Disegno #34

The Quarterly Journal of Design #34 Autumn 2022

This issue includes: A retreat to the countryside with Erwan Bouroullec at La Grange; reportage from Auroville, the utopian town whose masterplan has split a community; the case for unionisation in architecture; Janett Nichol and Forward, Nike’s new needle-punched material; contraception in the Worlds Best condom factory; the story of how the Tolix Chaise A went viral; ASMR and design’s discomfort with the weird; and a critique of queerness and disobedience in architecture with Adam Nathaniel Furman.

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Introduction

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From 1949

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Introduction

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Introduction

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Design Me Like One of Your Buff Boys Words Oli Stratford

I have just been for an organised run in Richmond Park in 33°C heat and the experience was absolutely awful.

Yet as I wondered whether the first responders would still be able to find me if I was sick on myself and then rolled into a laurel bush for shade, I began to think about a fantasy that I have held for some time.

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if there was some sort of mech suit that I could be strapped into that would do my exercise for me? This mech would have splendid engines that powered it along, jerking my muscles hither and thither as it moved. I would be performing all the actions of running, and experiencing the physical benefits from said exercise (I imagine the mech is also lifting weights as it goes too, so it really is an all-body workout), but without having to will myself to run because running is awful. I should also note that the mech would place me in a medically induced coma the moment I entered its iron grasp, so I wouldn’t even be aware of its superbly conditioning jigging and jostling.

I would simply wake up absolutely stacked.

This is the true work of design: creating new solutions that would allow me to have a majorly buff bod without tailoring my lifestyle towards this in any way whatsoever.

Introduction

Ham-like thighs, mighty tits and a griddle-pan tummy would suddenly be available on tap, rushing towards us on stout robotic legs. As the population grew ever more wham, we could use our spare time to eat powerful carbohydrates and drink rich boozes, fully protected by our robotic safety net. There will be those among Disegno’s readers who challenge this, arguing that solutionism is a flawed idea that is responsible for many ills. To those readers I say: wake up and place yourself into a medically induced coma at once.

Buffness is but a chemical sleep away.

This is what we need more of in design: bold, mech-based ideas that can lurch through context and consequences, and which raise two pneumatic fingers (the other fingers are operating those squeezy things for hench wrists) to any suggestion that we can’t have it all, whenever we want it. Forget about tempering your desires or reassessing your priorities, just clamber in and let the mech take the strain.

This is the hot bod future we can all believe in.

10

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Contents 9

Introduction Design Me Like One of Your Buff Boys

12

Contents

14

Contributors

16

Masthead The people behind Disegno

19

Timeline June to August 2022 in review

24

Opinion Learning from Failure Second time lucky for Ineke Hans

25

Photoessay Politically Erect Condom production in the maelstrom of the 2020s

31

32

Objects in Review Essential Forms Julien Renault’s Netflix classic café collection Objects in Review One Startup’s Trash Canal-dredged design

114

Review Embrace the Weird Does design get tingles?

123

Report United by Design Architects get organised

132

Interview Better Sensation Erwan Bouroullec retreats to La Grange

147

Objects in Review Clinging On Gorping at Tom Chung’s lamp

148

Objects in Review To Be Clear A see-through phone

Travelogue The Road to Utopia is Not Smooth A contested paradise in south India’s Auroville

164

Objects in Review Pipe Dreams Enjoy a crystal high

Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

168

Opinion Seen on Screen Plastic peepers are everything everywhere all at once

33

Essay The Everywhere Chair The irresistible rise of the Tolix Chaise A

48

Opinion Delft Blue Rhymes with Fake Handbags Eighteenth-century pottery meets knock-off Gucci

49

81

97

98

Design Drafts Is Design Just a Game?

New voices in design writing Roundtable Queer Refusal Architecture as a site of disobedience

99

Material Fibre to Form Nike bets the future on a needle-punched hoodie

113

Objects in Review It Hides a Mess!

Distributed manufacture; tidy mirror

12

Contributors Veronica Blagoeva is fascinated by how different eyes see different things. p. 99

Jango Jim is fuelled by coffee and good food. p. 123

Kristina Rapacki is a writer, editor and enthusiastic amateur rock climber. p. 147

Gijs de Boer is not a design-hating designer any more. p. 14 (Design Drafts)

Kareem Khubchandani loves clothes, and you can see more @kareempuff. p. 81

Rupal Rathore is trying to find her ikigai. p. 148

Katarina Bonnevier rummages in the borderlands with Mycket. p. 81

Sharon Lam just wants to find a job in architecture that requires scuba diving. p. 168

Dhiren Borisa dreams of being sexy in the city. p. 81

Kathryn Larsen is a Seaweed Arkitekt MAA based in Copenhagen. p. 20 (Design Drafts)

Rebecca Conway likes the mountains. p. 148

Malika Leiper wants you to consider new words for design. p. 26 (Design Drafts)

Brendan Cormier is all trees, no forest. p. 33 Aastha D is always raging, rolling her eyes, essaying, or feeling exhausted. p. 81 Chinouk Filique de Miranda is a semiprofessional screenshotter. p. 8 (Design Drafts) Fabian Frinzel started stretching because he is slowly getting older (39). p. 31, 32, 97, 98, 113 and 147

Gabriel Maher engages in critical spatial practice(s). p. 81 Theresa Marx’s greatest passion is her dog Leroy. p. 99 KNeo Mokgopa is an artist and writer living and working in Johannesburg. p. 81 Tetsuo Mukai likes circular design, as in “What goes around comes around”. p. 48

Adam Nathaniel Furman is a British artist and designer of Japanese and Argentine heritage. p. 81

Linnéa Nordberg is. p. 99

Ineke Hans loves London, but partly lives in Berlin. p. 24

Bianca Nozaki-Nasser loves to get lost in a good book. p. 2 (Design Drafts)

14

Ria Roberts is interested in mechanical, digital and human reproduction. p. 25 Leonhard Rothmoser is still not afraid of the white sheet. p. 24, 48 and 168 Vikramaditya Sahai lives and loves in Delhi. p. 81 Sunao Takahashi is a face painter. p. 99 Philippe Thibault recently installed himself in Lyon for better food. p. 33 and 132 Sophie Tolhurst has been collecting fluff. p. 114 Andre Vasiljev is living life a quarter mile at a time and hating photography. p. 99 Alastair Philip Wiper is microdosing LSD and enjoying ASMR. p. 25 Lauren Yoshiko writes about weeds and smokes a lot of broccoli. p. 98

28 28 Series by Omer Arbel Standard fixtures and bespoke installations

bocci.com

The Quarterly Journal of Design #34 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Subeditor Ann Morgan

Contributors Johanna Agerman Ross, Veronica Blagoeva, India Block, Gijs de Boer, Katarina Bonnevier, Dhiren Borisa, Erwan Bouroullec, Delany Boutkan, Rebecca Conway, Brendan Cormier, Aastha D, Chinouk Filique de Miranda, Fabian Frinzel, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Evi Hall, Ineke Hans, Jango Jim, Kareem Khubchandani, Sharon Lam, Kathryn Larsen, Malika Leiper, Gabriel Maher, Theresa Marx, KNeo Mokgopa, Tetsuo Mukai, Linnéa Nordberg, Bianca Nozaki-Nasser, Charles Pétillon, Rohit Rajak, Kristina Rapacki, Rupal Rathore, Ria Roberts, Leonhard Rothmoser, Vikramaditya Sahai, Oli Stratford, Sunao Takahashi, Philippe Thibault, Sophie Tolhurst, Andre Vasiljev, Charlotte Vuarnesson, Alastair Philip Wiper and Lauren Yoshiko.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Edition Offset 120gsm by Antalis. The cover is printed on Arena Extra White Smooth 250gsm

by Fedrigoni.

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long along@thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Thanks Many thanks to Delany Boutkan for her patience, wisdom and dedication; Aric Chen, Francien van Westrenen, and all the team at Het Nieuwe Instituut for a fantastic collaboration; Nanjala Nyabola and Marjanne van Helvert for their judging expertise; Salvatore Nicoletti and his colleagues at Nike for all their support; Fabien Frinzel for being so accommodating with deliveries; Erwan Bouroullec for his hospitality; and all of the interviewees for ‘United by Design’ for their openness in discussing a difficult issue.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Disegno #34 possible – not least to Tia, Moomoo and Mochi, without whom ‘Queer Refusal’ wouldn’t have been half the roundtable it is.

16

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong 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 Studio 3 The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ disegnojournal.com Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/podcasts/the-crit

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JUNE

news, near-total immersion in the

Short-term supply issues, it seems,

discipline on which he reported,

have translated into emergency

Roe v. Wade v. data

and enthusiasm for new financial

measures with potentially worrying

Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 case that

models for digital media. These

long-term consequences for forests.

established the right to abortion

were traits that, at various points,

in the US Constitution, didn’t even

drew criticism, but 16 years on from

make it to 50 years old before it

its launch, Dezeen remains essential

New universe, old designs

was overturned by the US’s Supreme

reading for anyone in the field. More

“Hey @Balenciaga, what’s the dress

Court in June 2022. In the intervening

than any of his contemporaries, Fairs

code in the metaverse?” Meta tweeted

months, much has been said about the

saw early and clearly the direction in

in October 2021. The answer, when

appallingly retrograde nature of the

which 21st-century media was heading.

it arrived the best part of 10 months

decision and its assault upon bodily

later, was underwhelming to say the

autonomy, but equally worrying are the

least. In June, Meta announced the

futures it opens up. The ruling not

launch of its avatar fashion store,

only once more jeaopardises Americans’

which contains a host of outfits

access to safe, legal abortions, but

designed by Balenciaga, Prada and

also creates the new nightmare of

Thom Browne for use across Facebook,

those seeking the procedure being

Instagram and Messenger. You might

tracked through their personal data:

be excused for thinking that creative

suddenly, search-engine histories

expression in these digital worlds

and information inputted into apps

would run wild, generating virtual

and websites may be pursued by law

garments unfettered by IRL factors

enforcement aiming to prosecute those

such as function, self-confidence

who have terminations. In such a

and material possibility. Well,

climate, it becomes urgent for tech

you’d be wrong, because all three

companies to redesign their handling

studios simply presented a series of

of user data (potentially expanding

milquetoast digital editions of the

end-to-end encryption such that

same clothes they make all the time:

personal information is not stored

Wood woes

grey suits, logo hoodies and tank

by default), because the threat is

European timber is one of many

tops. The sense of anti-climax

real – in August, it was revealed that

commodities whose supply chains have

was telling, as it is with many

a teenager in Nebraska is to be tried

been knocked off-balance amidst the

of design’s current explorations

for terminating her pregnancy, with

physical chaos and economic sanctions

of digital space. The metaverse

law enforcement having acquired user

brought about by the Russian invasion

may represent a transformative

data from Facebook in building its

of Ukraine. A quarter of timber sold

future – forging new aesthetics

case. The US may be determined to

worldwide in 2021 was supplied by

and functionalities – but its

return to the past, but it is doing

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine combined,

present expression is all too

so in a disgustingly modern way.

yet sanctions on Russia and Belarus,

familiar. Call us when the dress

along with difficulties in exporting

code gets weird.

Image courtesy of Dezeen.

from Ukraine, had made their impact

Marcus Fairs (1967-2022)

felt by the summer of 2022. For

“Dezeen changed the way people consume

designers and architects working with

Bartlett bombshell

design news, and Fairs was undoubtedly

solid-wood and timber construction,

In June, University College London

one of the design world's pre-eminent

this has proven prohibitive: the

made a formal apology to current and

power brokers,” concluded the Design

stocks either don’t exist or else

former students of the Bartlett School

Museum’s Justin McGuirk in his obituary

suppliers cannot give cost estimates

of Architecture, admitting that they

for Marcus Fairs, the founder of

thanks to the volatile market. In

had been subjected to “unacceptable

Dezeen, who died suddenly at the

response to this shortfall, Estonia

behaviour”. A lengthy investigation

end of June. It’s a neat summation of

has recently relaxed logging

from independent specialists Howlett

Fairs, whose embrace of the internet’s

restrictions on state-owned land,

Brown brought to light a catalogue of

breakneck news cycles and aesthetic

whilst Finland expects to increase

horrors, with students subjected to

accelerationism propelled Dezeen

its timber exports by 3 per cent.

psychological and physical abuse from

to the forefront of popular design

Ukraine, meanwhile, has (perhaps

staff members, and minority students

journalism, as well as building

understandably) passed martial law

and women enduring racist and sexist

his personal influence within the

to increase logging in its protected

treatment. UCL provost Michael Spence

field. Fairs was inseparable from

forests, whilst the deployment of the

decried a “pernicious underbelly of

the platform he created, with

nation's firefighters to frontline

bullying” that had festered at the

Dezeen's success built around its

combat has taken them away from

school for decades. The alarm was

founder’s keen sense for breaking

tackling summer forest fires.

raised back in 2021 by fashion

Timeline

designer Eleni Kyriacou, an alumna

which borrowed cues and geometric

of wholly aimless global attractions

of the Bartlett, who shared online

forms from traditional Japanese

designed to be climbed and take selfies

her negative experiences at the school

architecture. Good news, then, that

on,” offered Edwin Heathcote of the

two decades prior. In her search for

the Vitra Design Museum has acquired

Financial Times; “like a turd falling

justice, she put together a dossier

Umbrella House and transported it from

from a dog's arse,” summarised the

of people’s testimonies. After pressure

its original site in Nerima, Tokyo, to

University of Westminster’s Sean

from the press, the investigation

its campus in Germany. The house had

Griffiths. You would have thought that

began and an open secret was finally

been due to be demolished to make way

there was nothing left to say, but

formally documented. In response,

for a new road system, but the museum

as the great 20th-century philosopher

UCL has promised to change the

collaborated with the Tokyo Institute

Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, some

school’s culture and has removed

of Technology to move the building,

things can only be shown, not said.

several staff members.

dismantling the structure in the

Step forward video-game designer Dan

summer of 2020. The move was aided

Douglas, who set Twitter alight when

by Shinohara’s consideration of

he revealed that he had coded the Mound

The cloud ate my homework

construction. Umbrella House is made

into his patched version of Duke Nukem

The shift to cloud-based software

of cheap, widely available materials

3D (1996), offering players the chance

services is gaining pace, with

such as cement fibre boards, and

to blow it up. “To me, the Mound

subscription models offering regular

utilises a wooden post-and-beam

represents a total failure of concept,

updates and access from anywhere (and,

building method that meant that

planning, execution and aesthetics, a

of course, setting the user up as

it was easy to construct in 1961

literal monument to ugly unnecessity,”

a cash cow for the provider). Yet in

and easy to deconstruct, ship

Douglas told Dezeen. But, actually,

June, a Chinese novelist writing under

and re-build 60 years later. It’s

no explanation needed to be given:

the name Mitu was locked out of a

testament to an architect who is

Douglas’ critique was perfect the

million-word novel draft that they

influential in Japan, but who has

moment the Duke pushed the plunger.

had been writing on WPS, a cloud-based

not yet been widely recognised

Here at Disegno, we raise our hats

word-processing programme from Chinese

internationally. Here’s to Umbrella

to him.

software company Kingsoft. Mitu

House and a very well-deserved

claimed that WPS had been “spying

second housewarming.

on and locking my draft” due to the presence of what the programme had flagged as illegal content (something Mitu disputes). In light of the story, however, Chinese publication The

had been locked out of their drafts

by WPS for unknown reasons, with discussion coming to centre around the

Press button for more art

need for Chinese companies to comply

As sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke once

with state censorship laws (WPS itself

said, “[any] sufficiently advanced

has been supported by government

technology is indistinguishable from

grants and contracts). It’s a story

magic.” It certainly seemed magic

that highlights the two-way nature of

when DALL-E 2 – and its smaller

subscription services: how many of us

sibling Craiyon (formally known

are confident, or even care, that our

as DALL-E Mini) – launched in July,

cloud-based subscriptions are entirely

machine-learning models that let

private? A sobering precedent.

people create fantastical images from text prompts, no matter how off-the-

Your ass is grass, and I’ve got the weed whacker

wall. A portmanteau of surrealist

Sometimes, as a design critic, you just

painter Salvador Dalí and animated

have to stand back and applaud. Since

anthropomorphic robot WALL-E, DALL-E

Build better, build twice

its ill-fated opening in 2021, the

can manage photorealism or any number

“A house is a work of art,” said

Marble Arch Mound has been the subject

of art styles, giving users free range

Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara

of more spilt ink than its creators

for their most maniacal mashups. If

on completion of his Umbrella House

MVRDV would care to remember. “[Thin]

you want an impressionist painting

in 1961. Umbrella House was, in part,

sedum matting clinging desperately to

of Minions climbing the Eiffel Tower

a rejection of the tenets of the

the sheer walls of the structure,”

or Soviet-era propaganda posters of

metabolist movement and presented

wrote The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright

cats, they’re just a few clicks away.

instead Shinohara’s “First Style”,

of the installation; “part of a new era

Architecture Twitter amused itself

JULY

20

Images courtesy of Akio Kawasumi, Dan Douglas (@dandouglas), Andrew Jones and DALL-E, and Nicholas Menniss.

Economic Observer reported similar incidents of other novelists who

endlessly by feeding the AI prompts

Bondi Blue plastic, Apple’s more

weird to hear of a vote that was

for mundane locales designed by famous

recent product launches have felt

all around good news. Muyiwa Oki has

architects. OpenAI developed DALL-E

increasingly corporate in their

been elected president of the Royal

by feeding it a concentrated diet

familiar reliance upon black glass

Institute of British Architects (RIBA)

of publicly available digital images,

and milled aluminium. As digital

and will serve his term from 2023

which has presented a number of ethical

cultures embrace the aesthetic

to 2025. It’s a major role in UK

conundrums, particularly for artists

plurality favoured by online,

architecture, and as the 80th RIBA

and designers whose work may have been

perhaps it’s simply time for

president Oki has already made history

used to teach a machine that can make

Apple to also explore some

in more ways than one. He will be

“original” images for free, potentially

new perspectives on design.

RIBA’s first Black president in the institution’s 188-year history and,

putting them out of a job. Most of

at 31, he will also be its youngest.

the images are so cursed, however, that we don’t think we’ll be replacing

AUGUST

Traditionally, the presidency has gone

Disegno’s photographers and illustrators with robots any time soon.

to senior architects who have often

Stay warm to keep (the planet) cool

founded their own practice and have

We’re entering the catch-22 phase

a vested interest in maintaining the

of the climate crisis. Parts of the

status quo. Oki rode to victory on

world are becoming unbearably hot

a grassroots campaign and a platform

during the summer months, but turning

of being an early-career architect

up the air-conditioning to cool down

who will look out for the rights

buildings consumes more (increasingly

of his fellow workers. In a previous

costly) energy that burns the fossil

role at Grimshaw, Oki founded a

fuels that are driving climate change.

multi-ethnic group and allies network

Spain introduced new rules at the start

for the practice. Hopefully he can

of August limiting both the heating

continue his mission of cultural

and cooling of public buildings.

change at RIBA, which failed to keep

Railway stations, cinemas, shopping

its first diversity director in post

centres, airports and theatres can’t

for longer than a year. This is one

be heated above 19°C or below 27°C,

presidency we are excited about.

in an attempt by the government to reduce gas usage by 7-8 per cent as

Ive had enough

part of Europe’s move to wean itself

It’s the end of an era. In July, rumours

off Russian supplies. The rules will

began to swirl that Jony Ive’s 30-year

remain in place until at least

association with Apple was coming

November 2023. While tourists have

to an end, with the pair agreeing to

already begun complaining of too-hot

terminate the contract they signed in

hotels, there are some eminently

2019 when Ive stepped away from his

sensible parts of the regulations,

in-house position at the tech giant

such as the stipulation that lights

to found his LoveFrom design agency.

in shops have to be turned off after

It brings to a close a period that

10pm. In France, shop lights must

saw Ive’s work help lead Apple to

be turned off past 1am, and those

a (at one point) $3tn market value;

who haven’t been complying found

vastly raise the standard of design

themselves targeted by roving gangs

across consumer electronics; and

of youths this summer. Young French

launch the iPhone, arguably the

people have invented a new sport:

defining product of the 21st century

a variation of parkour that involves

Issey Miyake (1938-2022)

to date. Yet Ive may be leaving at

running and jumping up the sides of

“Anything that’s ‘in fashion’ goes

the right time. Under CEO Tim Cook,

buildings to hit the interpompier –

out of style too quickly,” Issey

Apple’s work on hardware design has

an external light switch. It’s a

Miyake told Parisvoice in 1998. “I

slowed considerably, with the company

Tiktok trend that would make Greta

don’t make fashion. I make clothes.”

focusing greater attention on software

Thunberg proud.

It was with huge sadness that the

and subscription services such as Apple

design world learned in August of

Music and Apple Fitness+. Similarly,

the death of Miyake, a designer whose

questions may be asked as to whether

Oki for president

attention to materiality, wearability

Ive’s design sensibilities remain

Since 2016, most election results

and experimental process attracted

as fresh as they once did. While his

globally have vacillated between the

adherents from across disciplines.

original 1998 iMac was radical in its

least-bad option and actively-opening-

Having founded the Miyake Design

language, resplendent in translucent

a-hell-mouth, so it was a relief/a bit

Studio in Tokyo in 1970, and begun

Timeline

showing in Paris in 1973, Miyake truly blossomed in the 1990s with his creation of innovative ready-to-wear lines that relied on cutting-edge technologies to create garments that considered the needs of their wearers.

Chief among them was the 1993 Pleats Please line, with structuring micropleats that created gorgeous,

city in the desert will presumably require a vast underclass of service workers to keep its delivery drones flying and its vertical farms watered.

Whether it will become a reality beyond the swanky renderings is anyone’s guess, but we really hope they’ll re-think the great wall of mirrors.

machine-washable, un-wrinklable garments, doing away with constraints such as delineated waistlines or pinching fastenings in favour of something more freeing. A survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, Miyake told the New York

Times in 1999 that he chose not to dwell on his past, “preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy.” In this, he succeeded as few others in the field could dream of.

A Line in the sand The latest instalment in the ongoing oddity that is Neom, the hypothetical smart city planned in Saudi Arabia for a patch of desert next to the Red Sea, landed in August with updated news about The Line. The imaginatively named linear city, its designers announced, will be 100-miles long Images courtesy of Brigitte Lacombe and Neom Co.

but only 200m across. It won’t need cars, only high-speed trains. And its 500m-high mirrored walls will disrupt the migratory patterns of many local mammals and birds, while presumably turning the sand around it into pools of glass. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman claims he wants to build a futuristic city that can escape the issues such as pollution and overcrowding plaguing the traditional, circular conurbation. But this new

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Learning from Failure

Words Ineke Hans Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser In 2011, Ineke Hans launched the 380, an injection-moulded plastic chair for Dutch brand Ahrend. Faced with manufacturing issues, however, the chair quickly fell from production. Then, in 2021, the design returned under a new name: Rex. I started working on Rex back in 2007, when I was approached by Ahrend, a historic Dutch design company. Ahrend had worked with some great designers like Friso Kramer and Wim Rietveld, so it seemed like a real opportunity.

The company asked me to create a chair concept that they could show in Milan during the Salone. I think they thought I might do something crazy to draw attention to their exhibition, but I wanted to make a sensible chair and show the world that I could work within heavy industrial design, because not many women get the chance to do that.

So I looked into Ahrend’s factories and archives to see what could be a good fit, before presenting three different proposals. Funnily enough, they selected the only design they didn’t have the

capacity to produce themselves – it had to be made in China. It was a serious project, but then the 2008 financial crisis hit. Spending started to be cut and, by the time they were ready to produce my chair, I discovered that they had only invested in rough moulds to create prototypes. Even so, when the chair launched in 2011, people liked it.

It won a few awards and it was asked for in a lot of projects – but Ahrend couldn’t deliver. So much had been cut from the industrial process that, once the chairs arrived from China, they had to go on to a company in the Netherlands to be finished. It became very expensive.

It was, personally, a disaster and I was always looking to see if there was another way to get the chair made.

I still owned the rights and companies would sometimes ask if they could take it on. But the new moulds would have cost around €250,000. Finding a new producer doesn’t happen automatically.

Then, about four years ago, I got in touch with Circuform, a small company that aims to give industrially designed furniture a circular life. I had always intended Rex to be made from recycled plastic, but I’d never been able to verify

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if that initial version was, and there were aspects of the engineering that I had never been satisfied with. But Circuform invested in the idea to make sure it happened, as well as working with me to correct the engineering.

They created new moulds and I also insisted on a campaign to properly explain the idea behind the piece and its circularity.

The new chair launched in 2021 and has been nominated for the Dutch Design Awards – it’s been a long journey but a real learning experience. It was such a disappointment to work with a historic manufacturer, of whom you have certain expectations, and have the project end badly. It turned out to be much better to work with a smaller company who could back Rex properly.

In fact, over the last decade my fantasy of working with big companies has completely changed. I’m very happy with what Rex became and I’m happy that I took things slower. That’s how I now want to work: focus on adventures and projects that interest me, rather than worry about working for big names.

As told to Oli Stratford.

Politically Erect

Words Ria Roberts Photographs Alastair Philip Wiper

Between the Monkeypox outbreak1 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade – coupled with the ongoing documentation of all aspects of our lives through TikTok in desperate attempts to go viral – Alastair Philip Wiper’s short films and photographs shot inside the Worlds Best Condom Factory in Denmark begin to feel like a fertile allegory for our present moment.

Founded in 1956, Worlds Best today occupies the corner of a cheese factory owned by DKI Group, a relatively anonymous operation that, according to its website, “consists of 10 companies with activities within a wide range of business areas.” Cheese and condoms appear to be two of these.

As you may have guessed from its present location, Worlds Best’s glory days are long gone, a period from the 1970s to 1990s that were, in part, brought on by an increased demand for condoms as a result of the AIDS epidemic. The brand’s standalone factory shuttered in 2018 and the company moved into the aforementioned factory, which specialises in grated varieties for pizza toppings. I can’t help but wonder if the two tribes of workers take their lunch breaks together, comparing notes on quality control.

In the tradition of “How It’s Made”, Wiper’s photographs and videos from this factory grant us access to a rather whimsical production process. The machinery looks as though it has changed little since the 70s and human presence is constant. The effect is something that I imagine Wes Anderson would appreciate, and provides a stark contrast to the outside world, increasingly ruled by algorithms and automation. Videos of the testing process – a condom being inflated to the size of a human torso, 1

a row of water-filled condoms swinging to and fro, a condom-covered metal shaft repeatedly thrusting between two gears – are hypnotising and absurd. Watching these objects subjected to such physical extremes through primitive measures is intensely satisfying. Ironically, I suspect these videos would perform well on TikTok. Since somewhere around the dawn of civilisation, humans have desired to fornicate without risking inconvenient results. In Ancient Rome, condoms were made from linen and animal intestines, and there are unsubstantiated reports that tissue from defeated (human) combatants was used as well. Casanova was anti-condom when he was younger, but came around to their value after contracting STIs. He apparently became accustomed to inflating them before use to make sure there were no holes (if only he’d had Worlds Best).

Since then, condoms have come a long way. Until the 19th century, they were essentially luxury items, primarily used by the wealthy, but a confluence of social activism and industrial innovation (in the form of rubber vulcanisation) served to ultimately bring condoms to the mass market – despite the best efforts of legislation such as the US’s Comstock Laws that attempted to limit their dispersal. In spite of their spread, however, condoms’ fortunes have often been tied to tragedy. STI rates tend to surge in accordance with wars, with access to and promotion of condoms following to varying degrees across different countries throughout the 20th century, while the discovery of AIDS in the early 1980s caused unprecedented promotion of condoms, despite many conservatives’ beliefs that abstinence

Monkeypox is not an STI, it is a disease spread by close contact and fomites, but it does represent a sexual health equity issue for the LGBTQ+ community.

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was the only answer, and that rates of infection amongst homosexuals were a deserved moral consequence for victims’ “sins”.

This brief history of condoms illustrates a cycle we find ourselves facing once again. As issues of sexual health return to the top of news agendas, as bodily autonomy comes under threat, and as misinformation spreads like wildfire, our current moment starts to resemble a game of 4D chess against a sociopathic algorithm. Wiper’s images, in their depiction of a methodical and consistent world, bring this sinister complexity to light through harsh contrast. As I watch a condom being inflated to the point of resembling a birthday balloon, or a half-dozen sheaths filled with water, jiggling back and forth like cartoon characters, or countless little condoms on their little condom conveyor belt, I can’t help but see them as jolly and confused volunteers. They’re bouncing their way to the front lines, striving to protect the fragile human race, wielding their durability and elasticity to the best of their ability.

Worlds Best Condoms are ready for whatever comes at (or in) them, having survived their rigorous and comical testing process. The real question is how we can create government policy, public-health programmes, and scientific innovation that can surpass the efficacy of our latex friends from Denmark. As a wise man once said, “Condoms aren’t completely safe. A friend of mine was wearing one and got hit by a bus.”

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Words Oli Stratford

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Essential Forms-There are several proposed derivations for the word “pastis”, but all swim in similar waters.

The French aperitif, an anise liquor typically served diluted, may take its name from the French “pastiche”, the Occitan “pastís”, or the Provençal “pastisson”, all of which refer to ideas of mixture and combination.

It is, as such, an unusual name for Julien Renault’s new collection of wooden chairs and bistro tables for Danish furniture brand Hay: as picture perfect a representation of brasserie dining as you are likely to find. “It’s very classic,” acknowledges Renault, who says that his design practice is driven by an appreciation of essentialism and a preference for careful detailing as a mode of “beautifying the ordinary”.

“I like to have something that is enough to tell everything,” Renault explains.

“I need a click – a detail that, when I have it, I have the whole design and can build around that.”

In the case of Pastis, this click is a subtly curving wooden profile that serves as an armrest in the chair and a leg in the table. It is a beautiful, characterful element, but not one that distracts from the seeming purity of the collection; were you to ask someone to sketch an archetypal wooden chair, there is a good chance the outcome would resemble Pastis.

“Hay said it’s the most mature chair they’ve ever done,” Renault notes, “maybe even timeless in a way. But I had a particular atmosphere in mind that I wanted to create when designing this.” Rather than revelling in mixture and combination to create a brasserie atmosphere, however, Pastis’s visual simplicity could suggest an exercise in reduction and purification. It is a particularly chair-like chair; a tablelike table. Undiluted, if you will.

Yet there is no such thing as a Platonic chair – the archetypal forms we inherit and rework are culturally determined, having been shaped by contingent historical factors such as

material availability, production capabilities, cost, and aesthetic taste. One chair is no more essentially chair-like than any other – the designs we deem timeless are, in fact, mongrel mixtures of elements that might easily have been otherwise. Take Pastis’s curved profile, for instance. “That’s from After Life,” explains Renault phlegmatically. “The Netflix soap.” While watching the programme during lockdown, Renault noticed a side table set in the background of a scene filmed in an English tearoom. “I just saw the shape of the armrests I wanted in its legs,” he says. “So I sketched it and sent it to Hay.” It is a novel mixture: a classic form that has found renewal through happenstance and Netflix streaming.

Seeming purity, as ever, owes a debt to serendipity. “I just thought it was a nice shape to translate into a chair and table,” summarises Renault. “I found that curve and, suddenly, the atmosphere I had wanted was there.”

