is that the tone employed in the WHO poster would also be counterproductive to vaccine uptake. It peddles fear and shame, and is astonishingly condescending

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to any parent who may have questions surrounding vaccination. What it does identify, however, is the feeling upon which vaccine acceptance hinges: it is not necessarily pride or parental love (those feelings can even fuel vaccine skepticism), but trust. Accepting a vaccine relies on a complex chain of trust. The recipient needs to feel confident in their healthcare provider; the private or public health body for which that provider works; the government which has purchased the vaccine; the scientists who have developed it; and the pharmaceutical company which has manufactured it. Should any link in this trust-chain be eroded – suppose, for instance, that the UK government was felt to have made a shambles out of its response to the pandemic – it will be diﬃcult to instil confidence through images and messaging alone. There are much deeper factors behind the rise in public mistrust in vaccines that communicators ought to take into account. Sceptical attitudes towards vaccines are as old as vaccines themselves. An 1802 etching by the great satirical cartoonist James Gillray shows Edward Jenner – the pioneering English physician credited with creating the first smallpox vaccine in 1796 – administering his vaccine to patients at St Pancras Hospital. There is the painful jab in full view; there are the multiple syringes and medical accoutrements. There, too, is the fear of a new and strange-sounding technology: the inoculated patients are sprouting bizarre bovine appendages! The smallpox vaccine worked by injecting fluid from a cowpox blister into the patient’s skin. Jenner had observed that cowpox, a virus harmless in humans, provided people with immunity to smallpox, which killed tens of thousands annually in Britain alone. A boy in the etching holds a pot labelled – not entirely inaccurately – “vaccine pock hot from ye cow.” In fact, the word “vaccine” comes from the Latin “vacca”, for cow. It took time to build up public confidence in the smallpox vaccine, as well as others against cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria and plague, among the many more which followed in the 19th century with the pioneering research of scientists like Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich. The UK became the home of the first Anti-Vaccination League in 1866 after a series of parliamentary acts made smallpox vaccination compulsory. (For all of Johnson’s bluster that mandatory vaccination is “not how we do things

in this country,” it was precisely how things were done in the Victorian era.) Unsurprisingly, coercion through penalties and even imprisonment did not go down well. “We prefer to take our chance with cholera and the rest rather than be bullied into health,” proclaimed The Times in 1854, as debates raged around the Public Health Act, the first of its kind when passed in 1848. Journals and pamphlets such as Henry Pitman’s Anti-Vaccinator followed, drawing support from those who deemed vaccines “humbug”, but also from those who primarily took issue with them being government-mandated. As the great historian of medicine Roy Porter has set out in his 1997 book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, this was the era in which the very concept of public health was pioneered and tested – in which societies

“We prefer to take our chances with cholera and the rest rather than be be bullied into health.” —The Times, 1854 set to the gnarly task of “balancing individual rights against collective protection.” It wasn’t until 1909 that Parliament finally rescinded its policy of compulsory vaccination. By and large, confidence in vaccines grew enough in the 20th century that smallpox became the first (and to date, only) infectious disease to be completely eradicated. My parents, who were born in the 1950s, were vaccinated against the disease, but I, a child of the late 80s, didn’t need to be – the WHO had declared its successful eradication in 1980. Polio, the childhood disease which struck terror into the hearts of generations of parents in the 20th century, has now also very nearly been eradicated, through the extraordinary efforts of campaigners and public health organisations across the world. (The US virologist Jonas Salk developed a widelyadopted vaccine against polio in the 1950s.) But what happened between the 1980s and now? What has brought on the “tsunami of skepticism” described by Larson? It is tempting to point to specific events. Vaccines have saved countless lives – especially those of children – and remain among the most effective public health interventions in human history. That doesn’t mean they cannot have side-effects, or haven’t sometimes

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Images courtesy of Public Health England.

James Gillray’s 1802 etching lampoons Edward Jenner administering

Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

his smallpox vaccine to patients at St Pancras hospital.

been developed under unethical circumstances.3 In 1974, a UK report was published suggesting a link between the DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) jab and neurological conditions developed by 36 children.4 The findings led to a DPT vaccine scare, leading uptake to drop from 81 per cent in 1974 to 31 per cent in 1980, and eventually to a resurgence of whooping cough the scale of which hadn’t been seen since the 1950s. The panic spread to other countries too, particularly the US, where a TV documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette helped stoke fears further. Another example from the same period involves a new strain of influenza that was identified in 1976 and feared to be a 1918-style pandemic in the making. A pandemic did not transpire, but a vaccine was nevertheless developed – it was found to make a small number of recipients ill with a rare neurological condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome. The fear of this condition in relation to new vaccines remains present: when I looked the syndrome up for this article, Google auto-completed my search term to “guillain barre covid vaccine”. It is also tempting to point to individuals. Andrew Wakefield, a British former physician who was struck oﬀ the medical register after the publication, and later retraction, of a study in The Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, looms large here. The study, which only involved 12 subjects, was later found to have been fixed, and its findings have been universally debunked by the scientific community.5 Yet, Wakefield continues his crusade against vaccines, directing the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe in 2016, touring the world, and drawing crowds who view him as a martyr for his cause. Wakefield’s influence was also augmented by the rise of online fora and social media in the 2000s and 2010s, platforms on which

An example of the latter is one of the many horrific revelations to come out of the ongoing inquiry into Ireland’s mother-and-baby institutions: throughout the 20th century, children from such homes were made to participate in clinical vaccine trials without any eﬀort to seek consent from their parents or guardians. It was later discovered that babies may have been mistakenly injected with a cholera vaccine for adults, due to an alarming clerical error on the part of GlaxoWellcome, the manufacturer of both vaccines. While the autism link is unproven, Larson points out in Stuck that “there is evidence confirming other vaccine-related risks, such as occasional febrile (fever-related) seizures following MMR immunization, which researchers in Denmark have found are caused by a genetic variation in some children.”

misinformation has the capacity to go, well, viral. The fallout from the MMR vaccine fraud has been stark: the uptake has dropped to the extent that the UK lost its measles-free status in 2019 after a series of fresh outbreaks in 2018. The WHO reported 142,000 deaths globally from measles in 2018, with most of the victims being children under the age of five. “Wakefield and his acolytes are like the seed,” says Stuart Blume, emeritus professor of science and technology studies at the University of Amsterdam, who has worked on the history of vaccines for the last 20 years. “But the seed has to take root in fertile ground to sprout.” There are specific vaccine scares, individual fraudsters, and social media platforms which act as loudspeakers for dubious facts, but the “fertile ground” is irrigated by deeper forms of public mistrust, Blume argues. He and Larson both suggest that public health oﬃcials ought to reflect more on how public mistrust might be connected to the pharmaceutical industry itself. “Part of the problem is structural,” says Blume, while Larson, writing in her opening acknowledgements in Stuck, says: “My views have not always been welcomed, as they question some of modus operandi of the public health community.” So what is this modus operandi and why does it matter to vaccine hesitancy? In Blume’s 2017 book Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, he sets out an overview of how vaccines work, as well as providing a detailed history of their implementation in public health. For most of the 20th century, many industrialised European nations, as well as some US states, had publicly-owned serum institutes which developed and manufactured vaccines for their populations. However, “the tidal wave of free-market thinking” that occurred in the Reagan and Thatcher years, Blume writes, “had major implications for the development and production of vaccines.” In accordance with the ideological shift towards free markets and minimal states, countries began divesting themselves of the capacity to produce vaccines, closing or privatising serum institutes in a process that began in Australia and Sweden in the 1990s. An example is Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, one of the world’s first when it was established in 1902. Since 2017 it has been run by the company AJ Vaccines, which is in turn owned by Saudi conglomerate Aljomaih Group. In the mid-20th century, writes Blume, “knowledge was freely available and freely exchanged. Patents

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played little or no role in vaccine development at this time, and flow of virus strains or know-how were scarcely hindered by commercial interests.” He points to the example of Jonas Salk, who donated his polio virus strains to the WHO. That changed in the 1980s and 90s, as large pharmaceutical companies, rather than public bodies, began to spearhead vaccine production. “Commercial vaccine manufacturers were unwilling to collaborate with those in the public sector as they had done a decade earlier,” writes Blume. “Scientific knowledge was being privatised and, as a source of potential profit, was now rebranded as ‘intellectual property’.” Today, the global vaccines market is very profitable. According to ‘Global Vaccine Market Features and Trends’, a 2013 report from WHO, global spending on vaccines went from some $5bn in 2000 to almost $24bn in 2013. The report predicted that that figure would reach $100bn by 2025 (that was, of course, before the pandemic). Vaccines, it would appear, have been thoroughly commodified. While governments have invested record sums into the development of the Covid-19 vaccines – the UK gave £210m to the international eﬀort in March 2020 – this is not representative of the general tendency between the 1980s and today, which saw governments step back, big pharma step forward, and new private philanthropic organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation take on the mantle of investing in global public health. Does it matter that the decisions and priorities of public health programmes are in the hands of companies, private charities, and governments which rarely divulge, openly, the deals struck with industry? Blume suggests it does: “I think it makes a diﬀerence that people don’t know where the vaccines are coming from, and don’t have any control over the priorities that go into developing them.” At the most extreme end of vaccine skepticism, in the nauseating kaleidoscope of online conspiracy theories, this recent history is still whirring around, but with baroque links being made between people and phenomena. Bill Gates wants to sterilise you with the Covid-19 vaccine, or at the very least use it to implant a microchip in you; evil pharmaceutical companies want to manipulate your DNA to turn you into something like a genetically modified crop; and governments, universities, and the media are conspiring to cover it all up. A particularly outlandish constellation of anti-Covid-19 vaccine groups that

is currently flourishing on YouTube and Instagram has been termed “Pastel QAnon”. It constitutes an intermingling of wellness and naturopathy influencers (who have long held vaccine-skeptical views) and QAnon conspiracy theorists (who believe, among other things, that Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities are running a Satanic pedophile ring through several seemingly random businesses). As per Clio Chang’s Cosmopolitan report on Pastel QAnon, the belief that “Covid-19 [is] overblown, a hoax, or part of a government scheme to microchip everyone with a vaccine” is often what bridges these disparate groups. Facebook announced in early December 2020 that it would update its Covid-19 policy and ban misinformation about the vaccines from its site – a difficult task given that the facts about them are continuously evolving. Faced with such clamp-downs, some anti-vaccine groups are simply moving their efforts offline. “With more and more restrictions online,” says Larson, “one of the latest things is all these [anti-vaccine] billboards and hoardings going up around the world. And they’re capturing the attention of people who are not looking for this stuff.” Suppression, then, is a Whac-A-Mole effort at best, and counterproductive at worst. After all,

“I think it makes a diﬀerence that people don’t know where the vaccines are coming from, and don’t have any control over the priorities that go into developing them.” —Stuart Blume not everyone with questions about vaccines is a QAnoner, or even a vaccine refuser6 – it doesn’t seem unlikely, however, that some might spiral that way if their perception is that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are controlling and shutting down the conversation. What is left, then, for communicators to do? A reinforcement of positive feelings – in the form

As shown by the multiple studies cited at the top of this article, an increasingly common stance is to be “hesitant” about vaccination, rather than refusing it outright.

of Margaret Keenan hugging her grandchildren after being vaccinated, say – is all well and good. Celebrity endorsement, one of the oldest forms of advertising, is also being employed by the UK’s public health authorities, according to plans leaked in December. In Blume’s view, however, the communication strategy around the Covid-19 vaccines should be more open about the things people say they’re most anxious about. “What seems to underpin most people’s objections or concerns is a fear of side effects,” he says. “What we see in the press releases are statements about efficacy, so 90 per cent or 94 per cent. But we don’t hear anything much about side effects. We’re told that there aren’t any, or at least not serious ones.” Maybe the vagueness of “Safe ✓ Effective ✓ Important ✓”-style messaging does little to assuage someone who is worried about potential side effects. Would a more persuasive fact card not include an acknowledgement of the small risk associated with vaccination (the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been shown to produce adverse reactions in people with certain allergies, for example), while simultaneously setting out that the risks of developing Covid, and/or passing it on to others, are much greater on the whole? An acknowledgement of what we don’t yet know about the vaccines – how long they grant immunity, for example – may also not be remiss. These are reasonable questions to ask, and if they’re not readily addressed by official sources, many might turn to unofficial ones. “We need to learn ways to engage better,” says Larson. “Because right now it’s really an imbalance. The anti-people are willing to make incredibly bold statements about topics they really don’t have credentials on, whereas the actual credible sources don’t want to put themselves out into that space.” Larson is hopeful that this can change. “I think it’s a transitional thing,” she says. “Once we have a younger generation of new doctors and health decision-makers who grew up with social media, they’ll be able to navigate it much better than the current ones.” The main challenge remains structural, however, and that is a task well beyond the remit of designers and communicators, regardless of generation. “People would have more faith if they knew more about the contracts between governments and manufacturers,” says Blume. “We need more transparency, but there hasn’t been any.” Blume argues that those contracts,

which include information on pricing, as well as the sharing of data between governments and companies, ought to be in the public domain. Instead, we get the occasional ministerial Twitter leak (Belgium’s budget state secretary, Eva De Bleeker, posted a quicklydeleted price list on the platform in December, detailing the amounts of each vaccine that Belgium intended to buy from the EU), and partially redacted documents (Israel recently made its data-sharing deal with Pfizer public, but obscured the parts of the contract relating to pricing). At the same time, it is unclear where the legal liability for damages, should recipients experience rare side-eﬀects of the vaccines, lies. In many instances, it is governments, not pharmaceutical companies themselves, which would need to make compensations – the United States, for instance, has granted manufacturers total legal immunity, in order to spur the development of the vaccine. The optics of all this could certainly be construed as, well, dodgy, even if the reality is simply the normal machinations of a market-driven vaccines industry. It might just be that those machinations should be reconsidered, given that they instil in people such widespread feelings of fear and mistrust. END

Essay

Dented, Knocked, Scraped Words Felix Chabluk Smith Images Rimowa

I’ve been asked to write a short piece about travel and luggage at the end of 2020, to be published in February 2021. But instead of stringing together a few thoughts and emailing it off, I’m quite paralysed, acutely aware of the time capsule I’m inevitably constructing; agonising over what ephemera should be sealed up in this biscuit tin. I’d been getting annoyed with every article I’ve read recently being about the coronavirus pandemic, but now I’ve been asked to write something, I realise it is not possible to write about anything else. Far better writers than I have written with far greater eloquence on this plague year, but as I have been given the opportunity to add my thousand-plus to the pile, I suppose I should say where we are at, from my perspective, in late December. I live in Paris, but my parents still live in the UK, and I hadn’t seen them for a year and a half. The borders were open and the trains were running, so after checking again and again with my parents that they would be comfortable having me in the house, I decided to travel home for Christmas. There isn’t much to do in my hometown anyway, and sitting on the couch drinking wine isn’t affected by a mandatory 10-day quarantine. My initial deadline for this piece, Friday the 18th, came and went in a flurry of last-minute work emails; Christmas shopping; shipping presents on the company’s DHL account; and getting home before the 8pm Paris curfew. My negative PCR test results had arrived in my inbox just after 6am that morning; the laboratories are presumably working through the night. I didn’t need this paperwork to travel to London the next day, but it meant that I was fairly certain that when I arrived and my father hugged me unquestioningly at the station, I wouldn’t be sentencing him to death. Had I filed my copy in time, this piece would have turned out differently. It turned

out I made it home just under the wire. As I was packing my suitcase on Friday night, the UK government was scrambling to respond to a new and highly contagious mutation of Covid-19, thought to have originated in Kent. I took a deserted Eurostar from Paris on Saturday morning, and just after I changed trains in London to travel north, it was announced that the whole south-east of England was to be locked-down into a newly created fourth tier of restrictions. By Sunday evening, much of Europe had banned travel from Britain. This sudden slamming of the door was shocking, despite coming at the end of a year of hastily imposed restrictions and lockdowns, with borders opening and closing as the virus ebbed and flowed. My mind went into overdrive, trying to work out if I would be able to get back to Paris. Over the past 10 months of the pandemic, travel has become like smoking: technically legal but occasionally banned, tolerated if-you-have-to but generally frowned-upon, and definitely bad for your health. Like any habit-forming vice, when we have to give it up, we crave it. In September, Tariro Mzezewa in The New York Times reported on Royal Brunei and Qantas offering “scenic flights” that take off and land in the same place, for those who love flying so much “that it is an exciting part of the travel experience. For those people, flights to nowhere are the salve for a year in which just about all travel has been canceled and people have been fearful of airlines not enforcing social distancing and mask-wearing rules.” It would be amusing in an eye-rolling, aren’t-people-funny sort of way, were it not for the horrendous amount of harmful emissions produced by commercial air travel. A seven-hour Qantas flight that took off and landed in Sydney sold out in 10 minutes, presumably before the weight of internet outrage could get it cancelled. The even-more polluting

cruise industry is trying it too, with the Royal Caribbean Quantum of the Seas setting sail from and to Singapore in early December. A passenger tested positive for Covid-19, but the ships are still sailing in circles. To Rimowa, founded in 1898 and a survivor of two World Wars, the Great Depression and the pandemic of 1918, the tumult of the past months will seem like a mere blip. Known for its Space-Age ridged aluminium cases, the German luggage-maker wears its history lightly, so when it came to publishing a book of their archives, there’s no time like the present I suppose – and there definitely hasn’t been a time like the present. The photos are crisp, the spacious layout calming, and the pressed-metal and glossy polycarbonate textures appealingly wipe-clean; page after page of rational, reassuring, precision-engineered Germanic expensiveness. I’m a fashion designer, so by rights I should be as materialistic as they come, but I have to admit that I’ve never quite understood the allure of luxury luggage. If you spend £1,200 on a pair of shoes, you’ll feel great. Not physically, because they’ll probably hurt like hell, but you’ll feel great because you’ll look great. With expensive luggage, however, I never thought it was worth it. No-one will compliment you on it, but neither will they think you’re insane, and I don’t know what’s worse. Like The Beatles, expensive luggage is a perfectly acceptable thing to like, but give me the New York Dolls any day. With a nice suitcase you won’t get that particularly delicious glance of confusion, fear and despite-themselves admiration from strangers that I’m looking for with luxury fashion. Flicking through Rimowa: An Archive, Since 1898 in my tiny Paris apartment – where to just see the sky I have to open my window, stick my head out and look directly up past the

A vulcanised fibre and painted steel lady’s dress case (No. 820), produced by Rimowa in the 1940s. The image is an advertisement shot designed to show off the case’s interior.