Objects in Review

Words India Block

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

One Startup’s Trash-What compels humans to shove things into canals? Whatever the answer, the urge to turf humanmade objects into humanmade waterways leaves cities with a problem: an underwater wasteland of shopping trolleys, bicycles and, increasingly, e-scooters.

If you live somewhere where they’re legal, electrified rental vehicles in acid-bright colours will be a familiar sight. Micromobility startups flush with venture capital have brought an estimated 360,000 e-scooters to streets across Europe. But when these vehicles’ batteries die and their GPS goes on the blink – say, for instance, when someone pushes them into a canal – they fall off grid, becoming a rusting hunk of metal that leeches toxic chemicals into the environment.

Take Malmö, a canal-ringed city on the coast of southern Sweden. In recent years e-scooters have been dredged from Malmö’s waterways by the city, aided by the involvement of volunteers.

“We recovered 250 scooters last year,” reveals diver Pero Rasič. “We tried to contact the companies but they didn’t want to hear.”

One local design studio did hear, however. When Christian Svensson, Jingbei Zheng, Peder Nilsson and Oskar Olsson, the founders of Andra Formen, read about the divers’ work in the local papers, they decided to engage in some guerrilla urban-waste recovery, planning to utilise the e-scooters as a repository of aluminium and other resources. Andra Formen approached Malmö’s divers, who readily agreed to go on an e-scooter fishing trip. The next challenge was taking the recovered vehicles apart. “They’re not made to be recycled or repaired,” says Nilsson.

“There are hundreds of different types of screws and other parts are glued together. You need an axle grinder to take them apart.”

Andra Formen took a nose-to-tail approach to developing the retrieved

e-scooters into a new series of household objects: the E-metabolism series. Large pieces such as the steering column have been Frankensteined into chairs and an angled desk light, while the conductive metals have been used to create haptic lamps that respond to touch with a rainbow display.

Across the collection, branding was kept intact: Andra Formen wants the pieces’ former incarnations to remain recognisable, so as to acknowledge the waste piling up in waterways. “If the scooter companies start talking to us, then they have to realise there is a problem,” explains Svensson. “Then they will be held responsible.” The trademarked logos blaring from the designs are confrontational, daring corporations to claim their waterlogged progeny with a copyright infringement claim.

“Our aim is to start a discussion,” says Zheng. “Hopefully the companies will have a better system in the future.”

Finding ways to repurpose these e-scooters has become necessary given the rate at which the vehicles are replaced.

“We read that it takes two years for one to pay for itself,” says Olsson, “but their average lifespan is only nine months.”

Andra Formen’s local supply of waterlogged waste may be about to dry up, however, with Sweden having moved to ban the culprits from being ridden anywhere but the road from September 2022. “It’s the end of the line for e-scooters on pavements,” said infrastructure minister Tomas Eneroth.

“Playtime’s over.”

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The Everywhere Chair Words Brendan Cormier Images Philippe Thibault

When I first moved to London in 2014, I used to play a game of “name that chair” while walking through the city. I had just taken up a job as a design curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and while I was well versed in the canon of architecture and urbanism, any design object smaller than a shed seriously challenged my historical and critical reflexes.

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The photographs accompanying this essay were taken at the Tolix factory in Autun, France.

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Were you to ask me what Thonet was at the time, I might have told you it was a French pastis. As a panicked corrective, I set upon a rapid study of the 20th century’s great chairs – figuring that such knowledge constituted the lowest bar for being called a design curator – and put together a kind of cheat sheet that could protect me from any embarrassing future exchange with colleagues.

The chair I came across the most was the 1930s Tolix Chaise A by Xavier Pauchard. It’s an easy one to spot. Made of pressed sheet metal, it has a distinct silhouette and comes in a variety of bright colours, which are often set in contrast with a restaurant or café’s otherwise muted colour palette. It’s a 20thcentury chair that made a lot of sense for the 21stcentury food and drink industry: it provided a punchy accent note in Instagram photos to drive online interest, and its metal body made it long-lasting and versatile enough for indoor and outdoor use. It also matched well with what was probably – and unfortunately –

A Chaise A meant that the host venue met some basic – if fleeting – criteria of cool and, with that, had a licence to charge more for everything. the dominant aesthetic of the early 2010s: a kind of industrial-nostalgia-chic replete with Edison lightbulbs, unfinished wooden surfaces, and random cast-iron parts from factory surplus sales.

It was a genuine thrill to spot my first Tolix, providing validation that my chair knowledge was improving.

It became apparent rather quickly, however, that this wasn’t a rare find. Tolix was experiencing a moment of raging popularity in post-recession London. And quickly thereafter, everywhere, it seemed. In Shenzhen, for instance, where I regularly travelled for work from 2014 to 2018, I saw the cafés and restaurants in the popular nightlife districts of OCT-Loft and Shekou begin to fill up with the Chaise A. The same went for other places I visited: a studio in Toronto; a snack

bar in Bangkok; a creative district in Dubai. More than its Instagram-friendliness and rugged functionality, the Chaise A seemed to be playing another role. It served as an immediate signifier of “design”, in that annoyingly superficial and pecuniary sense of the term. A Chaise A meant that the host venue met some basic – if fleeting – criteria of cool and, with that, had a licence to charge more for everything.

Like all things that ride on a rubric of trends, the Chaise A has likely started its slow decline into the unfashionable. Its ubiquity has already been noted.

In January 2019, Vox published an article about the chair titled ‘The Metal Chair that’s in Every Restaurant’, highlighting how the Chaise A is, unusually, available for purchase at style guardians such as Design Within Reach, high street mainstays like Urban Outfitters, restaurant-specific retailers including Superior Seating, and at bargain sellers like Bob’s Discount Furniture – all at the same time, all at wildly different price points. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, uses a distressed metallic version as her main work chair (which either means she doesn’t work very much, or, like the chair, has a back of steel), while Leon, the popular fast-food chain, provides red versions in all of its restaurants.

Just two months after the Vox piece, Vice waded into the world of design criticism with an excoriating hit-piece bluntly titled ‘Dear Restaurants: This Chair Sucks’. Simply referring to the offending item as “The Chair”, without ever mentioning its actual name, the piece equates it to a disease that has taken over the restaurant world, subjecting sitters everywhere to millions of hours of discomfort. Clearly, the Chaise A must go.

All of this mystified me. How did this chair become so popular? Its manufacturer Tolix was hardly a global brand. It had no major marketing campaigns that I knew of. It didn’t fit the model of any other company that achieves global domination. And yet, in Chaise A, it had seemingly produced a chair that had joined a limited group of designs both celebrated and reviled for their ubiquity. Perhaps a closer look at these chairs could offer some clues.

For decades, the all-injection-moulded-plastic chair referred to as a monobloc – more a type of chair than a specific design – was widely derided (and then partly revered) by design enthusiasts for its worldwide success. The monobloc was popular because it was cheap, but its global spread was aided by the fact that

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no patent was filed when early versions went to market in the 1970s. It meant that anyone with some plastic pellets, and an (admittedly expensive) industrial mould could get into the business. While most experts generally pinpoint mass-market monobloc production as having started in France, different companies around the world, from the US, to Italy, to Taiwan, jumped in, fuelling the global expansion of this chair type. Commenting on how ubiquity gives the chair a peculiar, placeless effect in 2011, media scholar Ethan Zuckerman sharply remarked: “The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context.

Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are.” Perhaps as a defence against this placelessness, the city of Basel banned this chair from public space between 2008 to 2017.

Lovely as Zuckerman’s quote is, there have been other chairs that have had the same non-place effect before. Take the case of Thonet (N.B. not a French pastis). Chairs by Gebrüder Thonet were the first to attain an impressive global reach, having been pioneered

by Michael Thonet before being carried on by his sons in the middle of the 19th century. Using a novel manufacturing technique of steam-bending beechwood into elegant frames, the company implemented ingenious methods to reduce costs and reach new markets in Europe and further afield. Flipping through images in the V&A’s photograph archive, I can find examples of the distinctive bentwood frame popping up all over the place: a shot by André Kertész of a French holiday town in 1929; a desolate diner from Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958); hungry children on a Bradford estate captured by Don McCullin in 1978; an anonymous album called ‘Views of Africa’ from 1910, showing a Thonet on a veranda in a Ugandan village. A friend of mine likes to collect archival images of bentwood chairs in Iran, where curiously, they are called “Polish Chairs” (Sandali-ye Lahestani) due to the 120,000 Polish refugees who came to Iran during the Second World War, who presumably brought some of their bentwoods with them.

Unlike the creators of the monobloc, Michael Thonet was savvy enough to acquire a patent in 1852, which gave his company protection for giving “wood various curves and forms by cutting and regluing.”

When this expired in 1869, however, the market was flooded with bentwood furniture: pieces that were

often exact copies of what Thonet was offering, marketed with the same model names. The companies J & J Kohn and Mundus, the latter of which was formed from a group of smaller bentwood manufacturers, were major competitors, and would later merge with Gebrüder Thonet in 1921 to become the largest furniture manufacturer in the world.

At some point in a chair’s global rise, the idea of the chair (its desirability, its use, its spread) becomes more interesting than who is making money from it.

As cunning a business as Gebrüder Thonet was, its ascendance to global chair status was only aided by the incredible amount of copied versions coming onto the market. Although design enthusiasts may shriek at this statement, the brutal truth is that most people don’t care who makes a chair and they definitely don’t know how to look for the clues that would help distinguish one manufacturer from another. In those photos I mentioned in the V&A archives, I can’t tell if I’m looking at authentic Thonet chairs or ones from their competitors. To make these distinctions is simply to recognise who is getting paid. At some point in a chair’s global rise, the idea of the chair (its desirability, its use, its spread) becomes more interesting than who is making money from it.

A handful of other chairs could also be thrown into the mix. Alvar Aalto’s Stool 60, produced by Artek and knocked off in abundance by Ikea with its Frosta; Arne Jacobsen’s 3107; the Eames DSS stacking chair; Emeco’s 1006 Navy chair. All these have a few crucial things in common: they are sturdy, stackable, and have the potential to be made cheaply. Most importantly, they’ve been copied endlessly.

Like any good brand, the Tolix story is well documented – published enthusiastically and in almost mythological terms on the company’s website. It begins in Burgundy in 1908 with an industrial sheet-metal manufacturer 36

named Xavier Pauchard. Pauchard discovered how sheet metal could be protected from rust by dipping it in molten zinc and, a decade later, he established a furniture business that would eventually go by the name of Tolix, turning galvanised steel into pieces of furniture suitable for outdoor use. By 1934, Pauchard had designed the first iteration of the Chaise A, which sparked some early enthusiasm: namely, it was used in the maiden voyage of the Normandie ocean liner to New York City in 1935, and in 1937 the chair was featured at the Paris Universal Exhibition. As a practical café chair, however, it didn’t stack well, so the design was refined over the next two decades until 1956, when the classic Tolix we know today was released (25 chairs could be now stacked to a height of 2.3m).

In the 50s and 60s the company was thriving, servicing a booming post-war economy driven by spa towns, beachside resorts, and street cafés, which all required ample seating. In addition to the Chaise A, the company also produced a bar stool, the Tabouret H, which has seen its own meteoric rise, and several variations of both chair and stool. In the 70s, the brand got an additional boost when Terence Conran, founder of Habitat and leading champion of “good design” in the UK, extolled the virtues of the chair’s simple design, stocking it in his shops. Incidentally, I have spotted a tattered Chaise A behind the Design Museum, which Conran founded, as well as stacks of blue, white and red versions in the back-of-house area of the Conran-owned Bibendum restaurant, surely both legacies of this boosterism.

By the early 2000s, however, the company was in trouble. Some of its larger contracts were drying up and it faced financial difficulties. In 2004, when a court order threatened the company’s liquidation, Chantal Andriot, who had joined the company in 1974 as its chief financial officer, made the bold decision to take over Tolix and rescue the brand.

Andriot implemented a host of changes, including product personalisation, factory modernisation, and some attempts at brand protection.

In 2018, I met with Kilian Schindler, a Karlsruhebased industrial designer, at Salone del Mobile in Milan.

He was tending to the Tolix stand at the sprawling furniture fair, showcasing several new products made under his creative direction of the company. He had been hired by Andriot in 2014, in part to think of ways to evolve the Tolix brand. I first came across Schindler’s name in 2015, with a project he curated called Face to

Face, in which eight designers and studios including Konstantin Grcic, Formafantasma, and Bethan Laura Wood artfully reinterpreted the Chaise A. The project can be seen as research into what constitutes the essential qualities of a chair – what makes a Tolix a Tolix. It’s an important question when your business is creating new works that diverge from the original while retaining its core spirit.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge for legacy brands such as Tolix. How can you continue to capitalise on the success of your big hit, while testing the market with new designs as a hedge against any future decline in sales? Emeco, producer of the iconic Navy Chair, is in a similar situation. Over the past few years, it has either commissioned small updates to its classic chair, such as Jasper Morrison’s upholstered Navy Officer, or else completely new designs from the likes of Barber Osgerby, Naoto Fukasawa and Norman Foster.

Again, Gebrüder Thonet provide an early precedent.

Although models such as the Thonet 14, designed in 1859, continued to be bestsellers for decades, by the turn of the 20th century the company had begun inviting Viennese designers to add to its catalogue, commissioning Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Josef Hoffmann. In the late 20s, Thonet took an even bolder step by swapping beechwood for tubular steel and producing some of the most iconic furniture pieces of the modern movement, including Marcel Breuer’s B32 and B33 chairs, Mies van der Rohe’s MR Chair, and the Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand.

With these challenges in mind, I mentioned to Schindler my interest in visiting the Tolix factory to see how the chairs are made, and how the enterprise works today. Both him and Andriot, who was also present at the stand, happily obliged. We set a date for two weeks.

The Tolix factory is situated in an industrial park on the outskirts of Autun, a small city nestled in the hills of Burgundy with charming Roman ruins and a medieval cathedral. The factory itself is modestly sized. When Andriot took over the company, she was working with just 20 employees, but has grown it to 65 employees since then. A lot of effort went into modernising the machinery, and the factory was retrofitted to meet high environmental standards. All of this shows.

When I go on a tour of the shop floor, I see a clean, well-organised space, neatly divided into workstations

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that correspond to the manufacturing process. There are five different components: the legs; an X-brace; the seat; the back; and a tubular steel back frame.

After the sheet metal is cut, the parts go to various stations to be pressed into form. This is more laborious than I expected. The legs themselves require 12 different stamping processes to get their distinctive shape. After this, the parts are spot-welded together, buffed and painted. Everything is made to order, customisable to a degree in terms of colours, finishes, and varnishes, as well as the occasional addition of words, logos or patterns, which has been important for the business.

The mood is remarkably relaxed. Several workers take a quick break from their station to welcome me and say hi to the sales manager walking me around.

It’s an efficient workspace, pumping out a steady amount of product, but without the stress of the more hardcore assembly line I might have imagined.

If I were to ever work in a factory, this would be ideal.

Later, however, I’m told that retention is difficult.

There is a loyal contingent of older workers, but younger employees tend to work only six to eight month stints before moving on to non-factory jobs.

Andriot offers to show me something else that may pique my interest just a short drive away. In the car, she talks passionately about her love of colours, landscapes, and how she enjoys painting at home.

She likes to think of herself as having a creative eye, and half-jokingly lists herself as one of Tolix’s designers on the brand’s website. Her insistence on being seen as creative is likely a tic developed from decades of having to convince people that someone with a background in finance can take a creative lead.

And, indeed, Andriot has made several design decisions since taking over the company, including bringing back a range of colours and personalisation options. Her priority, however, was to position Tolix as a design company – something the Pauchard family never quite embraced. For them, Tolix was simply supplying useful furniture. Andriot wanted to shine a light on what they had been neglecting – a good design story.

We pull up to an anonymous and slightly dilapidated warehouse, and suddenly this neglect becomes clear.

It’s a vast storeroom of dust-covered Tolix ephemera, collected over the course of a century of operation.

Andriot takes me to one room in particular, packed to the brim with different chairs: a taxonomy of the different experiments and iterations Pauchard toyed

with in coming up with the Chaise A and other products.

Little of this is properly catalogued and so a detailed design history of the company is at risk of being lost.

At some point Andriot asks me bluntly what the point of my journey is and I begin to feel flustered.

I wanted to know why and how Tolix got everywhere.

And now that I’ve seen the factory, it’s clear that this 65-person, lean manufacturing unit is not the powerhouse creating the design’s massive global supply. I want to know a bit more about the copies, so I inquire how they feel about knock-offs. Andriot lets out a sigh. She doesn’t like them, she says.

It’s clear that this 65-person, lean manufacturing unit is not the powerhouse creating the design’s massive global supply.

They are often made poorly but presented as Tolix chairs, which isn’t good for the brand. She tells me a few measures they’ve taken to counteract this.

One is to work with lawyers to trademark the brand.

Copyright law varies from country to country but, in general, legislation prevents mass-produced utilitarian objects such furniture and clothing from having strict protection. This is one reason why trademarks (ie logos) have taken off. While you can’t sue someone for making a bag shaped like a Louis Vuitton design, you can sue for the LV logos printed all over it. With this in mind, Andriot has implemented a small design change to the chair – stamping the Tolix logo on the back. Prior to this, the chairs had no explicit marker of authentication.

Schindler, however, is more ambivalent about the issue. He cites the example of Vuitton, whose bags are bootlegged everywhere, yet the brand still thrives.

He sees knock-offs as playing a potentially supportive role, increasing brand awareness. Once you build enough recognition, you will gain customers who want to invest in the real thing.

At the end of an all-too-short day, I say goodbye to my generous hosts, and am graciously given a lift to the train station. I feel, on one hand, uplifted by what I’ve seen: a legacy manufacturer, still managing

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to keep an industrial operation going in France, with high standards of product quality and labour practice.

On the other hand, it’s also clear that I’ve only just seen the tip of an iceberg buoyed up by an exponential amount of reproductions. To peer beneath the surface would rapidly complicate the picture.

There are thousands of paths you can follow online to find Tolix chairs both real and fake. Knowing where a retailer is sourcing their product, however, is a little bit trickier. Even chairs explicitly marketed as Tolix Chaise A will not always lead you to an authentic provider. The easiest tell as to whether something comes from the Tolix factory is price point. Design Within Reach and the Conran Shop, for instance, market their chairs at around the £300 mark and are careful to include images that clearly show the trademark stamped on the back. Most other retailers will offer knock-off versions of the chairs for substantially less. Even shopping at a big-name retailer is no guarantee that they are sourcing their product from Tolix.

As a case in point, a search on Walmart’s official website for “metal chairs” results in dozens of different offers for the same Chaise A-style chair, all cheap but all at slightly different price points and in slightly different colours and finishes, from companies you’ve never heard of. The language reads like a malfunctioning SEO-optimisation algorithm: “Furmax Set of 4 Metal Dining Chairs, Black $124.99”; “SmileMart Dining Chair, Set of 4, Black $155.43”; “Aiden Design Metal Dining Chairs with Wooden Seat, Set of 4, Gun Metal Gray $229.86”; “Costway Set of 4 Style Metal Side Dining Chair Wood Seat Stackable Bistro Café $229.99”; “Flash Furniture Commercial Grade Metal IndoorOutdoor Stackable Chair Orange $81.48.” And on and on. There are dozens of entries like this, all essentially hawking the same chair.

I’ve lost several hours going down internet rabbit holes looking up these companies. Sometimes you get a straightforward website, like with Furmax’s About Us page, which clearly states it is a furniture producer based in Ningbo, China. Flash Furniture brings you to an American site which requires a login and password, and which lists an address in Georgia, but another Google entry states that its manufacturing is in China.

Smilemart brings you to a Nepalese site selling face cream. Googling most of these company names won’t lead you to a company website at all, but to Amazon,

Wayfair, and countless other e-commerce sites, all selling the same thing.

Where Google fails, Alibaba wins. Since much of its traffic is for wholesale export, the Chinese e-commerce website is a treasure trove of manufacturing information.

Eager to visit a factory, I started searching for Tolix on the site, and encountered the same Twitter-bot-runamok language: “Foshan vintage sedie metal tolixs sillas chair” and “Do old Distressed Industrial Metal Dining Side Chairs tolix chairs metal chairs,” with hundreds of suppliers to choose from. Manufacturers are clearly marked, with more prosaic names such as Bazhou Dongduan Mingyou Furniture Factory or Langfang Lefeng Furniture Co. For each company, there is also a company profile, which lists the factory location, range of employees, a breakdown of the regional markets it supplies to, and factory inspection certification. Additionally, these profiles often come with promotional videos that show the factory floor in action. I had been planning a trip to China to see

A search on Walmart results in dozens of different offers for the same Chaise A-style chair, all from companies you’ve never heard of. how off-brand Tolix chairs were made, and here, with just a few clicks, I was watching it, admittedly in shaky phone-camera video, from the comfort of my own home.

My resolve to see a factory remained fixed, however, and I narrowed my search to Foshan, one of the main furniture manufacturing cities in China, and also close enough to Shenzhen to make a day-trip possible. Once I had noted down a handful of sites, I asked my Shenzhen colleague, Siyun, to see if she could contact them to ask if any would be open to us making a site visit. Siyun suggested that we needed a good excuse, and so she proposed we go with a local product designer who was familiar with the area; I would pose as her client.

Qiyun Deng, a designer for the Shanghai-based design practice Benwu Studio, had been spending the past few years in Foshan, working with injection-moulding companies to refine a set of bio-plastic tableware

Essay

that she had begun as a diploma project at ECAL in Switzerland. She graciously agreed to be our fixer.

production of more chairs. It’s like a self-reproducing system: chairs making chairs. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a lone Navy chair sat amongst the others.

The site manager nods and says, “Ah yes, we can make that too.” I immediately imagine this loose framework of a space being rapidly reconfigured at a moment’s notice when an order from the other side of the world comes in for an Emeco knock-off.

Our tour lasts all of 15 minutes. There isn’t much to see beyond the production steps that I am now well versed in, and I’m conscious of overstepping my bounds, having already tested the manager’s patience and incredulity for our visit in the first place. Back in the taxi, I imagine setups similar to what I have just seen playing out a thousand times over across China: a barebones shed fitted with equipment that has likely been retooled many times over, pumping out orders for Tolix chairs and countless other things. I think about how these sheds are tethered to the world via online e-commerce behemoths such as Amazon and Alibaba, but also how a world of circulating imagery – from print magazines and coffee table books on design, to Pinterest boards, and interior renders on Behance – feeds into it, acting as an echo chamber for certain styles and objects. There’s a strangeness to typing “vintage metal chair” into a search engine in London one day and finding myself in a shed in the north of Foshan two days later that I can’t quite get over.

Qiyun suggests we see one other place while I’m in Foshan: Lecong Wholesale Furniture Market. It claims to be the world’s largest wholesale furniture market (“the world’s largest” being a common refrain here), stretching several kilometres along a main road in a series of multi-storey buildings filled to the brim with all the furniture you can imagine. We walk past a few of the more low-key establishments, which, in their eclecticism look like the furniture section of a charity shop on steroids. Then we get to the climax: the Louvre, a capacious high-end combination shopping mall, event space and hotel. We walk through corridors flanked by tastefully arranged showrooms before arriving in a colossal atrium, the floor largely filled with massage chairs and pool tables, surrounded by five storeys of more elegantly designed showrooms.

Just beyond is a large open space for events, framed by neoclassical facades and a Calatrava-esque latticed column blooming into a roof-structure. It’s all ripped straight from the playbook of a Macau casino.

We meet Qiyun at Foshan West Station, having taken the high-speed train from Shenzhen and passed through a large swathe of the Pearl River Delta, one of the most densely populated regions of the world and home to an outlandish amount of manufacturing.

From the train station, it’s another hour-long taxi ride to the northern outskirts of the city, the landscape dissolving into a patchwork of fields punctuated by random residential towers, anonymous industrial sheds, and the constant rumble of trucks. Finally, we pull up at a shed on a barren street. From the outside there’s no indication of what goes on inside.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a lone Navy chair sat amongst the others. The site manager nods and says, “Ah yes, we can make that too.”

We’re greeted by the site manager, who kindly offers us water, as it’s a characteristically stifling and muggy day, as well as brochures. On entering the production site, we see some boxes of chairs ready for shipment, followed by piles of the back frames waiting to be welded. Workstations are somewhat chaotic: at one welding station a worker is using a Tolix chair as a work surface to weld other Tolix chairs. Around the corner, another with a grinder has set up a plywood sheet to stop sparks from hitting passers-by. At the stamping stations, large fans keep staff cool. Despite the relative shabbiness of the production space, the steps are identical to the production process I saw in France. I had come half expecting to discover some ingenious innovations in the design of the chair, making it possible to produce them at a fraction of the cost.

The only corner-cutting I really saw was in health and safety regulations, and lower wages.

Tolix chairs are scattered everywhere in the space – in production, as chairs on the line and as props for the 44

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In many ways, Lecong is old school in the way that all wholesale markets are old school. They are what the internet looked like before the internet – a great convergence of things in physical space all at once.

And yet the internet doesn’t have the same visualising effect that a market has – the ability to take a step back and see the forest for the trees. The internet is all trees, seen one page, one click at a time. Going to Lecong is, thus, a useful way to understand our modern design landscape and the vast flows of goods in China that move from production site to container ship, to end destination, all strangely touching on this one hub of activity. I leave utterly exhausted, but somehow feeling some pieces of the puzzle connecting.

By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair to a three-dimensional meme.

I started out wanting to figure out why a chair had become ubiquitous. In the end, however, it had little to do with any individual entrepreneur or company ruthlessly conquering a global market. Although we can pinpoint recent examples, those stories already seem to belong in the past and to an outdated model of business. Instead, the forces at work with the Chaise A are bit more diffuse, related to how completely and utterly the manufacturing landscape has been remade by e-commerce in the past 20 years. These changes may be harder to see or comprehend in the Global North, where manufacturing has already been largely stripped away by cost-cutting and union-busting, but in China, which has been a leading player in shaping e-commerce, the change is clear and present. It’s a world where images can be turned into any number of objects overnight; where entire villages are retooled into decentralised production sites for niche products online; and where a French metal bistro chair from the 1950s can become a viral production phenomenon.

Comparisons to the internet are hard to avoid, in part because the internet has become so integral

to the existence of an object. We could think, for instance, about memes. Nobody knows the original author of a meme and you can’t identify where a meme gets made. It simply circulates and circulates, until people don’t find any use in circulating it anymore.

Furniture today behaves like memes: you see an Instagram post with a chair, you like it, an ad pops up for more things that look like that. At the same time, a feedback loop is being pushed onto buyers and manufacturers to produce more of something.

Those appear in more photographs that get circulated online, and so on and so on. By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair with a great backstory to a threedimensional meme. In a nutshell, that’s the answer I was looking for.

If we can draw a critique of any of this, it’s not that the process is an injustice towards Tolix. I side with Schindler in thinking that the circulation of copies only helps to boost brand value. Instead, the real problem is the perverse same-sameness that this system seems to create. Charles Eames was once asked by a Swedish journalist how he felt when he saw his and Ray’s furniture being used in a Swedish airport. Eames replied that it was flattering, but surely the airport could have chosen from any number of great Swedish designs. And here is the same problem, albeit at an exponential scale. There are thousands of great chair designs that exist, and tens of thousands of designers. Factories are more flexible than ever to respond to market analysis, which itself is supposedly able to pick through an increasingly fine-grained consumer segmentation that identifies all our most personal bespoke desires.

We could be awash in an eclectic rainbow of designs.

And yet, here we all are, sitting on the same cold metal chair, drinking a pastis. E N D Research time and travel for this piece were made possible by a Hong Kong Design Trust Seed Grant.

Essay

Delft Blue Rhymes with Fake Handbags

Words Tetsuo Mukai Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser A few years back, I was in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, staying in a fashion district that mostly sold trendy, affordable clothes and accessories. Most were counterfeit items: Supreme box logo tees, the latest Balenciaga jumpers and, of course, fake bags styled after brands such as Chanel and Gucci. Some of these pieces were so creative and original that they could be considered sophisticated reiterations of an idea rather than mere copies, featuring new colour schemes and logos placed subversively on items that the original brand would never touch. But these fakes – which are typically now vilified as examples of the dishonest practice of hijacking someone else’s intellectual property – were not always seen this way.

Delft Blue earthenware, a Dutch pottery style that was extremely popular in the 1700s, was born out of people’s desire to own blue and white china, a coveted form of Chinese porcelain known for its sophisticated making

technique and exoticised patterns.

Blue and white was made exclusively in China and was widely regarded as superior in quality to its European counterparts, but the European market experienced a lack of supply following the death of the Wanli Emperor in the 17th century. This condition gave birth to the Netherlands’ homegrown version of the famous porcelain: a cheaper, tin-glazed clay version manufactured in the city of Delft. It was a creation from a time before widespread awareness of the harms of cultural appropriation, and the lack of rules and regulations against trademark infringement meant everything was fair game in the wild West.

Although Delft Blue eventually fell out of fashion, it is now valued as a collectable in its own right, not just as a cheaper knockoff. Perhaps modern counterfeit handbags, most of them made in China, will be appreciated in the future on their own merits. Already, they demonstrate mastery of many things: an ability to imitate expensive goods on the cheap; an understanding of cultural

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shifts and trends; and a sophisticated use of global logistics and supply chains.

These fake bags can be understood as not only making profit on the back of someone else’s work but as providing a commentary on the intricate history of cultural appropriation and commerce from a non-European perspective.

In response to these counterfeits, Gucci launched its Fake/Not clothing and accessories collection in 2020, which takes inspiration from the fake Guccis of this world through design nods such as the bicolour stripe logo (instead of the original tricolour) that was commonly seen among fakes in the 80s. There is a historical symmetry here: when Chinese makers realised that Delft Blue was gaining recognition, they began creating imitations of the earthenware to export to the European market. Four centuries on, we’re completing the cycle of duplication once again.

Design Draft

Is Design Ju

Het Nieuwe

s #1

st a Game?

Instituut x D

isegno

Contents 1 A Love Letter 6 Idle Browsing 12 Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait 20 Architecture School: Pay to Play 26 When the Words Don’t Exist

Editors Delany Boutkan (researcher, Het Nieuwe Instituut) d.boutkan@hetnieuweinstituut.nl Oli Stratford (editor-in-chief, Disegno) oli@disegnojournal.com Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com Subeditor Ann Morgan Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com Design Drafts laureates Gijs de Boer, Chinouk Filique de Miranda, Kathryn Larsen, Malika Leiper, Bianca Nozaki-Nasser and Andrew Pasquier Commissioners Aric Chen (general and artistic director, Het Nieuwe Instituut) Francien van Westrenen (head of agency, Het Nieuwe Instituut) Design Drafts jury members Aric Chen, Marjanne van Helvert and Nanjala Nyabola

Special thanks to Maureen Mooren (art director, Het Nieuwe Instituut), the Het Nieuwe Instituut research team (Janilda Bartolomeu Leite, Kirtis Clarke, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Marten Kuijpers, Setareh Noorani, Federica Notari, Wietske Nutma and Carolina Pinto), and Marina Otero Verzier (head of Social Design, Design Academy Eindhoven and former director of research, Het Nieuwe Instituut) Contact us Studio 3, the Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ disegnojournal.com — Het Nieuwe Instituut Museumpark 25 3015CB Rotterdam hetnieuweinstituut.nl

One of the pleasures of contemporary design is its complexity.

Although design is often still principally addressed through the lens of industrial manufacturing, contemporary design culture has come to be understood through a multitude of different points of view.

As our understanding of what a designer is, and in what languages to speak about the profession, has grown more complex, so too has design emerged as a means of reimagining social systems, of exploring diverse cultural identities, of navigating commerce, and much more (or, alternatively, none of the above).

Given this multiplicity within the field, what does it mean to write about design today? In spring 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut (the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture) partnered with Disegno to launch the first edition of Design Drafts, a programme that aims to nurture up-and-coming design writers and forms of writing. Following an open call, a small group of designers, writers and researchers were invited into the programme.

Over the course of the summer, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Disegno’s teams worked with the applicants to develop original pieces of long-form design writing around the programme’s central theme: is design just a game? The writers were invited to interpret this provocation in any way they chose – a critique of solutionism; an analysis of gamification; an assessment of the field’s own internal structures – and were encouraged to explore alternative formats and futures for design writing.

In the coming pages, we are very proud to share the work that the laureates of the first edition of Design Drafts produced. From graphic novels, internal monologues and reframed design histories, to love letters and memes, the results are experimental, insightful and personal, exploring fresh perspectives in design discourse.

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

A love letter with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser

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All images by Bianca Nozaki-Nasser.

Dear Designer, There’s no way this letter will be exhaustive, or even fully explanatory.

But that’s rarely the case with love letters anyways.

When we think of love letters, it’s easy to focus on their sweetness. But to me, a love letter is not just about the exchange of adoration or praise. When I think of love letters, my mind goes to the gift that is Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989.

This collection of letters is a glimpse into the intimate friendship of two revolutionary lesbian, Black, feminist writers. One of the things I love about their correspondence is that Parker and Lorde constantly push each other’s thinking forward. They remind us that love is not free from discomfort. Actually, it is their mutual love that carries them through moments of tension towards courageous questions and productive conversation. In The Black Scholar’s 1973 interview with James Baldwin, Baldwin calls forward the very thing about love that continues to bring me back to Lorde and Parker’s letters. “If I love you,” he writes, “I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

I believe that love letters are the perfect place to struggle through difficult questions.

I’m currently writing to you from Los Angeles (occupied Gabrielino-Tongva land), but I grew up in Orange County, the home of Disneyland and West Coast American conservatism. When I was three, my mom framed a scribble that I insisted was Big Bird and I’ve been calling myself an artist ever since. During my more formal design education, I heard a lot about how designs often start with science fiction. I was taught that design is a tool that helps define our world through spaces, objects and systems.

At its core, science fiction is a tool too. Through speculative storytelling we imagine far off futures and explore their potential consequences. It made sense that we would marry the two.

Take a look at Black Mirror, a Netflix show about a not-so-distant dystopian future that re-popularised the connection between design and science fiction. The show vignettes fictional pieces of future technology, such as in ‘Be Right Back’, an episode exploring the AI clone of

a widow’s recently deceased husband, powered by his social-media data (of course). The show’s portrayal of the future evokes a visceral response: the clone that was meant to soothe the widow’s suffering inevitably haunts her as a not-quite-living reminder of her loss.

Each episode of Black Mirror moves these kinds of far-off futures from something you think about to something that you can actually feel.

For designers, one of science fiction’s most useful requirements is the necessity to suspend disbelief. In order to be immersed in possibility, you must, for at least a few moments, ignore the current constraints of reality. Audiences are shown how science fiction and design can be powerful tools for world-building, but at the same time the worlds that designers dream of will never exist in a vacuum – even in our imaginations, what we create unwittingly embodies systems of power. In this sense, Black Mirror acts as a provocation: are we really building new worlds or are we just redecorating old ones?

In her book Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin situates designs as physical realisations of narratives. Not unlike Black Mirror, Benjamin shows us that objects reflect legacies of beliefs and systems that are typically presented to us as neutral or universal. Computer code, for instance, is something that Benjamin identifies as acting as narrative, operating “within powerful systems of meaning that render some things visible, others invisible, and create a vast array of distortions and dangers.” But instead of only speculating about the future, Benjamin’s work traces the insidious past of white supremacy to the present.

Consider the spirometer, a medical device used to measure lung function that is designed to automatically adjust for race. This adjustment assumes a smaller lung capacity for Black and Asian patients compared to their white counterparts. In practice this means that a Black person’s decline in lung function would have to be 17 per cent greater than a white person’s before they would be able to qualify for access to disability resources. This design feature for racial difference in lung function originates from chattel slavery. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia used the belief of biological differences between

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

racial groups to uphold the idea that forced labour improved the lung function of enslaved people. This false argument was repeatedly used to justify the gruesome violence of chattel slavery.

Despite many calls to eliminate racial correction from the spirometer’s design, race correction is still used today to inform everything from surgical anaesthesia to pulmonary function for patients recovering from Covid-19.

Studies released in 2021 from the University of San Francisco and Columbia University found that, as a result of race-based formulas, fewer Black patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other lung diseases are diagnosed correctly compared to white people with the same test results on a spirometer. Designs do not just provoke the future, but also give power to the past. The refusal to design and adopt a new spirometer is a choice that, nearly 200 years later, continues to execute the violence of white supremacy.

Regardless of a designer’s intent, design choices tell us a lot about who we deem worthy of wealth, power and even life. These design choices are not accidents, but reflections of the worlds we choose to build.

So, whose worlds are you building? I told you that I live in Los Angeles, where, according to the 2020 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority count, more than 66,000 people are currently unhoused. Year after year, there are countless hack-a-thon-esque open calls asking for designers to “design for good” and “solve homelessness”.

Responses to these types of calls for work can be varied, but frequently operate on speculative neoliberal political imaginaries.

In her essay, ‘The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism’, designer Lauren Williams explains that “inappropriately scoped problems and the designed media and interventions that respond to them[…] rely on hyper-individualised interpretations of systems-scale problems.” Proposals such as winter jackets that transform into tents for the unhoused (a design solution that resurfaces every few years) privilege an individual designer’s entrepreneurship over the realities of the problem they are claiming to address. This type of

capitalist solutionism invites us to live inside the imaginations of people so empowered by privilege that they’ve turned social design into a game they aspire to win, sustained by individualism shrouded in good intentions.

If designers fail to understand or even acknowledge their own relationship to systems such as white supremacy and capitalism, then it is impossible for them to speculatively reimagine them. Without this starting point of self-awareness, designerly attempts to solve social issues just become objects that uphold them.

Unfortunately, all the cleverly designed paper straws in the world won’t offset the weekly carbon contribution of celebrities’ cross-town private-jet commutes.

But, as I’m writing this to you, I have to admit something: I feel pressure, if not obligation, to perform the same type of solutionism that I just critiqued. It is a practice to remind myself that the expectation to provide a silver-bullet solution or a neat prescriptive list of actions to address the roots of imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, ableist patriarchy is exactly what I’m calling for designers to abandon. But, we do have to start somewhere. At this moment, all I can really offer is how I’ve begun to piece things together for myself.

In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, one of our most influential anti-colonial theorists, states that the coloniser does not recognise the humanity of the colonised. In response to this, Fanon proposes an inverse reality that he calls “the real leap [of] introducing invention into existence.”

I mentioned how science fiction’s suspension of disbelief has been cited by some as a starting point for design, and Fanon asks the colonised to do the same: to begin by suspending their own disbelief in order to reject the limitations of colonisation and recreate themselves. “[It] is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis,” Fanon writes, “that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.”

Those people who have always been the first to experience the impacts of collapsing societal systems – queer and/or trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, working class, immigrants, people with disabilities – have always taken “the real leap” that Fanon describes.

Whether it is asking you to imagine a world without prisons, police brutality,

or borders, these communities have always been at the forefront of the suspension of disbelief. Not as futurists, but rather as people recreating themselves, sometimes without any other choice, to initiate their own cycles of freedom.

For the last four years I’ve worked as a designer and creative director, partnering mostly with progressive grassroots organisations and community organisers to mobilise our communities to take action on issues that matter to them. Working with organisers has shown me an entire body of work, a history of speculative world-building, that designers rarely study.

Social movements are not just about fighting injustice, they are also about constructing alternatives to what exists. Organisers begin with a similar challenge as designers do: to create and physicalise narratives that represent a preferred future.

Moms 4 Housing, formed in 2019, is a collective of marginally housed mothers “uniting mothers, neighbours, and friends to reclaim housing for the Oakland community from the big banks and real estate speculators.” In November 2019, the collective occupied a home that had been vacant for years in a historically Black neighbourhood in West Oakland.

The house was owned by Catamount Properties, a subsidiary of real-estate investment firm Wedgewood, which has a history of buying hundreds of Bay Area foreclosed homes and renovating them to flip for profit.

The mothers occupying the home were met with an eviction notice, issued

by Alameda County officers, armed with AR-15 rifles and dressed in tactical gear, who stormed the house with armoured vehicles. The mothers stood their ground in the face of this militarised response.

Even after losing their eviction appeal in court, the group occupying the property went toe to toe with Wedgewood, and won. Less than one week after being served their eviction notice, Moms 4 Housing leaders announced an agreement with Wedgewood Inc., the City of Oakland, and the Oakland Community Land Trust to acquire the home. After their win, Moms 4 Housing received calls from groups advocating for equitable housing all over the world. Less than six months later we saw similar successes for groups

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such as Reclaiming Our Homes Los Angeles and Reclaim SF in San Francisco.

Moms 4 Housing’s “real leap” created a rip in reality, a portal from the present to a future in which homes were returned into the hands of the communities from which they had been taken. adrienne maree brown, a Black, queer, writer, organiser and facilitator, says that these abilities – recreation of the self, resistance of the present and reimagining the future – are what make all community organising science fiction.

I need to be clear, by sharing this I am not asking for designers to become community organisers. It is dangerous to conflate the work of designers with the work of local activists. However, what I am asking is what would it look like if more designers joined social movements? Not participating in a hack-a-thon, or a design-for-good project, but actually beginning, en masse, to invest in building relationships with people leading this type of radical world building.

Design is more than decoration.

Remember the spirometer? We know that design can make us conscious of the things we don’t see. Social-justice movements do not need you to show up with design solutions. Social-justice movements need you, designer, to build trust and add your skills to the pile with humility. To share your expertise for infusing beliefs and values into the spaces, objects and systems that will carry us into the future.

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley explains that “making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us.” This work will not, and should not, fit into a project-driven studio practice.

Designers in pursuit of contributing to transformational change must challenge the neoliberal values that underpin contemporary design and commit to building their own long-term relationship with movements. Not an easy task, but a necessary and worthwhile one.

I know I said that love letters were not about praise but, before I go, I would like to take a moment to give flowers to groups such as Decolonising Design, the Design Justice Network, Intelligent Mischief, and all the other designers around the world who have been laying

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

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the foundations to engage in the delight, struggle and messiness of this work.

Earlier, I also mentioned the limitations of love letters. But I’d like to reconsider that.

In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin shared how his love for America is what fuelled his criticism of it. “I love America more than any other country in the world,” Baldwin wrote, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I am eternally grateful for the patience and friendship of the community organisers, activists and cultural workers who have allowed me to learn and grow in real time as we work together. I am the first to admit that I don’t have all the answers. During these last four years, someone told me that no one knows everything, but together we know a lot.

I hope that as we work towards building new worlds, we are also pushed to criticise them, perpetually.

With love, Bianca

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

Idle Browsing with Chinouk Filique de Miranda

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Did I lo se her?

I probab I hide h ly just er? On p misplace urpose? d her so mewhere.

Or did Why woul d I… oh, h ere we g gesture. o. I jus A swipe t needed with all her reap to find t five finge pear in he right r s on the t h e top left this alw trackpad corner o ays happ makes f my scr ens when an abund een. Som there’s ance of e how, a seasonal tabs sta As it ha shift ta rt accum ppens, I k i u n l g place a ting in ’m eithe – for item my priva r lookin s to dro t e g b r f owser. o r inspir p in pri ation or ce. waiting My inten tion is not alwa like eac ys to pu h new ta rchase a b embodi lot of t a promis es a sug hings. I e. A pro g estion. t’s more m ise in w O r rather each tab hich the , hints reveals i t e towards m s of cloth omething for. A f ing disp I wasn’t eeling. l a y a A e w n d in a r attitude e that I that mig perhaps… was sear ht occur a c n h i b i ng e m yond the plied ch know. Ho ange in screen. nestly, c h I a t m r ’ o a s s cter t a bit fa times I other th r-fetche keep the an to ju d , s s e t I t b a r bs open owse. I imagine for no r like loo that wit eason king at h every become f nice thi p e r c e ntage dr urther r ngs. To op in pr emoved f towards ice, the rom what what I m se items they onc ight nee e were a d them t nd move o be. closer This pro cess – o n e where and fall I sit ai down the mlessly vortex o in front with dis f digita of a scr traction l window een .

I often -shoppin but from jump not g product, – is tin o n l y t ged o text, from one losing m to assoc site to y train i a a t o n i f o o n t t , to dif her, hought a on my su ferent t s each i bconscio ab – mpressio us. I on imprint n l l y e aves an get conf later. S imprint ronted w omething inorgani ith the weirdly c green impact o s p e c i c f this fi o c l o w u ill do i r of my triggeri t. The a celery j ng the m lmost uice (ye emory of the item s, I’m t a descri in this hat pers ption. I case was on) think th for your “ C h e colour l orophyll health a w a nd wardr y S i of l v sartoria e r”. Gree obe, we l wellbe ns are g suggest ing. Browns r e a b t a don’t re g g ing this The actu member, al item for your but I wo i n to be an c a u se? I ho ldn’t be actual b nestly surprise ag. I wa d if it by that s all th turned o point. e way do ut wn the r abbit ho l e That’s p robably why I te windows nd to lo that acc se sight u mulate s of the m multitud omewhere yriad br e of tab around t owser s a n d he digit reality. their co al bend. ntent fo I seem t The rm a dee o be in p haze o search o f imagin f nothin ary g, but I ’m open to

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Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

whatever the recommended list tells me I need.

Like her. The one I thought I lost earlier but, luckily, had just misplaced.

A cult find? A closet hero?Net-a-Porter A companion piece? For those cool and misty mornings in the mountains. Binocu lars (for bird watching or just to see things closer) in one pocket, a pocket knife for foraging (meadow mushrooms… wild garlic … prickly nettle…) in the other.Danielle Cathari The start of a journey, then?

I mull over these sartorial snippets and sugges tions, offered as descriptions and captions through an amalga m of fashion and digital culture. These statements, so beauti fully written in their own way, make me feel like I’ve landed in a novel.

They help me formulate my untapped thoughts, and allow me to fictionalise my feelings and aspirations. Today, I can be this person: elegantly understated,Net-a-Porter a less frivol ous, repurposed classic.Danielle Cathari And tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll be active,the one who knows how to have fun.Net-a-Porter I’ll wear my emotions on my sleeve,We’re Not Really Strangers and I’ll be ready for advent ure.Danielle Cathari The perfect personality is just a tab away. They’r e all mine, unfolding through the cluttered stack of tabs that accumulate along this jump-shift-journey. Think of them as a gesture of my independence: I can shed my old self and make room for a new, better version, whenever I want. Whenever I feel that something speaks to me. Time and time again.

It’s ridiculous, actually. And I can’t get my head around it — am I one person or just a bunch of my favour ite fictional characters, all glued together? I do get embarr assed thinking this way. A bit self indulgent, isn’t it? Best to just not say these things out loud. So back to the screen, where each tab lets me silently unpick my character, splitting me into multiples, flattening out the all-encompassing person I am.

These tabs lay out the different women I aim to be. The differ ent selves others might need me to be. The one who handles situat ions with care and knows when to ask the right questions, becaus e asking questions is an artform.We’re Not Really Strangers Or the trouble maker, someone who knows how to demand space,Browns steamr olling everything in my way. It’s a shape-shifting selfho od – a selfhood that lives in-between the target bubble s of online marketing. Every now and then, I wonder what aspect of this ever-evolving self actually makes me feel good.

Maybe it’s the constant state of newness; the fact that I have freedom of choice. The option to pick and choose who I want to be in any situation. The ability to feel safe and secure.

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at some point or how this happened, but Well, I’m not sure when ated one, has thetic and carefully cur my online self, the aes day-to-day life. self I use to navigate become my only self. The sn’t. It lets me speaks to me and what doe It now determines what d. The way items s I see, the texts I rea find myself in the visual I think about ke. to as being person-li and objects are referred described are es garments and accessori this extensively – how surrounds t tha ive d through the narrat online and characterise ns of tio ges sug er they uphold. The them. The rhetorical pow terate. rei y the on t Fashi tha es Match a new me a new dawn, a new day, se the in tly mos but st everywhere, This new me seems to exi . crumbs of online fiction otic and ducts becomes a bit cha The endless scroll of pro rt stories sho e lik d rea ts duct tex overwhelming, but the pro that once intimacy. The distance or anecdotes. They create collapsed. n object and person, has was, the distance betwee a certain in be observed and placed I’m the object, ready to most the queen on a chess board, (con)text. Much like the you t tha us Browns They’re simply reminding important piece. you but e, lif r in any area of you can give yourself better We’re Not Really Strangers worthy of it first. have to believe you’re h myself s me in conversation wit put It I’m fine with that. mirrors n eve it mes we live. Someti and the times in which s and bit h oug Thr . ers nect with oth the way I digitally con ht mig It f. sel d ate niche-ly cur pieces that reflect this promise.

I . lly rea Not . not s but it’ appear difficult to some, want to t reflections of how we Anyway, aren’t we all jus lectively aspire to be? live? The selves we col could grow up eration that was told we I’m a millennial, a gen t envision jus we wanted. If we could to be anything, anyone, ndless. In bou be possibilities would it and work towards it, becoming. of d ame the selves we dre reality, we’re often not their in s ard tow t we should dream We’re not even sure wha the void. fill s gin mar where descriptive place. I guess this is power ced oti unn e som snippets hold Where carefully created over us. or editors’ The way online snippets, It’s triggering really. y towards a universe lle Cathari seem to act as a gatewa notes,Danie participate , subtly prompting us to we curate for ourselves

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Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

e lost in th me to get r fo ney, l ur ua jo t unus ent a y. It’s no they repres as s nt me fa ti al at me nt me in th ents. So dress our Browns Some ad these garm urs. r lives yo ou rhetoric of on of rk ea to emba be an ar u yo to s ng re, em wi se allo always rthy of mo use there n’t feel wo ca do be s a we rd e, wa at en st ure to ng, wh ’re settli We’re Not Really Strangers Some gest we es h on ic e wh es in l. ough, th big or smal rough know. Alth th e th ed rm in fo g may it be ep you in ing; bein ke nd l ta ’l rs de ey ose who per: th mutual un you with th like a whis ng re ti mo ec nn ad ptions nes, co often re HURS The descri d one-to-o re l. te al fil to it un s toward need them a mix of t that we rn attitude es de gg mo su ke ur ma ts yo ll share ese produc to, they wi h around th allow them ns. we io if at that stretc , tu at si certain a tool. Th ge an na th ma re to be mo equipped or better ns woven us smarter descriptio e product Th e w. ot no Just em iv them by to action. e noticed ’v sation ll er st ca nv mu e co u at Yo immedi private No a s. or ne er li tt e days are love le into these u notice th ads like a yo re d di at : th friend is your vocabulary ng with a nter. this agine havi through wi it it in sh de I could im ma we get your nger again? d time to an from . sh el ru nn getting lo n of the tu serotoni d le en tt e li th a e . and if light at u could us deserve it el like yo self. you ur yo feel like order. I fe r t fo n’ ing nice u just do th yo me or so g et gettin t budg help your ways that your curren r in he t ot no me that’s e are so mbling now. ll stop ra u know ther wi yo w , s. ng al pi ic rlin You see ho shop y chem sruptive Be e some happ ed.Di as t ne le gh t re ri n’ n e do brai not th ng you buy anythi ’s probably t at n’ to th do em gh se se ou plea eces e? Alth d puzzle pi ted they ar . These od ly sophistica al st. tu mo ac Al forth.

Cunning, l back and word here. ra tu na r s within ou these text almost fit that I find y, wa ts n mp ow te in my den at tell you, ionally la trying to these emot ng uct of di od ar I’ve been pr sc a mere by ead of di st as In ions en . ng re the sc l modificat unsettli me through eir textua th th wi by to t d in ec ie ded to conn lf preoccup upation fa I find myse this preocc t, s on in se po marketing, po me im en text es. At so wh nc d ba te ur ac st tr and di when we’re are at I guess we s in us, or de n. nfi io co at king in it fasc l. When agine spea rson we im rsonal leve pe pe and a of ed on rt us the so ll-craft mething we entify with so r id of ou to e in is le ab change ery prom ea that a s. With ev id rd s e wo ip th e sh in es on th di we revel relati Moda Operan ch in the ucts, e any glit glamorous, lv so these prod re of ll on wi ti lf sa se ri acte , I aesthetic . The char ves. Really th garments rise oursel te ac ar we have wi ch to tly help us inadverten

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should be speaki ng for myself he re, but I’m almo I’m not alone. Se st certain that lf indulgent? Ye s. Delusional? I hope not.

Anyway, let’s ci rcle back to her.

The one I though The one that you t I’d lost. forgot about. Do n’ t worry, I almost about her too. So forgot , let me describe her to you. It’s impression — but just a first first impressions matter. She’s a the shoulders, wh bit loose on ich will make he r perfect for a da out with friends. te, or a night Super flattering and versatile, sh everything.Disruptive Berlin e will go with And, because she’ s delicate, made stuff, I’ll only from good wash her on a ge ntle cycle. Scra do it by hand. I’ tc h th at , I’ll ll safeguard her from the imperfec up over time. Pr tions that pop ocrastinate her unraveling. And up? She won’t be if they do show replaced. Becaus e her slight impe not to be consid rfections are ered defects, th ey just add to he unique character.Luisa Via Roma r value and

Net-A-Porter – ne t-a-porter.com Danielle Cathari – daniellecathar i.com We’re Not Really Strangers – were notreallystrange Browns – brownsfa rs.com shion.com Disruptive Berlin – disruptiveberl in.com HURS – hurs-offici al.com Luisa Via Roma – luisaviaroma.com Moda Operandi – modaoperandi.com Matches Fashion – matchesfashion .com

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Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait with Gijs de Boer

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Images by @neuroticarsehole, @avocado_ibuprofen, @afffirmations and Gijs de Boer.

A square image, listing 46 titles of design genres, set in Times New Roman, roughly ordered in two columns, on top of a highly saturated picture of a taxidermy fox. Some of the genres seem to have been added later, squeezed in to maintain alphabetical order. The Stoned Fox is a meme often used to signal unease, but this version has been deep-fried: it looks like it has been through many rounds of compression from online re-sharing.

The meme’s author, @neuroticarsehole, seems to be expressing a discomfort with these design genres, re-frying the image as if their unease has grown more extreme with each added genre.

I like the idea of design discourse as a place for designers and critics to come together – through symposia, schools and magazines – to figure out roles for designers that can be more helpful than harmful to our world. When that balance feels off in design practice, discourse can respond by analysing what has gone wrong and proposing ways of doing otherwise. But what if something in design discourse starts to feel off? @neuroticarsehole’s meme distils a lingering discomfort that I recognise from my own experiences. Even though I appreciate that there have been so many attempts at finding different roles for designers, I’ve started to grow suspicious. Seeing all those genres together makes me cringe.

They sound pretentious – more like studio start-ups than gathering places to explore different roles.

In a series of tweets from March 2022, @neuroticarsehole argues that the proliferation of design genres within discourse is a result of market pressures.

“Design discourse itself has been commodified,” they wrote, “causing an academic overproduction of design genres that all promise emancipation one way or another, but eventually just perpetuate a ‘false consciousness’ by assuming that designers had the agency to resist the logic of a capitalist economy within the scope of their individual careers.” In other words, the inflated claims of design discourse about designers conquering capital could, ironically, be themselves products of market pressure.

It seems a plausible explanation, particularly if we look at some of the claims that @neuroticarsehole often

quotes from current mainstream design writers: “design can transcend the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism,” (Matthew Wizinsky); “how capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it,” (Ruben Pater); and “designers can take hold of, dismantle, and rewire some of the abusive structures of capital,” (Keller Easterling). These claims have all been taken from promotional texts for publications (respectively a publisher’s summary, book cover, and interview) and, even though the books that they promote are likely more nuanced, the claims are all reduced to a power promise, divorced from any limits or doubts. Let’s call them hero bait – invitations to a designer to play the role of a saviour, carefully crafted to the sensibilities of anybody who feels stuck at their desk doing non-meaningful work.

It is difficult not to hear the undertone of a sales pitch every time a writer proposes a new design genre. This marketplace of ideas can quickly become an arena of voices, all seeking attention through bluff, exaggerated differentiation, and seductive offers. But with so much emphasis on promises, where does critique go? @neuroticarsehole fits within a wider wave of meme pages that are critical of their respective disciplines, including @dank.lloyd.wright in architecture, @freeze_magazine in art, and @bluefoamdust in industrial and interaction design. These pages draw me in because they voice a critique that feels less present in other discursive spaces.

While mainstream design discourse – that which is backed institutionally through systems such as book deals, teaching or curatorial positions, and speaker fees – can seem to be under pressure to promise emancipation, it is through memes that lingering suspicions over those same promises can find a home. In this respect, I read @neuroticarsehole as marginalised design discourse.

Yet with such a split – mainstream positivity on the one hand; marginalised suspicion on the other – can discourse still function well? Can it still be a place where hopes and suspicions, proposals and critiques, are measured against practice? Even if we agree that the currency of mainstream design

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discourse is hope, perhaps evading doubt is not necessary to garner attention. Is there a way to tempt our hero designer with another kind of call to adventure: not with a mythical elixir of power, but with a journey of exploration that may challenge and transform them? How to attract designers to the adventure of actually wrestling with a position that is still unresolved?

The Fox Trap I can roughly trace my path in the design field through the genres featured on the Stoned Fox meme: from Transformation Design to Speculative Design at the Technical University Eindhoven, then Posthumanist Design via philosophy and Auto-Ethnographic Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where I studied for my master’s and now teach. With every jump, I shifted further away from design as a mode of object production towards one of knowledge production. Designers as knowledge workers may perform cultural critique, raise awareness, and conduct research-through-design. Even when objects are produced (and they still are), they primarily function to generate, gather, or represent knowledge.

In this context, I’m tempted to read both design memes and design genres as contemporary design products: different ways in which knowledge takes shape and reaches others. To understand how both function as calls for designers, we can analyse the design choices behind how they present themselves.

For the design genre, we can take a simplified version of the hero bait claim: “design can fix capitalism.”

The examples of discourse that @neuroticarshole cites all follow this structure. A declarative sentence, in the present tense, stating its content as matter of fact: subject (“design”) – action (“can fix”) – object (“capitalism”).

This form seems functionally optimised to maximise the power promise, centring agency on the side of design-subject, while capitalism is framed as a passive object to be worked on. This purity seems to make hero bait function well as a gathering place for hope, but is less welcoming to people who harbour suspicions. There is no padding, no “maybe”, no question mark; no verbs that go both ways, such as: “Would

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designers be able to respond to the structures of capital?” While this would likely be a more accurate description of the content of the book being promoted, it may not easily excite a prospective reader. It literally doesn’t have the same power.

But language doesn’t have to be used literally. Critical memes show other design techniques, such as irony.

These memes may use the exact same words, but subvert their meaning through imagery or graphic design.

We see this when @neuroticarsehole writes “transcending the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism” above a painting of a dragon (“capitalism”) devouring a hero (“post-capitalist design”).

For those in on the joke, irony can function as a gathering place. I feel recognised by this meme because it relies on shared knowledge that it doesn’t need to explicitly express: namely, that the statement is a quote from a book summary (which @neuroticarsehole disagrees with).

In the face of institutional and systemic wrongs, meme pages offer a sense of belonging with others who share similar experiences. Yet through irony, the meme also creates a separation between its in- and out-group. While it offers me community, it distances me from what is being mocked. When writing about disillusions in design discourse, writer and artist Silvio Lorusso also notices this double-edged sword. “Irony functions as a means of coping with a feeling of powerlessness and irrelevance,” he says. “When switched on, the ‘ironic detachment’ mode allows us to alienate ourselves from collective and individual miseries. For this, we pay the toll of disengagement.”

While irony may function well in gathering suspicion, this same detachment makes it insufficient to attract designers to an unresolved position. Instead of a challenge, it seems to offer a way out. The in-group position of a critical meme allows me to look down on the “foolish” out-group, as if I hadn’t also been seduced by the hero-designer position in the past; as if I don’t experience a very similar kind of relief when I like a meme ridiculing that same hope. Detachment allows me to play the role of the outsmarting fox –

a position as safe and resolved as that of the saviour. Instead of baiting the hero, the ironic meme becomes a fox trap. It offers resentment as a revenge on seduction. But staying close to seductions may actually help us to find ways of dealing with them.

As design genres gloss over global issues as mere problems for designers to solve, so ironic memes paint mainstream design discourse as stupid, and the disillusioned designer as being above it.

Both offer me salvation, either as hero or fugitive. But I don’t want discourse that tempts me into adopting detached positions. I want discourse that can offer community and hope but also challenge me: invitations that don’t let me get away so easily.

So, how can a call for designers function as a gathering place that can host both hope and suspicion – both the humble hero and the fair fox? In the attention economy, it seems we can only have the pure hope of hero bait, or else the generalised suspicion of the ironic fox trap. But keeping both feelings close?

Nuance doesn’t stand a chance. Maybe @neuroticarsehole was right: it’s too late. Discourse, both mainstream and marginalised, has been commodified.

Mentor memes As I scrolled deeper through Instagram, looking for some hope, I found posts with affirmations, those empowering statements that you read to yourself in the hope that they will come true: “I always find a way.” But I don’t buy it. It sounds like a claim from a design genre, or like the dog in the burning house meme: “This is fine.” Was there not, anywhere on Instagram, some messy hope? Then, suddenly, I noticed something.

When I first saw this meme, I thought it was ironic. The image, the blur, the text glow – it all seemed designed to ridicule the sentence, “This summer will change my life.” But there are so many of these memes: “Overthinking is a foreign concept,” “I am Joy Of Missing Out,” “My social media presence contributes to world peace.” There seems to be something more going on.

To understand how meme creator @afffirmations overcomes cynical fatalism (posting 10 similar memes every day), we have to read one level deeper. Enter

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

post-irony. In Gabriella de la Puente’s review of @afffirmations for The White Pube, she writes how “post-irony uses insincerity to convey completely sincere feelings and thoughts[...] It has this new awkwardness because of the irony it passes through to get here.” Consider the following readings of @afffirmations’ meme. Pre-ironic: “This summer will change my life.” Ironic: “This summer will change nothing.” A post-ironic reading may be something along the lines of: “I hope this summer will change something.”