Photoessay

claustrophobic cliff-faces of the surrounding buildings; where to just leave the front door I have to wear a mask and fill out my attestation de déplacement – what really caught my attention wasn’t the design classics, the factory-fresh show-off limited editions, or money-no-object custom orders. I wasn’t seized by nostalgia for a supposedly glamorous, never-experienced jet-age, and it didn’t make me want to buy a Rimowa. Instead, I was drawn in by the airline stickers and customs labels, the dents and knocks and scrapes. I wanted to know who had owned these well-traveled objects and where they had been. To what far-off lands had that battered pilot’s case been? What had been captured by the lens held in that well-used 1970s camera bag? What treasures had been brought back in that old steamer trunk? The value was all in the damage, like lacquerware prized for the scratches and cracks accrued over a long life. I wasn’t yearning for the experience of travel, I was simply longing to go somewhere, anywhere, to pick up a few scratches and stories myself. To attempt to definitively describe 2020 as anything would risk becoming a crass understatement, but it has been frightening and frustrating, and speaking as a white, well-educated, middle-class liberal European, I am not used to being frightened or frustrated. Before the pandemic and the lockdowns, and before the door to Europe finally creaks shut in a few days at the time of writing, travel wasn’t seen as a privilege, or even a right – it just was. We have been accustomed to think that we are safe, that the world is ours and that we can go wherever we want, whenever we like, but we can’t, and for the sake of the planet, we shouldn’t. I’m hoping that the world in which these words are read is very different to the one in which they are written,

yet I’m not so naive as to think that the huge societal and industrial rethinks promised by this wake-up call will actually happen. We didn’t emerge from lockdown triumphantly brandishing jars of homemade pickles in our yoga-toned arms, blinking in the summer sunlight before walking oﬀ into a bright bucolic future, despite the think-pieces proclaiming the end of commuting, of city living, of factory-farming and all the other bad old ways. Normal life has been dispiritingly quick to reassert itself, even with tape on the floor, plexiglass screens and sanitiser dispensers at the door. Yet there has been some soul-searching. I’ve been writing about travel as packing a suitcase, taking a flight and travelling for hours, but I think – I hope – that because of the past year our ideas of travel and its luxuries have been recalibrated. Luxury travel will be travelling without having to have the back of my nasal cavity painfully swabbed or my blood drawn for evidence of antibodies. It will be travelling knowing that borders are not closing behind me. If I do manage to get back to Paris, it will be stepping outside my apartment building after 8pm. Above all, it will be travelling knowing that I can hug whomever meets me at the other end without worrying I’m killing them. Rimowa: An Archive, Since 1898 is published by Rizzoli, RRP $95.

Clockwise from top: promotional material for Rimowa’s first all-aluminium suitcase collection (No. 333) from 1950; a 1970s advertisement that ran with the tagline “Rimowa Fotokoffer sind löwenstark” or “Rimowa camera cases are lion strong”; wood and leather trunks manufactured by Rimowa’s founder Paul Morszeck in the early 1900s.

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Above: a custom polycarbonate case designed to hold model airplanes (2002), created for the collector Dieter Morszeck. Next page: stickers decorating the aluminium shell of a Rimowa suitcase.

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Clockwise from top: an aluminium camera case interior (c.1978); a Rimowa catalogue photo from the 1990s; the Airbag No. 2940, produced from scuff-resistant moulded plastic with an aluminium frame, advertised in 1968 as “High Fashion Light Weight Luggage”.

Photoessay

A Dirty Secret Words Rab Messina

In early 2020, when Jamie Marks took over two Iris Optical shops in Central London, his employees quickly noticed something: their new boss was obsessive about recycling. Since his teenage years, Marks had been the sorting sort, carefully separating paper from plastic from other nasties. And yet, even after more than 25 years in the eyewear industry, he realised he had a blind spot.

Anatomy

Producing a pair of eyeglasses is a particularly profligate process: cutting the frames out of a sheet of acetate leaves behind 80 per cent of the material. But that’s well-known in the business. The problem Marks had ignored was practically invisible: to put prescription lenses in, dummy lenses – the disposable ones used for demo purposes – have to go out. But out where? On an average month, Marks says that just one of his shops chucks about 800 of those clear petal-like pieces. From the bin, these plastic parts either head to landfill or are burned, depending on whether they come from a small optical shop using normal waste disposal practices, or regional distributors with the ability to destroy them on their own. In this case, as lenses cannot be easily reused, recycled or reduced to productive bits, they often go up in flames, their toxic fumes a sign of our failure to devise a circular production process for the most widely used accessory in the world. Like most people in his industry, Marks hadn’t questioned what happened to the dummy lenses after they left the premises. It took a cold call from Yair Neuman to break the news. “[Jamie’s] not an activist in any way, but he’s a good optician and a successful businessman who is concerned about wasting material and polluting,” says Neuman, a London-based designer who has devoted his practice to finding ethical alternatives to problematic manufacturing, providing a path for people who aren’t necessarily design-obsessed or activists. Earlier in his career, this manifested in tongue-in-cheek projects such as suggesting stale bread as a substitute for wood in furniture and household objects, but he later devised a commercial venture: after working at Ron Arad’s PQ Eye wear company in the early 2010s, he envisioned a way to reframe the traditionally wasteful creation of a pair of shades. That research turned into Wires Glasses, an eyewear brand that produces sunglass and optical frames in Treviso from a single wire, while the lenses and rims are 3D-printed using a bioplastic extracted from castor beans. The wire solves the matter of the 80-per cent acetate residue, but dummy lenses are still needed. Dummy lenses are always needed. Acetate, it turns out, can’t sit still. Similar to wood, it expands and contracts in accordance with humidity levels. That means that, lest they lose their shape from the factory to the shop,

these living frames need a skeleton of sorts to keep their shape while in storage. There is, eﬀectively, an actual functional need for temporary lenses. There’s also a psychological one. “For some reason, the idea of trying on glassless frames makes us feel almost clownish,” Neuman explains. The dummy lenses are there to provide the most realistic preview possible and to assuage our fears of looking stupid. How about the people who don’t need corrective eyewear but like the way it looks on them? They would still need prescription lenses without focal correction, as dummy lenses are meant to be disposable and are not suitable for wear – although they are made from optical-grade polycarbonate, they are thin, scratch easily and can shatter into sharp pieces. The more he worked in the industry, the more Neuman realised that lenses are as large a polluter as frames. So he started contacting independent shops in London – including Iris Optical – and talking to the owners and the employees who either directly or unwittingly produced those bins full of dummy lenses. They would be the ones, he thought, to feel immediately preoccupied and guilty once they realised the scale of the problem. “People are feeling guilty,” he says. “They are the ones who put the plastic in the bin.” By relieving them from their waste, he found himself a constant and free supply of material to experiment with – Jamie Marks, for instance, remains a frequent provider. One owner in particular was more than open to collaborating with Neuman on his experiments: Tom Broughton, the founder and CEO of Cubitts. This eyewear label does something seemingly counterproductive: it asks its customers to buy less. On average, optical eyewear users tend to buy new glasses every two years, but Broughton’s proposal is to repair them instead of throwing them away. The glasses, which retail for £125 in their acetate version, are designed using custom pins that allow for easy repair, and each Cubitts store has an on-site rehab workshop. This is, in other words, an industry-specific variation of the formula of buying good, buying once – and thus producing less waste. But Broughton still couldn’t find a suitable logistical response to the inevitable dummy lens waste his shops produced. “When you ask the question of what happens in other practices or labs, you realise you’ve uncovered 74

a dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about,” he says. So, within the first five minutes of Neuman’s cold call, he invited the designer to meet and find a way to improve things together. That collaboration resulted in an exhibition during the 2020 London Design Festival, where Neuman took his message public for the first time. Instead of removing traces of his material’s origins, he decided to let it speak for itself. “The project as a whole is very simple: taking the material and trying to do something with it,” he says. Rather than grinding and recomposing the lenses into something unrecognisable, he used pressure, heat and a massaging technique that helps fuse the parts in spite of the repelling force of their anti-glare coating. Neuman then manually moulded the resulting fish-scale-like sheets into six lamps that were put on display at Cubitts’ Coal Drops Yard shop in King’s Cross. Half conceptual objects, half communication devices, the pieces in the Lens Light collection revealed their origin in a transparent way, forcing onlookers to confront uncomfortable information. Following the showcase, Neuman began receiving calls from small companies and opticians from the US and diﬀerent parts of Europe who were interested in finding a better way to dispose of their dummy lenses. Logistically, it doesn’t pan out – at the scale at which Neuman is working, it’s more ethical to remain local to avoid the environmental impact of shipping waste internationally – but it does demonstrate the desire from individuals in the business to operate with a clearer conscience. At a company scale, however, things aren’t quite as straightforward. The eyewear industry is extremely profitable. As LensCrafters co-founder Charles Dahan admitted to The Los Angeles Times in 2019, the markup on glasses can reach up to 1,000 per cent. The problem lies in the small number of hands that control a large part of the business. Take the multinational that owns LensCrafters, EssilorLuxottica – the result of a 2018 merger between two European giants. Essilor already controlled 45 per cent of the global lens market, while Luxottica was responsible for 25 per cent of the frame market. As Vox’s Chavie Lieber explained, together they’ve engulfed a vast portfolio of brands and lens and parts manufacturers and specialised assemblers, as well as more than 8,000 patents. Through its EyeMed Vision Care Anatomy

1 A material sample produced from discarded dummy lenses. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)

2 A lamp created by Neuman for online retailer Harth. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)

3 Neuman’s original series of lamps were produced as part of the Lens Light collection for Cubitt’s. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)

4 To create the forms, Neuman moulds the waste lenses by hand. (Photo: Sebastian Costa)

5 The lenses are manipulated into a sheet material that may then be further worked with. (Photo: Sebastian Costa)

6 Neuman photographed outside of the Cubitt’s Coal Drops Yard store. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)

insurance, the group is connected to four out of every five optometrists in the US. In other words, it controls most of the global supply chain. If it says that a pair of prescription glasses that cost £20 to make can retail for £700, then so be it. Some direct-to-consumer (DTC) challengers have been trying to lower that markup to fairer levels. One of the most well-known of these brands is Warby Parker, a New York-based company that has been offering optical eyewear at close to the £70 mark since 2010. And yet, according to Euromonitor, this year DTC companies are expected to take but a small 2 per cent bite out of the £102bn global eyewear market. The remaining 98 per cent have, for decades, largely stayed silent on the dummy lens environmental issue. “When I approached larger companies, I felt there was that [sense of] ‘We don’t want you to tell the story – that’s just going to surface things that we don’t want to speak about,’” Neuman remembers. Although some of those small DTCs, particularly in Europe, are starting to produce lenses from biomaterials, it sadly remains at a negligible scale due to the prohibitive cost of the processes involved. Many of the large optical companies have sustainability units and R&D departments focused on more environmentally viable long-term materials – when contacted, Luxottica was not able to provide information on its environmental practices – but the lack of public outcry has had the effect of moving those efforts down the list of priorities. To buy some time until this waste stream hits the news stream, the big eyewear players appear to be furthering an out of sight, out of mind approach. There has thus been no incentive, nor a margin-friendly solution, to do something about it. Approximately four billion people use corrective eyewear. So why haven’t we, as consumers, been more keen to put two and two together, as has happened in small sections of the fashion industry? Although fashion remains highly polluting, it is now more aspirational for the informed consumer to purchase fair-trade clothes with a highly traceable supply chain than to buy from the likes of LVMH brands – to them, DIOP is far better than Dior. But even with the rise of eco-friendly fashion brands, designer handbags and high-street frocks are still seen as an act of frivolous conspicuous consumption, while optical eyewear is seen primarily as a necessity, a benevolent medical wearable. In fact, optical lenses

and their frames are considered Class 1 medical devices in the European Union. Even the high price of a pair of spectacles is internally justified, often seen as a personal investment in a better quality of life. And no matter whether one pays £100 or £1,000 for a pair of specs, chances are they still produce the same amount of manufacturing waste. The difference in price is merely in the eye of the beholder – something that cannot be said about a Zara shirt and its Reformation counterpart. And yet, when you are taking dummy and obsolete prescription lenses into account, the optical industry discards some 210m units every year. At best, these pieces are burnt, but the majority are put into landfill, where they will spend some four centuries before they finally decompose. Legislation might be an answer to this issue, although it takes time to come to the fore – in the US, for instance, Republican administrations have been known to favour employment numbers over what they see as job-killing regulations from the country’s Environmental Protection Agency. But even with a legal framework in place, some form of evasion is expected – since 1994, the European Commission has published reports on the thousands of nonconformity and bad application cases in the oldest 15 states of the Union. As Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions cheating scandal proved, companies – particularly large ones – can often find a way around strictures that may curtail profit margins. Or, as Cubitts’ Tom Broughton puts it, “regulation is too easy to skirt.” At this stage of the dummy lens problem, where most consumers are unaware of the effect of such a commonplace purchase, time is a luxury that should not be afforded. So others have started taking matters into their own hands, with some manufacturers creating recycling programmes for eyewear professionals and optical retailers. Florida’s Costa Del Mar was founded in 1983 by a fishing enthusiast and acquired by Essilor in 2014. Since 2015, it has run the Kick Plastic programme, which has turned more than 44,000lbs of lenses into objects such as scuba masks and motorcycle helmet shields. If this proves replicable and cost-effective – a particular challenge, since its parent company recently laid off 295 of Costa’s 350 employees and will move its operations to Luxxotica’s plants in New York and California – it could represent one path towards a more efficient

Anatomy

use of resources. But this might not be circular enough: can divers and motorcycle riders be a source for informed change within an industry they may not necessarily participate in? In order for optical eyewear consumers to demand change from manufacturers, they may need a more direct relation in the resulting recycling. The perfect object, just like Neuman’s lamps, would visually communicate its material origins in order to raise further awareness. During the early stages of reusable bag adoption, some manufacturers used to print slogans such as “I used to be 50 soda bottles” on totes. Similarly with eyewear, early-stage objects need to be directly linked to glasses just to communicate the existence of the issue. A first wave of informed customers, usually early adopters and trendsetters, can lead to mass adoption in a few decades – or now, thanks to social media, in a few years. While the fashion industry still hasn’t experienced a widespread rejection of ecologically taxing clothes, there is frequently a sense of guilt among those who purchase fast fashion. And guilt often leads to change, however long it takes. “In my experience, guilt is there all the time,” Neuman says. Fittingly, he is now working on an object to meet these requirements. The same anti-reflection coating that made dummy lenses diﬃcult to bind together with heat to create his lighting pieces also produces a welcome result when the surface of the coating is broken: an iridescent, nacre-like pattern. When layered to form a sheet about a third of an inch thick, the pattern becomes three-dimensional, almost like a bubble-coloured tortoiseshell that shines with greens and blues and purples. And, of course, that sheet can be used to close the loop to create frames, at a rate of 50 demo lenses per unit. “In a way, it’s a nice concept, because you need a lot of rubbish to create a little product,” Neuman says. As sociologist Ana Andjelic explained in her newsletter, The Sociology of Business, intellectual flexing is a consumer driver. “The purpose of flex commerce is to establish one’s status as distinct and superior to others,” she wrote in December 2020. “Unlike other forms of commerce, it’s unrelated to the cost of goods and services, but to their intangible, symbolic value.” The pearlescent pattern in Neuman’s frames could be an easily recognisable signal of moral flexing, and thus a probable hit with the DTC

audience. But he’s looking further ahead, seeing the limitations of preaching to the choir. “It’s good to make fashionable eyewear sustainable, but there’s more than that: the little brands, that I’m a part of, are catering to the people who are already convinced that sustainability is the way forward,” he explains. “If you want this process to realistically work in big quantities, you need larger facilities, and I really believe those big players can make that happen.” In other words, our current troublemakers hold the key to a possible win-win solution. On the one hand, large companies can clean up their act by cleaning up our landfills. On the other, consumers can aﬀordably purchase a mass-produced plastic element that defies the historical behaviour of mass-produced plastic, and can set a positive standard in other industries. When fashion designer Anya Hindmarch released her “I am not a plastic bag” canvas tote in 2007, 80,000 shoppers queued to buy their own at Sainsbury’s on launch day. To many, it was a chance to get their hands on an original Hindmarch bag for £5, with the design’s environmental message new to most. What started as Hindmarch’s personal concern turned into a PR coup that ignited a global debate, and became one of the elements that led to a present where urban dwellers carry foldable reusable bags with them, and many supermarket chains around the world have stopped providing plastic bags for free – or at all. If personal concern from a designer can produce an attractive object that gets media attention, then it may lead to public debate and more informed consumers who can influence the decisions of large companies. So go ahead. E N D