Something started to change. I was beginning to read these memes as the attempt of a cynic to feel hopeful. And it spread: like pulling tarot cards, these memes make me look for a specific way in which they are true for my life. I’m seduced to a position of hope, but not without being reminded of its utopian nature. I can choose to believe them, but I can’t claim they will offer salvation.

As a design technique, post-irony offers a way to propose agency without claiming that it is absolute: the summer-subject may not change everything, but that doesn’t mean it can’t change something.

If @afffirmation can be a place of hope for a cynical generation, can design writers use post-irony to reach cynical designers?

Some may worry: isn’t post-irony just masking against criticism? Is it anything other than a verbal sleight of hand that hides behind irony? I don’t believe so. In post-irony, the ambiguity is not whether what’s being expressed is ironic (it clearly is), but rather to what extent it can still be read as sincere in spite of its irony (and because of it). Post-irony is less about evading criticism and more about embedding it – including your doubts so as not to stop you from articulating hopes. Still, if proposals already embed their suspicions about what they are offering through irony, then irony cannot operate as a mode of critique. Where does the fox go?

Scrolling through many oversaturated images, I stopped at a dull-looking post: plain-black text and grainy drawings set against an off-white background.

In this comic, meme creator @avocado_ibuprofen articulates a suspicion around the idea of collective artisthood. I recognise this suspicion

Six custom design affirmation memes.

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and the difficulties of creating something together – the idea of collective artisthood can often feel unreachably utopian. Yet at the same time, @avocado_ibuprofen denies me the kind of ironic comfort that allows me to feel above this idea.

Looking at the comic, I still feel a little guilty for my individualist desires – my position is conflicted, unresolved.

Underneath the post, someone had commented: “sometimes you’re so good it hurts.” @avocado_ibuprofen deliberately designs their posts to not resolve the issues they raise. “I’m aiming for[...] something open-ended/self-contradictory enough that I don’t get stuck ‘defending’ my ‘position’ in a faux-conversation online and losing critical life energy,” they wrote in March 2022. Perspective seems to play an important role here.

The comic talks in the second person, but its use of “you” feels less like it’s addressing me directly, and more like a separate character in a story.

It’s not necessarily clear if the suspicions of this character are also those of the author. Personally, I am tempted to read the second-person viewpoint as auto-fictional: a way for the author to talk about their own struggles by fictionalising them as those of a character. Yet given that the comic is clearly a fiction, I’m never quite sure where to position the author. This ambiguity of auto-fiction suggests a mode of expressing conflicting parts of oneself without reaching any resolution.

Could auto-fiction be a way to voice messy suspicion? Can it provide a viewpoint where I’m not looking down on the field, but one where I can be both seduced by a genre and still suspicious of some of its claims? By fictionalising their suspicion, @avocado_ibuprofen allows the meaning of claims to change from literal (“Collective artisthood is a silly myth”) to something that is entertained between two different positions (“Would collective artisthood, while sounding good, not be hard to square with certain artistic desires?”).

and suspicion. I like how they both seduce and trouble me, inviting me as a reader to position myself amidst their complexity. But is there room for this performative register of language in design discourse? Could design genres sell their hopes for the field in ways that still admit doubt? Could design memes articulate their suspicions from a position that acknowledges the seductions of the field they feel deceived by? Can more entertaining calls to adventure really transcend the pressures of capital?

I’m not sure. Which design hero is waiting for a post-ironic book that ridicules its own promises? Which fox is feeling deceived, but still wants to be challenged by an auto-fictional meme?

Not much stops “entertaining” discourse from just being laughed at. My proposal, my genre of messy design discourse, relies on a vibe shift; on people being so disappointed with false promises and self-serving critique that they need something else. I find myself caught up in my own struggle: how to propose a path without offering a definite destination of salvation? How to express both my hopes and suspicions? Let me learn from memes.

Entertaining design discourse @afffirmations and @avocado_ibuprofen offer language tricks that enable going beyond straightforward syntax. Postirony and auto-fiction make meaning less stable, placing it between hope

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

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All images by Kathryn Larsen.

Architecture School: Pay to Play with Kathryn Larsen

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Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

When The Words Don’t Exist with Malika Leiper

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In 1953, King Sihanouk declared Cambodia’s independence, bringing an end to the 90-year-old protectorate of France. Vann Molyvann, a student living abroad who would go on to articulate the aspirations of this post-colonial modern nation as its state architect and head of public works, received the news in Paris.

Image courtesy of the The Vann Molyvann Project Private Collection, showing Vann Molyvann from Lok Serei, vol 7 no.5, 1958.

— The oars of the wooden fishing boats dipped in and out of the river’s choppy waters. Down by the Seine, Vann sought refuge from the click-clocking of hurried wooden heels on pavement, whilst above him Quai Malaquais teemed with rush-hour traffic.

A word had taken shelter under his breath – or rather, a lack thereof.

There is no term for “designer” in my mother tongue. For the longest time, I’ve been using អ្ននករចនា neak rochana.1 How do I speak about design when the words don’t exist? Vann pondered.

On this particular evening in the atelier, when Professeur Arretche launched into one of his frequent monologues on modernist design dogma, Vann felt a familiar rupture inside of him – the same captive energy that befell him in the classrooms of the លី​ីស៊ី​ី lycée.2 Perhaps it was because of the letter from his father that he had received that morning, a reminder of the immeasurable duty awaiting Vann as the first Frenchtrained architect of Cambodia. Or maybe it was the ease with which his classmate, Henri, slipped in and out of conversation – the fluidity of his comments jeering in contrast to Vann’s immovable silence.

Still ruminating on the substance of this term, Vann remembered asking his mother its meaning once. “You know I don’t speak បារាំ​ំង barang,”3 she had snapped in frustration.

And before she would even entertain the thought, it floated away, bobbing and

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dipping with the force of the currents.

Like a split coconut in the water, the word was an empty vessel awaiting its delivery into diligent hands.

— Vann left his contemplative angst at the river’s edge and began walking to the café to join Ngo and Sayed. Seven years had passed since they all arrived in Paris on a government scholarship.

As close friends, they often found themselves side by side, sketching, painting, and studying the works of great Roman, Greek and French architectural styles.

Ngo’s uncle was the famous Lê Đức Thọ, the Vietnamese freedom fighter affectionately known as the Hammer on account of his uncompromising revolutionary fervour.

The Hammer spent most of Ngo’s adolescence imprisoned in a cage in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, the French guards had the inmates perform Molière plays, improving their minds with good French literature in fulfilment of their civilising mission.

Maybe it was his uncle’s penchant for French theatre that sowed Ngo’s early interest in scenography, eventually putting him on the same steamship as Vann on their way to Paris.

As he neared the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Vann recalled the scrutinising glances of the passengers on the train bound for Marseille last month. Ngo had insisted on paying a visit to Unité d’habitation – it was the last time the three were together.

It wasn’t the novelty of the piloti that struck a chord in Vann, it was the reference to an architecture of his homeland. Though the wooden, stiltraised structures of his childhood were not reinforced with steel and concrete, a rush of familiarity surged through him as he passed under the cool shadow

of the building’s open ground floor and ascended its exterior walkways. Had Le Corbusier spent time in Indochine?

Standing on the rooftop, observing the city with a bird’s-eye view, a hunger swelled inside of Vann. He heard his father’s voice, “ស៊ីងគមរាំស្ត្រស៊ីរនិ​ិយម Sangkum Reastr Niyum4 awaits you.” What form should he give it? The vision was becoming clearer.

— It was dark by the time he reached the Café de Flore. His two companions were seated under the vestibule in the red glow of a heat lamp. Plumes of smoke amidst a sea of bodies wafted from the tables surrounding them. Young men and women chattered into the night.

Traversing the sidewalk, Vann caught the gaze of Henri, from Arretche’s atelier, and seated next to him was an unfamiliar face. The man was introduced as Richard, an American writer here to complete his second novel. Seeing Vann, Sayed beckoned them over.

“So, what is this big news we’ve been waiting to hear?” Sayed asked once the five men settled into their cramped wicker chairs.

“I’m not going to Rome. I bought a ticket to Saigon to join my uncle,” Ngo announced.

How could it be? Vann’s stomach lurched. He thought they were just here to bid a temporary farewell to Ngo, on his way to live and study at the Villa Medici – the first Indochine ever to win the coveted residency!

“How can you expect me to watch from a distance when the deafening cries for freedom are finally being heard all around the world?” Ngo continued, clenching his fists with urgency.

អ្ននករចនា Neak rochana (ne-ah ro-cha-na): Craftsperson. Decorator. លី​ីស៊ី​ី Lycée (lee-say): The French school system where Molyvann received his high school education. Derived from the French word for school “lycée”. The adoption of French terms into the Khmer language – mode, plan, patrimony – bear witness to a legacy of European domination, which at its height in 1914 claimed 85 per cent of the earth’s surface as dependencies, protectorates, dominions and commonwealth. បារាំ​ំង Barang (ba-rang): French. France. Foreigner. White man. ស៊ីងគមរាំស្ត្រស៊ីរនិ​ិយម Sangkum Reastr Niyum (sang-koom ri-yast nee-yoom): The People’s Socialist Community. The political party led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk that heralded nationwide modernisation efforts from 1953-1970, when Vann Molyvann would construct his most ambitious public projects – the Independence Monument (1958), Chaktomouk Conference Hall (1961), the Olympic Stadium (1963), and the Institute of Foreign Languages (1971) – earning Phnom Penh its reputation as the “Pearl of Southeast Asia”.

Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

“Freedom? The only freedom is in our craft, my friend,” Sayed replied despondently.

He had no intention of returning to a partitioned India. Daily news of the violent outbreaks of nationalist fervour sweeping his homeland beckoned him deeper into the solitude of his brushstrokes. For now, Van-Gogh, Cezanne, and Gaugin were his gods.

“But isn’t it dangerous?” Henri wondered aloud. “Just last week I read over one thousand people were killed by a Viet ambush,” he pressed.

At that point, the newcomer, Richard, began to chuckle. “I wonder what the headlines in the Vietnamese press were,” he said to Ngo, taking a drag on his Pall Mall.

Then, leaning forward with his palms clasped on the table, he continued: “I’m curious – for how long have you all been at the école together?”

“Seven years,” the four said in unison.

“So you must know the proportions of the Vitruvian man?” The American’s thick-rimmed glasses magnified the golden brown of his exacting eyes as he posed the question to the table.

“You mean The Modular Man?” Vann corrected him.

“Right! The Modular Man. What are his proportions?” Richard directed his question back to Henri.

“He is one-and-three-quarter meters tall.

Two-point-two-six meters with his arms overhead,” Henri said, raising his hand and accidentally beckoning a waiter.

“Now, how tall, if I may ask, is your mother?” Richard turned back to Vann.

“And what’s her shoe size?” Sayed said, a grin forming.

At that moment, Vann recalled the figure drawing lessons they had all attended in their early years of instruction. Hard as he tried to depict the form of the male nude, the tutors were unimpressed.

“It’s because their proportions are all off!” Ngo had yelled when Vann finally came to his friends in desperation.

“Of course they are! I bet you there’s not a Cambodian alive with feet that big!”

Sayed had chimed in, gesturing at the model’s toes with a flick of his pencil.

—

“Why is that relevant?” Sayed chuckled.

“It’s a serious question,” Richard insisted.

“The complete face,” Sayed began, “that is, chin to hairline, is one tenth of the human body.” Then, spreading his thumb and pinky fingers wide and bringing them to Henri’s face, he continued: “The head – chin to the crown – measures one eighth.”

“Fascinating. And that Corbu fellow.

What’s his name?” Richard pointed to Vann. “The Maligned Man?”

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6

7

Vann emerged from the cafe to a deserted rue Malaquais. He was walking home, bending the tattered corners of his father’s letter in his pocket when the wispy fragments of last night’s vision came into piercing clarity.

In his dream, Vann was standing in front of a magnificent slab of sandstone.

The ground seemed to tremble from the force of wooden mallets hitting metal as an army of វិ​ិស៊ីវករ visvakar 5 chipped away at the temple’s facade. “កូរស៊ីមុស្ត្រ��ឹកដោះ�ះ Ko Samut Tuk Dos”6 Vann whispered under his breath

as he continued down the Pont des Arts, the dream playing out in his mind’s eye.

Beyond him, Vann could see wild boar, elephants, monkeys and rabbits, clusters of thatched roofs surrounded by palm trees, water buffalo swatting at flies in the verdant rice fields, and the delicate pink of lotus flowers illuminating the dark-green shadows cast by lily pads.

Emerging from the dusty cloud of sandstone, an អាចារ achar7 came walking past, carrying a silver bowl in his weathered palms. Into it, he dipped a bundle of twigs and splashed water onto Vann’s forehead, which was now bowed, with palms pressed and thumbs resting at his nose.

A thunderous chant erupted from the old man’s toothless mouth, which was barely moving as he recited: “Just as rivers with water Entirely fill up the sea, So will what’s here been given, Bring blessings to departed spirits.

May all your hopes and all your longings Come true in no long time.”

The End Vann Molyvann served as head of public works and state architect of Cambodia from 1956-1970. In addition to his extensive work as an architect, Molyvann was an urban planner and oversaw the expansion of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville.

Along with his position in the faculty of Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts, Molyvann’s contributions helped shape a modernist design pedagogy that continues to serve as the backdrop of Cambodian design culture today. Molyvann died in his home in Siem Reap in 2017, at the age of 90 and is survived by his wife, three daughters, and two sons.

វិ​ិស៊ីវករ Visvakar (vi-sva-kaw): Engineer. Originating from the sanskrit “vis”, a derivative of Vishnu, and “kaw” builder – in other words, “divine builder”. Centuries of commercial and cultural interaction between the Indian kingdoms and the Khmer Empire led to a rich cultural exchange, culminating in the architectural masterpiece Angkor Wat, a Hindu temple constructed in the 12th century dedicated to the god Vishnu. In Hinduism, Visvakarma is the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects. កូរស៊ីមុស្ត្រ��ឹកដោះ�ះ Ko Samut Tuk Dos (Ko Sam-ut Tuk Daw): The Churning of the Sea of Milk, a Hindu story of the creation of the universe carved on a 49m-long bas relief in Angkor Wat. In this epic, gods and demons face each other in a tug of war for the elixir of immortality. For thousands of years they yanked back-and-forth on the giant serpent Vasuki, releasing supernatural creatures and giving form to the world in the process. អាចារ Achar (a-cha): A holy man called upon to conduct spiritual ceremonies and rites of passage in daily Cambodian life, from moving into a new home, to opening a new business. Derived from the sanskrit “acharya - an expert, a guru, a master”.

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Het Nieuwe Instituut: Design Drafts

Queer Refusal Introduction Aastha D (with thanks to Rohit Rajak)

Queer people have often forged love and revolution in unmapped places. Donning invisibility has sometimes saved lives, but lives deserve to be whole – their memories bursting with stories, histories, monuments, landmarks, folklore, music, loss, victories, sacrifice and style. And yet queer lives have never been so visible and vulnerable as they are now.

Roundtable

While mainstream acceptance may have arrived in some places (primarily in the Global North), this has brought with it a new set of pitfalls and a retracing of old prejudices. Some of us may now add our preferred pronouns to our bios and email signatures, but conservatism has undergone a resurgence with a vengeance. As we find and create a vocabulary to articulate our identities and desires, new laws are being passed to prohibit them. Queerness remains a site of disobedience.

Disobedience is a universal response to architecture: from using the kitchen table as a work desk, sleeping on a public bench, drinking on the steps of a university, to having sex inside a telephone booth. To speak of disobedience is to speak to the rules: to examine where they came from, who wrote them, who is policed by them, and what would happen if one was to defy them. Heteropatriarchy makes rules that queerness disobeys, and defiance of architectural programme is a place where culture is created and vitality thrives. Some bodies’ disobedience is simply compliance with their innate desires. As a response to their precarity, these bodies are continuously creating and transforming spaces.

Queer Spaces (2022), edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, is an atlas of LGBTQIA+ places and stories published by RIBA Books. Beyond creating an archive that traces histories of queer spaces across the world and cultures, the book reminds us of what is not included – and what could not be included. We still live in a world where parts of it continue to prosecute and kill bodies that “deviate”, and where not even anonymity offers protection.

To discuss these issues further, Disegno brought together voices from the community to speak about queer spaces and disobedience as practice. The panel consists of scholars, writers, artists, technocrats, performers, designers and educators. As an extension to the book, the following is a record of the discussion that speaks of the qualities of queerness and queer survival.

Some bodies’ disobedience is simply compliance with their innate desires.

The panel is: is an artist and designer, and the co-author of Queer Spaces.

Dhiren Borisa (he/him/they) is a poet, activist and queer urban sexual geographer.

Gabriel Maher (they/them) is an industrial designer and co-author of Contentious Cities, Design and the Gendered Production of Space.

Kareem Khubchandani (any pronouns) is a researcher, performance artist and organiser, and author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife.

Katarina Bonnevier (she/her) is a co-founder of architecture studio Mycket and author of Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture.

KNeo Mokgopa (they/them) is an artist, writer and manager of narrative development at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Vikramaditya Sahai (they/them) is an academic, activist and artist.

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Image courtesy of Dagurkel.

Adam Nathaniel Furman (they/them)

Comparsa drag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, showing “Mis armas, mis tacos” (our heels, our weapons).

The image depicts Marcelo Estebecorena carrying around a cart loaded with junk at the FIBA festival.

Finella in Cambridge, England. The Pinks, 1929.

Images courtesy of Dell & Wainwright, RIBA Collections, and Archivo de la Memoria Trans.

Hotel Gondolín in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Hotel Gondolín.

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An architecture programme is assigned by either the architect, client or municipality. Its defiance is where the magic happens; authenticity finds agency and culture is created. Disobedience is a highly revelatory, exciting and universal response to architecture! To speak of architecture is to speak of bodies: where they come from, how they perform, how they look, what stories they hold, how they navigate spaces, who they are, who they want to be, how big or small they get to be. Taking cues from the title of the book, what then is a queer space? What makes a space queer? Is “queer” an adjective describing a space’s occupants or programme, or is it a verb? If so, what is the queering of space?

Kareem Khubchandani Your question makes me think about my first time in a New York gay bar called G Lounge, with a space shaped like a lowercase g. I was under 21, so my friends took me there for happy-hour drinks at four o’clock before they were carding – there was a navigation of age and propriety just to get in. When the bar was full, the only way to get to the bathroom was to pass a lot of people. This space was teaching me how to cruise, how to navigate bodies pressed against the wall and against each other. It also performed this very particular kind of masculinity, asking you to pose in certain ways. I remember a Latinx trans woman who became my instructor in that space being like, “I know you see masculinity in the way that this cruising is happening, but these are all butch queens.”

I didn’t understand the term then, but she was trying to tell me that the performances I was seeing – that the space was asking you to do – didn’t necessarily reveal who folks in that space were. People were performing to be in this space so as to match the atmosphere and shirtless bartenders.

Space choreographs the body to perform dissenting desires.

KNeo Mokgopa I came to terms with my queerness at university in Cape Town as this tiny, scrawny kid who was really afraid. Queerness captured by commercial brands and capitalism means nightclubs, it means music, being extroverted and free, and it means expressing yourself. Unfortunately, these were things that terrified me. I was afraid of not being read as queer enough; as not presenting in an outwardly readable way and being rejected from the space. At the same time, ironically, I was also afraid of being queer, as in strange. Queerness has been commodified into almost a gender of its own, with particular markers and customs and costumes and diets. Engaging in architecture and this notion of a programme was something that I read as an imposition and not an invitation. At the borders of a community defining us is also a definition of who is not us.

Katarina Bonnevier I came at it from a slightly different perspective. I’d been studying architecture, but that field never really meant anything to me.

I could recognise a nice building but I didn’t have the tools to understand it. When I started to read [Judith] Butler, and I got into the performativity [of gender] and queer theory, I started to look at architecture with those powerful tools for interpretation. Suddenly, I started to understand architecture. I have a theatrical background and I have always liked things that have a narrative. When I found queer theory, it connected me to myself and the way I inhabit the world. I started to understand how any space could be a queer space, which is where disobedience comes in.

Of course, any space can also be a straight space or a normative space, Aastha D

Roundtable

“Engaging in achitecture and this notion of a programme was something that I read as an imposition and not an invitation.”

—KNeo Mokgopa

which makes me feel I am wearing a costume. I know what I’m supposed to do there, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing I can do there.

This idea of queering is a powerful tool to inhabit or take on spaces.

Gabriel Maher I approach this question from an analytical perspective. First, what is space itself? It’s the material, embodied and conceptual spaces, it’s the territories, it’s the entry points, the thresholds. How is space produced? It’s just as complicated as queering or queerness, if we think about queer and space as mutually informed or mutually produced in a social-spatial relationship. Queerness and space produce themselves through this complex layering [that] is constantly creating emergence.

I find that incredibly powerful to try to grapple with if I break myself down as a body and an identity moving through space. Recently, at Berlin Pride, I had an incredible queer spatial experience in Berghain.

There’s a very interesting threshold moment at the point of entry to Berghain, where you’re judged for permission to enter the space – it can be harsh. I had this moment where I [asked myself], “Am I coded queer enough? Is my body going to be read this way?” Once in, though, what I found despite it being an incredibly intense experience – electro, drugs, dark rooms – was that it was one of the safest spaces I’ve been in because of its intentionality.

Dhiren Borisa I study queer spaces, that’s my discipline, and I’m supposed to be able to speak about it. I teach a course on “Sex in the City” where we talk about it, day in, day out. But I want to start with the way I came to terms with the feeling of being queer. I grew up in a small town, in a neighbourhood that was caste-coded: a neighbourhood that was defined through its relationship with other places. The neighbourhood and the home itself were queer in relation to the system of power within which they were located. To escape this form of a queer relationship of marginality to another form of relationship of marginality, I say that the city is my sexuality. But the city has also made me feel I don’t belong in most of its spaces. I came to the city for education. I am a first-generation learner, which meant that the first time I fell in love was in school, because it was there that I met the kinds of people we were taught we could fall in love with – the boys with the bodies that are supposed to be desired.

Bodies that are seen as aspirational, that are upper caste, that are rich.

One of the boys I was in love with told me he could take me home, because I did not look Dalit. I felt that my entry into his home was a queer practice, based on its fragility of being revealed – what if his parents knew what I was? My performance of that space was building on the fact that everybody assumed I was upper caste. It’s those practices that, in those ephemeral, small windows, make any space queer, and allow for a possibility to survive. Even in this big city, in big universities, you feel that you do not belong and you feel that you have to continuously perform in order to make yourself believe that you belong. In everyday moments, we are creating this niche of spaces that are queer because they help hold us together. Queerness for me is those ephemeral moments of realisation that it’s fragile, but it will give you hope and resilience.

Vikramaditya Sahai i don’t really know how to enter this conversation because i am against the idea of a personal story, given that some of us have to 86

“Queerness and space produce themselves through layering that is constantly creating emergence.” —Gabriel Maher

Images courtesy of Kaoru Yamada.

constantly perform it. Part of my inhabiting a world that is beside the normative has been to refuse some of this. Practices of disobedience, or defiance, or subversion inhabit a space in relation to the law. Even if it’s a “no”, the sovereignty of the rule or the space is still accepted. i’m far more interested in refusal. Refusal is dream work. It’s work that does not accept the question asked. That’s from my relationship to transness, more than queerness. What is the relation of trans to queer? Maybe it is that of Frankenstein to the monster: it names it, it offers it its legacy and also its deadliness. Transness too is something that grapples with space. To be trans is a provincial identity or personhood, not simply in terms of its relation to national boundaries, but also provincial as it moves from the clinic to the club to the street. More abstractly, in architecture, trans is what is outside. The discipline is constantly defined by the exclusion of transness – whether it is in the public/private conversation, the national and the domestic, the exterior and the interior, space and depth, foundation and height, the basement and the penthouse. All of these binaries rely on sex, which is built on the exclusion of transness. Transness is that constitutive outside.

Adam Nathaniel Furman My answer has been catalysed by the work I’ve done on the book. Hearing people’s stories, something coalesced in my mind. Within this broad coalition of extreme difference and infinite intersectionalities, queer people all over the world are born into nonqueer families in non-queer societies. Queer people don’t have a culture we’re born into. We don’t have a family that can teach us how to be queer.

We have to find that. The most common experience throughout my life has been a profound sense of loneliness. I found that’s common within people born into the rainbow coalition. We’re like turtles hatched on a beach in the dark. Some of us go off in the wrong direction and end up in the forest where we’re eaten by an alligator; some of the lucky ones make it out to sea, and swim to the big city and find other queer people. That experience of being born different and having to discover that and find other people is something that unifies these spaces. The book has been criticised heavily for not defining what a queer space is – for not being about queer architecture. But whether it’s just a space where people have found each other, to buildings built by queer oligarchs or royalty, there’s this desire to get away from loneliness, and there’s a desire to forge a sense of togetherness, history, and belonging. They’re places where people create alternative modes of family, made in the interstices of everyone else’s programme. It’s about that defiance of isolation and loneliness, and the search for a sense of belonging – whether that’s through the construction of history, objects, interiors, spaces; or the occupation of spaces; or the temporary transformation of spaces through bodily activity or dancing; or just by having a cup of coffee in a little book club for lesbians in a back street of Bangkok. It’s about finding each other and not being alone. Sadly, lots of people die before they get to realise that they’re not alone. Just to exist: there’s an inherent disobedience there with all the boundaries and binaries.

Kareem A lot of these examples are about departure as the act of entering queer space: leaving home, leaving a small town, entering a nightclub, Roundtable

New Sazae in Tokyo, Japan: The late owner, behind the bar, surrounded by cassettes and CDs.

New Sazae.

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Category is Books in Glasgow, Scotland, with founders Charlotte and Fin Duffy-Scott.

Images courtesy of Category is Books and Eusebio Penha.

how we’re not born into queer space. I’m actually quite dissatisfied by what queer space has offered me, queer being LGBTQ+. These parties and safe spaces and centres are often also spaces of exclusion, and sometimes they’re just very boring. I want pleasure and fun and joy.

Sometimes queer spaces are invested in removing those things and moving only towards critique, darkness and depression. I think about my mom and the neighbourhood aunties, sitting around in a space they had made for each other to gossip. The loud laughter of 15 women in the living room, eating for hours and gossiping about how awful their husbands are. Using laughter as an act of survival is something I aspire to as much as I aspire to being lost in the beat in a nightclub. Sometimes we find ways to revel in queerness inside of the homes we were born into. Those can be as productive as acts of departure and entry into new spaces as well.

Vikramaditya Kareem has touched a nerve – i mean that both as disturbance and invitation. i inherited the queerness of a broken home. i came from a genealogy of abusive domestic spaces that eventually broke apart. The word “queerness” in that way offered me entry into the loneliness at the heart of heteronormativity. i know no one more lonely. It’s ridiculous how lonely married people with children are, but their forms of abandonment have no language or grammar. They feel greater shame speaking about it than any of us do talking about our sexcapades, dirty fantasies or broken hearts. To further the conversation that Adam started, those of us who do find other queer people develop a grammar around our abandonment.

We develop forms of living and surviving together. Queer spaces like clubs have never interested me – i find them really boring. It’s like the expectation of a parent, but from queer elders, that i’m supposed to participate in something i find no revelry in. i have tried to build other kinds of queer spaces because i understood loneliness from the get-go.

The loneliness that we are gifted when we are born into these non-queer spaces is a beautiful thing. It has a wayward grammar. It’s unsureness.

It’s uncertainty. It’s tentativeness. Maybe what Dhiren called “fragility” is actually an invitation. The doubleness is what makes it interesting.

What one calls loneliness and abandonment are things that are prized about queer world-making, rather than residues we must overcome.

That’s the difference between an LGBTQ-ness that draws on Pride, versus queer world-making that draws on refusal and loneliness. That gap is a productive gap. Most masc, attractive gay men don’t feel like they belong in the clubs either. If we all fit in, then i am going to join the next movement. i have said that i will stop being trans the day the great prime minister of this country wears a sari. i will stop wearing one, because inclusion is of no interest to me at all. At 35, i’m approaching a life that – wow, i’ve entered the personal – is not built around coupledom. A world making that denies the capaciousness of loneliness is not livable to me.

Aastha If we talk about the grammar and the syntax of normative mapping, we know that queer or trans spaces escape those. If we speak of the objective or intent of mapping, queer spaces need to escape those for their survival, or exist in interstitial, hard-to-map spaces. Would it be useful to come up with an alternative grammar or rules: a cartographic

syntax for spaces that we are calling queer? Or is the constant subversion, challenging and constant refusal, of those rules and syntax where we thrive?

Dhiren I love dancing, and I want to embrace some of these spaces that make me feel anxious and lonely. There are times that I go to one of them and stand in a corner watching everybody, or dancing on my own.

It comes with a double bind. Entering queer spaces we are prescribed a certain script, the grammar to perform: to be queer, to be flamboyant, to be fabulous. At times, I want to refuse that, but I tend to want to embrace it. I also want to relish loneliness when I can. But sometimes that loneliness comes to you as a trap. You know the space is fragile, it is anxiety inducing, but you do not stop going to these parties. You do not stop hoping that somewhere you might be able to renegotiate, claim it, rename it and make it your own in queer forms.

KNeo I am taken by this notion of queerness and fragility. Coming back to the question around grammars, I’m not sure if someone can be absolutely queer in the sense that they’re nothing other than queer. In that context, there are ways in which we can bring resources and strategies from the different communities that we also come from into queering spaces.

Recently, I was talking about [Steve] Biko [a South African anti-apartheid activist, ed.], freedom, Afro-pessimism and Black consciousness. And it occurs to me that Afro-pessimism and conversations around queerness have been very similar in their grammars. Afro-pessimism describes the absolute social death [where] your Blackness means you’re nobody, but your suffering is special and maintains civility in the Western world – in many ways, that’s how we understand queerness. We see queerness as defined by its suffering, its out-of-sightedness, its otherness. Biko died as though he were an Afro-pessimist, even though he was one of the authors of Black consciousness and his teachings of Black consciousness were beautiful and the opposite of Afro-pessimism. He teaches us, in moments and states of oppression, to reject the thing that’s rejected you.

As Vikramaditya said, this is not about disobedience: it’s about refusal.

Biko never demanded anything from the state, because to demand is to acknowledge and acquiesce to the sovereignty of the structure of power.

Biko says that Blackness is not about skin pigmentation – it’s a frame of mind. It’s a political consciousness and orientation, which is really powerful in the context of a hyper-regimented environment that overdetermined people’s identities. He wasn’t asking for representation, he wasn’t asking to be included. He was saying that the means by which we define identity in this space are useless and pointless. He rejects them. In doing that he builds a porous community. Many of us have described a kind of queerness that has been promulgated against us: how we don’t recognise it, it’s too regimented, too strict and binary, it reproduces these grammars of an identity being solid. But this idea of a porous community is really exciting.

Vikramaditya Dionne Brand reminds us that with map-making come people who can read it and therefore a deep relation to mastery. That is the fault-line of inventing a lexicology, a grammar or a dictionary of queer things: the quiet ways mastery interrupts the process. That’s where, to borrow from Brand again, cartography becomes about description rather than journeys. On refusal, the question we need to ask is how to write Roundtable

Caminito Verde in Mexico City, Mexico: a landscape that houses hidden same-sex intercourse.

Comparsa drag in Buenos Aire: a queer crowd taking over a street corner after meeting at Silvio Lang and Endi Ruiz’s workshop on drag performance.

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Roundtable

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Taormina in Sicily, Italy: Wilhelm von Gloeden, Flowering Almonds, c 1890-1914.

Images ccourtesy of Vicente Vila (previous spread), Getty’s Open Content Program, and Ruhul Abdin and Maruf Arefin Mim.

about and draw queerness as an invitation, rather than a description.

To choreograph a refusal, rather than say, “This is what it is.” That cannot happen with the master’s tools. Any time universities or clinics or our queer elders who organise Pride events sit down to develop this lexicology, they are being masters. How does one think of a map that refuses mastery?

As soon as mastery enters, what we’ll see unfold is the question of entry, as Gabriel said, or a betrayal or disappointment. The question of mapmaking has to sidestep the developmentalist imagination of queerness as “X”. We must realise that it is the masters who are asking for the map, not those inventing into existence.

Katarina When you talk about mastery and the Audre Lorde quote about the master’s tools, I always liked the continuation of that by Lilian Robinson, who wrote that of course you use the master’s tools if those are the only things you can get your hands on. We’re moving between metaphor and materiality with our bodies in these queer spaces. All these spaces that we talk about pretend to be static, but the permanence of spaces is a big lie. No spaces are really there all the time. Architecture is, at the same time, almost always a prison, but never a prison. We can make a hole in the wall with the tools – even if it’s the master’s tools, you can still use them. That’s a way of both being defined and defying how they want to frame us – pushing through that wall that pretends to be static. If I’m stuck in theoretical reasoning, as soon as I return to the craft, to the tools that I can use, it becomes possible for us to meet across differences. As you enter into helping someone, say, fix their hair, you can actually meet, even though we are so immensely different. I mean, look at this group of people – there are so many things that you have talked about that I don’t know anything about, but what I have found is that across the actual making of space, or the remaking or unmaking, there is a kind of possibility for us to meet and care for each other.

Kareem This conversation has me thinking about that critique of Adam’s work that it doesn’t land on what queer architecture is. It has me thinking about queer, not as identity or structure, but as a way of looking. This gets to what Vikramaditya was saying about loneliness as a site of epistemology.

Some of my favourite queer studies texts aren’t pointing out what people are doing, but naming how hegemonic structures work. They’re peeling that back and saying, “Here’s how to read this map. Here’s why this map was created this way.” Some of the most exciting queer work is from that position, and then it lets people take whatever routes they want to “queer” it – where queer becomes the doing. Here’s how to look at a map to know how these things have come to be, that there’s a history to their structural form – that’s really exciting queer work that doesn’t require sex and desire and pleasure and joy, but is actually quite institutional. It becomes useful to queer life and survival. As you asked about new cartographies, Christina Hanhardt’s book Safe Space comes to mind. She documents this moment in the 2000s where the New York City-based organisation Fierce’s young, queer, working-class activists were asked to draw their dream city. In the dream city, they included a welfare office and a space for safe sex work to happen. When I teach this chapter, my students are like, “Why does the dream city still require sex work?” What I love about this is that it’s an

alternate cartography, but it’s not one that doesn’t imagine their own lives and bodies as living in the present conditions. They’re reimagining space and strict structure, but they’re also still maintaining the rules that they live inside of and enjoy and inhabit.

Adam I was obsessed with maps as a child. Any map that I could get my hands on, I would pore over. The world in maps was much more amenable than the real world outside. Maps provided this strange, abstract framework, within which I could imbue my imagination and longing. I was constantly drawing maps of desire. I would populate these whole worlds with all the things I hoped for, the friends that I wished I had, the cultures I felt I was missing a connection to. Maps, cartography and legends were tools of Western inscription on the world and division. There’s the Sykes-Picot Agreement [the 1916 secret treaty between France and Great Britain that carved up swathes of the Middle East by drawing arbitrary lines on a map, ed.] and horrible examples all over the world. But at the same time, the framework of them was liberating for a lonely child. Josh and I approached the book in a similar spirit. A lot of the conversations we had implied that – at least within the world of architecture – there were designers and practitioners who were missing a sense of belonging to a history or narrative: queer designers looking for that story couldn’t find it. The reason that we called it an atlas was to do the inverse of a normal atlas, which is all about the unambiguous division of the world into units that are calculable and comparable across space and time. We tried to create a sense of belonging across space, time, and cultures. It brings things together in a sense of community and family. It has maps driven by desire, and hope, and longing. It’s not one language, one master descriptor, one unit of metres or miles that will divide the whole world, but a plethora of descriptions and a panorama of different voices, who each have their own way of describing it. It’s in the absorbing of all of those together that one starts to get a feel for the overall community.

Gabriel I feel terrible following this with a very technocratic approach, but there is a very urgent thing to unpack. It is one of the master’s tools and it’s a map I’m working on deconstructing. It’s called Geographic Information Systems/Science mapping, or GIS. We’re talking about the map as a digital cartographic environment, it’s completely pervasive, and it’s a real power/knowledge tool: it has a significant impact on our identities and bodies, but it’s seemingly invisible. GIS is built on a violent geographic history. It’s software that started out as a military tool for surveillance, but which is now used by urban planners, landscape designers, and architects. What’s urgent from a spatial justice perspective is to be able to intervene or object to what GIS is putting forward, because it’s working on all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about: the heteropatriarchy, the gendered nature of infrastructure, the Cartesian space-time grid. All the things we were talking about in terms of architecture and how we’re aligning or coming out of alignment, or orienting and disorienting, are now being produced and reproduced on an exponential scale. It’s this dangerous monster. We are now data points being aggregated. GIS uses Big Data and AI to algorithmically programme a city, or predict behavioural patterns and movements.

Roundtable

Pop-Up Queer Spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

It’s using huge capacities of data and aligning our movements from the gyroscopes on our mobile phones. We need to figure out strategies for resisting that capture. World-building is becoming a digital, AI, Big Data phenomenon, and what implications does that have for the production and reproduction of gender, sexual orientation and queerness in terms of the map? I’m really interested in what Vikramaditya is talking about around the reparative programmatic with a system like this, which is adopting de-corporealised, universal ways of thinking about the body. How the body occurs in this programme is as a point and a line for movement – it’s flattening and capitalist. This is an important terrain to deconstruct, to queer, but first we need to pull it apart and understand its impact.

How can a citizen be a part of that process, even in terms of understanding the logics that are informing our movement in space? To destabilise that and think about modes of intervention within something that is this massive is a question of resisting.

Dhiren I am a geographer by training. I was taught map-making in my department, which was obsessed with conventional tools, scales, putting everything on the grid, GIS technology. But what do queer cartographies of desire look like? Mapped dating apps are very interesting ways in which you can understand queerness. I drew maps of six different parts of Delhi based on data from Grindr in order to see what Gabriel is talking about – how we have been reduced to points, but also about the ways in which technology, the mobility that smartphones [facilitate], allows you to move through different geographies, dimensions that people are not otherwise [able to access]. Through your movement you are redrawing some of these maps on those grids. It’s not so much about the dots, but the story that each person is there: that spatial narrative of negotiation, of movement, of aspiration not limited by the geographies into which they have been born. The idea of the queer is not fixed, it is shifting as we get co-opted within systems of power. Who is queer right now is totally different than who was queer in the 1980s and 90s. I want to think about maps not as a fixed place, because every time you go to a party it’s a different script that you embody, there’s no narrative that you can reproduce. The map is shifting, the map is dynamic, it is populated by different kinds of bodies that it did not imagine previously. Every time that difference enters into that map, it reshuffles. To think about cartography through those narratives of hope and resilience might be much more beautiful.

Vikramaditya One of the things we must speak to is that merely having a map does not give us access. It’s not simply about readability. We noticed [this] from the first maps we were introduced to as children – those political maps of the world, defined by national territories. Movement on this map and outside this map rely on regimes of security and territory, including access to the right kind of identification and documents. The modern world created mobility. As Toni Morrison reminds us, the slave was the first modern – the quintessential modern – experience of alienation and uprooting. Morrison tells us that [the modern] is disenfranchisement, it is enfleshment and it is deeply violent. In India, the digital and national is combining to disenfranchise large pockets of this country through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CCA) [passed in 2019, it excluded Muslim 94

Images courtesy of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans.

Hotel Gondolín in Buenos Aires.

Roundtable

Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, is pubished by RIBA Publishing, RRP £40.

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Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories.

Image courtesy of RIBA Publishing.

minorities from applying for citizenship, ed.]. The anti-CAA movement refused and said, “Hum kagaz nahi dikhayenge (We won’t show the papers).”

We might want to think about not simply alternate cartographies but also the long life of slavery and the national-modern on these maps. If tomorrow i consider moving cities, because of the difficulty of existing [as trans] within my ID cards, it is an impossibility. It’s not a queer impossibility; it’s a national impossibility. We strike against the limits of a bureaucratic and cartographic imagination once we think about ways that maps create this flat world. Some of these worlds cannot be queered. Sinking boats in the middle of the Mediterranean tell us that escape from the national modern and its cartography is a plunge into death. This is not social death: this is families dying in the water. We must think about the limits of queering, as much as we might want to think about an alternative to map-making and world-making.

Adam With maps there is that aggressive desire to define things. But before the invention of the nation state, things were pretty much all gradients.

The boundaries between ethnicities, the boundaries between cultures, were constantly shifting. There were blurred edges. Then the borders started going up, the national myth started to be created, narratives of the Other, the outsider, the gypsies, the Jews, the homosexuals. In order to create that resilience of definition, you have to decide who’s outside of it. I’m very comfortable in those in-between spaces. I am a child of genocide and multiple diasporas. As Vikramaditya mentioned, the beginning of modernity was the violence of extraction, removal, separation, exploitation, and the creation of this permanent sense of loss and longing for those who have been moved around the world and don’t have an origin. Even that word, “map”, is difficult because it’s got that Roman idea of carving the world up into grids. How can we start to ascribe those blurred edges? How can we describe those gradients?

KNeo This conversation about maps made me think about the short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges. The story goes that there were these cartographers looking to make a faithful map of an empire.

They’re going about drafting and find that the only scale that will satisfy them is a scale of one to one. Then the map and the Empire start blurring – where the map was torn, the shape of the Empire was dishevelled. I take so many different things from that story when I reflect on it, but today I’m reflecting on how those historically Western binary impulses and desires to have a depth of exactitude and determination also have a limit. If they are achieved, it is just as awful as having a more ambiguous identity described here in this conversation. E N D

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

To Be Clear/“Transparency significantly increases the design workload,” says Adam Bates, design director of London-based tech company Nothing. To demonstrate his point, he flicks over the studio’s new Phone (1) smartphone, revealing its seethrough construction. “There’s a whole new set of surfaces, finishes, textures and components to work with. Things that are usually hidden are suddenly right in front of you.”

In illustration, Bates points to a precise white form, nestled beneath the phone’s limpid glass surface. “A flexible PCB [printed circuit board] is beautiful in its own way, but if you took the back off another smartphone, it wouldn’t look like that,” explains Bates. “We have had to work to achieve that.” Warming to his theme, he points out a charging coil, as well as a battery peeking out from under electrical elements.

“With transparency, decisions that usually just factor in function, quality and reliability also have to consider design.”

Transparency is the design signature of Nothing, a tech startup founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Carl Pei and electronics company Teenage Engineering. The company debuted with a set of wireless earphones, Ear (1), and has now stepped into smartphones with Phone (1): a device billed as eschewing pointless feature creep in favour of unique hardware design. “Lately, it feels like after a slew of more and more similar products, and more and more uninspiring products,” Pei narrates in the launch video for Phone (1), “that

somehow the smartphone revolution had ended.”

The design aim with Phone (1), Bates explains, is to restore “surprise and fun” to a typology that has been “formalised into a very effective and functional archetype”. Transparency is one means of achieving this, not least for its contrast to the black box design of the industry’s biggest players. “Even if only subconsciously, it gives you a sense of what these things are actually made up of,” says Bates. This, of course, also creates risk. Physical transparency does not equate to transparency in a company’s supply chains, the conditions of its labour force, or the environmental impact of its products – how much does the smartphone industry really want consumers looking beneath the surface?

These issues are thornier than any perceived staleness in new designs, but Nothing is at least trying to be more transparent here also. Phone (1) is made from recycled aluminium, for example, and more than 50 per cent of its internal plastic components are bio-based or recycled post-consumer waste. The team say that they will also work to extend the lifespan of its devices through regular software updates. “We want people to stick with this phone as long as possible,” Bates summarises.

These are simply the challenges of working in smartphones – a world that prizes the rapid churn of devices through an iterative mode of annual releases that runs counter to the design values that Nothing hopes to embody.

“Transparency is about being open and showing things that others perhaps don’t,” Bates explains, but he is under no illusions about the challenges ahead.

What happens, for example, when the market and investors demand a Phone (2)? “That’s what you should be losing sleep over as a designer,” he says. “How are we going to do this again? How are we going to surprise ourselves?”

Words Oli Stratford

Objects in Review

Words Lauren Yoshiko

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Pipe Dreams-Across the world of glass production, cannabis smoking devices occupy a particular niche: a wacky, colourful niche, that largely comprises borosilicate pipes and bongs in cartoonish or psychedelic shapes. It’s an active space, particularly as more countries legalise cannabis for medical and recreational purposes, but the high-art world hasn’t really considered it yet due to enduring stigma. There is, however, a growing need for smoking accessories that can appeal to a wider range of consumers.

J. Hill’s Standard, a traditional Irish cut-crystal maker, is now entering this uncharted space with Pot Variations, a series of cannabis accessories made in collaboration with Amsterdam-based designer Aldo Bakker that bring a more contemporary design aesthetic to cannabis. A curiosity for exploring new functions for glass drives the brand’s founder, Anike Tyrrell, who was eager to venture into this realm after seeing her sister find relief from chronic back pain through cannabis. “We are interested in making beautiful forms that function very well,” she says. “We hoped to make something that could help more people open their minds to plants like cannabis with real medical potential.”

Tyrrell approached Bakker in 2019, with a brief referencing traditional Irish clay pipes and not much else, trusting the designer’s playfulness and purity of form. Bakker ended up finding inspiration in an inflatable swan pool floatie he saw on vacation, which informed his design for Cloud Pipe – a smooth, spoon-shaped pipe that resembles a swirling cloud when smoked. Next came HopStep, a versatile vessel that converts into a pipe with an aluminium insert. “Simplicity is core to us, which can be the absolute devil, because if you make a mistake, there’s

nowhere to hide,” says Tyrrell, who worked with Richard Whiteley at the Corning Museum of Glass Studio to produce the pieces while J. Hill’s Standard gets its own kiln set up.

“Aldo’s piece was very challenging to realise for that reason: it has to be perfect down to the millimetre.”

HopStep’s unique shape is made possible by a dual-cast kiln method that fires separate interior and exterior moulds, which are hand-sculpted together after. It blew open the creative possibilities for Bakker. “With a transparent material, you see the outside and inside simultaneously – an outer line and an inner line,” he says. “A straight line, a diagonal line and a little quarter of a circle. The name ‘HopStep’ came from that movement connecting the shapes.”

Whether through the soothing approachability of Cloud Pipe or the beguiling movement of HopStep, Tyrrell hopes these pieces not only progress the art of glass craft in cannabis, but help further conversations around the drug as medicine. “Everyone is coping with a lot right now,” she explains. “If there’s anything we can do to make it easier for them to try something that may make them feel better, it’s a worthy endeavour.”

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Fibre to Form As you might expect of Nike’s chief design officer, John Hoke owns a lot of hoodies. “Really old ones,” he says. “Nike fleece from years ago that I’ve washed a thousand times so they’re supple and buttery.”

Recently, however, Hoke hasn’t been wearing his old stalwarts quite so often.

Words Oli Stratford Photographs Theresa Marx Photo assistance Andre Vasiljev Styling Veronica Blagoeva Make-up Sunao Takahashi Hair styling Linnéa Nordberg Models Charlotte Carey and Patrick Wilson

Material

A Forward hoodie with A.W.A.K.E Mode skirt, vintage sunglasses from Bridges & Brows, and Manu Atelier boots.

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Four months ago, Nike’s apparel innovation team gave Hoke a new hoodie to wear. On first glance, it seems pretty ordinary. It’s a standard heather grey, which is about as conventional as you can get in a hoodie – Nike uniform, if you like. Having said that, the new design is a little more voluminous than you might expect. It’s more structured and sculptural than most hoodies, to the degree that it looks as if it might be quite stiff – the material holds its shape, rather than slumping in the way that synthetic fleece does. Hoke, however, is adamant that it’s perfectly soft. “It has a slightly different feel to it, I will tell you that,” he says. “A little bit lighter. There’s a structure to it – I have my cuffs on my wrists, it sits on my shoulders, and it gives me a little bit of an offset, if you will.

Layering, which I like.” If Hoke’s old hoodies are slouched and slumped, the new piece is poised and airy. It falls into shapes that most hoodies would not.

Hoke has been wearing the hoodie around Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Oregon, where it has prompted questions from colleagues. “I have people stopping me to ask what it is,” he says. They may have noticed, for instance, that the hoodie has no zippers, aglets or laces, and there’s a fairly minimal use of seams across the design. It’s very stripped back, which, for a garment already as stripped back as a hoodie, is really saying something. There are pockets, but even these are pretty raw – just slits in the fabric. “We laser cut and seal it,” Hoke explains, “and it doesn’t have any hardware to it.” The longer you look at Hoke’s hoodie, the more its differences to a conventional garment become apparent – particularly when you notice that its entire surface has been perforated.

The fact that it’s only people on Nike’s campus asking Hoke about the hoodie is also telling. At present, wearing the garment off-campus is verboten – it’s the first result of a top-secret material research project.1 “This is a big one,” Hoke tells me, grinning.

“This is one of those innovations we’re just at the dawn of.”

Hoke’s hoodie is the first example of Forward, a new material that Nike has developed as part of a sevenyear research project that was led by Janett Nichol, the company’s vice president of apparel innovation.

“This is a future long-term play that we’ve been driving towards,” Nichol tells me, “so it’s taken us a minute, 1

So I imagine there’s a whole wardrobe of the stuff in Mar-a-Lago.

but that’s what innovation does.” The key to understanding Forward, she says, is to appreciate that its composition is fundamentally different to that of fabrics conventionally used in contemporary garment design. “In the apparel industry, you have predominantly two main material types,” she explains.

“You’ve got a knit, and you’ve got a woven.” In both cases, a fibre is first developed into a yarn, which is then processed in one of the two main directions: either interlaced or stitched. “But Forward is not a knit or a woven,” Nichol notes. Instead of being transformed into a yarn, the shredded polyester fibres that make up Nichol’s textile (the bulk of which are produced from recycled PET bottles and sourced from a third-party manufacturer in Taiwan) are processed directly into a final material. “This is going from a fibre to a form. This is not woven through a regular weaving machine and it’s not knitted – it’s needle punched.”

In itself, this is unremarkable: needle punch is a standard process. It’s one of the methods through which felt is produced, and it’s widely employed in the creation of a whole host of non-woven textiles; materials that variously serve as cleaning cloths, under-carpet, filters, and geotextiles. “They’re made on a massive machine,” says Nichol, recounting her visit to the Taiwanese facility that currently produces Forward, “I’ve never seen anything so huge in my life.”

This machine has a moving bed onto which loose fibres are fed, coupled with a board filled with barbed needles.

As the fibres pass through the machine, the needles rapidly stab down into the bed, catching the fibres and causing them to become enmeshed. Eventually, the fibres coalesce to form an interlocked, non-woven structure. “It just keeps punching and you see the material coming out the other end,” summarises Nichol. Non-woven materials, of which needle-punch textiles are one variety, may be common – “That industry creates a lot of things that we use every day,” explains Nichol, “things like tissue, paper and diapers” – but the technology has historically had few applications within sportswear. “Early stages of this exploration were really clunky,” admits Hoke, “[because they were] thinking about a non-woven process which, let’s be honest, is mostly used to create carpet padding.”

Over the course of Forward’s development, Nichol and her team went back and forth with the factory, exploring different methods of tailoring its output towards a material suitable for apparel. “We spent a lot of time with these partners working through

Material

whether we could create something that you can put next to skin,” she says. “We were asking them to take shredded fibres from a recycled polyester and create a material, and that took a lot of time to figure out because they weren’t used to using this type of fibre to create products. That’s where the art and the science had to keep going back and forth: a little more of this, or less of that, or the fibres are too thick [and so on].”

With time, the team began to zero in on a textile

“but when you think long term, it can potentially expand across any of the dimensions of our FIT platform.”

Such remarks undoubtedly serve a promotional role, but Hoke tells me that the company’s optimism surrounding the material finds a precedent in Flyknit, the footwear technology that Nike launched in 2012.

A means of knitting racing shoe uppers to reduce weight and waste, Flyknit now pervades the brand’s collections, with a host of similar technologies also adopted throughout the wider industry. “Forward is much like what we did with FlyKnit years ago,” Hoke states. “It was small at the beginning, [launching in February 2012 with the Flyknit Racer shoe] and this programme will be almost identical: starting small as a hoodie. But down the road it can be anything and everything, frankly. And it’ll change pretty dramatically. The way we think about fabric and material usage, and how we innovate at a thread – or, in this case, at a substance level – lets us do the things we need to do with form, function, beauty and utility.”

In this vein, Nike’s ambition is that Forward will quickly spread throughout its apparel range, with the expectation that competitor versions will spring up from other companies, even if the brand holds patents on aspects of the production process. “I hope that other designers or manufacturers and brands are inspired by the push that we’ve made,” says Hoke, “and they can go apply that to their particular product.”

While the initial designs’ aesthetic leans heavily into perforations, and the garments are presently only available in grey, Nichol says that these are both choices, rather than technical requirements. “We decided to look at the way we style it, how we finish it, and what the trims are, because we didn’t want to take away from the innovation of Forward,” she says.

“It was intentionally designed in such a way that could amplify the beauty of this material and highlight the structural aesthetic of it.” Yet the material can present differently: it takes colour, can be cut and styled as desired, and the composition of the different layers can be adapted between garments or functions. Forward, if all goes to plan, will soon be perceived as a broad material base within Nike, rather than a specific product range. “The general public is not aware of what this is yet,” Hoke tells me, “but they will be.”

“Down the road Forward can be anything and everything frankly. And it’ll change pretty dramatically.” —John Hoke formed from five discrete layers of needle-punched material. “When we did six [layers] that was too many, and when we did fewer it was too light. We had to figure out the right combination and solution to get us to where we are today.”

Yet while this may explain where Nike currently is with Forward, less certain is where the brand is taking it. Alongside the flagship hoodie, which launches in September 2022, the earliest pieces produced using Forward are a small collection of sweatshirts and jogging bottoms, in which the material plays a similar functional role to synthetic polyester fleece. It’s a use that Forward seems well suited to, particularly given that it has a higher Rct rating (a measure of thermal resistance) than Nike’s existing microfibre fleece, which means Forward is lighter and warmer than other materials in the company’s stable – something of a no-brainer for sweats. But Nichol is adamant that thermal insulation is only one direction in which Forward may develop, and states that the material’s structure can be adjusted to serve other purposes.

“We wanted it to be able to solve what we have always continued to drive, which is our FIT platform,” she says. FIT, which launched in 1991, stands for Functional Innovative Technologies and is the terminology used by the company to refer to technical materials with particular functional qualities: Dri-FIT wicks sweat away from the body, Therma-FIT provides insulation, and Storm-FIT offers protection against wind and rain.

“In this particular solution, [Forward] happened to solve the Therma-FIT proposition,” continues Nichol,

This envisaged versatility hints at one of the complexities surrounding the Forward project: 102

why develop a material to perform the same role as existing textiles, particularly given that Nike says it has no plans to cut those pre-existing materials from its range? “[Forward] does not remove fleece,” Nichol tells me bluntly, with the company noting that pricing between Forward and its existing Tech Fleece is roughly commensurate – the pair do not necessarily fall into separate brackets, but will instead compete with one another. “There are now two different solutions that can solve the same problem,” says Nichol, “and it really is up to the consumer to decide which one they choose to engage in.” Forward, she argues, stands on its own and its planned applications need not be placed in dialogue with other materials. “When we started on this journey, we did not start off by saying, ‘Let’s solve fleece.’”

This is worth exploring. When I ask Nichol what did prompt Forward’s development, she cites the mismatch between the process’s traditional output and Nike’s aims as a central part of the creative appeal. “A lot of things spark our interest,” she tells me. “[Here,] we were just inspired by a different part of industry and thought: ‘What if?’” The decision to explore needle-punch, she says, was in this sense fortuitous, with little prevailing logic at the beginning of the process. “We just happened upon this [needle punch] vendor, and one of the things we’re always trying to do is look at machines as a way to create new ideas in the apparel space.” This is no doubt true, but it also seems an incomplete explanation for the authorisation of a seven-year, funded research programme. After all, while Nike hopes to present the initial Forward collection as unrelated to polyester fleece (likely because it is continuing to sell fleece), there are clear comparisons.

One of the central virtues of Forward’s production process, for example, is its lightness in comparison to a traditional fleece, with Nike citing a 75 per cent reduction in carbon emissions between the two.2 In part, this has been achieved through methods that could be applied more widely across Nike’s materials.

Forward is made using at least 70 per cent recycled content by weight (its constituent layers can be produced using industrial, pre-consumer or postconsumer waste), and its fibres are solution-dyed 2

A measurement taken by the Dutch sustainability consultancy PRé as a cradle-to-gate assessment: a partial product life cycle that excludes use and disposal, but which incorporates processes from resource extraction through to sale.

as opposed to relying upon more traditional dyeing methods. Conventional batch-dyeing processes for yarns are notoriously energy- and water-intensive, whereas solution dyeing (which is only possible for synthetic fibres) cuts down on these demands by introducing pigment while the plastic is still molten, meaning that the colouration becomes intrinsic to the resultant fibre. It is a process that is relatively uncommon within apparel, insofar as it raises costs and forces decisions about colour to be made early (causing challenges around maintaining stock across colourways), but Nike is not alone in using the technique.

Patagonia, for instance, also creates a selection of its pieces through solution dyeing, citing a resultant “90 per cent reduction in water use and 96 per cent CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] savings overall compared to batch-dyeing, with considerably fewer chemicals released from the overall process.” In the case of Forward, Nike states that no water was used in either the dyeing or finishing for the debut collection. While improving dyeing methods and upping recycled content would, perhaps, be good policy across Nike’s range, more unique to Forward is the fact that its higher Rct rating means it has a corresponding lower base weight to fleece. As a result, less material is needed to fulfil the same functional requirements, with the additional virtue that a needle-punch material does not shed fibres at the same rate as fleece, thereby limiting the amount of microplastics released into the environment.3 “One of the things we want to make sure really lands with the consumer is that this is different,” says Nichol.

“We’re trying to solve many different things and we want consumers to connect with not just the item itself, but to understand what we’re trying to do around the future of circularity.”

While the company is proud of these material developments, part of its optimism is grounded in a focus on what the material may mean for the manner in which it designs and produces apparel. While the reductivism of the garments’ styling is, as Nichol notes, an attempt to display the material front and centre, it is also a means of designing clothes that can be more easily processed by recycling systems at the end of their lifespan.4 “They’re [made from just] one material, [which] I think is part of the future,” 3

Material

“You will experience some pilling [with Forward], but it’s minor,” says Nichols. “You can just get one of the the fabric shavers that you’d use on your couch or a sweater – takes it right off.”

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says Hoke. Zips and aglets have not been used in the designs because these elements would need to be separated from the garments pre-recycling, and the overall simplicity of the design is similarly intended to reduce friction in this area. “What more can we do with one material?” continues Hoke. “[Can we] give it creasing, perforations, different depths and textures, and different apertures that can mimic and act the way people have thought about fabrics in the past?”

Further experiments in achieving complexity through a single material are, Hoke tells me, underway. “I get to see what’s coming around the bend. You’ll see the same progression of Forward as you saw in FlyKnit.

It becomes more dynamic, more breathable, and it’ll have different uses of colour, different weights, drapes and hand feels. That’s all coming, but what we’re trying to do now is get the public interested in the idea that this is a material that has been reclaimed, can be reused, and which is produced differently.”

Consumer engagement seems key to the project, which ties in with Nike’s broader design plans. This year marks the company’s 50th anniversary, during which the brand is trying to connect its past and future through an ongoing “Never Done” campaign. It’s a communications strategy summed up by hiring Spike Lee to create Seen It All, an advert that attempts to knit together the company’s timeline by way of Lee reprising the role of Mars Blackmon, his motormouth bike messenger character from She’s Gotta Have It (1986), in order to wax lyrical about how “I’ve seen it all before” as he traipses back through 50 years of sporting achievements while playing chess in New York. Lee’s opponent, Zimmie (Indigo Hubbard-Salk), represents sport’s future, countering Mars’s rhymes about past greats with reflections on contemporary sporting icons. “Look OG, I know you think you’ve seen everything, but you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she announces before swiftly putting Mars in checkmate.

I have limited patience for this sort of thing, beyond a willingness to tip my hat to Lee for what was, presumably, an almighty pay day. Taken on its own terms, Seen it All is campy and celebratory, but 4

Worth noting, however, is the fact that just because Forward is recyclable, does not necessarily mean that the garments actually will be recycled at the end of their lifespans. To Nike’s credit, it does have better form in attempting to tackle this issue than some corporations. The company launched its Nike Grind initiative in 1992, which collects manufacturing scrap, unused materials and end-of-life shoes and converts them into materials for sports surfaces, trainers, underlay and other applications.

provides little clarity as to where Nike is heading (the closest it comes to any concrete information is a shot in which Mars and Zimmie turn to the camera, hold up sneakers, and roar Mars’s catchphrase “Yo! It’s gotta be the shoes!” – shoes, after all, remain Nike’s biggest seller, bringing in more than twice the revenue of apparel). Clearly, not much weight can be placed on Seen it All – it exhibits the natural tendency of advertising to gravitate towards bluster and grandiloquence – but some other initiatives from the anniversary year have been similarly reticent around detail, offering aspiration in place of information.

All Conditions Here, for example, is a 2022 design fiction that the company published in the form of a free newspaper. In this story, Nike imagines a future in which landscape, design, technology, data and sport have become fully integrated: “Our clothing and gear now interact directly with the landscape,” says one of the characters as they explore a Nike running course outside Nairobi. “The landscape is constantly sensing us.” The ideas within All Conditions Here are, perhaps, an interesting barometer as to where Nike sees itself heading (or a horrendous premonition, depending on your perspective on surveillance capitalism), but they also seem far-flung and distant.

It’s an issue that appears particularly acute when there are more pressing design challenges facing the brand.

Nike states that it was responsible for the emission of 11,706,664 metric tons of CO2e in its 2020 financial year alone – a vast figure and one that the company says it is working to bring down. As part of its “Move to Zero” campaign to become “zero carbon and zero waste” by 2050, for example, Nike has set itself a number of sustainability targets for 2025. Precise targets are difficult to track down (the company seems to prefer speaking about the progress it has made, rather than the exact endpoints it is working toward), but those that do appear in concrete form mostly focus around reducing waste, increasing the percentage of renewable energy utilised in Nike’s facilities, and upping the proportion of recycled materials in its products.5 “We have a goal of reducing absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 70 per cent in our owned and operated facilities by using 100 per cent renewable energy and converting our fleet to 5

Material

On the topic of which, there are worthwhile questions to ask about whether the wide-scale use of any synthetic fibre, recycled or not, plays a role in trying to create a more sustainable apparel industry.