Of Fashion and Gatekeepers Words Johanna Agerman Ross

A gatekeeper is, at their most benign, someone who prevents people entering without permission; at their most malign, they’re a person who has the power to determine who gets a particular resource or opportunity. Both forms of gatekeeper are regularly deployed in high-end fashion, either to keep someone out of a space, or else to restrict access to resources. They come in the guise of the security guard, press oﬃcer or magazine editor, to name just a few. The gatekeeper is there to uphold the myth and mystique of an industry that profits from the creation of an image of a sole, genius creator; they make sure that access is only granted to those who can be trusted to uphold this vision. But in 2020, the gatekeepers lost some of their power. As the convulsions of the pandemic rippled across all sectors of society, the staples of the fashion industry were not immune. The fashion show, the launch and the press trip: all have been cancelled or reconsidered, like so many other events. Although these events are normally for a precious few (read: buyers, fashion editors and celebrities), they are consumed by a wider public via photographs on social media and in mainstream press. Without the opportunity to invite people to chronicle these exclusive events for general consumption, they decline dramatically in value. Such is the strange equation of a system built on rubbing our noses in the fact that a majority of us do not have privileged access. The majority of us do not experience first-hand what is on the other side of the velvet rope. Instead, we live it through paparazzi shots, Instagram stories, or carefully orchestrated fashion shoots. They portray a fictional account of fashion that is focused on escapism. As Edward

Enninful wrote on the launch of British Vogue’s July 2020 edition: “first and foremost, Vogue proudly waves the flag for fashion, in all its empowering, escapist, lavish and identity-aﬀording capabilities.” In Vogue’s own words, it has not built a reputation for “chronicling the minutiae of everyday life”. However, during multiple global lockdowns we have been faced with

The staples of the fashion industry have not been immune. The fashion show, the launch and the press trip: all have been cancelled or reconsidered, like so many other events. that minutiae of everyday life, every single day, without any practical means of escape. Even Vogue changed tack and featured three frontline workers on its July 2020 covers: a TFL train driver, a midwife and a supermarket attendant, all shot in their everyday uniforms. But what about the fashion brands that have built their whole existence on trading on exclusivity of access, with the careful choreography of the fashion show at its pinnacle? In a year when physical

Review

events are the antithesis of luxury and exclusivity, when excessive air kissing could be the literal kiss of death, and when sitting shoulder to shoulder with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people to watch models parade down a catwalk does not follow regulations around social distancing, what can replace this most sacred of fashion events? They are events that are as much, if not more, about the people seen to be attending, as they are about whatever happens to be displayed on the catwalk. Chanel faced this conundrum when showing its 2020/21 Metiers d’Art collection in December 2020. The event had been due to take place in front of a live audience at the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, but new coronavirus restrictions suddenly changed the plan. “Theoretically, we could have had a large number of guests in the Château de Chenonceau,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel, to Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen. “That was the first objective: to come back to the experience and the emotion of these shows. We have no choice this time so we’ll do it diﬀerently.” The solution was to have an audience of just one: the actor and Chanel ambassador Kristen Stewart,

filmed on her own in the Chateau enjoying a socially distanced catwalk of models, with creative director Virginie Viard coming out for a bow at the end to Stewart’s exuberant clapping. Despite the peculiar set-up of such an event, it was a hit with audiences on social media. A one-minute clip of the film has been watched over 12m times on Chanel’s

The primary emotion attached to a live fashion show seems to have become one of dread rather than exclusivity, with brands now developing a number of diﬀerent formats in response. Instagram account. It’s an interesting turn of the tables – what Pavlovsky emphasises as “the emotion of these shows”, hinting at the live physical experience, is clearly far inferior to bespoke digital content, at least in terms of the number of people reached. To put the December event into perspective, a recording of Chanel’s October 2020 show, which did allow for a regularsized audience to attend, received approximately 700,000 views on the same platform. So if the “emotion” of the fashion show is what fashion brands are pining to recreate, is an actual, physical show the answer? We’re only a month into the new year, but 2021 seems likely to be much the same as 2020 in regards to restriction of movement, physical distancing and limitations on larger events. In that context, the primary emotion attached to a live fashion show seems to become one of dread rather than exclusivity, with brands now developing a number of diﬀerent formats in response. In November, New York-based fashion brand Proenza Schouler released a book that combined photography of its spring collection with incidental snaps of New York, all captured by photographer Daniel Shea. “We didn’t want what we did to disappear, to be this thing that was ephemeral and disappeared into the ether the minute it was over,” said designer Lazaro Hernandez, one half of Proenza Schouler, in a conversation about the book that streamed on YouTube.

Hernandez’s partner Jack McCollough credited the book-format for some of the design decisions in the collection: “There’s something freeing about not having a show.” Other brands have turned to film. In December, Alexander McQueen released First Light, a film by the British director Jonathan Glazer to showcase Sarah Burton’s spring 2021 collection for the brand. Filmed on the shores of the Thames at dawn, it tells the story of a Fagin-like gang (although all young adults) in romantic Victoriana-styled garb. Meanwhile, Gucci’s Ouverture of Something That Never Ended is a seven-part miniseries that launched in November to show the Gucci spring 2021 collection. Directed by Gus Van Sant and the Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, it oﬀers a slow narration of a fictional day in the life of Italian actor Silvia Calderoni in a Dario Argento-style world – without the slaughter. “Which new horizons do arise when fashion leaves its comfort zone?” wrote Michele in a press statement around the launch of the series. “What life do clothes get when they stop walking down the catwalk? These are the questions that come to my mind in a present that is uncertain, but pregnant with premonitions.” However, despite both brands’ employment of critically acclaimed film directors, the results seem somehow dated and not entirely at ease with the forums in which they are aired. The numbers bear this fact out. At the time of writing, First Light had only 64,000 views on YouTube, while Gucci’s seven-parter failed to maintain audience interest. The first episode was viewed 2.6m times, but episode seven only 400,000 – a drastic decrease. If fashion is future-facing and chiefly preoccupied with setting a tone for what is to come – in order to eventually trickle down to us mere mortals, as economist Thorstein Veblen claimed it does – none of these examples seem particularly visionary. Fashion film grew in prominence throughout the early 2000s, with emerging platforms such as Showstudio pushing the medium to new audiences. But the care and attention taken over them in regards to styling, make-up, set design and direction seem to run counter to a generation of viewers who binge on YouTube-streamed DIY films, TikTok dance moves, and Instagram Live.

These forums are not about high production values, but instant gratification for either the maker or viewer. In the plethora of new experiments around showing fashion, there is, however, one brand that stood out for its willingness to adopt more experimental formats. Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow is a video game conceived by Balenciaga’s creative director Demna Gvasalia and his team to showcase the 50 looks of the house’s autumn 2021 collection. Created with Unreal Engine, a software platform developed by Epic Games, Afterworld is set in 2031, in a city which seems an amalgam of parts of Tokyo, Beijing and New York. There are five levels to Afterworld and in each you encounter a number of avatars of actual people

Gucci’s Ouverture of Something That Never Ended oﬀers a slow narration of a fictional day in the life of Italian actor Silvia Calderoni in a Dario Argento-style world – without the slaughter. donning looks from the collection (each model and outfit having been meticulously 3D-scanned and transferred into the digital environment). The “game” is not a game in any real sense of the word (there’s no gameplay beyond looking at the collection), but it does borrow the language and aesthetic of games while inviting the player on a “hero’s journey” that starts in a Balenciaga store and ends atop a mountain at sunrise. The collection itself borrows from gaming culture and features armour, PlayStation logos and military fatigues. “I see a lot of potential in merging fashion with games,” said Gvasalia at the game’s launch, continuing: “and in-game shopping is certainly the tool to be considered in the near future.” While the gatekeepers made sure that fashion insiders got a preview of Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow via specially distributed headsets, the experience of exploring the game is ultimately a personal and intimate one, regardless of whether you are a Balenciaga customer, fan of the brand, or Anna Wintour. As fashion writer Sarah Mower commented on Vogue

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Images courtesy of Balenciaga and Gucci.

a collaboration with Pokémon Go, whereby players can visit specific PokéStops to get branded T-shirts, backpacks and caps. However, for those who agree that high-end fashion is an art form as well as pure commerce, the spectacle of the fashion show is one of the key signifiers of this status. And while the multitude of interactions with gaming lends the fashion industry a charming face, it risks

The cute, rotund and squat figures who populate Animal Crossing are a far cry from the tall and slender physique that fashion promotes as an impossible ideal.

A look from Gucci’s Ouverture of Something That Never

Ended, directed by Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele.

Runway: “It’s an alternative to the ‘experiential’ destination travel the insider fashion world got so extravagantly involved with in the past few years – just going to a far more democratically open-to-all realm, minus the mass expenditure of flight carbon emissions.” In fact, it is in this “open-to-all realm” where the most interesting recent highend fashion initiatives have taken place – far away from any gatekeepers. In spring 2020, during the first round of global lockdowns, TikTok exploded with amateur knitters showing oﬀ copies of a patchwork cardigan by J.W. Anderson, as worn by Harry Styles. Rather than clamping down on the copycat phenomenon, Anderson

released an open-source version of the intricate knitting pattern for all to enjoy. Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, meanwhile, also oﬀered an avenue for fashion brands to reach broader audiences in more democratic ways. Marc Jacobs, Valentino and Sandy Liang are all oﬀering their collections for characters to wear within the game – an interesting departure in itself given that the cute, rotund and squat figures who populate Animal Crossing are a far cry from the tall and slender physique that fashion promotes as an impossible ideal. Continuing the trend of providing online avatars with fashionable choices, Gucci and The North Face just launched

tipping the practice of this engagement with gaming culture into the realms of pure commerce, rather than also serving as a means of creative exchange. A Gucci backpack in Pokémon may be a fun novelty, but it does little to advance either field creatively – it’s simply a marketing exercise to further brand awareness with new or expanding audiences. This is where Balenciaga’s Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow provides a sobering counter. By engaging with the art form of game-making on the level of creating its own gaming universe and utilising the visual language of gaming culture and the actual tools of game creation, Balenciaga has begun to probe where fashion actually sits in this new realm. By the look of it, it’s a domain that we will all become more familiar with in the coming months, as Zoom fatigue sets in and physical interaction is still some way oﬀ. Oh good gatekeepers of Balenciaga – hook me up to a VR headset now! You can play Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow by visiting videogame. balenciaga.com.

The Only Thing Left to Design is the Foot Words Oli Stratford

I had something funny happen a few days ago. I was watching television when I realised that, despite having just binged four hours’ worth of Netflix, I couldn’t tell you very much about my TV. Not the brand; not the model; not how many cables come out the back; not whether its screen is LCD, OLED, QLED or microLED; not what its stand looks like or, actually, if it has a stand; nor what size its screen is, beyond quite big. I do know it’s black, but then most TVs are black, so I don’t know if that counts as specific knowledge about my TV. And this struck me as funny, because I’d known for weeks that I was going to be writing this essay about the design of television sets, and I’d actually just come oﬀ a Zoom interview with the designer Yves Béhar, who’d said, I had something funny happen a few days ago.

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This call was in early December 2020, when Béhar had just celebrated Thanksgiving in San Francisco with colleagues from his studio, Fuseproject. “It’s a really big Thanksgiving tradition that everybody cooks at Fuseproject, because we have people from 20 diﬀerent countries and everybody cooks a diﬀerent speciality,” he’d told me. “We have this big meal together, which of course we couldn’t do this year, so we had a Zoom instead where everybody was talking about what they’re thankful for. And a few people said, I’m thankful for Netflix.” I can relate to that, I said. “Well, me too!” he replied. “I guess the TV has suddenly gotten a bit of renewed interest.” He’s right about that. During the first flush of Covid-19 lockdowns, Netflix gained 15.8 million new subscribers, while Disney Plus has accrued more than 86 million subscribers since launching in November 2019. Although you can watch these services on phones and tablets, Netflix estimates that 70 per cent of all its streams are viewed on connected televisions. A similar breakdown is likely to apply to Disney Plus, especially when you consider that television’s dominance of Netflix holds true across all of its content categories, but is particularly marked in kids and family shows. In the UK, meanwhile, the government regulator Ofcom’s ‘Media Nations 2020’ report found that Britons watched an average of 3 hours 46 minutes of broadcast television a day during the height of the nation’s first lockdown, up 32 minutes from 2019. Wider use of televisions for streaming, gaming and so forth was also significantly increased. “Covid-19 and the lockdown restrictions that came with it had a significant impact on TV viewing,” observes the report. “In addition to people watching more TV on average as a result of Covid-19, more people than usual tuned in.” The report attributes the majority of this rise to increased “news viewing”, but it also goes some way towards acknowledging that people sat indoors with nothing to do may invariably gravitate towards the television. The report hypothesises, for instance, that a longterm increase in working from home may result in “a more permanent slight uplift in TV set viewing”. That’s true. Between this sentence and the previous one, I watched two episodes of Schitt’s Creek. Less quantifiable, however, and of less interest to Ofcom, is the suggestion that television may have also proven popular during the pandemic because it played a pastoral role, an idea first floated to me by Bodo Sperlein, former creative director of German television

brand Loewe. “Yesterday we finally had fibre internet installed, and when the guy came in to do it I asked him if he had been busy throughout the lockdown?” Sperlein told me during the UK’s second lockdown in late November. “Oh yes, he said. With the first lockdown people were setting up home oﬃces and fast internet access, but now they all want TVs because they’re feeling lonely. A lot of one-person households turn the TV on as soon as they come in because it’s background noise and talking. It’s the psychology of human beings to want that feeling of something going on. Television gives us that, more so than something like an iPad.” Despite TV’s resurgence, I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who couldn’t tell you much about their television set, not least because I’ve read someone attempt and fail to do so almost as completely as I did. In late 2019 and early 2020, designers Erwan Bouroullec and Augustin Scott de Martinville led a television workshop with MA Product Design students at Lausanne’s ECAL university in conjunction with the technology giant Samsung. “The goal was definitely not to produce TVs from the workshop, but to open up some doors a bit,” said Camille Blin, leader of the MA Product Design course, when I spoke to him in late December. “How can we rethink the scenario of the normal TV a little bit? It was about questioning the position of this object in our daily life.” Under Bouroullec and Scott de Martinville, the students developed a series of ideas for conceptual televisions and new behaviours for the typology, before publishing their research in the form of New Horizons, a digital zine which deserves a readership outside of the confines of the school. Alongside its project proposals, New Horizons is structured around a series of interviews in which the students discuss their thoughts about televisions, as well as answering basic questions such as, Do you guys own a TV at home? To that particular question, eight out of the eleven students polled replied No, while one of the few designers who did have access to a television, Timothée Mion, revealed that his knowledge of the device was patchy at best. “I live in a shared flat and the TV is not mine,” Mion wrote. “I know it’s a Samsung TV with a white frame. It’s probably a 42–inch but I don’t know exactly which model it is[…]. The only times I use a television are to watch sports, such as football or rugby, and I usually prefer to go to the pub to do so.” 84

Design studies produced by MA Product Design students at ECAL as part of the school’s New Horizons workshop

Images courtesy of ECAL.

in conjunction with Samsung.

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Left: the JVC Videosphere model 3240 (1970). Above: the Sony A1 television, designed by Tako Hirotaka (2017). Below: the television concept designed by John

Images courtesy of the V&A, Sony, and John Tree.

Tree and Jasper Morrison for Sony (1998).

This fogginess may just be the nature of the typology. “The role of the television is in large part to remove itself from the world in order to produce images,” writes cultural historian Chris Horrocks in The Joy of Sets (2017), his comprehensive history of the medium. “Turned on, it sees from afar, but the viewer is also taken away from the object, transported through the glass into a place elsewhere.” As a screenbased device, the TV is typically understood as an object that is intended to fade away in favour of the content it displays, and this is frequently a specific goal within the design process. Tako Hirotaka, for instance, is the head of Sony’s European design centre and an astute commentator on contemporary television design. “I’ve worked in this field for the last 10 years and designed more than five generations of Sony TVs,” he told me when we spoke in midDecember. “I’ve gained an insight into the history of TV and its design.” I asked Hirotaka how Sony approaches creating new television sets, particularly in terms of their place as domestic objects. “I believe that the product’s architectural and minimal aesthetic elements play a supporting role, whereas applications and content are the heroes,” he replied. “From my perspective, TV shouldn’t shout Look at me, look at my design. The focus of attention always needs to be inside the screen and on the experience itself.” This sounds like a practical application of the ontological stickiness that Horrocks detects between televisions and the content they display. In contrast to many types of product, where the distinction between an object and its function seems stark and clear, screens present to the user as if the two have collapsed together – there is no object, only image. “The television set’s existence was predicated on the tension between its unusual quality of being both an object and a screen, an item of design to be looked at and a window to be looked through,” notes Horrocks. “It disappeared as an object once it was switched on as an image.” Although I disagree with this impulse to delineate between screens and objects – it seems important to acknowledge that a screen is a type of object performing the function it was designed for, just as much as any other piece of furniture or product design – Horrocks nevertheless describes the TV’s elusive eﬀects persuasively. Televisions don’t necessarily stick in the mind as traditional objects because they’re not meant to. I’m not an idiot just because I don’t know anything about my TV.

Except, there’s a long history of televisions that do stand out as designed objects and which I have no problem remembering. Philippe Starck’s Jim Nature (1994) TV for Thomson encased its technology in a high-density wood casing that looked like something Donkey Kong knocked together; Dieter Rams’s FS 80 (1964) television for Braun is exactly what you imagine a Dieter Rams television for Braun would be, replete with tasteful boxiness, Cold War dials, and a palette of greys and silver; Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso’s Black ST 201 TV (1969) is a semi-transparent black acrylic cube that stepped out of 2001 and into the

“TV shouldn’t shout Look at me, look at my design. The focus needs to be on the experience itself.” —Tako Hirotaka

home; Philippe Charbonneaux’s glorious Téléavia (1957), a furniture maker’s take on a praying mantis; the Pye CS17 (1957), featuring cabinetry by Robin Day, a picture-perfect 1950s living room set; and the JVC Videosphere model 3240, an orange space helmet of a TV that was explicitly advertised under the tagline of being “more fun than most of the shows you’ll see on it”. These were spectacular objects, laboured over and shaped by the great and the good of 20th-century furniture and industrial design – something that has been largely alien to the field in the 2000s and 2010s. “[Those collaborations with external designers] used to be more common,” agrees Michael Shadovitz, a product designer at Panasonic in Japan. “I wonder why that is?” Prior to working on televisions, Shadovitz was based in Panasonic’s audio division. “But then they put me on TVs and told me to do whatever I wanted. It was interesting because I’d call friends and family to tell them the news and they’d say, Is there anything left to design in TVs? It’s a good question, and one that you get asked a lot, because I guess one thing that happened [with those designer partnerships] is that the television lost its form.” Just as with his own set, ECAL’s Timothée Mion oﬀers a refreshingly straightforward assessment of the general state

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of contemporary TVs: “The television has become a large black rectangle”. The critical moment in this transformation came in the late 1990s, when the industry began to move away from the cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology whose comparative bulk had prescribed the medium’s screen-in-a-box format, and instead adopted the plasma and LCD technology which helped enable commercially viable flatscreen displays. While this change broke with decades’ worth of televisual forms, it actually brought about the fulfilment of the very earliest ideas around what the technology’s physical form might be, something Horrocks traces back to Victorian science fiction. The téléphonoscope in Albert Robida’s 1883 novel Le Vingtième siècle, translated by Horrocks, is “a simple crystal plate, built into the wall or placed as a mirror above any fireplace”; the varzeo of Ismar Thiusen’s The Diothas, or A Far Look Ahead (1883) similarly appeared as a mirror, but was “in reality, a peculiar metallic screen”; while the pandioptic of James Payn’s The Fatal Curiosity, or A Hundred Years Hence (1877) displayed “instantaneous reflections on my wall[…] of what all my friends are doing all over the world”. What served as a fulfilment of Victorian fantasy, however, also went some way towards undermining the television as a product suitable for traditional object design, setting an agenda for the subsequent 20 years that has treated the form as essentially two-dimensional. While new display technologies such as OLED, QLED and microLED have emerged to oﬀer thinner panels with sharper, brighter pictures, the fundamental design trend in the field has not changed since the late 1990s – if anything, Mion’s large black rectangle has become more of a large black rectangle, thanks to panel sizes stretching and bezels diminishing as improved technology allowed the television to shed its last trappings of three dimensionality. “The thing with TVs, and you can find this with a lot of technologies, is that it goes through waves,” summarises Shadovitz. “A technology comes out, takes a form that is recognisable, then reduces into its minimal parts until the next change happens. In TVs, that change happened in the early 2000s with flats.” While this reduction may be technologically impressive, it provides less obvious room for product design to manoeuvre within its constraints. A screen is an object, but also a fait accompli – the panel is what it is, deal with it, while the tendency towards

reduction described by Shadovitz means there’s no longer even the same scope for twiddling around the edges. “There’s less to do,” agrees John Tree, a former senior designer for Sony, who has subsequently formed a longterm partnership with Jasper Morrison after the two worked on a family of audio-visual products for the Japanese brand in 1998. “The TV suddenly became the worst [design] job you could end up with, because there was nothing to do. The game with televisions had always been to try and make them not look as big, so you’d spend two minutes on the front and a lot of time on the back to try and create the impression that it wasn’t as big as it really was. That changed.” I ask whether Tree has ever been tempted to return to try his hand at the new flatscreen typology. “I would be interested,” he responds, “but it seems like such a terrible job. The only thing left to design is the foot.” His colleague Morrison is similarly mixed when I put the same question to him. “I would be tempted,” he says. “Personally, I rather like TVs in interiors: that atmosphere of background image and sound in a very gentle way, and the flat screen and lack of bulk is very appealing. But I don’t really much like flatscreen televisions as they’re presented by the main brands. There’s all this marketing detailing, and blue lights, and over-fancy stands.” These are not just the concerns of designers external to the television manufacturers, but hint at factors being wrestled with on a day-to-day basis by those working regularly within the industry. “I have to deal with the fact that the screen is a flat structure and that’s locked, so you have to find out what else you can do,” says Torsten Valeur, a master design adviser for technology brand LG, who spoke to me from his studio in Copenhagen. Alongside his role with LG, Valeur is the designer behind Bang & Olufsen’s television range, a position he took over from his mentor, the industrial designer David Lewis. “I joined David’s studio in 1995 and some of the things we’re facing today are the same things that people have been dealing with from day one.” A central issue, Valeur explains, is that many people find the flat expanse of screens alienating and dominating, particularly in a domestic space. “Even going back to the time when I was born, people were saying they didn’t want this piece of alien technology in the living room; this picture tube like a Big Brother eye watching you. What do you do with that?” He’s not wrong. Writing for The American Mercury in 1952, the novelist Calder 88

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Image courtesy of Valeur Designers.

Previous page: the Bang & Olufsen Harmony, designed by Torsten Valeur. Above and right: Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec, and the first-generation Serif television. Below: the Valeuer Designers studio

Images courtesy of Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Design and Valeur Designers.

in Copenhagen.

Willingham reported a friend telling him that “to look at the tube of lights and shadows almost invariably brings to mind such things as death, tuberculosis, cats howling on the back fence, incest, dishes in the sink, etc[…] to look at it for any length of time, even in the company of others, causes sexual impotence, shortens the life span, makes the hair and teeth fall out, and encourages early psychosis in otherwise normal people.” Television was, Willingham’s friend assured him, “much worse” than “drinking in solitude or taking morphine while shut up in a closet”, which may be true, but that’s hardly television’s fault. Its manifestation through incest and tuberculosis aside, the sense of televisual unease that Willingham describes is something that all designers in the field are acutely aware of. “You’ve got this issue,” Valeur summarises, “of who on earth wants a big, black piece of glass in the living room? You only accept it because it gives you something: a live picture.” In his own work for Bang & Olufsen, Valeur has produced a number of televisions that artfully break up the screen with elements including sound bars and speakers, executed in materials such as wood and milled aluminium. “It’s all about finding what else we can do to make it mentally disappear when it’s off,” says Valeur, which is something you hear again and again from those working in and around the television industry. “We want the best of both worlds,” explains Carole Baijings, a designer who began a project with Samsung on televisions in 2011. “You want a big screen because it’s more comfortable to look at [and better for your eyes], but when it’s turned off you don’t want to have to look at a black screen all day. When the flat screens arrived they were seen as a luxury to show off, but we’re now in a different time.” Flatscreens were initially billed as a development that could liberate domestic spaces from the constraints imposed by the physicality of cathode-ray televisions. In comparison to the heft of CRT sets like the 34inscreen Sony WEGA Trinitron (2005) – which measured 44in wide, roughly 30in deep, and weighed 86kg – flatscreen technology was supposed to usher in an era of more discrete devices that could blend neatly into the home. While the experiment succeeded in cutting down on the space a television occupies, it did little about the wider issue of obtrusiveness. “It’s a void,” says Yves Béhar, who has worked with Samsung across its product ranges for the past 11 years. “People have more eclectic tastes and want their domestic

environments to reflect who they are. A big, black screen that is off for 22 hours a day does not just take up a giant piece of real estate, but is also a eyesore that a lot of people, myself included, have a hard time reconciling themselves with.” When I put this observation to Bodo Sperlein, he laughs in recognition. “When I joined Loewe, I said to the teams there that if they were really telling me that a massive 60in sheet of black glass on the wall is not obtrusive, then I don’t know what is. It’s so obvious. Even if someone has paid £20,000 for a black sheet of glass, it’s not telling me that or speaking about luxury. It’s just telling me: God, that’s a big sheet of glass on the wall.” That’s the problem in a nutshell, but solving it is more challenging. If a black screen is alienating, what do you do with a domestic product that insists upon resolving itself into a bare screen? “It’s something we discuss quite often,” admits Sony’s Hirotaka. “A TV is switched off for more than 50 per cent of the time, so we frequently talk about what is its place and physical presence during that time?” And yet television sales might lead you to think that this is purely academic – a grievance for designers rather than consumers. According to a January 2020 report from the Consumer Technology Association, TVs remain “the flagship technology in many U.S. homes”, with manufacturers expecting to ship 40.8m units to the US market in 2020, driving $23.4bn in revenue. Much of this revenue is generated by a handful of major players. According to the most recent data from industry researcher Omdia, 59.8 per cent of global revenue from television manufacture is controlled by three companies: Sony with 10.1 per cent; LG, 16.6 per cent; and the industry leader Samsung with 33.1 per cent, a position it has held since taking over from Sony as the world’s largest television manufacturer in 2006. “The TV is still a big part of the living room for most people, so we need to design it carefully,” explains Hirotaka, and even some of the ECAL students – those inveterate TV sceptics – seem attuned to this. “I have a plan to buy an 85–inch TV after I will move to a bigger apartment,” writes one of the students, Zhang Jingxiang, reasoning that a “[big] size and high-quality TV is essential for a contemporary family.” But if the black rectangles sell, is there sufficient motivation for companies to investigate overhauling the design of the format? In December, I got in touch over email with Kyunghoon Kim, Samsung’s senior

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vice president and the design lead for its visual display division. A number of designers have suggested that they feel the design of televisions has been very driven by technology since the arrival of flat screens, I wrote. Do you think this is a fair assessment of the situation? “I can understand where that’s coming from,” Kim wrote back. “This does not only affect TVs but also other products that have continued evolving based on the innovation in technology. However, with the advancement of technology, there are already so many products that meet consumers’ expectation in the market.” This is crucial. While televisions sell in big numbers, profit margins are tight, competition is fierce, and pricing highly sensitive to fluctuations in the market. “It’s a cost issue: most of the mass market are squeezed incredibly, so they have almost no earnings on televisions,” explains Valeur, who adds that this business model has stark repercussions for the role of design within the sector. “You really can’t afford to do more than the basics. If you do something that adds to the cost, you might lose most of the market share. A lot of [companies] are not earning money with televisions and it’s hard to convince big producers that they should take a risk with some of their major lines when they’re facing the issue that if they are £500 or £1k higher than a competitor, they suddenly lose access to that market.” John Tree recalls the same phenomenon from his period working with Sony. “Electronics is such a different field to furniture, because the quantities are so high that companies’ futures depend on something succeeding,” he says. “So designers are forced into these knife-edge positions where they won’t let you do anything really. I did a TV where the front was painted silver, and just that extra cost of painting something had to be justified so much. It’s soul-destroying. So many of the ideas that people would come up with were beautiful, amazing designs, but they’d just get put in the bin.” It’s an issue that Erwan Bouroullec, who together with his brother Ronan has worked with Samsung on television design since 2012, quickly became aware of when he started in the industry. “We felt a natural attraction to the TV, but usually when we engage with a company we’re nearly assured to succeed with the project,” Bouroullec said when I spoke to him in December. “Samsung was very different.” The cause of this gap, Bouroullec explained, is found in the differences between the world of high-end furniture and object design, and that

of consumer electronics. “What was certain was that you need to bring some clear value with the design,” he said. “We don’t exactly value this in the same way in furniture, but as soon as you step into electronics you see that people are looking carefully at what they’re buying and what they’re getting. It’s an area that’s hardcore with pricing, function and technology.” As evidence of this, Bouroullec points to the environments in which TVs are actually retailed. “Something which should never be forgotten is that televisions are sold in supermarkets. Those are hardcore environments – you could take a chair from us for Vitra or Hay and put it in a supermarket next to another chair. Would we survive? I’m not sure.” Nevertheless, Samsung has taken pains to form a long-standing relationship with the Bouroullecs, as it has with Yves Béhar – talented designers with big reputations forged outside of the field of televisions. This level of external design expertise would hardly be necessary if the company were solely following the business-as-usual approach described by Valeur, but Samsung has, in fact, placed the televisions that have resulted from these designer collaborations front and centre in its product portfolio, billing their outcomes as a new category: Lifestyle TVs. “As a TV designer, making a difference is the most difficult part,” said Kim when I asked him about this move. “In a growing market, there are endless possibilities to improve on product design. However, in a mature and low-growth market, many believe offering competitive prices is the only road to growth, which puts a lot of pressure on product designers to create more innovative designs that will truly make a difference.” Samsung’s turn towards more explicitly design-orientated televisions, he says, is a way of “breaking through the limits of the saturated traditional TV market” and “expanding the TV market in a new direction”, by relying upon practitioners “from other fields who provide new perspectives in helping us understand a variety of consumers’ lifestyles”. Here, Béhar is worth listening to, a figure who stands out in the design world for the depth and duration of his engagement with the technology sector. “What is interesting to me is that usually the big shifts we see in industry are technologyled, meaning that you go from the [cathode ray] tube to LEDs, OLEDs and other technologies,” he says. “What there is on the part of Samsung, by contrast, is a strategic desire to change and transform itself using the tools of design.” 92

Using design as a differentiator is nothing new to TVs. Horrocks notes that as televisions proliferated in the 1950s, for instance, “product design was critical in establishing aesthetic differences between the many brands on offer”. The difference between this phenomenon and today’s market, however, is that design is no longer purely being used to persuade

“Most of the time, people don’t realise that the TV breaks some very basic rules of objects.” —Erwan Bouroullec a customer to buy one brand’s products over those of its competitors, but rather to buy them in favour of foregoing a television altogether. “The biggest question, from what I understand, is that we’ve reached the point where everybody who wants a TV has a TV,” says ECAL’s Camille Blin. “If you want it to remain as it is, then there’s not much of a job for the designer anymore. It exists, it’s already there.” Similarly, while technologies continue to accelerate, their rapid progress has so dramatically outstripped programming as to make little meaningful diﬀerence to everyday viewing. “OK, we can get 8K or 16K [resolution], but broadcasting will never catch up anyway,” says Valeur. “[That technology side] is maybe not so interesting any more.” In other words, barring a radical shakeup of the typology, the battle lines have been drawn. “There aren’t many types of object that I haven’t designed in my life,” adds Bouroullec, “but the TV is the only case I can think of where people already have a point of view on whether they would buy it or not. TV defines people: some people want it, some people don’t.” What this means for television brands, if they wish to maintain sales figures, is that they need to find ways to persuade non-TV people that they may, actually, be TV people after all. The first entry within Samsung’s lifestyle category was Bouroullec’s Serif (2015-), a design that its creator acknowledges is a “total negation of what we could find in the field”. Rather than a flat panel, the Serif recasts its display within a defined body – a sculptural I-beam form that provides mass at the screen’s top and bottom by flaring out to form two shelves. It is,

to my eye, the most beautiful mass-market television produced in decades. “Most of the time, people don’t realise that the TV breaks some very basic rules of objects,” explains Bouroullec. “One of the things that modern screens do is to somehow suggest there is no gravity – you don’t find anything else in this world that is just a sheet of paper standing alone. When we brought volume to [Serif], we instantly gave a body to the TV that makes it much more visually acceptable as regards its surroundings.” Trapped on the horns of Horrocks’s dilemma between screens and objects, Bouroullec resolved this tension by emphasising and reimagining the device’s body. The panel’s frame does not distract from the content it displays, but does ensure it retains a tangible presence within an interior. “Many people are very oppressed by the TV,” says Bouroullec, “and a big part of the expertise we gave Samsung was to create a device that will be welcoming to people in the home.” In this respect Bouroullec seems to have succeeded, at least if judging by the fact that a surprising number of the people I interviewed for this essay admitted to owning a Serif. “Just having that frame around it makes it much more palatable than a blank screen,” said John Tree of his attraction to the design. “It’s still a black screen staring at me, but it has more of a feeling of being something.” Jasper Morrison, meanwhile, praised the design for eschewing the tropes of flatscreen television. “The genius of Erwan was to remove all that and replace it with something so sculptural and removed from the normal appearance of a TV.” The Frame (2017-) by Béhar and Fuseproject exhibits a markedly different approach. It is no less revisionist than the Serif, but reliant upon an interrogation of screen technology rather than form-making. Béhar’s primary aim with the Frame was to tackle the issue of the black screen, reasoning that if a TV spends the bulk of its time off, then the display of programming should no longer be considered its primary function. To deal with this, Fuseproject encased the panel within a body that mimics the appearance of a picture frame. When on, the television functions as normal; when off, the panel displays artworks sourced from museums and galleries from all around the world, including the V&A, Prado and Hermitage. A built-in light sensor adjusts the brightness of the display to ensure that the digital image is indistinguishable from a physical picture in a frame, while a motion sensor tries to limit additional energy consumption by

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only switching the screen on when someone is around. “Screens are going to continue to get thinner and bigger and brighter, but that’s not really what people care about,” says Béhar. “What people care about is how these screens integrate in their lives and homes.” The physical tolerance afforded by the Frame’s bezel, Béhar explains, allowed for a thicker, more affordable panel, freeing up time and money to develop the Frame’s light sensor and art collection. “The big Aha! moment wasn’t saying, Let’s put art on the TV, but to say that we should make the TV subservient to the artist and have it serve the artist and artworks,” he says. “We could have it disappear and be camouflaged, by having the art hide its other function as a television.” The cleanness of Frame’s presentation is what enables this illusion, but it almost does the design something of a disservice insofar as its slickness masks the more radical dimension of Béhar’s approach. By clouding the primacy of programming to television, particularly in the context of a design world that valorises legibility of function, Béhar has done more than most to engage with the hybrid nature of the contemporary TV. “We forget that some of these conventions can be challenged and that things don’t have to remain the way they are,” he says. “The cultural status quo of an object is only there because we all agree it is what it is, and nobody is challenging it.” Although the Frame and Serif are polar opposites in their design approach, each grapples with the same inconvenient truth: while the ways in which we use televisions and screens have evolved rapidly and in multiple directions, the design of the objects themselves has remained static. The first of these changes is one of content. Traditionally, “television” described both the object and the medium that it enabled. A television played television or, to differentiate linguistically, what the cultural critic Raymond Williams termed television “flow”: the preprogrammed sequence of adverts and programming that make up broadcast television as a medium. Today, television flow is in sharp decline, particularly among younger generations – since 2014, YouTube has reached more 18-34-year-olds than any cable network, for instance. To combat this, television sets have opened themselves up beyond their namesake platform and embraced different mediums in a bid to remain relevant: streaming, gaming, photography and other app-based content. “What we are seeing here is a real change in the viewing habits of Millennials,” argued the analyst Craig Moffett in an appearance on

C-Span’s series The Communicators. “They are simply watching TV in a very different way than my generation watched TV.” More precisely, younger generations are watching televisions, but not necessarily television. As the TV has diversified in the content it displays, however, it has pushed itself into direct competition with the other screens that dominate contemporary homes, be they smartphones, tablets or laptops, which may be additionally bolstered by projectors – perhaps a neater fulfilment of Victorian novelist James Payn’s vision of television as “wall-pictures” than even a flatscreen. These devices provide more flexible, portable outlets for many types of content, not all of which naturally lend themselves to television (in an effort to accommodate vertical smartphone content, for instance, Samsung launched a rotating set, the Sero, in 2019, and this functionality has also been built into some models of the Frame), as well as affording more intuitive, direct control through touchscreens and keyboards. It is a battle in which the television is holding its own for now, at least if Netflix and Disney Plus’s figures are anything to go by, but one where the tide is likely to turn in future generations. “My son doesn’t have a television, he has a projector,” says John Tree. “My daughter has a projector in her flat [too]. Television isn’t something that’s in their mind, so I don’t know if the TV is going to die as a thing.” Certainly many of the ECAL students provide a bleak prognosis for the device’s survival, at least unless the television undergoes a Scrooge-like epiphany and mends its ways. “The TV means for me a very high-tech and cheap product but with limited use,” writes Hugo Paternostre, one of the students interviewed in the New Horizons zine. To Paternostre, television is “discredited by all mobile devices – laptops and smartphones – that allow you to watch anything from anywhere,” and “has somehow lost its exclusivity over content”. Nor were Paternostre’s comments unusual among his fellow students. “The TV as a product has become very insignificant for me,” says Benjamin Bichsel. “I almost exclusively use other devices and watch things on streaming platforms.” Those in the industry may not be quite so pessimistic about the state of the television, but all seem to acknowledge that the television is on the cusp of generational change. “We are entering a new era for the end user, [where contents can be watched in different ways],” says Hirotaka. “There’s lots of content available and lots of different uses, so the 94

Above: the bezel of the Frame television by Fuseproject for Samsung. Above right: Daniel Rybakken’s Vitrine concept for Panasonic and Vitra. Right: the Bild 9 television

Images courtesy of Samsung, Panasonic, and Bodo Sperlein.

by Bodo Sperlein for Loewe.