Forward joggers, paired with an A.A. Spectrum jacket.

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A Forward sweatshirt, accompanied by tights by Zoe Horgan and Manu Atelier boots.

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electric vehicles,” the company notes in its 2021 fiscal year ‘Impact Report’. “Today, we are 78 per cent of the way to that goal.” These are sizeable achievements but, given the scale of Nike’s production, they need to be – ecologically speaking, the status quo cannot be maintained. “Most people understand Nike is big,” the company states in its ‘Impact Report’. “But we thought it would be worthwhile to give that idea more context.” Running over a host of numbers – 75,400 employees; upwards of 1 million workers across production facilities; and more than 1,500 physical spaces – the report reaches a surprising summation. “If [Nike] were a city,” it notes, “we’d have roughly the population and carbon footprint of Amsterdam, Netherlands.”

This is where complexity arises. There is little doubt that Nike is right to try and reduce its impact, but given its status as a major manufacturer there are obvious limits to the methods it will countenance in order to achieve this. Nike is unlikely to cut back on the scale of its production, for instance, with its 2021 ‘Impact Report’ making interesting reading when placed alongside the company’s 2022 financial report: a document which notes that yearly revenues have “increased 19 percent to $44.5bn”, with around $5.8bn returned to shareholders. Sustainability may be of interest to Nike, but its pursuit is clearly yoked to profitability. Given this constraint, however,6 the brand’s only real option for improving its environmental footprint is to reduce the impact of its processes and distribution networks, improve its recycling and reuse systems, and introduce materials and designs that represent an ecological advancement on those already in use – a strategy that has historically left the brand open to charges of greenwashing. In 2021, for instance, the Changing Markets Foundation, a Dutch sustainability body, criticised Nike and other brands for utilising recycled polyester as a sustainability initiative, given that the material continues to draw upon petrochemicals as a source of fibre. “If fashion brands are serious about reducing their environmental impact,” the foundation said, “they should stop the charade of downcycling plastic bottles into clothes and instead focus on cutting their addiction to fossil fuels and curbing overproduction.”7 New materials and techniques 6 7

Assuming that a complete overhaul of society’s political and economic systems is unlikely to occur in time for those 2025 targets.

Criticism of this downcycling approach focuses on the fact that it takes PET bottles out of a closed loop system.

may be commendable, but they do little to rupture the existing cycles of rapid consumption and production that have been a key driver of climate crisis – if anything, they likely drive further consumption through the creation of desirable products marketed as eco-friendly.

I’m not sure that any manufacturer bringing in $44.5bn in annual revenue could be considered sustainable.

This is a criticism to which Nike’s design team are alert, with Hoke acknowledging that “if you look at any company that’s making things, you’re gonna find some things that might not be great.” While Nike’s sheer scale undoubtedly exacerbates these issues, Hoke argues that this same size can also represent an opportunity for design to drive change, of which he sees Forward as an example. “Our scale is the change, right?” he tells me. “If we make incremental and exponential adjustments in how we source, build and think about eventually designing for disassembly, and [creating more circular systems], we’ll change the industry.” Hoke similarly believes that existing structural concerns should not deter designers from improving products already present on the market.

“We are committed to looking at ourselves internally and saying to ourselves, ‘What can we do as a design organisation to make better choices to make positive change?’” he says. “That’s going to be progressive – there’s no silver bullet here. It’s a matter of committing, changing and adjusting[…] Our intention is to protect the future of sports, and we’re going to do that incrementally, making small adjustments to everything we do, and exponentially introducing completely new fabrics and new methods of making. That’s the commitment.” An obvious rejoinder to this is to note that design can and should also influence the overall curation of a brand’s range – reducing product bloat, cutting out the worst offenders regardless of impact on profits, and avoiding the annual iteration of new models to which sportswear brands are prone – but this is a difficult discussion to have within corporations, where design principles frequently conflict with business models. Design may be a hopeful discipline that can initiate change,8 but it is pointless to pretend that it is not equally at the service of wider economic forces. Either way, Hoke’s optimism seems undimmed. “A universal need today is, ‘What can designers do to help think about a better tomorrow?’” he tells me. “The future is unwritten, but not unimagined. And that’s what we do.”

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Material

Sometimes.

This is one of the central complexities of the Forward story. The programme’s material innovations merit acknowledgment and, according to Nichol and Hoke, would not have been possible without the financial backing made possible by Nike’s scale.

“It’s hard – it’s really hard to do,” says Hoke when I ask why non-woven materials have not been more widely adopted within apparel. “This material is something that was behind the scenes. What happened [with Forward] was that we said, ‘Well, what if it wasn’t behind the scenes? What if it was the scene?’” The resultant development process, Nichol recalls, made demands that smaller companies would simply not have been able to absorb. “It takes a while and so it takes investment and it takes commitment,” she says.

“It takes a bunch of amazing, brilliant innovators within Nike to say, ‘We can we can crack this and we can make this.’ We’ve got a pretty big target from a purpose perspective and we want to contribute to that target on the apparel side. We know that we make a lot of products and we want to make sure as we’re continuing to make amazing products that we’re doing what’s right.”

Yet Nike’s scale also serves as a limiter on Forward’s ability to make meaningful change: a more ecologically sound material represents no advance until it actually replaces the materials that have come before it. If it is simply an addition to an existing stable of products, there is no advantage. This, then, is the central challenge facing Forward. If new materials are to form a bedrock of the company’s wider sustainability strategy, can they squeeze out their predecessors? It is a decision that Nike hopes to place at the feet of consumers.

“The Forward proposition is a choice,” says Hoke.

“It’s a choice option for consumers out there. As a consumer, what am I investing in?”

Speaking to Hoke and Nichol, I’m in little doubt as to what they would choose. Both eulogise Forward’s ecological advantages, as well as the options that it provides to designers. “It has the ability to be so sculptural,” Nichol says. “You can create shapes that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do with a knit and it doesn’t drape the same way. That’s what makes it really appealing.” When I ask each of them what wearing the material feels like, they are unequivocal.

“It doesn’t compare to anything,” Nichol offers, whereas Hoke opts to reflect on his experiences wearing the hoodie around the Nike campus: “It just feels like it’s something from the future.” Have

no doubt: there are a litany of ethical and environmental issues with placing the responsibility for creating a more sustainable future at the doorstep of consumers,9 but this is the reality of our current material development and manufacturing systems. Both Nichol and Hoke will simply hope that the work they have accomplished with Forward within these parameters is enough to tip the needle in the material’s favour. “Part of the magic of design in this particular era is that we’re here to innovate, and we’re here to make things better,” Hoke concludes. “What we’re asking the public for is a bit of their attention, a bit of their imagination, and to go on a journey with us. Because we’re not saying it’s perfect; we’re saying it’s another step.” E N D Nike contributed financially towards the photoshoot acccompanying this article.

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Not to mention questions over the actual efficacy of this approach.

Material

A Helmut Lang top, with Nike bumbag and Forward joggers, paired with Manu Atelier boots.

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Words Evi Hall

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

It Hides a Mess!/“Standing mirrors are big,” Inga Sempé acknowledges of Cabine, her new design for Ariake, “so it’s important to be able to use the back of it.” Cabine stands tall, with two mirror wings angled behind, pegged back at the bottom by a woven triangular basket. Above, floats a set of wooden hooks. Sempé sees the design’s purpose as twofold. “It catches the light in different ways: you can look at yourself but also look at other things in the room,” she says. “And it hides a mess.”

Sempé’s mirror was commissioned

by Gabriel Tan, creative director of Ariake. The brand, launched in 2017 by furniture makers Hirata Chair and Legnatec in southern Japan, caters to the international market, as part of which it has long planned to move some of its production out of Japan. “We were planning to show in Milan and start producing in Europe,” explains Tan. “Many of the challenges with shipping items from Japan to Europe are logistical – even before Covid.” Lead times were long and costs high. “During Covid it exploded,” he continues.

“We’re in a situation now where even if you’re willing to pay the price for the shipping container, sometimes there are simply no containers.”

As such, Tan wanted a collection that could be made closer to Ariake’s end consumer, wherever they might be.

“The new collection will be produced in Italy for the European market,” he says, “and in Japan for the Asian market.” By simplifying the superfluous shipping that would otherwise go into making a single piece, Ariake is able to achieve both economic and logistical benefits. “It was silly to ship wood from Europe or the US to Japan, process it and then send it back,” says Tan. Products made in both regions will, by and large, use materials sourced from their home market. “We will still give

customers in Europe the option of buying Japan-made products,” says Tan, but there are ramifications: “the lead time is different and maybe there will be fewer shipments a year.”

Tan sees untangling this logistical knot as bringing additional benefits. “People view Japanese companies as being very proud and traditional, and wanting to keep craft in Japan,” he says. “But for Ariake, they realised that they need to be progressive and think about sustainability and the logistics crisis.” Tan wants consumers to know that buying from a Japanese brand does not have to mean made in Japan.

Instead, products are made “where it makes sense, where it’s sustainable and where you get the best results.”

In the case of Cabine, the design reflects this ethos. Its hinge allows it to be flat-packed and easily shipped. Asked whether this was part of the brief, Sempé shakes her head: “No, but it’s obvious!” Cabine, then, reflects a desire from both Sempé and Tan for KISS: keep it simple stupid.

Objects in Review

Embrace the Weird Words Sophie Tolhurst

What do the following have in common? Björk taking apart her cathode-ray tube TV and comparing its innards to a cityscape; a fluffy, white dog being groomed in a salon, satisfying scissor snips revealing a glimpse of an eye here and there; the tinkling of an aeroplane drinks trolley as the captain is heard over the intercom; a woman whispering, “for those of you who love to hear people whisper”; the BBC’s Shipping Forecast from 16 February 2022.

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All images courtesy of the Design Museum and ArkDes.

ĒTER’s pillow-based exhibition design for Weird Sensation

Feels Good, accompanied by a Neumann KU 100 Dummy head binaural stereo microphone for immersive 3D sound.

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the utopic or dystopic, with design stressed as the deciding force that could tip us in either direction.

It is under both rubrics that Taylor-Foster set up his exhibition. “I felt that ASMR[…] could tell us something about the questions that design is there to inform us about,” he says. “How are we living today and what is happening to us?” ASMR is not only an internet culture, Taylor-Foster argues, and “this is

The connection may not be obvious. If you consider these videos as examples of design, they all have different aesthetic qualities and have been made to variously inform, entertain, document or advertise.

In this respect, there is little common ground. What does unite them, however, is that they are all capable of eliciting a specific emotional and physiological response in some of those who watch or listen to them. Ranging from a feeling of calm to euphoria, accompanied by a tingling sensation that may start in your scalp and move down your neck, spine and arms, this sensation is known as ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. As such, these videos are also united by having been brought together for Weird Sensation Feels Good (WSFG), an exhibition on ASMR curated by James Taylor-Foster. It initially ran in 2020 at ArkDes in Stockholm, where Taylor-Foster is curator of contemporary architecture and design, and is now on show at the Design Museum in London until 16 October 2022. ASMR may still be an unfamiliar term to some, but a quick search online summons more than 900m results – largely videos on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. The phenomenon was first named in a Facebook group called “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Group” by Jennifer Allen in 2010 and, in recent years, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity via the internet; WSFG is the first IRL (in real life) exhibition on the phenomenon.

You may ask: why is this at a design museum?

There are few traditional design objects on show in WSFG, but both of the exhibition’s host museums argue that design should be seen as a more expansive field than can be captured by familiar exhibits such as chairs, consumer electronics or shoes.1 Instead, both ArkDes and the Design Museum predicate their programming on the idea that whatever the subject, looking at its design can afford new knowledge about people, places and things – and, more broadly, about the way we live. This may mean reframing a familiar subject, such as the Design Museum’s 2022 exhibition Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, but it is also common for museums to venture into the unknown, looking to speculative design or design futures. As with anything future-orientated, these tend towards 1

It is clear that ASMR is complicated: is it offline or online? New-fangled or primeval? Medical or recreational? an exhibition that is telling us about larger societal questions, whether that be surrounding mental health, loneliness, and stress and anxiety[…] or [about how] the design of technology relates to public life.”

Under the internet-speak of its title – the subject line of a 2007 forum post on steadyhealth.com dedicated to the then-unnamed sensation – the exhibition’s tagline is “design that mediates between mind and body.” The featured designers (and content creators) are known as ASMRtists, who create experiences to trigger ASMR in their viewers, perhaps by tapping objects in specific ways, whispering, or simulating intimate situations such as giving their viewer a facial.

Similar health benefits are attributed to ASMR as those derived from meditation or yoga, which is perhaps reflective of ASMR’s initial “discovery” on the discussion thread of a health forum. “Anecdotally, ASMR is being used more and more as a form of self-medication against the effects of loneliness, insomnia, stress, and anxiety,” the exhibition text says. “[This] is a cue to its success, to its transcendental appeal.” This kind of social framing immediately helps to provide ASMR with real-world validity and a sense of urgency.

Regardless, it is clear that ASMR is complicated: is it offline or online? New-fangled or, as Taylor-Foster suggests, primeval? Medical or recreational? There is a lot to cover in the exhibition given that ASMR is variously described by WSFG as a “community”, a “creative field”, a “culture” and a “format”, and there are plenty of challenges too. “Even making a loan agreement for a YouTube video – there’s no precedent for that,” says Taylor-Foster, adding that most of the ASMRtists thought they were being scammed

As evidence of the way in which what we deem to be “core design” changes over time, it is worth noting that as recently as 2004 the Design Museum was accused by James Dyson of “neglecting its purpose” and becoming a “style showcase” when it hosted an exhibition devoted to shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.

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when first approached by ArkDes. In this respect, generating a sense of mainstream validity seems to have been important to Taylor-Foster, who says that he hopes to “plant a flag in the ground” for ASMR, introducing it to those who may never have heard of it. Rather than drawing a line around what ASMR is or isn’t, the curation focuses on its experiential elements so that visitors can make up their own mind – while hopefully even experiencing ASMR themselves.

Immersive and experiential exhibitions are undoubtedly a current curation trend – to which the phenomenon of proliferating Van Gogh “experiences” bears witness – but WSFG’s wider aim is egalitarian. “One of the most interesting things about Weird Sensation Feels Good,” Taylor-Foster explains, “is that the only prerequisite to experiencing the exhibition is whether or not you can feel something.”

With this in mind, the exhibition is intentionally light on text (with more information provided in an optional booklet), although some loose definitions of ASMR are offered at the start, alongside a glossary of terminology such as “trigger” and “synaesthesia”.

There are documents from Allen’s archive printed on the wall, such as the first ASMR Facebook group charter, although these are rather dense and uninviting.

More engaging is the series of videos showing ASMRtists defining what ASMR means to them, such as this from Life with MaK: “[ASMR] reminds me of when my mum used to stroke my back, or my friends used to play with my hair; how it gave me loads of goosebumps which are called tingles, tingles, tingles, tingles.

And that’s what ASMR is, but through a screen.”

The majority of the subsequent exhibits are ASMR videos, “carefully chosen from hundreds of thousands of possible works,” Taylor-Foster explains. Their labels divide them into “intentional” and “unintentional” ASMR – the latter triggering ASMR thanks to qualities such as rambling narratives, hypnotic motion or completing intricate tasks. There is, however, little attention paid to one kind of video that dominates internet-search results for ASMR: films of young, pretty and most often white or East Asian women (although there is a wider demographic of ASMRtists working in this genre too) simulating close personal attention with kind eyes and soothing voices. These types of video are not shown in full, but are instead glimpsed only briefly among the short clips featured in Definitions of ASMR by ASMRtists, one of the exhibits within WSFG. It could be inferred that Taylor-Foster

hoped to move beyond what the algorithm typically churns up – he describes ASMR as “an extremely diverse and divergent world of creativity” – but given this genre’s popularity, its absence from the exhibition would surely confuse those who look online after visiting.

For those looking for more conventionally “designed” exhibits, WSFG breaks you in gently with five works of motion graphics, such as Synthetic Crops by artist and design duo Wang & Söderström, where ambiguous vegetal forms shudder, bubble and pop. Defined as “visual ASMR”, the ASMR-inducing qualities of videos of this ilk seem to have influenced a more widespread design aesthetic that is increasingly prevalent across both physical and virtual realities: soft shapes, pastel colours and minimalist backdrops and smooth renderings. The few physical objects in the exhibition include equipment typically used to make ASMR videos, such as sensitive binaural microphones shaped like ears, perfect for tickling and whispering into; and ASMR-adjacent “soft” tech, such as Marc Teyssier’s prototype for Artificial Skin for Mobile Devices, a skin-like cover that you can pinch and stroke.

Across all of this, a general vibe for ASMR is established, perhaps best exemplified by the inclusion of Bob Ross’s instructional TV show, The Joy of Painting, which enjoys a whole room in the London exhibition.

Ross is an important figure in ASMR, despite having died 14 years before the phenomenon was even named.

With his soft voice and encouraging words to his audience, accompanied by the sounds and close shots of his “wet-on-wet” painting technique, Ross ticks a lot of ASMR’s boxes. Since episodes of the show were broadcast on Twitch in 2014, he has come to be known as the “Grandfather of ASMR” and grown an audience of more than 5.3 million subscribers, having by now far surpassed the million followers who earned his YouTube channel (posthumously set up in his name) a Gold Creator Award in 2018.2 Taking the digital offline The biggest challenge facing the curators of WSFG was the fact that ASMR is created to be viewed alone with headphones in a private space. Not knowing whether it would even work in the museum – a fear echoed 2

Review

The channel was set up and run by Janson Media, which bought the digital rights to Ross’s show in 2014, working with Bob Ross, Inc.

Meridians Meet by Julie Rose Bower.

by a number of the ASMRtists featured in the show – “was one of the core experiments of the exhibition,” explains Taylor-Foster.

“I ran a small ideas competition with five different architecture studios,” he continues. “I gave them a very simple brief – most of them had never heard of ASMR before –and I said, ‘I just want one image of how you would spatialise this show.’” From very different options, he picked Riga-based ĒTER’s design.

“Our initial goal was to create space that would be experiential by merging what you see and hear with how you feel inside the [architecture],” ĒTER tells me.

At ArkDes, ĒTER’s design covered the whole of the space, while at the Design Museum it forms a central “arena”. Stepping onto a cream carpet (shoes must be removed), visitors are confronted with approximately 90m of wiggling sausage pillow – either intestinal or brain-like – that creates distinctly un-museum-like walls and seating. “When I saw ĒTER’s sketch[…] it clicked in my mind [that] my position was not to glorify internet aesthetics, which is what usually happens in these kinds of exhibitions,” Taylor-Foster explains.

Instead, he wanted “softness” and a “spa for the soul”, making for an unhurried museum experience while simultaneously translating into architecture what the exhibition suggests ASMR does on the internet.

“ASMRtists do not seek to entertain but to relax; for ‘experiencers’, they offer a degree of insulation from a noisy, wandering world,” the exhibition text states.

Taylor-Foster adds that this additionally aimed to open up space for vulnerability. As suggested by the name “arena”, part of the ASMR-like experience is watching and being watched.

This participatory dynamic is also at play in Meridians Meet, a new commission for the Design Museum version of the show by artist and researcher Julie Rose Bower, which allows visitors to make ASMR for themselves. Taking cues from the design of sensory spaces, it creates a welcoming and inclusive environment. Five stations are designed to trigger ASMR in different ways, reframing familiar items such as an arcade coin spinner. “I tried to create a bridge between[...] the world we all know [and ASMR],” says Bower. This approach allows visitors 118

to take up an active role as both ASMR performer and audience, yet while the installation is intended to be cross-generational, older visitors remain the most hesitant, she adds.

The 2D design – including captions, signs, vinyls, digital graphic layers and a booklet by Agga Stage and Alexander Söder, with Emil Andersson – takes cues from digital, making particular use of “hyperlink blue” and “hyperlink purple”, but these, as TaylorFoster suggests, appear softer once removed from the backlit screen. Meanwhile, ĒTER’s design also makes a feature of the technology through which ASMR is mediated, with “TV chandeliers” wreathed in chunky cables and dangling headphones. “ASMR content is created, amplified and perceived with the help of technological extensions of our bodies,” the studio tells me. “Devices such as extra-sensitive microphones, headphones, cables, and smartphones give us new superpowers for pleasure and relaxation.” There is a degree of sci-fi kitsch: brightly hued moulded hands among the cables evoke a cyborgian state and the abundant wires seem anachronistic in our near-wireless world (while nicely prompting conversations over the inevitable tangling of headphones).

Taylor-Foster explains that the “radical” aim at the exhibition’s core is to intervene in how we conceive of exhibition spaces and public space more generally – although this is perhaps more relevant at ArkDes where entrance is free. Taylor-Foster recounts a charming anecdote of an elderly couple falling asleep together on the exhibition’s second day at ArkDes, while during my own visit to the Design Museum I witnessed a woman nestle in amongst the pillows, lay her jacket over herself, put the headphones on, and finally don an eye mask.

On the other hand, one group appeared distinctly uncomfortable and left the area quickly without sitting down or watching the videos. A disappointment is that accessibility has not been prioritised, and some of those with mobility issues would struggle to clamber over the uneven seating in order to have the proposed experience of this space. This seems particularly pointed given ASMR’s usual digital form. In 2020, ArkDes broadcast a 90-minute “virtual vernissage” for the exhibition’s opening, which was created when the pandemic prevented a conventional launch.

But while this film is still accessible online, it is not promoted as part of the Design Museum show – echoing the more widespread disappearance of virtual events after the peak of the pandemic.

A challenging exhibition So what does WSFG represent in exhibition making?

Digital and online culture remain relatively uncharted waters for museums, and while all new things present challenges, ASMR may be seen to pose a greater one than many. There are still relatively few scientific studies to testify to its existence and everyone responds differently to the phenomenon, including by sometimes having no discernible response at all. The proximity to sexual pleasure of ASMR – early names including “braingasm” – also causes friction, and it is notable that right from the beginning Allen pivoted away from this term and opted instead for an assemblage of pseudo-medical words.

This may be why many institutions have been slow to explore ASMR, despite its popularity in the media and online. One exception, however, is ASMR at the Museum, a programme created by Julie Rose Bower for the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A), one episode of which is included in WSFG. Bower talked to me about the “reticence” that shaped the project: the V&A explicitly approached her rather than an ASMRtist, considering her design-led content more appropriate for the museum and its staff. The videos’ specific genre of ASMR focuses on close attention – another example in WSFG being The Lost Art of PasteUp video by Anthony Wilks for the London Review of Books – which has something to offer museums in sensorially documenting “[the] relationship between expert [conservator] and the object; it’s about celebrating the collection through direct contact,” she explains. Yet while Bower is documenting the “native ASMR” of museum conservation, “I always frame it with the microphones in shot,” she says, “because it has always been an ASMR project.”3 Receiving millions of views, the series has been a success both as ASMR and as a tool for a museum.

The Courtauld Gallery has since approached Bower too.

It’s possible that some of these same fears apply to WSFG. Museums are intended as inclusive spaces, able to appeal to those who know nothing about a subject as well as those who have an active interest. But still it could be argued that the WSFG team played it safe.

Bower commented to me that there was a sense in which ASMR’s highly codified aesthetics were not right for the V&A and this typology – carefully made-up 3

Review

Interestingly, this has been labelled “unintentional ASMR” in WSFG; Bower considers this a compliment.

women with long manicured nails, using feminine props in bedroom settings or against green screens – is notably absent from WSFG too. Nor are there other, more challenging subgenres of the phenomenon, such as Mukbang, which translates from the Korean as “eating broadcast”, and features people eating large quantities of food. Eating noises are a common trigger for both misophonia (hatred of sound) and ASMR: a repulsion/attraction dichotomy that would be interesting to explore and experience.4 There is also the question of NSFW (not safe for work) ASMR, which has a sizeable presence on sites such as PornHub, but Taylor-Foster considers these videos to be later fragmentations rather than a core genre of ASMR and delineates ASMR as “more sensual than sexual”. He does, however, discuss with me how “there is so much correlation between sensuality, sexuality and the feeling of security that ASMR can provide,” while in an essay for EXTRA EXTRA in 2020 he explored the connection more explicitly: “As I write this essay, there are close to ten thousand heterosexual porn videos tagged as ‘ASMR’ on PornHub. On PornHub Gay, there are a little over five hundred, although I’m at a loss in understanding quite what PornHub choose to define as ‘gay’. According to PornHub, ‘ASMR’ ranks 4,591st for daily searches, making it roughly equal in popularity to searches for ‘sextape’, ‘waitress’, ‘male stripper’, and ‘hunky’.” This discussion, however, does not make it into either the curation or text for WSFG and it seems that such discourse within the museum is a long way off. While this is understandable given museums’ need to appeal to broad audiences, what is the cost of sanitising ASMR in this way?

In general, the framing of the subject and the specific works on show in WSFG can feel uneven.

This is part-explained by ASMR’s newness; TaylorFoster points out the lack of experts in the field, and that many of the clinical trials of ASMR by Giulia Poerio, a leading psychologist researching ASMR and a consultant on the project, post-date the exhibition’s shaping. It would, however, be possible to look more at what is better understood. Take the design of the internet and its platforms, for example. The exhibition’s booklet references the birth of YouTube and our attachment to handheld devices, and suggests that 4

some of the problems of our reality, such as the “sense of restlessness” bred by the attention economy, are something that ASMR is able to “harness” for good: “[ASMR] subverts these technologies to provide a new form of care. It carves a niche on the internet and fills this space with personal attention, available on demand.” Yet it seems simplistic to attribute too much agency to ASMRtists working within the constraints of a particular platform, and the booklet does not mention the astonishingly high financial rewards that a small number are able to earn from using these platforms5 or consider how the large presence of ASMR content contributes to YouTube’s own economy.

Meanwhile, the suggestion that ASMR is “carving a niche” of its own serves to erase a longer history of digital communities of care. ASMR may be a kind and seemingly (or, perhaps, bizarrely) troll-free space within the now-Facebook-dominated model of Web 2.0, but there are older online communities that performed similarly. In my own mid-noughties digital wanderings, for example, I discovered online spaces similarly centred around health issues offering a great deal of support and kinship, and as far back as 1998 Annette Markham’s Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space discussed digital intimacies across “significant support groups, social networks, and even communities[…] The stories about the meaningful consequences of these social contexts astounded me.” Markham described the strong physical presence felt by those she interviewed, concluding: “It is crucial to emphasise this point: To be present in cyberspace is to learn how to be embodied there.

To be embodied there is to participate.” On the other hand, ASMR may not always be as kind as its community wishes. There is a contiguity of negative experiences between the wider internet and ASMR, such as the extreme attention that women receive online including cyberstalking, of which there have been recent cases involving ASMRtists, as well as the vulnerability of underage practitioners. “The question is,” Amelia Tait wrote for Wired in 2019, “is it right for a child to trigger[…] ‘head-to-toe euphoria’ in adults,” before listing cases in which young ASMRtists were asked by adult fans to “do really perverse things that [they] obviously didn’t understand [they] shouldn’t be doing.”

Global cultural variance comes into play here too and TaylorFoster is keen to see the exhibition travel to outside of Europe, in particular to Korea.

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The highest earning ASMRtist is believed to be South Korea’s Jane ASMR, whose monthly income has been reported as $500,000.

Sound and Vision by Chris Milk.

The Voice of Touch by Marc Teyssier.

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In this vein, looking more closely at the context of the internet and its platforms could help us to consider how ASMR itself has been shaped: how much of the internet’s legacy can be found in ASMR, and would a different category of ASMR have emerged from platforms or technologies which prioritised different things?6 It would have been possible within the exhibition, for instance, to mention the dominance of women ASMRtists and their often ultra-feminine presentation. As a design question, this could relate to the gendering of assistant technologies, for example, while as a larger societal question it could add to the conversation around the disproportionate burden of emotional labour and caring duties carried by women more generally. The exhibition booklet quotes from Julie Beck’s 2016 Atlantic piece ‘The Emotional Labor of ASMR’, but it does not engage with its framing of ASMR as labour, or its questioning of the monetary value of this “not trivial” service of on-demand emotional support.

to see it!” she adds. “Some people think the gender politics, like the femme-ness, has been overstated; I don’t agree.”

It seems that some of ASMR’s “feminine” or otherwise “challenging” aesthetics have been left out in WSFG’s attempt to validate ASMR as design.

This strikes me as unfortunate. This response may be prompted by my own background in fashion, a design discipline that stubbornly resists narratives of making the world “better” and which knows that elements of “bad taste” can be both affective and desirable. But to really make the most of ASMR, WSFG should instead have more strongly embraced the “weird” of its title (although Immeasurable thirst / That feeling by Tobias Bradford, a mechanised disembodied tongue eerily flexing and dribbling spit from one corner of the room, is rather weird), leaning into those areas that arouse discomfort, and not hiding from aspects that complicate or compromise its framing as design. While ĒTER’s spatial translation is effective in creating an immersive and notably different space to engage visitors, its clean, cream embrace seems too utopian. However, upon visiting a second time, I did witness the commotion of one visitor shouting, “I can’t hear you,” and pointing to his headphones while Design Museum staff tried in vain to get him to remove his shoes. This felt more faithful to the chaos of the internet: there’s always a troll, someone flouting the community guidelines of even the most carefully moderated online spaces.

As the first of its kind, WSFG will, Taylor-Foster hopes, allow visitors to “feel comfortable enough or primed enough to understand how [ASMR] relates to how you see the world.” He continues: “Like any good exhibition, it’s something to position yourself against.

When you’re looking at something so contemporary, that’s the main job.” The exhibition is engaging and is able to introduce ASMR both concretely and in more ephemeral ways, but some of the decisions obfuscate rather than open up, framing the subject nicely, but losing sight of what lies just out of shot. If ASMR can help to expand our understanding of design, then it at least needs to be met on its own terms. E N D

Redefining the design lens The question surrounding women in ASMR could also be reframed, however: should women be given more credit for dominating this field as creative practitioners?

This brings into question the idea of a design lens.

Design discourse sometimes struggles to move beyond a core notion of “good design” – with all its various historical and social entanglements – but ASMR’s qualities are far removed from any notion of design represented by mid-century modern chairs or the architecture of Le Corbusier. Historically feminised disciplines such as textiles, fashion or performance have typically been given less interpretative clout than something like architecture, but these fields could be more relevant when approaching subjects such as ASMR. When I ask Bower about the feminist aspect of her wider work, for instance, she explains her interest in Foley and ASMR as marginalised practices that foreground the body, and which, she suggests, engage a style of “creative listening” in a similar manner to the work of composers Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood. But for WSFG, she notes that she was not commissioned to engage with the gender politics of ASMR. “Then look who comes 6

Weird Sensation Feels Good is on display at the Design Museum until 16 October 2022.

See ‘Online Ass Wars’ by Carolina Are in Disegno #32 and books such as An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist by Jessa Lingel.