“Screens are going to continue to get thinner and bigger, but that’s not really what people care about.” —Yves Béhar Report

Image courtesy of Samsung.

television needs to develop to blend-in and reflect our lifestyle.” Perhaps spurred on by the Frame and Serif, many other designers and brands have begun to explore that challenge. “Our Lifestyle TV portfolio has certainly influenced the market,” says Kim, who adds that this impact has nonetheless been a slow burn. “In terms of consumer’s response, the initial sales figures were not matching up to our expectation because TVs have a longer lifespan than other products and are not replaced frequently. However, over time, our sales have increased, delivering a 100 per cent increase year-over-year.” While the Frame now sells in large numbers – “it has become one of the most successful television products out there and I continue to watch its success like a proud father,” says Béhar – the Serif has not achieved the same level of commercial success. It has, however, become something of a cult object, as well as an undeniable darling of the industry. “The first generation of Serif was very special in the field but never had any advertisement,” says Bouroullec. “[Samsung] tried to go into furniture or fashion shops with it, but it remained quite low-selling even if the sales were incredibly stable.” Kim acknowledges that the company is “still considering how to eﬀectively promote these new lifestyle products to consumers in the early stages”, but when Samsung announced that it was to discontinue the Serif after three years on the market, it sparked a rush to purchase the last available units. “They were selling for more than ever before in Korea,” says Bouroullec, with this boom ensuring that a second, reengineered generation of the television was authorised and launched in 2019. “It was a great surprise, but we had the chance to bring down the price and bring it closer to the market, and it’s now having its own life,” he says. “It took a little bit of time, but I believe there is a lot in that thing [furniture manufacturer] Giulio Cappellini used to say about how he never made best-sellers, he made long-sellers. The Frame is selling in greater numbers than Serif, but this whole field of lifestyle, Serif included, has started to become very successful.” One of the earliest experiments in the field outside of Samsung came through Bodo Sperlein’s 2016-2018 tenure at Loewe, where his Bild 9 and Bild X sets ploughed similar terrain to Bouroullec in their eﬀorts to re-embody the television set. The Bild 9 and X are elegant televisions, casting their flat panels within delicately wrought, three-dimensional metal frames

that create volume without mass through the tracery of their structures. “It was quite sad out there in terms of television design, particularly given that the television was [historically] such an important product in the house,” says Sperlein. “I looked into line sculptures whereby you can use line to create three-dimensionality, because I thought it could be interesting to draw that out of the two-dimensionality of the screen.” Sperlein’s designs broke many of the rules of conventional TVs, but still achieved impressive sales figures within their targeted luxury market. “My products had a turnover of €155m in one and a half years, which was 60 per cent of Loewe’s overall turnover,” he says. “It’s a funny business, the TV business, because people always think it’s very tight margins and that people are not willing to spend a lot of money, but I disagree.” Design, Sperlein argues, is both what can sell products within a crowded marketplace, and also what secures the tech required to produce new televisions. Within the industry, particular technologies are often the purview of specific companies. All QLED technology is produced and exclusively used by Samsung, while all OLED panels are manufactured by LG, which then sells this technology to other brands. Even a giant like Sony depends upon LG’s OLED panels. “Televisions look pretty much the same because they all use the same components,” says Sperlein. “LG produces all the OLED panels for all the manufacturers, who then put a speaker bar on and that’s about as exciting as it gets. In the past, Loewe would have produced the actual panels and in designing those you probably added a little bit more to the product.” The result of this shift in the landscape, Sperlein notes, is that smaller companies are now dependent upon pitching to the bigger manufacturers to obtain access to whatever new technologies they may wish to use. “Loewe wasn’t a big player, so you can imagine the fights we had,” he says. “But LG was supportive because they believed in the strength of the design, although if we hadn’t had a strong idea they wouldn’t have given us [access to their technology]. The added value was really my design, because the panels were all LG.” Even proprietary technologies are finding use for design, however. In 2019, Panasonic attended Milan’s Salone del Mobile trade show to display its Vitrine concept, a television developed by the lighting designer Daniel Rybakken in conjunction with Michael Shadovitz and his team. Vitrine is built around a transparent OLED

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panel, housed at a slight angle within a wooden frame that is thick enough to accommodate ornaments at its base. “It solves the problem of the black screen because when it’s off it’s transparent,” says Rybakken, who adds that the OLED screen displays in one direction only. Sat in front of the device, it functions as a normal television; seen from behind, however, it remains entirely see-through, even when on. “It opens up different ways of using it, because it doesn’t have a clear front or back,” says Rybakken. “You can place it more freely as opposed to against a wall, because a big problem with the TV is that it dictates how people decorate the living room. The arrangement of the TV facing the sofa is not as social as other arrangements, and then when they’re turned off it’s just a black hole, sucking energy out of the room.” Vitrine is a fascinating concept, and one that is now being developed into a commercial product, although the current cost of its OLED panel, which remains a nascent technology, means it will remain out of reach for most. In its investigation of screen technology, Vitrine treads a similar path to Béhar’s Frame, but its focus on the television as a physical presence within interior space tallies more with Bouroullec and Sperlein’s work – something reinforced by the fact that the furniture brand Vitra partnered with Panasonic on the project. “The first conversation we had with Eckart Maise [Vitra’s chief design officer] was whether we could do something about the black hole, because he said that when a television is off it takes away from all the things Vitra have tried so hard to create,” says Shadovitz, who acknowledges that the decision to involve a furniture brand helped shape the project. “The way we use the TV today is not as central as it used to be, so the gravity of the TV is just too strong [as it stands]. If you have a decent-sized TV, everything in the room circulates around that.” Indeed, one of the enduring oddities and disappointments of contemporary design, for instance, is the relative lack of practitioners whose work extends across furniture and product design to also cover consumer electronics and white goods, forms which are themselves domestic objects and play a key role in interiors. “It’s always surprising to me that TVs and home appliances like vacuum cleaners or washing machines belong to a very separate world,” notes Bouroullec. “I question why that is, because we share the [aim] of trying to make the best with what we’re given. But the language [of those products] is very strange and

it’s diﬃcult to find a match with what I’d like to have myself.” When I put it to Rybakken that the Vitrine is unusual in its consideration of the television as an interior element, he is unequivocal in his response. “It’s a big problem in the technology sector and you wonder why didn’t this happen 15 years ago,” he says. “Just imagine the improvement if more industries

“TV companies have problems selling TVs basically. The industry is in crisis and it needs to rethink itself a little.” —Daniel Rybakken

started using interior designers, like the Bouroullecs with the Serif. The problem with a lot of TV companies is that there’s the engineering department and then there’s the design department. It’s not fluid [between the two] as in Apple or other companies.” When I suggest that projects such as Frame, Serif or Vitrine suggest that this may be changing, his response is stark. “TV companies have problems selling TVs basically,” he says. “They added technologies, they dropped the price, but they still couldn’t find a way to make money. So the people at Samsung had the idea to make it into a lifestyle object to reach out to new people. The industry is in crisis and it needs to rethink itself a little.” Across that industry, a tentative consensus as to one potential route by which the television might adapt itself to meet this challenge has, however, begun to emerge. If personal devices excel at facilitating individual engagement with content, then it may make sense for the television to carve out space for itself by prioritising social engagement. “The television screen brings back something that is more about sharing and being together,” says Bouroullec. “I much prefer my kids to watch TV than to be stuck in a phone or tablet because behind the TV is this idea of watching things together. Even if you’re alone, the presence of what you’re watching is somehow a little communal.” This 98

idea of community, even in absentia, is picked up by Sony’s Hirotaka as an enduring virtue of the typology, particularly in the context of coronavirus. “During the Covid pandemic, people are watching more online/ on-demand content than ever,” he says, “and the TV is an important part of people’s lives. It’s a key piece for getting the family together, or meeting a friend, or even connecting people around the world remotely. The television could be a window to the world, or at least that’s my optimistic future for it.” Whether or how this sense of communality will aﬀect the physical form of televisions remains to be seen, but a number of designers see it as providing a rationale for the typology’s ongoing relevance. “Before Covid, there was a time when we thought it was the end for TVs,” says Baijings. “But we’ve now all seen the important role they play in bringing people together, whether that’s through gaming or watching movies and sports with friends and family.” The Frame, she argues, is particularly well adapted to playing this role. “It’s the perfect thing in the sense that it’s normally just a picture frame hanging there, but if everyone’s around, it’s your TV.” I think similar cases could be made for Sperlein, Rybakken or the Bouroullecs’ sets as integrated elements of an interior – televisions intended to complement rather than dominate a social space. “If you monitor the time I spend in front of the television than with the iPad in my hand, it definitely goes to the iPad,” says Valeur. “But we’ve come to start to value the time in front of the TV as something else, because suddenly it seems social. For so many years people were trying to hide the television because it was associated with laziness and so on, but it’s diﬀerent today because if you’re killing time, then you’re doing that with your phone. So suddenly television can be a sign of something else: you value a movie, or you value social time. It might even be a symbol of being a family. Something has changed here.” Part of this change, I suspect, is owed to a wider shift in the way in which TV is perceived. “Traditionally, television was seen, culturally speaking, as a low-brow object,” says Béhar, and you need only look to the nicknames it accrued over the course of the 20th century to see his point: “idiot box” and “boob tube” chief among them. “Television’s greatest minute-byminute appeal is that it engages without demanding,” wrote the novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: television and U.S. fiction’.

“One can rest while undergoing stimulation.” Thirty years on, this analysis strikes me as still basically correct, although it’s worth noting that it was written before major changes in the style of content now available through televisions. Within the form’s home turf, content has seen shows such as The Sopranos (1999-2007) and The Wire (2002-08) raise standards for televisual drama and narrative, opening the floodgates to a raft of programmes that have broken down the stereotype of television as a country cousin to the more urbane cinema. Meanwhile, streaming has meant that a number of more traditionally highbrow mediums, such as art-house cinema, opera and theatre – which television has historically been deemed inferior to and less social than – now exist relatively comfortably through the platform by means of simultaneous release schedules, live broadcasts, and pre-recorded performances. The TV has become catholic to the extent that WarnerMedia’s decision to launch its 2021 movies simultaneously in theatres and on HBO Max, although prompted by the pandemic, was not a real surprise: it’s the direction the wind has been blowing in for some time. Foster Wallace may have been right when he concluded that many TV programmes qualify as “Special Treats” that one can “receive without giving [attention to]”, but for a number of years televisions have been opening themselves up to the type of content that might support the more social uses which Baijings and Valeur imagine. “Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly diﬀerent in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests,” wrote Foster Wallace. Now, some of those more refined interests seem to be working their way onto television. Indeed, long before the pandemic, in 2013, Ofcom’s then director of research James Thickett made an interesting claim about changes in the way television was being consumed. “Our research shows that increasingly families are gathering in the living room to watch TV just as they were in the 1950s,” said Thickett, arguing that people were “increasingly reverting to having just one TV in their household”, as opposed to the multi-set households that had previously dominated. This does not necessarily mean that the television is resurgent, however. “Unlike the 1950s family[…] they are also doing their own thing,” continued Thickett. “They are tweeting

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about a TV show, surfing the net or watching different content altogether on a tablet.” It is a curious change – both a reassertion of the television as a central element of family life and a decentralisation of its monopolistic one-time influence; a change in culture that has seen the television become both more and less important to daily life, and which has begun to blur Foster Wallace’s notion of dumb versus noble interests. Television can become social in its capacity to act as a conduit for event television, live performance and sport, all while dragging you through the filth of scrolling through Twitter or watching cat videos on YouTube. The rise of flatscreens had attempted to reduce the television to a bare screen, sparking what Horrocks terms “the gradual withdrawal of the television from its role as a three-dimensional object in a setting, and existential emergence in the context of its increasing two-dimensionality”. Now, however, I wonder if we may see efforts on the part of some television designers to reverse this trend and attempt to recapture the importance of the typology to the settings in which it finds itself. This change may take the form of re-embodiment, as with Bouroullec and Sperlein, reassessment of function, à la Béhar and Rybakken, or something more modest still. Hirotaka’s A1 television (2017) for Sony, for instance, is a flat OLED display propped up on a strut such that the overall design forms a lambda that sits in place like an easel – what the company calls its “One Slate” concept. It is in some senses a traditional screen, but one executed with a care that elevates it, and which grants it a physical presence. “One Slate is a very pure sculptural expression,” Hirotaka explains. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to introduce a new form factor, that is unique and original in terms of its identity. TVs need to be evolved as TVs, or to become something different, something new. There’s still lots of potential there.” Even within the black rectangles, there may still be space for design to make a difference. “Back in the day I guess the TV replaced the role of the fireplace in the living room and you gathered as a family in front of it to share a moment together,” says ECAL’s Blin. “Nowadays maybe it’s something very different. Maybe it’s just an element in the space, like a chair – you use it, it’s there. Why not try to explore the potential of this element in the home in a different way?” This is the question facing the television industry

– a format that has spent the past 20 years resolving itself into a screen is now being squeezed by other forms of screen. Suddenly, it has some scope and motivation to change course. “[Personal devices] have made everything more dynamic and changed the TV’s role completely,” says Shadovitz. “It’s gone from the centre of the universe to something that could be more of a question mark, which is what is creating all these diﬀerent approaches to how it could sit in the living room. I don’t know whether it’s a renaissance, but it’s certainly an interesting time to be a television designer.” END

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Words Kristina Rapacki

Image by Choreo.

Botanicals by Glithero!“They mustn’t be too pretty,” says Sarah van Gameren, one half of London-based studio Glithero, together with her partner Tim Simpson. “It’s usually the really hardy, clingy, down-trodden plants that end up looking great when they’re pressed.” Van Gameren is referring to her and Simpson’s practice of collecting weeds local to their north London studio and pressing them in home-made herbaria. It started in 2009, with the idea of creating botanical cyanotypes – light-printing the contours of flattened plants onto the surface of ceramic tiles and vases using photosensitive chemicals. A resulting series of objects, the Blueware Collection, launched in 2010. But since then, says van Gameren, “the foraging has continued as something of a habit”. In the last few years, Glithero has found fresh use for their botanical specimens. Partnering with a Dutch atelier that specialises in historic techniques of tile-cutting and glazing, the studio found that they could reproduce the effects of the Blueware Collection, while doing away with some of the volatility of using photosensitive chemicals. The Dutch craftspeople use a technique called sgraffito, whereby the contours of a specimen are incised into the slip, leaving behind luminous x-ray-like ghost-weeds on the fired tile. “The sgraffito is something the atelier used to do, historically,” says van Gameren. “We introduced the idea of them trying to use the technique again.” It took the best part of a year to set up production, but the result was Botanicals, a new collection of tiles which can be custom-made at much larger scale than the previous process allowed for. Murals and fittings using the tiles have already been installed in a London home, a Maldives resort and a Manhattan restaurant. For the latter, explains van Gameren, Glithero foraged for seaweed on the banks of the East River. An anchorage in a project’s specific locale is important to the studio. “We find it nice to keep it local, so we try to forage within a square-mile radius around us.” Similarly, the glaze

shades – deep Delft blue, dark greens, a pale London-sky grey, to name a few – are drawn from existing recipes rooted in the Dutch ceramic tradition. Decorative botanical imprints; historical crafting techniques – you’d be excused for thinking Botanicals somewhat nostalgic. Van Gameren rejects the term, however. “We’re not nostalgic,” she says. “We always tweak traditional techniques to fit the present. But we do find it reassuring to see that people have worked in similar ways before.” And it’s true. The eﬀect of Botanicals is decorative, but never straightforwardly pretty. The tiles have a timeworn, organic quality. You imagine that you are yourself reaching for those sinuous weeds through the thicket of shrub in some London park; for seaweed through the murky waters of the East River.

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Assalam Alayki Ya Myriam: A Prayer Introduction Alfred Tarazi Photographs Myriam Boulos

I first encountered Myriam Boulos’s photographs in 2014 on a giant LED panel at night, bathing the irregular bitumen of a road in Beirut. Flashing across the screen, her black and white images depicted turbulent youth immersed in the city’s infamous nightlife.

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This page: an image shot by Myriam Boulous in Beirut, 2019. Next spread: designer Sandra Mansour in her destroyed studio, 23 August 2020 (shot for Vogue Arabia).

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The panel faced the headquarters of a bank that had just honoured her with an award and exhibition. Compelled, I visited the show the very next day. In retrospect, I can now see that these images were all set on the stage of a crime; captured in them are the victims and the profiteers of a cataclysm that would alter Lebanon irretrievably. What is left today of the carelessness with which Lebanese millennials danced? The music is gone, some are dead and most have left. What is left today are Myriam’s photographs. In the years that followed that first exhibition, Myriam assiduously alternated between commercial jobs and lonely portraits of naked bodies oﬀered as prey to a country hungry to devour its most innocent. The trick never failed. She was cast oﬀ and spat on by those whose morals prevented them from ever experiencing a glimpse of freedom. Then, in the autumn of 2019, the banks went on strike and closed for several weeks. With the utmost cynicism, these private banks secured the gains they had accumulated through decades of organised theft and corruption in conjunction with the ruling mafia. When they opened again, it was too late. The country erupted in revolt, and the turbulent youth that Myriam had captured smoking, kissing and drinking took to the streets. What Myriam saw, Myriam captured. None of it is staged, none is manufactured. Her images portray the plurality and diversity of a multitude that none can claim. Ultimately, these are violent images imbued with the anger of the dispossessed. Where does this anger stem from? What has been stolen from these elderly and young faces reclaiming their streets with song, dance and fire? Their pride? Their past? Their future? Hope? Hope fills these faces and love irradiates these streets. These moments amidst the fire, when bodies collide in search of ecstasy, are what Myriam looks for. And when the repression of the security forces heightens and clouds of teargas spread through the air, she records them as great natural formations. Hope. Always, hope. Then, behind the teargas, bullets fly and the underpaid guardians of the stateless regime lash out from helplessness. Blood pours and the price of the revolution shows its true colour. It is scarlet and Myriam plunges her fingers into the wound to commit to the struggle. This is the colour of our revolution. This is the colour of our struggle. After the euphoria, in 2020, the revolution reached a stalemate. The Lebanese Lira crumbled, private

banks stole citizens’ money, and the pandemic spread. Life as we knew it vanished. No more song, no more dance, and no more revolution. Then, as we were contemplating the sacrifices yet to be made in order to reclaim the country, the unthinkable happened. Those who were not in Beirut on 4 August 2020 will never relate. It has been linkened to a nuclear explosion; it has been ranked amidst the four largest explosions in history; investigated; described; analysed; filmed; and photographed, but none of that matters to those who met their fateful end on that day. Death in Lebanon has always been a sordid lottery. However, through 15 years of civil war, 30 years of instability, death never resorted to destroying half the city through the carelessness and corruption of its rulers and citizens. Nothing prepared us for this. Yet, following the explosion, hope, always hope. If you are looking for documents to know what the city looked like before the explosion, Myriam could one day open her archive. She’s barely 30 and her photographs are already documents of a world vanished and gone. This is what Armenia Street looked like. This is downtown Beirut. This is our revolution. Here is the city’s pulse, its heartbeat and its carotid artery, all drained. We were dreaming of freeing the country, containing our anger for another confrontation, and then the port blew up, claiming its senseless tribute of blood, sorrow and destruction. Among the slain, it could have been her, it could have been me. Instead, it is she and I jerking tears at the sight of our friends covered in blood. This is not the Beirut you have heard of, the distant remnant of a city destroyed by a civil war, rebuilt only to be ruined once more. This was our Beirut, the streets and houses through which we drenched this city with love. The streets and the houses in which we communed with its love; the precarious, fragile, broken love of a city called Beirut. In the deserted streets at night, you will no longer find large LED panels illuminating the streets with the hopes, dreams and excitements of a 22-year-old girl. The electricity is scarce, the panels torn to shreds and we are preparing ourselves for a battle yet to come. In light of this latent violence, I fear for Myriam, her generation and the younger ones. In this darkness some light candles and break down in prayer. We are in 2021, this is Beirut. Assalam alayki ya Myriam. END

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Left: an image from the Dead End series, 2017-18. Above: Beirut on 7 September 2020. Every day since the explosion, people have taken selfies in front of the port at 6pm (shot for Polka).

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Ziad Ghantous, a medical student at the heavily damaged St George Hospital, photographed on 18 August 2020 (shot for Time).

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Above: an image from the Nightshift series (2015). Next spread (left-hand page): Ahmad, a volunteer with the Al Shifa Palestinian association, prays in Mar Mikhael on 5 August 2020 (shot for Time). Next spread (right-hand page): a photo from the ongoing Tenderness series.

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This spread: images from the Tenderness (left) and Nightshift (above) series. Next spread: an image from the

Revolution series (2019-2020).

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Left: an image from the Dead

End series (2017-2018). Above: a cactus in broken glass on 5 August 2020 (shot for Time).

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Above: an image from the

Revolution series (2019-2020). Next page: Andrea, a drag performer who was injured and whose home was damaged in the explosion, photographed on 8 August 2020 (shot for Time).

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Asma’ Al Mohammad in quarantine. Her husband was working in a garage at the port during the explosion and survived by taking cover in its inspection pit. Their home was destroyed (shot for Polka).

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An image from the Nightshift series.

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Image by Choreo.

SaltyCo Textiles!It takes on average 10,000l of fresh water to produce a kilogram of cotton. If my rudimentary maths is right, that means that a single 30g cotton sock uses up 300l of what might otherwise be clean drinking water. This fact riddles me with guilt about all the orphaned socks I have lost in my life. Equally horrified are the SaltyCo team, a group of recent graduates from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College’s joint Innovation Design Engineering MA. Building on what began as a student project, they set out to produce textiles using salt-tolerant plants, thereby helping to preserve the fresh water that makes up just 3 per cent of the world’s water supply. “Right now, the most sustainable material is polyester made from recycled plastic bottles, which still uses a lot of water and takes a tonne of time to biodegrade,” says Antonia Jara Contreras, SaltyCo’s chief procurement officer. “So even though it is one step ahead, it’s not really enough.” By contrast, textiles produced from natural fibres grown using salt water would represent a sea change. The group’s first product is insulating stuffing, which they aim to launch in late 2022. Early samples show a soft, naturally water-repellant material that is three times more insulating than wool, and which can be used inside puffer jackets, pillows

and duvets. The team have also developed samples of a woven and nonwoven fabric, although the company is unable to reveal precise details of the processes behind its materials. “It involves us getting covered in lots of fluff, that’s for sure,” says Julian EllisBrown, SaltyCo’s CEO. The information that the company does share, however, is encouraging. Working with a saline farmer in Scotland, the team grow a salt-tolerant crop native to many parts of the world. “The biomass we process into our textiles doesn’t use any fresh water when it’s growing, it sequesters huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and it’s plant-based,” says Ellis-Brown. As the company’s chief technology officer Finlay Duncan notes, saline farming is an effective way to repurpose disused farmlands: “In areas of the world where farmland has been lost quite rapidly to things like rising sea levels, you end up with salinated land, and poor irrigation practices can end up salinating and damaging lands.” Eventually, they plan to license their fibre extraction process to other manufacturers in more waterscarce areas. Saline agriculture is still in its infancy, and SaltyCo is the first to explore making materials using salttolerant crops. “Almost the entire world’s infrastructure for agriculture is based around [a limited number of crops], so it’s tricky trying to introduce a new crop into those cycles,” EllisBrown explains. “It’s not only the agriculture itself – all the machinery [only] fits those crops.” In spite of these hurdles, the SaltyCo team say that they are committed to adapting existing manufacturing processes to suit their new fibres. “We want to make sure that we don’t create something which forces the market to introduce completely new processes,” stresses Neloufar Taheri, the company’s chief operating officer. “That would be unsustainable in itself.” Words Helen Brown

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Enzo Mari was a Universe Introduction Francesca Giacomelli

On 19 October 2020, the radical thinker and designer Enzo Mari passed away in Milan, shortly followed by his wife, the art historian and critic Lea Vergine. Disegno gathered a roundtable of collaborators, friends, students and scholars to remember a figure who was often at odds with the design industry. His assistant Francesca Giacomelli introduces the conversation, which features designers Martino Gamper and Corinna Sy, design historian Cat Rossi, and curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lorenza Baroncelli.

Above: Enzo Mari (1932-2020) photographed by Ramak Fazel. Left: a silk-screen print from Mari’s La Serie della Natura with

Images courtesy of Triennale Milano.

Elio Mari for Danese (1961).

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I was honoured to work with Enzo Mari for more than 14 years, observing his research method, his revelations, failures, and theses. He had first called me in 2007, asking me to assist with the curation and coordination of Enzo Mari : l’arte del design, an ambitious exhibition held in 2008 at GAM in Turin. After that extraordinary project, he asked me to continue to assist him. Working with Mari was an enlightening experience. It wasn’t always easy – a sort of monastic training in which I pursued exercises of criticism and utopian thinking. Mari involved me in constant dialogue – endless discussions in which time seemed to be suspended as ideas flowed and hypotheses were dissected, denied or cultivated. These conversations often triggered clashes, but their intellectual exchange was my greatest teacher. Mari jokingly called me the “anarchist conscience” of the studio, because of my critical tendency. But, as he taught us, if we want to change the world, then we need a lucid madness, a faith in utopia, and the critical ability to identify what needs changing. Mari was a universe. His lifelong project was to transform the world through a socialisation of design. By freeing us from simply being passive consumers of design, he believed we could reorganise society according to more collectively conscious principles of material and intellectual production. He saw design not as a simple producer of forms for contemplation or consumption, but as an instrument for transformation that needed the active participation of the collective. His ideas for a new form of civilisation were rooted in the cultural and social degradation that he saw around him, and that he fought against his entire life. In 2018, Mari, his wife Lea Vergine, Stefano Boeri, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lorenza Baroncelli and I decided to recreate and expand L’arte del design, the last exhibition curated by Mari himself. The resulting show at the Triennale Milano opened on 17 October 2020, and displayed an unprecedented number of works, as well as hitherto unseen archival materials. It also symbolically marks the hand-over of Mari’s archive to the City of Milan, which Mari provocatively said won’t be publicly accessible for another 40 years. As he wrote in Funzione della ricerca estetica (1970): “The meaning of the research will only be understood by the public after a mediation, which will last for at least two generations”. This archive is a complex codified diary in which Mari collected and conserved his projects and wider programme of revolutionary

ideas; it is his life’s work, the essence of his research. For Mari, “The research is the design, not the product”. Now we need to rediscover those methods and ideas, preserve them, and celebrate their astonishing transformative potential. Martino Gamper I met Enzo Mari as a student in Vienna, where I studied in 1994-97. Matteo Thun had been our professor, but he then left and so the college was looking for a replacement. They asked Enzo, but we had no idea who Enzo Mari was. I guess the 90s was anything other than Enzo Mari design – it was Philippe Starck and that whole idea of “form follows fun”. So Enzo walked in and was very charming, but also rigorous and strict. He really left an impression on us from the first day we met him. He was very pragmatic and made us clean out what he called “all the shit” from the studio, because there was a lot of stuﬀ that had been there for 15 or 20 years. It was an interesting way of refreshing the course and, after that, I kept in contact.

“My interview with Mari lasted over two hours. I asked one question.” —Cat Rossi

Cat Rossi I’m afraid I only knew him from a distance. I’m a design historian and did my PhD on the role of craft in postwar Italian design, and was fortunate enough to interview him. It was an amazing experience because you think you know how an interview is going to go: it’ll last an hour and you’ll ask some questions. This interview lasted over two hours and I asked one question right at the very beginning – that was it. He just gave this magnificent rationale for everything he believed in and how it informed his design practice. It left an impression, that’s for sure. Martino To be honest, we were terribly confused when he came to Vienna, because can you imagine going from someone like Matteo Thun to suddenly having Enzo Mari in your classroom? It was like day and night. He said that if you needed more than three images to show your work, it was basically a bad idea. So we had to really get the essence of our work out

History

never heard of Enzo Mari, but as I started to learn about him I became fascinated. I got in touch with him because my former colleague Sebastian Däschle initiated workshops for refugees with Mari’s remarkable concept of Autoprogettazione [a 1974 manual that provided instructions on how to assemble a furniture collection designed by Mari using readycut materials, ed.]. Based on this, we founded Cucula [a project which hosted workshops and produced furniture with refugees in Germany, ed.]. Unfortunately I never met Mari, but he granted us the rights to sell the collection. Hans Ulrich Obrist I used to teach at IUAV [Università Iuav di Venezia] in Venice in the early 2000s. At that time I was the curator of the Musee d’art Moderne in Paris, and I would always take the night train to Venice and stop over in Milan to work with Stefano Boeri. Stefano was editing Domus back then and had asked me to do the art pages. So I started to do a series of interviews, which was the beginning of meeting this extraordinary generation of designers in Milan. One day, somebody will have to write a book about the salons at Maddalena and Stefano Boeri’s house, because they were like the great 19th-century salons in Paris. It was a circle where you would have Nanda Vigo, Cini Boeri, Alessandro Mendini, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, and Achille Castiglioni. At one of these salons I sat next to Enzo and politics really infused his entire thinking: he immediately started a tirade against the design world. I think he was reassured that I was not from the design world and that was the secret of our later close working relationship: his anger wasn’t really directed at me. He invited me to his studio and I was fascinated by his many dimensions. It’s almost like superstring theory with Enzo, because there was Enzo the polemicist, the writer, the intellectual, the furniture designer, the industrial designer, the DIY designer, the exhibition maker, and Enzo the artist, with his extraordinary contribution to Arte Programmata. At the same time, there was also Enzo the pedagogue, the teacher, the anti-teacher, or however one wants to see it. As a result of that, I invited him to come and teach at IUAV, where he spoke for hours against this idea of art, architecture and design education. He basically told all the students to leave the university because it would be a big mistake to continue unless he took over. Lorenza In the summer of 2018, we decided to host an exhibition on Mari. We felt it was necessary because he’s someone that everyone knows, but to whom

there. There were tears and all kinds of disasters as you can imagine, but he was also sort of a father figure. At the end of the day we would go and have a drink with him in one of the Viennese coﬀee houses, and he would talk and ask personal questions. He was

“Mari was a kind of myth for everyone in Milan, as well as all around the world.” —Lorenza Baroncelli

interested in where people were from, what they did, what their background was. And it always ended up in quite a heated conversation where we lost him in a rant. Because he didn’t speak any German, he had to be translated for those who didn’t speak Italian. A friend of mine from Bolzano said, “Okay, well, I can translate whatever Enzo is saying.” I remember that a couple of times Enzo somehow knew that the words my friend was using weren’t right, even though he had no idea about German. My friend was trying to be more polite and using slightly softer language, but Enzo would get absolutely crazy about this; totally mad about small details that were very important to him. Lorenza Baroncelli He was a kind of myth for everyone in Milan, as well as all around the world. I had the chance to meet him for the first time when Hans Ulrich and I were working on the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2014. Hans Ulrich came to Milan and we went to visit Enzo – I remember that I didn’t speak for the entire afternoon. I was so impressed. When we started to organise the exhibition at the Triennale Milano with Stefano Boeri [president of the Triennale Milano, ed.], Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli, we spent an entire day in his and Lea Vergine’s apartment, which was the last time I saw him. That last time he was older and more tired, but he was perfect with us and spoke a lot about his career. We expected him for the opening of the exhibition at the Triennale, but he was already in hospital with coronavirus. Corinna Sy Like Cat, I only knew him from a distance, even though he has been very present in my life these last seven years. When I was studying design I had

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Above: an installation view of Enzo Mari

curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, at the Triennale Milano until 18 April. (Photo: Gianluca di Ioia) Right: Il Lavoro, a lithograph from Critica

della Ricerca Intellettuale Separata, Edizioni Il Lavoro Liberato (1975).

History

Above: research materials on volumes and colours in relation to paper and wood. (Photo: Paolo Monti) Below: the Triennale Milano show is the last chance to see material from Mari’s archive before it is hidden from public view for two generations. (Photo: Gianluca di Ioia)

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Clockwise from left: materials relating to the 1974 Autoprogettazione guide, including a technical sheet, nails and balsa wood panels, photographed in 2002; La mela e la farfalla, a polychrome print (1958/1969); the panther from La Serie della Natura with Elio Mari for Danese (1964).