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United by Design Words India Block Illustrations Jango Jim

A grassroots labour movement is rising across the US and the UK, driven by the overworked and underpaid employees of Amazon warehouses, Apple stores and Starbucks cafés. Barristers, baristas and baggage handlers are walking out until their demands are met.

Once seen as the preserve of the factory floor, union organising has evolved to suit a modern working class defined by precarity, overwork and wages that have failed to keep pace with bills, all set against the backdrop of the pandemic, climate crisis and growing wealth disparity.

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Architectural workers1 are also joining the ranks of exploited labourers pushed to breaking point and burnout, mobilising so as to make collective demands for better conditions and pay. Grassroots organisations including the United Voices of the World – Section of Architectural Workers (UVA-SAW) and Future Architects Front (FAF) have mobilised in the UK to campaign for better workplace conditions, while in the US the Architecture Lobby (AL) and Architectural Workers United (AWU) are assisting people attempting to unionise their workplaces.

It took a lot to push architecture professionals to this point. Those I spoke to while researching this piece told an eerily similar story of how unhealthy industry norms played out, to the detriment of their health, finances and careers. As the philosopher Beyoncé just said: “Damn, they work me so damn hard.”2 “The architecture industry is extremely toxic and unsustainable,” says John,3 who started work at an international office in New York. “We hardly ever worked a 40-hour week, it was at least 50 or 60 hours.

Sometimes I worked 90 or 100 hours a week. We didn’t sleep; we stayed in the office overnight.” If that sounds unsustainable, that’s the point. “They’re famous [practices] so they get young professionals who are dying to work there. They ride them like a horse until they die. Then they get rid of them and start again with a new batch,” continues John. “That’s their business model.”

“There’s a super-high turnover rate,” says Vanessa, an architect working for a high-profile New York practice.

“This culture of exploitation has existed forever in architecture. It’s a creative service that is really hard to value properly because it’s so complex and it takes such a long time.” Studio founders are unlikely to have received any business training, she explains, and every new practice has to set up its processes from scratch.

“They don’t understand how to manage a business 1

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Union organisers are careful to use the term architectural workers as it encompasses everyone working in practices, including support staff. The title of architect is reserved only for those who can afford to complete a laborious, multi-part qualification process that often requires years of work experience in underpaid assistant roles in studios.

From the song ‘Break My Soul’ on the album Renaissance. The fact that Beyoncé, a billionaire with a royal moniker who hasn’t worked a nine-to-five in a long time is moot when she unfailingly captures the zeitgeist.

Names have been changed and identifying details withheld to protect those who spoke with Disegno on condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions from management.

or write a proper contract. They end up agreeing to timelines that are unrealistic, or letting the client manipulate us into more studies, or changing the design late [in the process].” Some of these issues are exacerbated by financial structures within the field. Charging too-low fees upfront pushes bosses to try and get more out of their workers for less.

Unlike other professions that require similar levels of qualification and training, such as law, architects do not charge by the hour. “If it were unfeasible for [clients] to manipulate us because we had our fees so high, we would be able to have more control over the process,” says Vanessa. Instead, poorly paid junior workers bear the brunt, often ending up working for the equivalent of below minimum wage in expensive cities with large amounts of student debt.

The situation in London is similar to that which Vanessa and John describe in New York. “A toxic environment and culture led very quickly to burnout for me,” says Jonah, an architectural worker in communications. “We were working under a lot of the same kind of constraints and systems as architecture firms – contracted to a developer and a local authority, working under the same kind of artificial deadlines with high pressure.” Jonah tells me that it was a strict hierarchy and poor people management from managers that created a particularly noxious environment for workers. “Decision-making was done by the directors; there was little to no input even from the people under them,” he says. “There was no transparency about pay.” Requests made to management often went ignored. “It’s this culture of a power imbalance,” he concludes.

But while service and factory workers have a storied history of labour organising to draw on in response to these kinds of abuses, the architecture studio has, until recently, been fairly devoid of class consciousness. “Blue-collar workers who are more likely to be exploited in more physically demanding ways on site have, historically, been unionised and they have been able to build value for themselves,” says Vanessa. “They make a decent amount of money and their hours aren’t terrible because a lot of contracted workers are unionised, so they have power. Architects have none of that. We don’t have these standards [and] we are being exploited.” In the creative industries, workers tend to over-identify with the creative part of their field’s self-appointed title, with its ideals of artistry and passion, but forget

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the industrial rejoinder. The pervasive myth of the starchitect (usually white, usually male) presiding over a self-titled studio deliberately elides the workers who make grand ideas and dashed-off sketches a carefully designed reality. “We think about Frank Lloyd Wright as this singular genius who was insanely prolific and had lots of different styles and techniques,” explains Andrew Daley, an architect now working for AWU. “But we completely ignore that he had hundreds of employees producing all of that.”

Daley was a part of the recent, aborted union drive at the architecture firm SHoP,4 before leaving the practice to spend more time with his young family and taking on a communications role at AWU. Not a union itself, AWU is associated with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and provides education, support and resources to architectural industry members attempting to unionise their workplaces. “There’s this ethos that if you work hard enough, you can become a partner at the firm or start you own,” says Daley. But this, he argues, is often a trap. Getting to the top is nigh impossible “unless you have crazy amounts of money and you never want to see your kids.” The intimacy of studio life further complicates matters. The CEO is rarely a distant, fat-cat figure making your life miserable from corporate HQ, but a regular(ish) person you spend most of your waking hours with. “When you’re having cocktail hour with your boss,” he says, “it’s a lot harder to see yourself as labour.”

Educating architects to see themselves as workers who could benefit from a union is half the battle. “Architects have been absolutely endlessly alienated from any identity as a worker,” says Charlie Edmonds, a designer who co-founded activist network Future Architects Front (FAF) with Priti Mohandas.

“We’re indoctrinated into this idea that architecture is something more than work. We don’t work for a company – we work for a studio, we work for an atelier. That myth-building helps to alienate people from their real economic conditions.” FAF uses acerbic memes on Instagram to build solidarity with architecture professionals and encourage them to 4

see themselves as workers. “[We] can’t organise people as workers until people realise they are workers,” he says. “FAF is trying to first build solidarity through illustrating that workers are suffering from the same conditions, and then build class consciousness through introducing concepts of organising labour, collective action, so that people can actually identify why a union is relevant to them.”

Originally, the FAF network coalesced around an open letter to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the UK architecture industry’s professional body, with demands based on a survey of architecture workers. “The things that came up most frequently,” says Edmonds, “were unpaid overtime, accountability for exploitative practices, equity and representative governance.” Unpaid overtime is perhaps the clearest example of how broken the current architecture system is in countries such as the US and the UK, where relaxed labour laws and prevailing neoliberalism provide fertile ground for exploitation. In order to appear competitive to developers, studios compete to offer the lowest fees. The only way to deliver these projects on time and in budget is to pressure junior staff, who are contractually obliged to sign away their right to paid

“We can’t organise people as workers until people realise they are workers.”

—Charlie Edmonds, Future Architects Front

overtime, to work long hours.5 “When this idea of the free market was introduced in the profession, what happened was a series of practices undercutting one another in a race to the bottom of devaluing the profession,” says Edmonds. “[Studio bosses are] super dependent on the free labour that we donate on a daily basis to be able to deliver the deadlines,” says John. He experienced insecure middle managers, desperate to impress the principal architects, who would regularly include people’s weekends in deadline-crunch schedules.

Workers at SHoP began talks about unionising in 2021, but ultimately pulled the petition in May 2022 after managers mobilised an aggressive anti-union campaign. In the US, a workplace can be unionised when 30 per cent of workers sign cards or a petition in favour of a union, or one is voluntarily recognised by management.

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Riffing on Dolly Parton’s famous anti-boss anthem ‘9-to-5’, the next line in ‘Break My Soul’ goes: “Work by nine, then off past five.” See, even Beyoncé knows unpaid overtime sucks.

Ironically, charging so little for professionals’ time in a business model that builds in high turnover due to burnout only further devalues design. “There’s very little respect for the design work of the architectural industry,” he notes. “From the client and consultant’s point of view, design is something fun. You don’t have to be paid as much [as] you’re not doing something so special; [they think] everyone can do it.” Workers who were born in countries with greater worker protections are particularly shocked when they experience the way things happen overseas. “Labour rights are much stronger [back home] than they are here [in the UK],” says Jonah. “There’s paid overtime, there’s a maximum number of hours you can work a week that either doesn’t exist or is insufficient here.”6 Unpaid overtime that effectively takes pay below the legal minimum is just a fancy name for wage theft, something a workplace union can seek to address.

Once a workplace has a union, they can negotiate for less overtime and better pay. Once union density in a city reaches a certain level, the entire industry will be in a better position to negotiate with their developer clients. “If over half of the firms here [in New York] are unionised, then we can start to raise the minimum standards across the board,” says Vanessa. Her dream is to see architectural workers eventually use their collective bargaining power to have more of a voice in how cities are designed. “We could start to have more of an impact on land use. How zoning occurs in the city, how much green space there is and trying to be more equitable about it, and trying to push low carbon.”

The unpaid overtime, the toxic culture of overwork that dogs creative services, the power imbalance both within architecture studio hierarchies and the hierarchy between developer and architect – none of these are new. So why are architecture workers looking to organise now? The consensus amongst those I spoke to revolved around two major factors: the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Seeing protesters out on the street galvanised them to start looking critically at their own workplaces. Racial diversity in architecture is atrocious: only 2 per cent of registered architects in the US are Black, despite 6

In the US there is no legal limit to the number of hours worked per week, but overtime has to be paid according to the Fair Labor Standards Act – unless employees sign an exemption in return for a flat salary. In the UK, the legal limit is a 48-hour work week but your employer can ask you to opt out of this.

Black people accounting for over 12 per cent of the general population. Similarly in the UK, only 1 per cent of architects are Black. While Black people make up 3 per cent of the general population in Britain, they account for almost 8 per cent of the population in London, where all the big architecture practices are based. “It was ridiculous: [we were asking] where are all the Black people in our office?” says John. While managers made emotional statements about the tragic police killing of George Floyd, Black employees remained underpaid and underpromoted. It became clear that while diversity was a serious issue, simply trying to hire more Black people into an exploitative work environment wasn’t the solution. “Wanting to increase representation and access to the field is one thing,” says Daley, “but what conditions are we recruiting people into? We need to think more radically.”

Before the Covid-19 lockdowns, it was harder to realise how insidious studio mindsets could become, says John. “There’s a cultish culture. It’s ‘fun’ to be here and ‘you’re lucky to be a part of this.’” Until he was forced to work from home, John hadn’t realised how being employed by a huge practice had changed

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him. “I was extremely stressed out. I wasn’t myself anymore, I was always irritable. Work always came first and if anybody messed with that I’d freak out,” he says. “My credit-card bill and my expense-report bill were the same number. The only thing I had done was take cabs to work and have dinners there.” While many headlines in the wake of the pandemic have focused on the “Great Resignation” as unhappy workers quit their jobs, the architecture world has experienced a Great Reflection on the poor conditions that workers had been conditioned to accept. “I knew architecture was intense,” says Vanessa. “I just didn’t understand that [studios] were bad at business and [architects] weren’t valued. I also realised that the people that start firms are, for the most part, already fairly wealthy,” she adds. “A lot of people started to realise all this during the pandemic.”

It was the time to reflect provided by the pandemic that gave designer Eleni Kyriacou the motivation to blow the whistle on the discrimination and harassment she had experienced at University City of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture (BSA) some 20 years prior. “It was a combination of the pandemic and the #MeToo movement that gave me courage,” she tells me. “It shouldn’t be an endurance test going and studying architecture.”

Kyriacou’s tireless work putting together a dossier of former students’ experiences forced UCL to employ independent investigators Howlett Brown to examine historic and contemporary student experience at the Bartlett. The “environmental investigation” published in June 2022 makes for queasy reading. Students reported being told to work nights and weekends to keep up with coursework, and even being encouraged to take drugs that would help them stay awake. “The structural and procedural aspects of [Bartlett] culture, together with a small group of staff, are the central cause for[…] creating a toxic and in parts, unsafe learning and working environment,” said the report.

The school’s famous unit structure was singled out for encouraging “a culture of unhealthy and unsafe competition by promoting an ‘any means necessary’ attitude to achieving success,” with students finding themselves co-opted to burnish their tutors’ industry status. “The unit structure included having students work excessive hours for the entirety of their time at the BSA, or working for free during holidays,” said the report, making students “fearful of the

consequences to their future careers if they did not comply.”

Sexist and racist bullying was also found to be rampant in the school and escalated to physical abuse, with documented cases of staff members shoving students or throwing heavy objects such as laptops at them. Staff ripped up drawings in front of their class or threw their models out of their windows in aggressive displays, leaving traumatised students to stick their work back together to submit it. “From reading the report, I can see things have gotten worse,” Kyriacou sighs. “It’s really sad to say this, but it is a real dehumanising of students. To be honest, I think that report might be not even 10 per cent of the misconduct that’s gone on in that school.” Now the report is out, she says that more people have come to her with stories of developing eating disorders and depression during their time at the Bartlett, with some dropping out due to the extreme conditions. “They told me all these weird stories: how on the back of the door when you went to the Bartlett they had mug shots of

“On the back of the door they had mug shots of all the students. As people dropped out, they would cross off their photo.”

—Eleni Kyriacou

all the students [pinned up]. As people dropped out, they would cross off their photo.”

It’s not just that an abusive education system predicated on pulling all-nighters and having your work quite literally torn to shreds in a crit leaves young designers more vulnerable to toxic studio culture. FAF is clear that they are two sides of the same coin. “Currently, practice and education are like an evil, awful ouroboros,” says Edmonds, “constantly encouraging and enforcing the worst in each other.”

Studio heads, for example, are often the ones leading modules at schools. “There’s a very porous membrane between academia and practice,” says Edmonds.

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At the risk of stating the obvious, no one who was well adjusted, with a healthy attitude towards their practice, would think it was appropriate to violently destroy the work of young people to whom they owe a duty of care. The hazing ritual that begins in education perpetuates through industry. “I worked for a practice here in Athens,” says Kyriacou, who lives in Greece.

“All of the partners had studied at the Bartlett and there was sexism, long hours, really bad pay and no value of personal time. It was just a continuation of the same thing.” While lockdown gave her the time to reflect on her experiences, she had also gained distance after having quit architecture for a career as a fashion designer. “I had nothing to be afraid of, [whereas] a lot of people were terrified about their careers,” she says. “I’m not in London anymore. I’m not an architect. So the Bartlett has no hold over me.”

It was a side effect of the pandemic that opened a similar Pandora’s box of toxicity at SCI-Arc, a private architecture school in California. A panel discussion for undergraduates given by tutors on 26 March 2022 as part of the school’s Basecamp lecture series was recorded and posted online; the content drew anger from students and the wider architecture industry.

The roundtable, titled ‘How to be in an Office’, was held by three faculty members, Margaret Griffin, Marrikka Trotter and Dwayne Oyler, who work in practice for Griffin Enright Architects, Tom Wiscombe Architecture, and Oyler Wu respectively. The discussion was a slowmotion train wreck that laid bare the underpinnings of toxic studio culture, in which the architects extolled the virtues of low pay, long hours, and hustle culture to their student audience. “[Do you want] a 40-hour work week that you can barely get through?” asked Trotter, “[Or] a 60-hour work week that you can’t wait to start every day? You have got to choose your poison.”

Unimpressed students were subsequently prompted to come forward with damning accounts of how Trotter and Tom Wiscombe, who is also a teacher at SCI-Arc, had treated students who had been asked to work unpaid for Tom Wiscombe Architecture in place of following a taught course. According to a report in The Architect’s Newspaper, the students were made to work 18-hour days with no breaks and ordered to deep-clean the office. When they refused, Wiscombe allegedly “intimated that students could ruin their professional reputations if they quit.” Trotter and Wiscombe were placed on administrative leave by SCI-Arc and posted an apology on Instagram7 that

they later deleted. An external investigation has been commissioned, the results of which are still pending at time of publication.

Grim reading as all this makes, real change may be just around the corner thanks to the activists, students and architectural workers determined to detoxify the industry at all levels. FAF is working with the Architects Registration Board (ARB) to get rid of the UK’s current three-part model of architecture training. “The journey to becoming an architect needs to be more inclusive so that the profession can become more diverse and reflective of society,” ARB chief executive Hugh Simpson said last year. “This means we have to make our regulatory framework more flexible to encourage new, different and cheaper routes to becoming an architect.” The recent summer 2022 RIBA elections also saw a historic win for President-Elect Muyiwa Oki, who will be the first Black RIBA president and its youngest. As an early-career architect, Oki represents a significant break from a long line of RIBA presidents who have been bosses, not workers. “I am grateful to the grassroots movement whose support and passion offered a platform to represent architectural workers,” said Oki of his win. “I hope this is the start of many great things to come for those who feel disenfranchised and under-represented.” Edmonds is positive that this is just the beginning. “This wave organising is definitely gaining momentum,” he says. “The fact that in the wider political economy, things are just getting more inequitable adds fuel to that fire.”

In New York, Daley is also hopeful that the city may see its first unionised architecture studio. “Going first [feels] impossible,” he says. “You saw it with Starbucks. Years of effort to get those first couple of stores over the hump, [now hundreds] have filed. It’s pretty wild to see that happen in six months from the first election filing.” Currently, workers at eight studios in the city are in the process of gathering support and signing union cards. “We’re hopeful that by the end of the summer, there should be some good news,” he adds. “Who knows, maybe by the time this article comes out.” E N D

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“We know we have an intense, high-pressure office culture[…]

We acknowledge that students are just absolutely tired of being faced with industry-wide failures that reduce access, exhaust workers, and create little outlook[…] we acknowledge that some faculty and students feel that way,” said their textbook non-apology apology.

Better Sensation Introduction Johanna Agerman Ross Photographs Philippe Thibault, Charles Pétillon, Charlotte Vuarnesson and Erwan Bouroullec

In recent years, Erwan Bouroullec’s practice has diversified dramatically. Previously known for his work in furniture and lighting design with his brother Ronan, Bouroullec has become increasingly interested in consumer electronics, coding and forms of creative practice that sit outside of the traditional design industry. While the Bouroullecs’ design studio still operates from its Paris office, the brothers have both found spaces outside the French capital for more independent research work: Ronan in their native Brittany, Erwan in Burgundy. It is to the latter – to Erwan’s converted barn, La Grange – that I’m heading on a hot July day to talk to him about this new phase of personal and professional life.

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An EB-LG-F71 HIMD stool, produced using materials and labour sourced from within 5km of La Grange.

Portrait by Florian Böhm.

Erwan Bouroullec, photographed at La Grange.

One of the farm buildings at La Grange.

Interview

The day that I make my pilgrimage to La Grange – first catching the Eurostar from London and then taking a TGV train the 90-minute journey from Paris – is recorded as being the hottest on record in both France and the UK. The build-up to the heatwave’s peak has been intense and, as temperatures nudge past 40°C, frenzied newsreels in the UK report trains being cancelled due to tracks overheating and hospitals full of people suffering from heat stroke. In France, only a few hundred kilometres southwest of my destination, wildfires burn, displacing a quarter of a million people from their homes and prompting headlines of “a heat apocalypse”. As I step off the train, the rolling, and still fairly verdant, hills of Burgundy do nothing to ease the feeling of not being able to breathe. There is no wind, no glimmer of water to ease the sense of suffocating air.

With the climate emergency unfolding as a reminder of industrialised society’s sins visited upon the Earth, it is time for everybody to consider their impact on our quickly unravelling reality. It is within this context that I meet Bouroullec, aiming to get a sense of how his thinking has been impacted

by Covid-19 and its lockdowns; his thoughts on the increasing conversations around how design converges with issues connected to climate change and sustainability; and the effect that a new space to work and live in has had on his practice. Bouroullec’s interests lie in disparate fields, but all are somewhat united in his personal project: La Grange.

La Grange is a plot of land and farm buildings that Bouroullec has redeveloped in Burgundy as a second home and studio. While the space holds a private interest, it has also come to influence his public work: his coding explores the surrounding countryside, for instance, capturing the land within coded artworks; he has created furniture that uses scavenged materials as essential elements, all sourced from within a 5km radius and made locally; and he has partnered with the architect Charlotte Vuarnesson and local builders to restore the property with a lightness of touch that retains many of its historical features. This is a project that doesn’t do more than it has to in order to create a habitable space. It reuses materials found on site and in the surrounding landscape where possible.

While the idea of retreating to a place in the country is a luxury afforded to only a few – proof of the success the Bouroullecs’ studio has enjoyed

in the last 20 years – it is a move that Erwan does not consider to represent his turning away from the industry he works for, or the people he works with.

Instead, he is busy thinking of its potential and benefits – not only to himself and his family, but to students and colleagues. His retreat from the city is not a private one, as the invite to visit reveals, but rather a statement of intent. A statement that, like La Grange, remains a work in progress and may never reach a conclusion, but which hopes to catalyse important conversations along the way.

Johanna Agerman Ross How did you find this place?

Erwan Bouroullec It was an attempt to find a second place

to work and live in that could provide a balance to Paris.

I was always looking for quite a wide, open space, but it was strange because most of the places [that met that description] were almost like chateaux – they were moving into being something far more bourgeois. What I liked about this place was that it was an old farm and I could really feel that in all of its details – it was a working farm and you can see that in how it had been set up for utility, with this kind of low-key practice in the way it had been built and adapted. But, really, the landscape was everything.

It felt like this place could be a parallel to Paris, even if I didn’t actually know Burgundy at all – the rural landscape was what attracted me. Ronan is fascinated by the sea, but I belong much more to the countryside, and to its greens. Looking for this place was a very clear search for, not a better way of life, but at least a very strong “sensation”. Nature here has a very clear character and I’m sure that, for a design practice, it’s good to be able to look at the world through a different perspective.

Johanna You mentioned that Burgundy was new to you.

Is its landscape one that you recognise? Brittany, where you grew up, is quite different.

Erwan Brittany is relatively far away, both in distance and time, and most of my memories from that area are linked to my family rather than its landscape.

The Brittany that built most of my memories was a hardcore agricultural area, with heavy breeding of pigs and chickens, so it was a little bit of a sad landscape – many of the borders between the fields had disappeared, and there were fewer and fewer trees. I can see some parallels between Burgundy and Brittany, however. In France, if you go lower than the Loire you come into the south of the country,

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Construction work underway at the farm, which is being overseen by Bouroullec and architect Charlotte Vuarnesson.

A work from The Impossible series of coded artworks, photographed in the landscape that inspired it.

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One of the windows at La Grange.

Part of The Wanderer ITW (Into the Wild) series.

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whereas I belong much more to the north, which is still very green and far less rocky. But I didn’t want to go back to where I had come from.

Johanna It’s about establishing something on your own terms.

Erwan Yes. Johanna Along with the farm, you acquired some land and forest – what’s the significance of that? Was that always a part of the plan?

Erwan The area had been a little bit abandoned, so it was quite easy and made sense [to acquire that land].

Since we’ve been here, we’ve been replanting some things in the surrounding fields, but we’re really trying to let the wild come in. I’m very far from planning any kind of formal garden – I’m quite happy to let things come in naturally and explore what is already here. There’s a pond, for example, and this place must have originally been built because there was water in the area. But that pond was just full of things when we arrived: bushes, trees, everything.

So we needed to clean everything out and dig down into the clay. Two years later, it’s incredible. The water has come back, millions of frogs have returned, and so have many plants. In general, we’re working with “non-intervention”: we’re happy to just discover all of this. One of the problems in our world, which industrial design has played a part in, is that certain molecules have become so dominant. Polypropylene is a wonderful plastic, it has amazing properties, but it’s so widely used. Palm oil, similarly, is a good fit for the industrial process and so has become overly dominant. What has been nice here is that we have seen how nature has an amazing ability to overlay many things and allow things to cohabit. It’s nice to be confronted with that.

Johanna And that natural overlay is influencing you?

Erwan I’m very far from being a “new peasant”. I’m not moving into permaculture and I’m just trying to let things happen. It’s funny, because I think my design practice is quite minimal in a certain way and taking care of this land will also be minimal.

Try to do nothing and just let things happen. So many people can’t bear that, and ask why I’m letting everything grow, but my idea is that year after year, the land will become better and better and better.

We need to let nature grow again.

Johanna But even if it’s not a landscaped garden or a super-intentional construction, you have nevertheless

replanted all that grass, you have cut things back.

There’s still an intervention.

Erwan Yes, but I’m trying to not control too much. It’s ridiculous to imagine perfect lawns, because you need to make so much effort to contradict what’s a basic logic of nature – the greater the mixture of species, the more control each plant has. Just letting things

“To me, nature is this interweaving of plants, animals and human production, the latter of which becomes a new part of nature.” happen is a strong decision. But a counterpart to all that is that I love the intervention of humans within a landscape. I have a very strong attraction to rural machinery and buildings, because they provide a very strange opposite to the landscape. The equipment uses plain, synthetic colours: strong reds and greens, or even fluoros. Then the buildings themselves are amazing because they’re so incredibly geometrical and react very strongly to the light. To me, nature is this interweaving of plants, animals and human production, [the latter of] which becomes a new part of nature. I know it’s a kind of contradictory expression, but what I’m looking for is this mixture of human presence and nature. That’s part of my romanticism around landscape.

Johanna What you’re hinting at is that nature isn’t necessarily “natural”. So much of what we see around us, even landscape, is human-made somewhere down the line. There’s a cultural history that you can see very clearly in this landscape. But what strikes me is that, just as you’ve adapted or adopted the landscape around you, you’ve also approached the buildings in that same way – they’re not trying to do too much architecturally.

Erwan I’ve been doing this with Charlotte Vuarnesson from Le Dévéhat Vuarnesson Architectes, who is a friend of mine, and I’m really trying to bring much

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more “performance” into my design practice. I’m once again dreaming the real dream of design, which is to provide better with fewer resources and less use of material. I’m not sure I really understood the scale of this project when we started – everything was down to us. We had to redo all the carpentry, the roof, everything. So this has been a real process of listening and understanding, which is something that I know how to do from design. When I work with prototypers, I have really learned that the best that you can do is make sure that they understand how everything they do is valuable – that’s what creates this amazing detailing in projects. I’m convinced that design is a question of building a culture that can bind people together. It’s a complex thing to express, but sometimes you can find an approach in which you’re making things emerge from people, rather than making things by yourself. That’s what I’ve been doing here with the buildings. I’ve been looking for a certain roughness, looking back a little to the way things were done in the past. It’s more about establishing a way of practising, rather than very precisely defining things. For me, a big part of this was done through intuition, and the only way to achieve that was to work with Charlotte, because the builders absolutely still needed drawings, numbers, studies and so on. I was asking for so much intuition from them, but the only way to let them express that was to be clear about the performance we were looking for.

Johanna Was embarking on this project with the farmhouse a way of approaching architecture or is it just a way of getting somewhere to live?

Erwan Nearly everything I do in life is somehow connected to my work, but I wouldn’t say it’s a statement of architecture for me, which I guess could be very different for Charlotte. I do find the overall practice fascinating, however. I’ve been telling my daughters that, here, you can do whatever you want.

There are so many materials available to you in the countryside. You can go and collect branches from the forest, for example, and work with those, and we’ve also been trying to make a rough oven so that we can cook some of the clay we’ve dug up from the ground.

Johanna For you it’s an opportunity to experiment?

Erwan I’m more and more understanding that there can be an unbeatable value in making by yourself – to explore a form of making that is imprecise and which doesn’t need any pre-required skills, but which can still create incredible value. This is one

A work from The Impossible series.

of the largest questions of product design in general.

A century ago, your clothes would likely be made by a clothes maker; your furniture would be made by a cabinet maker. Many of the things in a person’s life would be made by them or else by a local maker. There would always be more of an interaction and I’m really happy to be exploring that kind of making again today.

You don’t need to be polite with the materials – you can be very rough and work quickly with your hands without needing too much organisation.

Johanna You’re talking about industrial design and how we’ve moved away from individual makers, but are you saying that you think there is a way back to that?

Erwan No, it’s more that I’m totally into design – just exploring everything together. Design is really about building a culture or making a culture visible. It’s an issue of binding people together around a certain culture. You need to look for those signs – in furniture design, for example, you need to identify what sign makes something look comfortable. If something

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looks comfortable, it will be comfortable. If it doesn’t look comfortable, it won’t be. To identify these signs, you need to practise – it’s not like you can just find them straight away.

Johanna This kind of return to nature, or a return to a more rough and rustic point of view, is something that we can see happened historically as well, with modernists such as Le Corbusier creating his Cabanon or the Lubetkins experimenting with furniture made from small diameter wood and cow hide. What do you think the need is for someone like you, who has a history of making and manufacturing very precisely, to revisit nature? What is psychologically interesting to you about it?

Erwan I’m at a point at which I believe less in the extreme power of an idea. I’m starting to believe more in better sensation, better practice. But if you start to look for that, you need to be in situ.

When you’re in a very strong environment, there is something very interesting, insofar as all the parameters you have in your practice are reinforced.

If you are doing something with a foraged piece of wood, for example, which is not a perfect piece of timber, it forces you to access a very primal form of making because the parameters are more extreme.

This helps you access a kind of radicalness because the environment itself is bringing you to something more radical. In a more urban environment, so many possibilities are open that the parameters are looser – there is nothing fundamental. I guess that nature, farmland or whatever it may be, creates limits within which you act. You can’t escape sensation here.

You can’t escape the rain or the sun. In an urban environment, there are many things you can escape.

Johanna One of the things you’ve worked on here in Burgundy are a selection of furniture pieces, whose legs are made from very rough foraged branches, with Douglas fir tops. How does that project factor into what you’ve been discussing?

Erwan I wouldn’t even call it a project. I was here during the lockdown and, because we own this tiny piece of forest, it became interesting to think about forestry.

We saw that the foresters only collect the trunks from the trees they fell and then just leave all the branches on the ground, so I was thinking, “OK, why don’t we do some easygoing, open production? Collect these sticks and assemble them with some Douglas fir that comes from a couple of kilometres away.” It’s been an interesting “back to the future” method, because

collecting the branches nowadays seems quite nonprofessional, but you do have to think about what kind of branches you need. So it’s a kind of practice as a state of mind, instead of, you know, purely designing an object. I would love to find a network to produce and deliver these objects every year, but I wouldn’t

“I’m at a point at which I believe less in the extreme power of a idea. I’m starting to believe more in better sensation, better practice.” want to do a limited edition. I like the idea of producing and releasing them according to the season and then just waiting for the next season. People are always saying that Ronan and I are inspired by nature because they see certain natural forms and patterns within our work, but from my point of view we’re far more interested in the way nature operates. So I’m very far from trying to make this as a statement piece, like Enzo Mari did with [his DIY furniture manual] Autoprogettazione: it’s more about the making.

Johanna So, within that, is there a criticism or questioning of the industry you’re working for?

Erwan It’s a little bit different – at the end of the day, you accept the task of industry or you don’t. It’s quite simple. I don’t criticise industry, but I am looking for information that is valuable to share. Industry is formed from standards and high levels of repetition, with everything based upon reducing the amount of variation possible within a process. So you need materials where you’re able to replicate the same thing 100 per cent of the time to the same quality.