History

nobody had dedicated an important reflection. We knew that he was considering how to donate his archives to Milan, and we felt that the city should reflect on him before that, which is why we decided to invite Hans Ulrich Obrist to curate it. Mari had already said that he felt his work should be closed for the next 40 years. He said nobody was able to understand it because designers are too much under the influence of design’s economic system. He wanted a moment of silence, so we decided to build

“We call it Autoprogettazione, but in a sense it was also Autolimitazione. He could be very limiting.” —Martino Gamper this last chance to show it before that. Obviously we didn’t know about coronavirus when we decided to host the exhibition, but by coincidence his work seems really important in this moment of transition. He brings the political value of what we do in design back into the debate. There is a sentence in the catalogue where he says that you have to look out your window and see if you like what you see. If you don’t, you need to do something about it. We started working on the catalogue during lockdown and it was interesting to look outside and see everything closed. We realised that we didn’t like what we were seeing right now. It’s really a moment to change our way of thinking. Hans Ulrich There’s an idea that the future is often invented with tools from the past and Mari is such an inspiration in that sense. As to why Mari now, I think there is a certain urgency because he wanted to get rid of the ideas of profit, of commercialisation, of industries, and even brands and advertising. For him, design is only design if it communicates knowledge. Martino In Vienna, I saw him as a designer who had obviously shaped a lot of the post-war generation, but somehow it hadn’t clicked with me yet. I had to go away and it wasn’t until I was at the RCA in London that I actually came back to Enzo and fully appreciated his thinking. Some of my projects were inspired by his work and very close to his thinking, but I also got to the limits of his projects. We call it Autoprogettazione, but it was also Autolimitazione in a sense because he

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could be very limiting – he didn’t really want people to make other stuff out of that project. There was the set of things that he designed, the furniture, and you made it that way or no way. This project, as much as we love it, and everyone gets inspired by it, was also a limitation because it wasn’t necessarily open-source as we know it. It wasn’t that anyone could contribute to it and so extend the catalogue. The catalogue is the catalogue, and that is it. It hasn’t really progressed the way that we live and it’s a very static project in a sense. That’s where Enzo Mari becomes interesting, because he was this character who was divisive, who was cold, but in some ways also very warm. He would give you a lot, and at the same time, he would tell you off and say that your work is terrible. That was just him. Corinna At Cucula, we started pretty naively with Autoprogettazione. The idea began by offering workshops to refugees living in a camp to use the time and to learn something, and produce furniture they might need. Actually, most of them didn’t like the pieces at first. They said, “No, this is really not a nice style.” We were disappointed, but everybody enjoyed the common experience anyway. The educational background among the participants was very diverse and we were mostly working with people with little to no experience in carpentry or craft, but it was amazing to see how they came to really understand design and how to produce it. One of the participants, who didn’t like the design at first, even ended up building his whole interior based on Enzo Mari’s design. But what was more relevant was it taught us a lot about labour. We wanted to break the stigma surrounding why these people are not allowed to give value to society. Martino I think young designers go back to his work because he’s one of the few designers who spoke his mind and was very, very clear about intent. There’s no misunderstanding with Enzo. His Barcelona Manifesto, for instance, is a clear declaration that anything to do with “IT” is basically just an excuse to vomit sellable goods. In our time of Instagram, where really superficial imagery is spread all around the world with very few words, I think we like characters who speak their mind and have a clear vision of what their work is intended for. Maybe he was out of touch, because digital technologies have changed the world: the way we’re having this conversation, and the reason why his work has become fashionable again, is because of how they have allowed people to share things so widely online.

Cat I think his legacy and how it’s understood has changed hugely over time. I was a design student in Milan in the early 2000s and he wasn’t really a name that was referenced. But in the last 15 years that I’ve been teaching in art schools, you’ve seen this growing realisation and understanding of how important he is in connection to this growth in political, sustainable and ethical consciousness among young designers. I think he stands out, both now and then, because he wasn’t about ego, it wasn’t about a work being an Enzo Mari project. His was this idea of the designer stepping back from being the figurehead, which I think appeals to young designers. It’s not about them, it’s about what they can do with their design and how, through design, you can endow people with agency. Corinna I’m now working in the field of social design, and everything I learned from Mari is very valid right now. It’s all about questioning systems and structures; questioning what is being built instead of giving answers within an existing system. As Lorenza said before, if you’re unsatisfied, start a project. That’s how we started Cucula – we were unsatisfied with the situation facing refugees in Berlin, so we started from scratch. We created a workshop, built furniture, and followed that with the concept of teaching and learning together. The project became something of a proposal or even

“Enzo said something about the need to smuggle research into practice. That is burned into my head.” —Corinna Sy a provocation, but it’s important to create these different models, and to have more experiments which could give an idea or inspire a different way of living together. Enzo once said something about the need to smuggle in moments of research to practice, and that is now burned into my head. This is what we need now: to figure out alternative way of living. Hans Ulrich I think it’s fascinating to hear from Corinna and Cat, in terms of a younger generation of designers, that it resonates so much. Every generation seems to be inspired by Mari, but in a different way. The complexity of his oeuvre is almost irreducible. There’s so much there that every generation can

find something else. So in the exhibition, we have Nanda Vigo, another immense loss to Covid, who created an homage to her friend Enzo using light, reinterpreting his Sedici Animali and Sedici Pesci to create an Enzo “zoo” out of neon. So you have artists and designers of Mari’s own generation who were inspired by him. Then you have Martino’s generation, as well as another generation of designers like Formafantasma, who discovered sustainability and accessibility through his lens. Not only the democratisation of design, but sustainability is another area where he’s a model because his objects were made to last for good. When I was in Milan for Salone del Mobile, I would always ring Enzo and say, “Would you want to come and see some shows with me?” It was always very amusing because he usually never went to see the shows, so nobody could believe it when suddenly Enzo Mari showed up at the design opening. And then, all of a sudden, he would start to scream in the middle of the show about an object: “This is not going to last!” He was opposed to any form of disposable waste of resources and yet he connected it to his passion for transformation. Cat It’s interesting, because even in the 70s he was talking about how he wasn’t understood. He talked about that with Autoprogettazione, but he also talked about it with its precursor, the Day-Night bed for Driade. That used tubular steel and an aluminium frame to create a very simple sofa bed that was meant to be really cheap, really standard, as an example of the anti-elitist idea of design that he promoted. But he complained that nobody bought it. It was a flop and he just thought that A) he couldn’t get it cheap enough, and B) people didn’t understand it. He would talk about that as being a problem of alienation from a Marxist perspective and a problem of the capitalist system. In a way Autoprogettazione was the next step on from that – you have to hand the tools over to the people. That project was popular in the sense that he got hundreds of letters and hundreds of photographs, and in the front of the catalogue there’s an invitation to send in photographs of what you’ve done. So while Martino is right in the sense that it was closed, he was also interested in seeing how people might be able to express themselves through it. But he still complained that people didn’t get it and thought it was an aesthetic when really it was about consciousness-raising. Martino He was almost like a master for designers, because no one ever criticises anyone in design.

History

Clockwise from above: details from L’Uovo e la

gallina, a book for Emme Edizioni (1969); Enzo Mari’s studio photographed by Mimmo Jodice in 2020; L’Uovo e la gallina, a polychrome print for Emme Edizione (1969).

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Struttura 783, a structure made from small PVC tubes (1965).

History

Qualche puntino sulle i, hand-drawn plates published in Wired in 2011-2012.

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The design world is diﬀerent to the art world. In the art world, you have harsh critics, and more critical writing, whereas in the design world you have press releases and that’s as far as it goes. Even between designers, there’s very little criticism unless late at night in Bar Basso someone says, “Actually, I think your show is shit,” which is probably more an insult than a critical instigation. The design world is not known for its criticism because it is linked to industry, markets and global companies. It’s always about

“He had these connections to utopia, but felt we lived in a diﬃcult time. That’s why he wanted the archive to be inaccessible.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist talking things up and making things look amazing and great. Enzo was one of the few figures who would say, “this is shit”, and we all need to hear that things are shit as well. We can make things as beautiful as we want, but the system is broken. He could already see that 40 years ago. Cat A word that describes a lot of what we’re talking about is “integrity”. He wouldn’t do something if he didn’t genuinely believe it. He was invited to design one of the domestic environments for MoMA’s Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, this seminal show from 1972, and he refused. That’s quite some commission to turn down. Instead he wrote this catalogue essay where he talked about the fact that designing physical objects didn’t have any significance anymore. It seems so prescient, because we now have more stuﬀ than we could ever need, and most of it is rubbish. In the end, he talked about communication being what he was going to design instead. That’s the really interesting point, because the key to being a critical designer was actually to not engage with processes through which you could get commissions and opportunities. Hans Ulrich I think he was very aware of his legacy, but he just thought it was somehow a moment that would pass. If you look at his writings, ideas of utopia appear quite a lot. There is a really interesting [issue of] NAC or Notiziario Arte Contemporanea that he

[guest-]edited with his partner, Lea Vergine, in 1971. It starts with a proposal from Enzo where he basically asks all the magazine’s participants – and it’s a long list: Argan, Archizoom, Thomas Maldonado, Lea Vergine and Sottsass – to talk about the annunciation of a utopia, or what he calls a “visione utopizante”. It’s really fascinating to see that he had these connections to utopia, but I think he felt we lived in a diﬃcult time, which is why he wanted the archive to be inaccessible for 40 years. He told me and Lorenza that 40 years, in the bigger picture, is not such a long time. Martino I think he was ahead of his time. He was very much a long-term thinker and I don’t think he saw his thinking as a fashion that would change. It was grounded in the past and he spent a lot of time reading and investigating other people’s work as well. His thoughts didn’t just come from him being a stubborn and very charismatic designer. They are grounded in a lot of other people’s writing and his knowledge of that. I think he saw his thinking as something that’s eternal, and which would hopefully prove lasting. Cat I don’t think he has ever been overlooked by design, but I always see him as being slightly “aside” from aspects of its history. If you think about radical design, you think of people like Superstudio and Ettore Sottsass and all those figures who always get grouped together, even if falsely, but Mari was apart from that. Although he was political, he was outside of the politics of those other practitioners, but I would say that he was respected. Alessandro Mendini talked about his importance, and critics like Giulio Carlo Argan talked about and understood the political significance of it. Mari caught people’s attention – he won the Compasso d’Oro four times and featured in the key magazines like Domus and Casabella – but I always got a sense that he had a diﬀerent position in those social circles to some of his contemporaries. Hans Ulrich Lea Vergine played a very big role in his thinking. Lea was one of the visionary art critics of her generation. She originally wrote on the same art that Mari was interested in, Arte Programmata, but then she moved into body art and performance, and became a great feminist thinker and critic. She made it a rule that she wouldn’t write about Enzo, so they wouldn’t mix their work. But at the same time, they discussed their work every day. She was, of course, extremely influential on him because she questioned everything and would discuss everything, and vice versa. Her influence on this exhibition was immense.

History

Lorenza She followed everything, all the details: looking at the design and discussing everything with Hans Ulrich while smoking her cigarette, because she was always smoking. Francesca Giacomelli was also an important figure, who really has the archive of Enzo Mari in her hands. She knows everything about every object: where it is stored, when it was produced, and has all of the documents, the original files, the original

been shown. He must have kept the knives in his house, because I never saw them in his studio. Lorenza His studio was impressive. It’s going to be destroyed, in accordance with his wishes, but every room was devoted to a topic. One room for materials; one room for prototypes; and all the chairs were stored in the bathroom. The most interesting room was the kitchen, because that was where they produced objects. He was also obsessed with the archive, so created two books with the list of all the objects in the studio and all the documents. He gave Arabic numbers to every object and catalogued everything in those two books. This programmatic system was the basis of his work and I think is the reason why there was no diﬀerence between art and objects and graphic design – for him, it was all part of one unique path. E N D

“That’s a curse for Mari. He may not want it to be about objects, but he also created such beautiful objects.” —Cat Rossi drawings, the text. She’s the person, I think, who will run the legacy of the archives. Hans Ulrich Francesca has this immense knowledge and there are literally 2,000 projects or more that Enzo created during his career – she knows each of those 2,000 projects by heart. There’s no-one on the planet who knows more about Mari than her, but this idea of knowledge production was key for Enzo. He wanted design to convey knowledge and so the exhibition in that sense also has to be about producing knowledge. It would be absolutely contrary to his idea of work if the exhibition was about objects and not research. Cat That’s a curse for Mari in a way. He might not want it to be about objects, but he also created such beautiful objects. Things like the Pago Pago vase, or all the marble works he did in the early 60s, or the Putrella series, these I-beam [trays] that are absolutely stunning and couldn’t be from anywhere other than post-war Italy. And yet they’re all underpinned by a kind of politics. The skill to marry that politics with aesthetic sensibilities is really something. Martino He was also a collector and had a really big knife collection, for instance. Whenever he traveled, he would buy knives. I wanted it for my Serpentine show [Martino Gamper: Design Is a State of Mind, 2014, ed.], but he wouldn’t lend it. He was an avid collector of everyday objects – a bit like Castiglioni, but actually a lot more. I don’t know what’s going to happen with his private collections. They’ve never

Camicia, a glass and aluminium vase for Danese (1961).

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Do We Still Love Our Bookstores? Words Matthew Turner

Since its humble beginnings operating from Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994, Amazon has come to dominate the world of online shopping. It has manipulated how people desire products and shop for them to the extent that it’s sometimes hard to recall what the retail landscape was like before its rise to power. It may also be tricky to remember that Amazon started life selling books online, the domain in which a new project, Bookshop.org, proposes to take back control. Begun during the Covid-19 lockdown, when pressures on the already struggling bookselling industry increased, this new site is designed to offer an alternative, socially conscious outlet for independent bookstores, authors and publishers. In many cases, Amazon is the only option in the landscape of book buying, and can afford to pay commission on every book sale that online media companies direct their way. It means that most articles will link to Amazon and exclude independent bookstores. Such moves enabled its sales to grow by 46 per cent in the first half of 2017 (to £2.33bn) and it now accounts for more than half of all consumer book sales. It’s a dominance that has not gone unnoticed, with the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority even proposing new regulations so smaller companies stand a chance against companies judged to have “entrenched market power”. Books may seem an odd place to have started for a company as emblematic of future modes of consumption as Amazon, but since the beginning they seem to have been an important guide for Bezos. The company started after Bezos took an American Booksellers Association course where, he revealed in a 1997 video interview, he observed that no one person or bookshop could own all books (i.e., all knowledge), yet warehouses linked together by a

website could “build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way.” Books are just another commodity for Amazon, but they’re also a mission statement and a concept model for its monopolising aspirations. Is it possible to offer another option with such a vast reordering of how books are bought and consumed? Or, due to Amazon’s near complete ubiquity, does attempting to compete result in the same problems in different guises? When first alighting on the Bookshop. org web page, I was curious. For a platform trying to be different, it shares Amazon’s anachronistic full-width page layout (an endangered species in current websites). And both pages have odd colour palettes: one similar to pharmaceutical companies attempting to look benevolent, the other, something you might see in a used car dealership. But that’s where the similarities end for now. Amazon’s homepage has a wide highlighted search bar heading the page, whereas on Bookshop.org this function is placed within a crescent of book covers that place the emphasis on browsing rather than searching for what you already know you want. Bookshop.org’s search bar is very literal in comparison to Amazon’s personalised and context-aware features. Search “happiness” and you will get books with that keyword in the title, or, you have the option to switch search criteria and look for bookshops with the phrase in their name instead. Rather than using this function, it’s better to keep on scrolling down the page. Next you will be met with one of the keys aspects of the enterprise: a full-width banner showing how much the website has currently raised for local bookshops (£782,585.46 at the time of writing). Affiliates of the site – be they

Review

authors, publishers, influencers or reviewers – are assured that when they link to Bookshop.org, authors will make 10 per cent of every purchase made through the site, which is then matched by an additional 10 per cent that will go to independent bookshops semiannually. Of the rest of the revenue on a sale, Andy Hunter, the website’s founder, says that the publisher gets about 50 per cent, Bookshop.org gets 5 to 10 percent to cover costs, and the rest goes toward processing and shipping the book. In the UK, Gardners, the country’s largest wholesaler, will fulfil all orders and provide two- or three-day shipping, customer service, and a competitive return policy. It’s a similar structure to Amazon, where sellers are linked through a building in the middle of nowhere. It has already led one bookseller, speaking to Ellen Peirson-Hagger of The New Statesman, to claim that Bookshop. org is “just another big warehouse” . Much of the more sensationalist press around Bookshop.org has taken the angle that the website plans to compete with Amazon, but really it aims to get money into the hands of the right people in a way that the latter rarely does. As recently as January 2021, Amazon had to remove hundreds of Durham University students’ PhD theses after they were listed for sale without the authors’ knowledge. It regularly uses shady third-party sellers obfuscated through the convoluted design of its notorious “Buy Box” – sometimes not even the publishers know where Amazon is acquiring its books from, as Penguin Random House’s investigations revealed in 2017. This means that publishers may not be getting paid, and, by extension, neither is the author. While Bookshop.org

seems more transparent and remunerative in comparison, some booksellers have said that they find its financial structure incredibly complex and do not fully understand how it works – it is seen, Peirson-Hagger summarises, as being “not at all transparent”. Scrolling still further down, the main space of the website comes into view. Hunter has said that Bookshop.org wants to utilise readers’ “fondness for their local booksellers”, and the website design does mimic the experience of walking into a physical bookstore. Publishers, independent presses and authors who sign up to be part of the website’s aﬃliates network are able to curate their own selection of books in horizontal displays of covers you can scroll through and click on for more information, much like table and window displays in IRL bookshops. Combining the idiosyncrasies of actual humans rather than algorithms, this includes, at the time of writing, recommended reading from the author Elena Ferrante; Barack Obama’s favourite reads of 2020, compiled by Reading Roots Bookshop in Wetherby; a “sapphic selection” from The Bookish Type in Leeds; and many more thematic groupings in continual flux. The feed they create

Though it may sound a bit chaotic – in the way creative processes always are – Bookshop.org has none of Amazon’s visual distractions that lead to impulse buying and the concealment of supply chains. in the centre of the page – a procession, like walking between shelves – captures the random collisions and constellations of words and images that can often lead to unexpected discoveries in real-life bookshops. It may be a subtle eﬀect as it stands, but could easily be intensified with something along the lines of Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky function. Though it may sound a bit chaotic – in the way creative processes always are – it has none of Amazon’s visual distractions that lead to impulse buying and the concealment of supply chains (‘Frequently bought together’ and ‘Books you may like’ carousels, for instance).

The simple and homemade design of the Bookshop.org website means that it is always clear where you are and who you are buying from; it’s easy as well to learn more about each affiliate and their ethos from witty profile pages. Daisy Buchanan of the You’re Booked podcast, for instance, promises to ask your favourite writers about “the first forbidden books they read under the covers” and is currently displaying those chosen by Dawn French. On the surface, capturing the quirks of real-life browsing is a positive move in the sterile world of the internet. Amazon may appear to give the potential for access to “all books” and infinite variety but conversely, it actually promotes – similar to Netflix and other online services – a global monoculture where everyone consumes similar content. Amazon’s A9 algorithm puts most emphasis on books that can be easily classified using simplistic keywords, and is more interested in words that have given high sales in the past. A cumulative effect ensues, whereby products that are more highly ranked are more likely to receive more traffic and thus have a better chance of achieving high sales. In turn, this boosts their ranking, and so on, until there are a relatively small number of books getting any spotlight. Amazon cultivates an echo chamber of sameness, which seems curious considering that many of its subsidiary products are named echo. Echo Connect, Echo Spot, Echo Look, Echo Plus, Echo Dot – the list goes on. Bookshop.org cuts through this and allows for chance encounters, potentially with writers you have never heard of. Or does it? All buying platforms have their biases, and if it’s not the algorithm (many profiles on the site boast of “life without algorithms”) then it’s biases inherent in the literary canon. As Jorge Carrion, the author of Against Amazon and Other Essays points out, many of the most well-known independent bookshops stock a remarkably similar catalogue of titles, “with each list copying another”. The algorithm has always been there, albeit in a different form. However, Bookshop.org’s proximity to actual shops has left some booksellers concerned. They claim that the website wants to turn them into a monoculture, by encouraging the use of the same

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platform which makes uniform their unique differences. Speaking to Peirson-Hagger, Blackwell’s digital director Kieron Smith argued that Bookshop.org “removes the agency” of independents. And with bookshops making 13-20 per cent less than if the customer had bought the same books at the same cover price directly from a shop, they fear the site, rather than competing with Amazon, is diverting shoppers away from the high street. While Nicole Vanderbilt, UK MD of Bookshop.org, has rebuffed these claims, they could also respond in the site’s design. It’s good to have the total amount raised for local bookstores emblazoned across every page, but it would be even more beneficial to show how much individual shops make and how much more they would profit if you visited in person or bought your books direct – putting emphasis away from buying online. In tandem it would make the complex financial structure of the site more accountable. When the browsing has finished, then comes the checkout, which is a more familiar affair. While the serenity of the Bookshop.org website is refreshing, providing only the bare essentials for buying a book (price, format, add to basket, add to wishlist, and sometimes blurbs from other writers), it can feel a little static and quiet. Here, perhaps, there are a few tricks it can learn from Amazon, which creates the noise of the marketplace by having designed a website that seems to be constantly evolving. A sense of scarcity is cultivated by telling you how many copies of a particular book they have in stock, adding urgency with the ‘Buy Now’ button to reinforce the fact that offers change daily, incentivising repeat visits. And, vitally, the book rating sits below the product name to guarantee its visibility and to highlight what UX designers call “social proof” to validate the purchase quality and mitigate buying anxiety. “Do I need this book?” Yes! Everyone else does. Dialogue surrounding books – reviews, conversations and eloquent shelf talkers – is currently absent from the Bookshop.org website and it would do well, for example, to integrate some of the conversation from Twitter and other social media. Although these platforms have their own problems,

Image courtesy of Bookshop.org.

The Bookshop.org homepage.

independent publishers rely heavily on Twitter for publicity in the absence of large PR budgets. This is not to say Bookshop.org should attempt to copy Amazon, but if it wants a piece of the pie it could explore its own parallels. Other independent publishers and bookshops already do: the Sternberg Press website is particularly good in this respect, and has images of its latest releases activated and overlaid with a changing ticker tape displaying current announcements, as well as a vertical feed of videos from their most recent discussion events. It feels like a three-dimensional experience that you can almost touch. The tactility of books is now perhaps even more important to shoppers: just look at the rise of #bookporn since 2010. The sad, flattened views of covers oﬀered by the Bookshop.org website don’t even hint at this experience. Furthermore, such an image-led homepage runs the risk of alienating users who are unaccustomed to following visual cues on websites and don’t always realise they represent live links. Four Corners Books has a more contemporary-feeling website in comparison, using both text and image-based navigational cues. It also includes books photographed in a way that values them as design objects, detailing binding types, coatings and the texture of paper – the only thing missing is the smell. The fetishisation

of books as something approaching miniature sculptures or ornaments is becoming increasingly important in publishing, with more elaborate hardback designs released each year. It could be that people want something indelibly physical in contrast to all that is digital and amorphous. Though they share similar traits, Bookshop.org – if we return again to its early press releases – was not started to compete with or replicate your local bookshop. It bills itself as a platform which supports them financially, to ensure that going to them IRL will be possible for many years to come. Yet these intentions become confused in the details, falling into similar traps as Amazon, though to a lesser degree. And these issues become even more present when expressed through the site’s design, whereit could be more transparent and even learn important lessons from the rival juggernaut. Bookshop.org has shown progress in getting more money to those in publishing who need it, and regardless of how people in the industry perceive this, they have still made a successful contribution to discourse. It has made clear, if it wasn’t already, that Amazon’s business model is toxic for the industry. But knowing this, how do we explain why we keep going back for more from Amazon?

Review

Relatively speaking, Amazon hasn’t been around for that long, but already the site’s outdated design has nostalgia value, concurrent with the early and innocent days of the internet and its pained chorus of dial-up modems. It’s easy and cheap, and we keep going back in secret, or simply without thinking, just like we might go to McDonald’s for comforting junk food. Maybe it only appears that people still love their local bookshop, because it’s cool to walk through your neighbourhood with their name on a tote bag, or to post a picture of your new purchase – that you won’t have time to read – with their retro awning in the background. Maybe we like how they can express the fantasy version of ourselves, rather than being the place we spend our money. The bulk of our purchasing, our Amazon orders, don’t fit our vibe and will not be broadcast, just like your last Big Mac won’t be seen on your Instagram. Maybe Amazon is what we want whether we like it or not. Bookshop.org may simply be an expression of how we like the idea of independents, rather than actually buying from them. Bookshop.org is, unsurprisingly, available at bookshop.org.

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Bocci – bocci.com Omer Arbel – omerarbel.com

Writer’s note: When I first emailed Omer, I accidentally spelled his name incorrectly. With a surname like mine, I’m particularly sensitive to such blunders. So, mortified, I was delighted when Omer later told me that his working philosophy is “there are no mistakes.” —Anna Ploszajski

INTERVIEW: A MOMENT OF CRYSTALLISATION pp. 18-25

AIA – aia.org Architects Declare – architectsdeclare.com B&B Italia – bebitalia.com CIA – cia.gov Grenfell Inquiry – grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk Harvard GSD – gsd.harvard.edu Kopenhagen Fur – kopenhagenfur.com Pfizer – pfizer.com Salone del Mobile – salonemilano.it Unesco – unesco.org

TIMELINE pp. 13-16

AHEC – americanhardwood.org Benchmark – benchmarkfurniture.com Design Museum – designmuseum.org Hayon Studio – hayonstudio.com Heatherwick Studio – heatherwick.com Ini Archibong – designbyini.com Maria Bruun – mariabruun.com Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska – mariajeglinska.eu Sabine Marcelis – sabinemarcelis.com Sebastian Herkner – sebastianherkner.com Studiopepe – studiopepe.info Studio Swine – studioswine.com

Writer’s note: The choice of featuring three woods in Connected – American red oak, cherry, and maple – was a conscious attempt by AHEC to crack open the stronghold that oak and walnut hold in contemporary furniture design. “[The design industry] has narrowed the choice over the last 10 years,” David Venables tells me. “That’s partly economic, but also partly [due to] being ignorant of the possibilities. There’s a whole generation of designers now who won’t remember cherry being in fashion 15-20 years ago. I’m old enough to remember it, as were a couple of the designers [in Connected]. But others said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard about the cherry thing – I was still at school.’” —Evi Hall

REVIEW: THE REAL FEEL pp. 45-48

Contemporaries – contemporariesproject.org Ebon Heath – listeningwithmyeyes.com Head Hi – headhi.net MASS Design Group – massdesigngroup.org Stephen Burks Man Made – stephenburksmanmade.com Zero + Maria Cornejo – zeromariacornejo.com

Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Madrid (1933) – an image I’ve looked at and admired all my life – stepped into my frame. Quite sure it was him, overlooking the 88 years in between, I clicked. Now it’s hard to be sure as he wore a mask. —Dean Kaufman

Writer’s note: There have been so many articles over the past year about how to cope with lockdown and improve your mental health through DIY home exercise and Zoom yoga, but if you’re feeling down during these diﬃcult times I would like to recommend a method of self-care I discovered a few months ago when I was low. I bought

PHOTOESSAY: DENTED, KNOCKED, SCRAPED pp. 64-71

Guide to Covid-19 Vaccine Communications – covid19vaccinescommunicationprinciples.org Public Health England Campaign Resources – campaignresources.phe.gov.uk/resources

I came across was one issued by the US Centre for Disease Control in 1977. In it, C-3PO addresses the viewer: “Parents of Earth, are your children fully immunised?” R2-D2 stands next to the prissy golden cyborg, fixing the viewer with what I can’t help but interpret as a stern robotic eye. “Make sure – call your doctor or health department today. And may the force be with you.” —Kristina Rapacki

Index

Photographer’s note: While standing “Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass” (aka: DUMBO) for this issue’s photo shoot, I had to un-fog my glasses and do a double take, as suddenly the protagonist from Henri

CONVERSATION: WELCOME TO CONTEMPORARIES pp. 27-44

Yo-Yo Machines – yoyomachines.io

Writer’s note: Had I not run out of space, I would have included the fact that Konstantin credits Magis’s head of marketing, Ruben Hutschemaekers, as an important influence on the development of the Bell chair. Designers are so often pushed front and centre in the media that it’s easy to forget all the other people who play vital roles in shaping a new product. It was nice to hear Konstantin give credit where credit is due. —Oli Stratford

Writer’s note: Bill Gaver from the IRS told me a story that is testament to the accessibility of Yo-Yo Machines: “I’ve been using my Light Touch with my mom for the last month or so,” he said. “I built it here and sent it to her in California. At some point, it dropped oﬀ her table and broke. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna have to send her a new one!’ But she actually managed to take it apart and reassemble it. She managed to do that and she’s 92 with no experience with electronics.” —Evi Hall

Writer’s note: In researching this story, I spent a fair amount of time trawling through the digital collections of medical history libraries. The most charming poster

ESSAY: LIGHTNING RODS pp. 52-63

Illustrator’s note: Before settling for the final format, I was playing around with an idea inspired by Francis Alys’s 1997 performance Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, in which the artist pushed a block of ice around Mexico City for more than nine hours. —Leonhard Rothmoser

ILLUSTRATION: ULTRA COLD CHAIN pp. 50-51

Bell Chair – bell-chair.com Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design – konstantin-grcic.com Magis – magisdesign.com

OBSERVATION: BELL CHAIR p. 49

OBSERVATION: Y0-YO MACHINES p. 26

Alexander McQueen – alexandermcqueen.com Balenciaga – balenciaga.com Chanel – chanel.com Gucci – gucci.com

Writer’s note: I am a crap gamer. As an example of my abysmal track record, I once managed to kill Lara Croft in a Tomb Raider level meant to teach you how to use your controller. —Johanna Agerman Ross

REVIEW: OF FASHION AND GATEKEEPERS pp. 79-82

Cubitts – cubitts.com Iris Optical – irisoptical.co.uk Yair Neuman – yairneuman.com

Writer’s note: There are only three programmes in the world strictly focused on eyewear design – one is in Italy, one in France, and the third in South Korea. That means the most common way to learn how to produce a pair of optical eyeglasses is on the job. The industry is lucrative, so why aren’t more institutions oﬀering specialised training that can lead to the questioning that often takes place in design schools? —Rab Messina

ANATOMY: A DIRTY SECRET pp. 72-78

Rimowa – rimowa.com

a very expensive bottle of champagne, a large jar of pâté and a small jar of cornichons, and consumed the whole lot on my own, as a weeknight dinner. Although money is tight for many right now, the cost of the champagne should be high enough that it feels reckless and definitely more than what you’d spend if buying it for someone else; it should ideally replace a regular, responsible, balanced meal; and it must be eaten alone, on your couch, while watching something stupid on YouTube. If you don’t eat meat, there are many things you could go for instead of the pâté, but if you don’t drink alcohol there’s nothing I can do for you. —Felix Chabluk-Smith

142 Editor’s note: While recording this conversation, the pronunciation of “autoprogettazione” caused such problems for us non-Italian speakers that Martino Gamper was forced to take action. “Autoprogettazione = APZ,” Martino kindly wrote in the chat bar. “Like HUO! [Hans Ulrich Obrist]” he added for clarity. This felt more relieving than you can possibly imagine. —Oli Stratford Cucula – cucula.org Driade – driade.com Martino Gamper – martinogamper.com Triennale Milano – triennale.org Serpentine Galleries – serpentinegalleries.org

Bang & Olufsen – bang-olufsen.com Bodo Sperlein – bodosperlein.com Carole Baijings – carolebaijings.com Daniel Rybakken – danielrybakken.com Jasper Morrison – jaspermorrison.com

ROUNDTABLE: ENZO MARI WAS A UNIVERSE pp. 123-136

SaltyCo – saltyco.uk

Editor’s note: It took three members of the team to establish that 0.3 per cent of 1kg is 30g. Christ, we’re shit at maths. —Oli Stratford

OBSERVATION: SALTYCO p. 122

Writer’s note: Despite everything, we are lucky to be alive. I’m waiting for the revolution to reignite in order to bump into Myriam on the streets of Beirut! —Alfred Tarazi

Writer’s note: In 1946, the head of 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zauck, said that he wasn’t at all worried about the impact television might have on cinema. “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months,” Zanuck predicted, dare I say it, rashly. “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” —Oli Stratford

REPORT: THE ONLY THING LEFT TO DESIGN IS THE FOOT pp. 83-100

Index

Associative Design – associativedesign.com, p. 17 Bocci – bocci.com, p. 2 Carl Hansen & Søn – carlhansen.com, inside front cover, p. 1 Crafts Council – craftscouncil.org.uk, p. 12 Laufen – laufen.com, p. 7 Maharam – maharam.com, p. 5 Sunspel – sunspel.com, p. 9 Squarespace – squarespace.com, outside back cover Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de, p. 11 Vola – vola.com, p. 15

ADVERTISERS

Teenage Engineering – teenage.engineering

Writer’s note: I wasn’t joking, I really don’t understand what a synth is. —Oli Stratford

Botanicals by Glithero – botanicals.work Glithero – glithero.com

GALLERY: ASSALAM ALAYKI YA MYRIAM: A PRAYER pp. 102-121

OBSERVATION: OB-4 pp. 144

Amazon – amazon.com Bookshop.org – bookshop.org Four Corners Books – fourcornersbooks.co.uk Gordian Projects – gordianprojects.com Sternberg Press – sternberg-press.com

Writer’s note: Amazon was originally called Cadabra, like the magician’s term “abracadabra”. But Jeﬀ Bezos’s lawyer told him that the magic reference was too obscure, and when you say it out loud, “cadabra” could be mistaken for “cadaver”. A premonition through mishearing of the company’s current unsettling presence in our lives. —Matthew Turner

REVIEW: DO WE STILL LOVE OUR BOOKSHOPS? pp. 137-139

Writer’s note: I asked Sarah van Gameren if she and Tim Simpson had ever gotten in trouble for digging out weeds from London parks. “No,” was the short answer, although she did pause. “There has maybe been some reputational damage,” she laughed after a moment. —Kristina Rapacki

OBSERVATION: BOTANICALS p. 101

John Tree – johntree.net LG – lg.com Loewe – loewe.tv Panasonic – panasonic.com Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Design – bouroullec.com Samsung – samsung.com Sony – sony.com Torsten Valeur – valeurdesigners.com Yves Béhar – fuseproject.com

Image by Choreo.

OB-4 by Teenage Engineering"I was initially surprised to learn that Teenage Engineering had designed an FM radio. Radio? It just seemed so old-fashioned, particularly for a studio that made its name with cutting edge synths like the OP-1 (2011) and the OP-Z (2018) – devices that married functional complexity with crystal clear industrial design. I don’t understand synths because I’m musically illiterate, but even I love those pieces. By contrast, I do understand radio, which tells me that it must be a dead technology. So what is Teenage doing messing around in the past? “You know,” says Thomas Howard, the Stockholm studio’s vice head of design, “I think you’re onto something there.” Of course, the OB-4 isn’t just a radio. “Actually, a lot of people were

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very angry and upset with us that we’ve pushed it as an FM radio,” says Howard. “Doesn’t it have digital audio, DAB, or whatever that radio standard that’s only used in Norway is?” Strictly speaking, the OB-4 is a portable loudspeaker, but that’s where things stop feeling quite so strict. The device is equipped with an endless looping tape, meaning that a quick twist of its motorised dials lets you rewind live radio to cut up, loop and time-bend whatever is being broadcast. “What can a speaker be other than something that just takes in a signal and spits it back out?” asks Howard. Meanwhile, a disk mode sets up the radio feed as a test lab, housing a number of experimental functions that Teenage will add to over time: so far, it includes ambient drone formed from radio snippets, a metronome, and a “musical mantra box” that sounds like doing yoga with robots. “We’re really interested in active listening as opposed to passive consumption,” says Howard. “Radio is cool because it’s both very easy to receive a signal, and it has that super live, local feeling to it – a sense of being connected to your community which we’ve all missed. It’s a good platform for the future.” The more I think about it, actually, the more this dialogue between past and future seems essential to Teenage. Its Pocket Operator synths (2015-) smuggled contemporary connectivity into 1980s-style Game and Watch devices, while its OD-11 speaker (2014) was an immaculately re-engineered, but otherwise faithful recreation of a 1974 original by audio engineer Stig Carlsson. “For us it’s interesting to see how we can add just one thing to something familiar to transform it entirely,” says Howard. The studio delights in delving into the history of electronics, and finding forgotten devices and formats before messing around just enough to restore them to relevance. “We don’t really have a grand plan: it’s more sticking stuﬀ together and seeing what works.” So, I ask Howard, what does happen when you start rewinding and looping FM radio? “Long live radio, I would say!” he replies. Words Oli Stratford

The Quarterly Journal of Design

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