But I think we need to find a way to accept that things can’t be 100 per cent perfect all of the time, because that’s generating many issues around ecology.

Permanently pushing to master everything, to repeat everything, is pushing us towards a very strong form of capitalism. Around here, however, I’ve seen a lot of farmers working with new forms of organic farming, which is one of the only examples I know of something progressing by moving backwards. Progress normally amounts to more and more industrialisation, which

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can be interesting because it lets you use fewer and fewer resources to build something. A lightbulb, for example, is now almost like a leaf from a tree – it costs nothing – and you only achieve that kind of result through heavy industrialisation. But industrialisation also means more engineering and more investment in manufacturing resources. If you look at the history of cars, for example, they’re much more efficient and far cheaper compared to what they were like in the past, but they also require a huge industrial system in order to be produced like that. Most of the time, progress means this kind of ever-growing complexity, but some forms of agriculture present a different point of view. The quantity of produce will change every year, and the product isn’t always the same – depending on the time of year, the taste of a goat’s cheese changes a lot, for example. What I’m trying to do here is to also explore a slightly different method.

I’m making quickly and roughly – doing exactly what is needed, but without over-finishing. What I’m doing doesn’t need a large production. I don’t see that as a statement against industrial production; it’s just a different point of view.

Johanna You presented these furniture pieces at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen – how come you wanted to enter them into “the system”, so to speak?

Erwan I’ve got this problem that somehow I’m always “in” my practice. I’m not doing a proper job of trying to identify things and separate them out, whereas the world today needs things to be branded – everything has to be very clearly identified. I’m just happy to bring all these different things together, but six months from now these works will have probably moved into something else. These things are not stable and I would happily show the work from the farm with the new Pier shelving that we designed for Hay – honestly, to me, they all go together like a big family. I love things being layered on top of one another. In the past I felt more able to individually brand a concept, whereas now I’m more about overlaying everything. I’m looking for a more general concept within that overlay, rather than within individual elements.

Johanna One aspect of that overlay is that you’re mixing these physical works that are very situated in nature with a lot of digital artwork. How do the two connect?

Erwan The way I’m coding is exactly like nature. Nature repeats a tiny number of operations all the time, with tiny deformations and adaptations. That’s very similar

to coding, which is just setting a number of operations that you’re going to repeat. One of the things that is interesting about coding is that you can quickly produce a million steps, but input some perturbation, which creates an interesting pattern. That’s not so far from the perturbations you get in nature. So, for me,

“Nature repeats a tiny number of operations all the time, with tiny deformations. That’s very similar to coding.” coding and nature fit together quite easily. I see the digital as a tool to explore complexity.

Johanna How does that work in The Wanderer ITW (Into the Wild)? In that series you have different circles interacting with each other.

Erwan So those circular elements try to avoid touching one another. I’m looking for simple rules of movement: if you meet something, try to avoid it. Strangely, what I have discovered, however, is that this point of avoidance creates some form of attraction. When those elements run away from each other, they end up becoming stuck in a tiny area, and one of the perspectives I’m getting from being here and doing this kind of work is a sense of a much more complex ecology. There are more parameters, but they somehow don’t build into an overbearing complexity. It’s a little bit the opposite: they’re reinforcing certain parameters that allow you to end up in a proper balance. My ultimate dream is to create some software to ensure that no drawing would ever be repeated.

Johanna So the artworks would be self-generating?

Erwan It’s a little bit more complicated than that.

If you let things self-generate, you’re just putting the computer on and getting signals back in return.

But with these works, I’m always checking, adding things, changing parameters. It’s a little bit like being in front of a CNC machine. I’m there, but there are also random factors at play and I’m very happy to see the direction in which things go from there.

It’s building the spirit of a practice, rather than just building a final result. I’m letting rules play out and,

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The Burgundy landscape around La Grange.

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through that, you discover many things. It’s a kind of conceptual art in which you establish rules, and then follow those through to the very end. You can get a visual complexity from that, but what I really like is how you can dig into the rules or the conceptual statement, which for me is necessary. Ronan bases everything in his artworks on the voice of his hand and is very into a handmade practice, but that’s very different to me. I’m always tweaking the software so that it’s unstable. I like art with a conceptual background; I’m a little bit more lost with art that has a more romantic background.

Johanna Is it very intentional for you that these series of works all look so different? The Wanderer is very different to The Impossible, which combines photography with block colours.

Erwan I guess it is intentional. In general, I find quite a lot of limits inside product design – with product design it’s very difficult not to be elegant. But with these works I’m looking for something a bit more dirty or muddy. I’m looking for something impolite that can blur things, because contrast is something that I find interesting. I want these works to not be precious by their nature.

Johanna That seems reflected in the way you print these pieces. It’s quite casual: they’re kind of scrunched up, or else are printed on fabrics. Is that also part of your desire to re-evaluate the outcomes of these processes?

Erwan One of the problems with contemporary art is that people can’t really handle it. There are so many contrasts between the price of the thing and its physicality. I’m just trying to do things that have a kind of easiness inside the roughness. Right now, I’m thinking that I should print some very big canvases with the people who print graphics on trucks, for example. I don’t give a shit about printing quality or colour quality, or at least not in the usual way.

Johanna You don’t want control of it?

Erwan Some printers have asked me if they’ve printed these works in the right colour. But there is no right colour because I’ve been doing them on multiple screens, all of which display colour differently. I’m happy not having 100 per cent control of the process.

Roughness gives a certain conceptual easiness. There’s an artist I have always admired called Claude Viallat.

He used to paint on canvases, but those would be dented or whatever – they weren’t pristine – and I always loved Frank Stella because he also moved

out of typical canvases. You then have people like Robert Smithson, who literally poured glue out onto the landscape [Glue Pour, 1969, ed.]. That was always very attractive to me in terms of its impoliteness towards nature. I would be happy to bring students here and tell them to do literally anything with whatever they can find here.

Johanna And is that because you feel that that freedom is ultimately lacking in design education and our everyday lives?

Erwan I feel very concerned with the growing complexity of progress. So many things look literally impossible to practice now. But you can just practise without too much thinking; you can practise by just being on site and making. Face the reality that is in front of you.

As I get ready to leave and catch the TGV back to Paris, the skies suddenly open. The oppressive heat of the last 24 hours evaporates and it feels easier to breathe again.

It’s like a lid has been lifted. Bouroullec’s daughters run into the rain, jumping around, laughing, faces to the sky. Looking at them, he says, “Sensation. That’s what I’m talking about.” E N D

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Words Kristina Rapacki

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Clinging On/For those who don’t know, a piton is a superannuated piece of climbing equipment: a metal spike with an eyelet, which is hammered into crevices in the rock for protection and later laboriously extracted. It is rarely used today, having been replaced by more advanced gear that does not damage the rock face.

Piton is also the name of a new lamp by Rotterdam-based designer Tom Chung. It is an apt title for a light that takes the basic form of an increasingly outmoded type: the handheld torch, whose function has, like many other things, been superseded by the smartphone. Perhaps as a result of this, Piton has the skeuomorphic appeal of an archetype – a quality that designers past and present have capitalised on. “There is a certain obvious lineage between Mayday by Konstantin Grcic and Parentesi by Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù,” admits Chung. The Mayday lamp, from 1999, imitates the shape of a megaphone while Parentesi, from 1971, resembles a bare-bones spotlight rig – like Piton, both mimic technical equipment.

In its promotional material, Piton leans into its climbing associations – Muuto has had it photographed suspended by ropes and carabiners.

But this is mostly marketing spin. “All things gorp [“Good Old Raisins and Peanuts”, the classic hiker’s snack] have become super mainstream since the pandemic,” notes Chung drily. If you buy the product, you will receive the armature and a charging cable – no slings or ropes, although the standcum-handle lends itself to creative rigging. To Chung, the key feature of Piton is that it can traverse indoor and outdoor environments.

Beyond Piton’s gorpcore styling, there is, perhaps, a deeper appeal to aestheticised tools. Technical equipment is typically durable and repairable by necessity – it possesses many qualities that the jacked-up, novelties-obsessed world of haute design would do well to

embrace. This is an attitude that Chung borrows from US artist-designer Andrea Zittel, who runs the Institute for Investigative Living out of a property in Joshua Tree, testing the limits of the amount of stuff she needs in her home. “For example,” says Chung, “she only uses bowls, because she says you can eat out of a bowl, drink out of a bowl – everything else is superfluous.”

Zittel’s approach is “similar to when you’re going camping or hiking or doing anything in extreme conditions,” says Chung. It’s not typically necessary in a domestic context, but “what,” he asks, “if you did take that approach to your home?

What would that look like?” Or, more provocatively: what if the 21st-century domestic interior is, in fact, a product of extreme conditions?

Objects in Review

The Road to Utopia is Not Smooth Words Rupal Rathore Photographs Rebecca Conway

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My first visit to Auroville last year, in the heat and humidity of March, offered a glimpse into the working of this experimental township.

Auroville is a 20-minute drive from the coastal city of Puducherry, south India, and the village road leading up to its visitor centre is full of posters announcing yoga or pottery workshops; signs giving directions to organic farms, bike rentals and guesthouses; cozy cafés, tea stalls and pizza corners. You can walk along the tree-lined road to Auroville’s innermost Peace Area, and gaze up at Matrimandir, the meditation pavilion, in awe of its shimmering golden discs and massive scale.

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varying stages of completion), peripheral green spaces and a surrounding lake, all planned by the late French architect Roger Anger, who was appointed

by The Mother to oversee the physical development of Auroville.

Anger’s proposal for Auroville’s masterplan was inspired by The Mother’s initial sketch in 1965 of a mandala-like city form with four demarcated zones – residential, industrial, cultural and international – distributed around a central nucleus. He called this the Galaxy Plan, due to the spiralling “lines of force” essential for the integration of all access to the city centre. After The Mother had made requests to many national governments (including her home country France) to donate land for the establishment of a city that “does not belong to anyone in particular but to humanity as a whole” (as she stated in the handwritten document called the Auroville Charter, which sets out the ideals behind the township), she accepted the dry and barren stretch that she was given in India, in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu.

This gift of land was granted in the wake of India gaining independence from almost 200 years of British colonial rule, with the country keen on generating a new, modern identity for itself.

More than 50 years later, the idea of what it means to be an Aurovillian continues to develop. Today, the city has a one-and-a-half-year induction process for those applying for citizenship, which includes offering voluntary services in any one of its departments (such as the Centre for Scientific Research that experiments with green building technology, using mud blocks or ferrocement), finding accommodation, and receiving feedback and approval from the existing community.

Upon becoming a member, the person receives a monthly “maintenance” sum (fixed at 18,000 INR or around £187) in exchange for community service or employment at an income-generating unit in Auroville. As such, there are no privately owned businesses or land investments allowed in the city.

However, one can set up commercial activity on collectively owned land after registering it as an Auroville enterprise, with bakeries and eateries being among the most popular of these initiatives.

Citizens are offered benefits such as free schooling for children up to 18 years of age, medical insurance, and access to groceries, meals and some services at reduced prices. The township has gained selfsufficiency in the production of milk and some

Auroville is a self-governing, international city located 5km off the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

Recognised by Unesco as an “international cultural township”, Auroville is as much a social experiment as it is a town-planning model. While it falls under the jurisdiction of the central government of India, it has been given a degree of autonomy, such that anyone from around the world can formally apply for Aurovillian citizenship – although they would still be required to obtain an Indian visa to stay. Its 3,300 residents, who hail from 60 different nations, describe themselves as being committed to working towards the utopian dream of “divine consciousness for all”, which was set in place by Auroville’s founder Mirra Alfassa (better known to her followers as The Mother), the French disciple of the Indian nationalist and spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo. Yet alongside Auroville’s spiritual mission, the city is noted for its experiments across education, green building technology and economics, attracting students and volunteers from within India, as well as Europe, Russia and America.

People come here to participate in sustainability workshops, study spiritual teachings, or simply get a feel for the city.

“Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.” These words were read out on 28 February 1968 as representatives of 124 nations and all states of India placed handfuls of earth from their homelands into a marble-clad urn to symbolise human unity – the stated purpose behind the birth of Auroville.

More than 5,000 people gathered on inauguration day at the amphitheatre that had been built along

Auroville’s 3,300 residents describe themselves as working towards the utopian dream of “divine consciousness for all”. with Matrimandir (the Temple of The Mother) in what was to become the central core of the city, now known as the Peace Area. The Peace Area also contains 12 main gardens around Matrimandir (which are in

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Anger’s masterplan for Auroville was inspired by The Mother’s sketch of a mandala-like city with four demarcated zones aound a central nucleus.

A treehouse at the Auroville Youth Centre, which was partially bulldozed during an attempt to clear an area making up the site of the proposed Crown Road project.

A pathway through a forest in Auroville.

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Workers decorate and press paper at the Auroville Papers workshop.

seasonal fruits, and fulfils 50 per cent of its overall vegetable requirements.

Most people who have decided to become a part of this community, or are born into it, willingly offer their expertise and services in the hope of the brighter future that The Mother and Sri Aurobindo foresaw, embracing new technology for innovations in the field of sustainable living. In this respect, some Aurovillians remain committed to continuing to build the township as per the Galaxy Plan and its projected population of 50,000 people. Recently, however, Auroville has reached a crossroads, with some residents starting to challenge whether the faithful completion of Anger’s masterplan should be prioritised above all else. At the centre of this debate is the construction of Crown Road, a circular road around Matrimandir that would link the four zones in the masterplan.

For the past two years, discussions over the Crown Road’s implementation have prompted a prolonged period of indecision about a defining element in the township’s future development. With mounting tension within the community, and pressure from the central government of India (which partially funds Auroville’s development along with NGOs and private donors) to go forward with the approved masterplan, Auroville stands on the brink of change.

that would comprise members appointed by the Indian government, international advisers, and representatives from the Aurovillian community, to be headed by the government-appointed secretary to the Foundation.

This Foundation is now at the heart of a series of incidents that have beset Auroville around the Crown Road project, which has made apparent the pre-

“We’ve been in a slumber and stuck in endless discussions. This has definitely woken us up.”

—John Haper, executive of Auroville

existing fractures in the social fabric of the township.

In 2021 Jayanti Ravi, the principal secretary in the health and family welfare department of the Gujarat state government, was transferred to the post of secretary to the Auroville Foundation. Her tenure has been marked by a policy of “building the city immediately”, which became tangible when JCBs arrived to tear down buildings and uproot trees in the path of the Crown Road in the Galaxy Plan.

On 4 December 2021, bulldozers and police massed in the forest of the township under the cover of darkness.

“That night dozens of protesting Aurovillians stood in their pathway and prevented any demolition,” reported The Guardian. “But five days later, the JCBs returned and this time razed a 25-year-old youth centre and hundreds of trees.” Citizens have alleged manhandling and forced detention of young people in police vehicles. They also claim that in the second show of violence, the police, on the secretary’s command, came with a pack of goons who were paid to ensure that the clearance happened without any hindrance from protesters.

“This place is something very beautiful that India has so magnanimously offered and we cannot have decadence and stagnation any longer,” said Ravi in justification of her acceleration of the Galaxy Plan.

“The masterplan was already agreed upon by the residents; it is my mandate to implement it.” Her words and actions have fuelled concern, however,

Initially, The Mother guided the development of Auroville herself. After her death in November 1973, however, residents found themselves in confrontation with members of the Sri Aurobindo Society (an organisation started by The Mother in 1960 and headquartered in Puducherry), which claimed control over the township. In response, and following repeated requests from residents, India’s central government passed the Auroville Emergency Provisions Act in 1980, whereby the management of all assets and undertakings in Auroville was temporarily vested with the Indian government. The Sri Aurobindo Society challenged the constitutional validity of the act on the grounds of Auroville having religious autonomy, but was overruled in 1982 by the Supreme Court, which maintained that while it represented the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo, the township was not owned by the Society. Following this period of government intervention, the Auroville Foundation Act was passed in 1988, ordering the formal constitution of a governing body

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Buildings belonging to the Youth Centre, which was partially bulldozed during an attempt to clear an area making up the site of the proposed Crown Road.

that this could be the start of India’s central government interfering directly in Auroville’s planning and future. As a career civil servant, Ravi is implicated in the project of the leading Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing government pursuing an increasingly Hindu nationalist ideology under prime minister Narendra Modi. There are speculations that Auroville has now become a part of the central government’s larger “development oriented” scheme, following Modi’s “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (everyone’s support, everyone’s progress) approach – a more action-based style of governance that has been criticised for failing to consider its own socioeconomic and environmental implications.

“I was feeling physically sick back in January when things were being razed down in Auroville,” says John Harper, one of the five executives of Matrimandir responsible for decisions regarding the development and management of the Peace Area. “The entire commune energy was disturbed.

However, these events have made us realise that

we’ve been in a slumber and stuck in endless discussions. It has definitely woken us up.” Even before the blatant display of power by Ravi, however, Crown Road was the subject of serious discussion among Aurovillians, with clear standpoints beginning to emerge on both sides. Some residents hold the view that The Mother’s vision of spiritual consciousness for all cannot be realised without building the city exactly as she instructed. As such, they see the secretary as a catalyst for positive change. Others, who are sometimes labelled “anti Galaxy”, are of the opinion that Anger’s masterplan is only a broader scheme for Auroville’s incremental growth and need not be followed to the letter. They believe that it should be adapted to the present ecological realities of the town and actual usage. “My parents came to Auroville because the Charter excited them, not the masterplan,” says Nina Sharma [name changed] over lunch at the Solar Kitchen, a community dining hall on Crown Road.

“They were selflessly working in the sun when nothing had existed here at all. We know what it took to make

Travelogue

a single tree survive,” she continues, referring to the efforts put by pioneering Aurovillians into intensive tree plantation that helped raise the groundwater table. “I am deeply offended by how easily some [Auroville residents] have forgotten that.” As it stands, the National Green Tribunal, India’s highest environmental court, has put a stay on all tree felling in Auroville after a group of residents filed a case against the Foundation. Additionally, a petition was signed by more than 500 people requesting a stay of any construction activity for Crown Road. Aurovillians are now debating how to manifest their utopian dream without running the risk of the township falling apart.

When I travelled to Aurvoille in March 2021, I did so as an architect. The trip was the result of an open design call to create four out of the twelve main gardens in the Peace Area. Announced by the Matrimandir executives in 2019, the open call aimed to shortlist conceptual entries after a two-stage process. Along with my colleague Vir Shah and two other selected teams, I was invited for a 15-day stay in Auroville as part of the process. Personally, the thrill of our designs going forward was quickly surpassed by the chance to tour the township accompanied by Aurovillians.

Covering everything from public buildings and schools, to forest walks and waste-management systems, our visit was largely aimed at addressing one of the major drawbacks of the anonymous design-selection process for the project (the first design call opened to people outside of Auroville’s community), which resulted in inviting designers with a limited understanding of the place, its ecology and social structure.

“We worked with the agenda of restoring peace in the Peace Area while formulating the selection process,” says Hemant Shekhar, a Matrimandir executive at the time, and our primary host in the first visit. “The gardens had not progressed for six years due to the internal conflicts in Auroville.”

The Matrimandir gardens are part of Anger’s Galaxy Plan and were each assigned a spiritual theme by The Mother, along with a list of flowers that she had chosen for them. They are the embodiment of the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, and together with Matrimandir symbolise the spirit of unity that gave birth to Auroville. In essence, the 12 gardens are intended to reveal specific spiritual qualities to those walking through them before

they enter Matrimandir for silent meditation.

However, Anger’s designs, and subsequent proposals by other creatives, had not been implemented due to disagreements in the community over the designs not physically translating The Mother’s concepts satisfactorily. After reaching a dead end, the executive committee was reshuffled in 2018 to start the process afresh. “The only way ahead was to come up with a fair procedure to invite new ideas for the four gardens of Light, Life, Power and Wealth,” says Shekhar. The selection process included two rounds of community feedback, as well as suggestions from a neutral international panel of landscape architects.

The selected teams had also been brought together to Auroville in the hope that our designs could be integrated over a period of two weeks,

“The gardens had not progressed for six years due to the internal conflicts in Auroville.”

—Hemant Shekhar, former executive of Auroville

and that the outcome would be superior to what the individual teams had proposed. Ultimately, since one team did not show up, Vir and I joined hands with the third selected designer, Anandit Sachdev, to present a collective proposal for all four gardens. During this time, we were introduced to “dream weaving”, a term coined by Aurovillians for engaging in design discussions with the community, integrating feedback and collaborating with experts within Auroville for inputs on lighting, irrigation, planting and other civil works. This has turned out to be a successful arrangement – residents feel more involved in the making of the gardens and we designers gain the practical support required for the project to move ahead. Dream-weaving has been tested in the past with equal success for other projects in Auroville, such as the visitor centre parking area and the Garden of the Unexpected (one of the peripheral gardens in the Peace Area), although these did not involve designers from outside the community.

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At present, the gardens of Life and Power are nearing completion and will be inaugurated on the 150th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo’s birth on 15 August 2022 – a date that also marks 75 years of India’s independence. The construction of these two gardens, situated under the Big Banyan – the tree that was chosen to be the geographical centre of Auroville’s planning – began in November 2021.

While some Aurovillians have expressed scepticism about “outsiders” designing the second most important element of the masterplan after Matrimandir itself, many are looking forward to experiencing the finished gardens. Also on track for 15 August is the construction of a 100m-wide, 10m-deep water reservoir that will encircle the Peace Area, converting the central core of the township into a mini island, as suggested in Anger’s Galaxy Plan.

“At first, I had found it quite odd that the gardens were being designed by those who had never been to Matrimandir before and did not know The Mother’s philosophy around the different themes of these gardens,” says G. Kalaiarasan Sambavar, a thirdgeneration Aurovillian who heads the electrical department at Matrimandir. “[But] after having worked with the three of you and seen the designs evolve over the past few months, I am happy. The gardens are taking shape with the collective spirit that Roger had wanted.” While the final planting scheme is being implemented over July under the supervision of the 90-year-old Richard Eggenberger, who was appointed by The Mother for this task (and prefers to be called by his spiritual name Narad), the executive body at Matrimandir has been replaced since construction began, save for one member. “I had to leave Auroville with my wife for a few years when things got too heavy down here: too many groups, too much negativity took an emotional toll on us,” Narad tells me in his low, husky voice while flipping through the book on flowers that have been chosen for each garden on the basis of their “vibration”. “[My wife] left her body a few years ago,” he adds. “I have only recently started to get involved in the work that The Mother assigned to me. I can’t avoid it!”

Curious about Narad’s opinion, I press him on the debate around the garden-design selection process.

“I don’t think the ‘who’ really matters when it comes to The Mother’s gardens,” he replies. “You and I are only the media for this divine work to happen. Do not make the mistake of identifying yourself with the

designs that are manifesting here in front of us. We like to talk here in Auroville, when the only thing we should be doing is working! The Mother’s vision was not restricted to only those who have signed up to live here. New Consciousness will dawn upon the whole world; she was clear about that.” Many Aurovillians are practitioners of Integral Yoga – a system prescribed

by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother for rapid spiritual transformation and self-revelation – central to which is detaching oneself from material aspirations and surrendering to divine service. Working to fulfil The Mother’s vision is recognised as the primary divine service in Auroville, in the process of which a person would transcend lower levels of human consciousness.

Both Galaxy and anti-Galaxy proponents believe that they have understood The Mother’s intentions better, and all members of the community have varied understanding of these spiritual teachings. There are only some, such as Narad, who truly believe that the progress made in Auroville will have universal implications on human consciousness in totality and that the place should therefore invite contributions from outside the community as well.

As of now, the new executives at Matrimandir have decided to complete the gardens of Life and Power by the set deadline, but not go ahead with the integrated designs for Light and Wealth given that working with designers from outside Auroville has added costs that were not accounted for in the initial estimate. Out of the twelve main gardens, four are already built and

“Do not make the mistake of identifying youself with the designs manifesting in front of us.” —Narad, an Auroville resident another two will be ready in August. For the remaining six, an internal design call (inviting only Aurovillians to participate) may be announced in the near future to ensure cost effectiveness and daily supervision on site. There is also the possibility of adopting one of the older sets of designs from the archives for the next six gardens, thereby avoiding lengthy processes of community feedback and approval. While the

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Visitors at a viewing point overlooking the Matrimandir complex.

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Auroville residents meet to discuss the creation of a Youth Network and other issues.

have particularly cropped up in the 1.25km-wide Green Belt of forest cover going around the township as set out in the Galaxy Plan. In addition to this, there are also farmland and houses owned by Tamil locals, legally registered with the state government, that lie within the 2000ha allocated to the city by the central government of India. It is estimated that the Foundation has only managed to acquire 850ha of that land so far.

Various committees have been formed in Auroville to study the situation and negotiate with villagers who have ancestral connections with the same land and whose families lived here before Auroville came to be. Technically, all the land required to develop the 5km-diameter township is already collectively owned by Auroville and none of it needs to be bought.

However, the community has refrained from taking the extreme measure of forced eviction. “The big mistake we made in 1999 was to go to the central government to get approval for our masterplan, when land matters are a state subject in India,” notes Paul Vincent in an interview given to Auroville

completion of all 12 gardens will help inch closer to The Mother’s vision for Auroville, there is frustration at the slow pace of reaching consensus, as well as the lack of unified support from within the township.

“Fifty-three years have passed by without much progress in the physical manifestation of the city,” the TDC (Town Development Council), a planning body made up of Aurovillians, stated in the October 2021 issue of Auroville Today. “The Crown being a fundamental component of the Galaxy, without manifesting it, the city cannot be manifested. This is imperative to protect Auroville from outside suburban sprawl and tackle the threats to our natural resources.”

Auroville’s proximity to Chennai (the capital city of Tamil Nadu) and the Union Territory of Puducherry (an ex-colony of the French East India Company), as well as its growing popularity amongst tourists, is inviting numerous commercial investments and unregistered settlements in and around Auroville – on land that has already been designated for the development of its masterplan. These developments

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Today in August 2019. “Even if the state government constitutes a new Town Development Authority [for Auroville] and accepts our masterplan, a Detailed Development Plan (DDP) still needs to be created, which defines what will happen on each plot of land.”

Today, Aurovillians are still having to defend their claim on the land assigned to them by the central government, because locals have competing approvals issued by the Tamil Nadu government. Vincent, who has been involved with trying to protect Auroville’s physical integrity since 1975, explains that the land threats began around 1994 after many permanent

“The manifestation of the ideals needs to be based on a shared vision and plan of action.”

—Prashant Hedao, landscape architect

structures had already been erected, prompting villagers to realise that land could be sold off at higher prices to the Aurovillians, who seemed to be serious about building a city. Where negotiations have not worked, land litigation cases are being heard in court. To add to the complexity of the situation, some Aurovillians themselves have purchased land in the Green Belt to develop commercial property or private residences. Some of them claim that these private deals are one way of securing land for Auroville, although they have continued to keep the property under their own names instead of donating it to the Foundation. Some of these same people also oppose the development of Crown Road, which would eventually be followed by the implementation of the rest of the Galaxy Plan and the loss of their private land. Other residents who have knowingly erected their houses in the path of Crown Road have been accused of hoarding land meant for the growth of the township.

Architects and planners in Auroville have taken an ecology-sensitive stand on the matter. They believe that the masterplan should be tweaked and adjusted to accommodate fully grown trees, water catchments and paths that have organically developed over time.

One of them is Prashant Hedao, a landscape architect and urban planner who has been active in the bioregional planning of Auroville. “For a circular city like ours, a road connecting the four zones is needed,” he says. “I don’t think many people have a problem with the Crown; it is how and when it is to be implemented that needs to be discussed.” It is a debate that Hedao knows well, having been a member of TDC between 2007 and 2009. “This is not a city we should build in a hurry,” he told the local press in Auroville in 2021.

“Where we should be putting our energies is in supporting activities and building institutions, which would attract the right kind of people to come here.”

Hedao, however, feels these inputs are not being incorporated into Auroville’s current planning approach because the TDC is fixated on the symbolism of the Galaxy Plan and its specific geometry, such as Crown Road, which is designed to be a perfect circle and 16.7m wide. Since Auroville is envisaged primarily as a cycling and pedestrian city, it is argued that the proposed road width will not add to its functionality, but rather invite more vehicles and thereby increase traffic rather than reducing it. Hedao asserts that all the sections of the proposed road should be studied and treated differently, based on context and need.

Part of Crown Road goes through the Darkali forest area, close to a village that is infamous for anti-social activities such as alcohol abuse, as well as incidents of sexual assault. Adding a road through Darkali, which would likely be used by a limited number of Aurovillians, may pose a safety threat. Since the Galaxy Plan was developed for a total capacity of 50,000 people, Hedao argues, it should be executed in a phased manner as resident numbers grow.

“Auroville seems to have splintered into different groups with different views, each with their own set of priorities; and there are many ‘free’ spirits who do not wish to have rigid rules,” Mohan Chunkath, who served as the secretary to Auroville Foundation between 2016 and 2019, told the local press towards the end of his tenure. Chunkath must have read the situation well, as it was during his time that discussions around the township’s future started to play out. “So, while most residents seem to have a strong commitment to the ideals of Auroville and its deeper purpose, the manifestation of the ideals needs to be based on a shared vision and plan of action by which the township can be realised in

Travelogue

Workers sew flowers made from paper onto a screen at the Auroville Papers workshop.

Decorating papers.

A worker makes thali meals at the Solitude organic farm and kitchen.

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the full capacity that it was conceived.” To some extent, the community is now coming together for another self-initiated dream-weaving process to discuss some of these pressing issues and strive to resolve them amicably. To bridge the increasing gap in opinions and review things critically, Aurovillian architects, planning experts and other residents are conducting studies on the Crown Road proposal and documenting the actualities on site. They have also engaged Vastu Shilpa Consultants, the architecture firm led by Pritzker prize-winner B.V. Doshi, to prepare a detailed project report for the same stretch. The dream-weaving sessions, which have been happening since late

“Here’s a city which can present an alternative model to the world since our mega-cities are not proving sustainable.”

—Prashant Hedao

of community-driven governance, it is also proving to be a tool to fine-tune Auroville’s methods and clear the path for inevitable change. Aurovillians are now engaged in an internal dialogue to decide on the best way to progress. With added pressure from the state and central governments, and other external factors such as increasing tourist flow and land encroachments, the road to utopia is not smooth.

Some residents are even considering going back to their home countries until harmony is restored and Auroville’s future is secured. While people are feeling forces close in from all directions, with predictions of a government takeover or the township becoming engulfed in suburban sprawl, many prefer to remain optimistic. There is an increasing awareness in the community of the need to “take our time to work together and not hurt each other in the process of reaching our goal,” observes Elvira from Germany, who works as a change-management consultant in Auroville. “I’m trying to listen to the different bubbles in this participatory movement, and to initiate that we talk to each other so we can create synergy. But we are a bunch of individualists, and there are too many leaders,” she laughs. “However, by letting myself be involved in this, I see new connections emerging around me. It’s magical; there is a feeling of belonging here.” E N D

January, are a collaborative effort to bring different ideas together and to decide on a common direction to follow. The participants are now listing some shortterm goals to be worked upon and presenting an alternate proposal for Crown Road to the Foundation.

“It is important to understand Auroville in totality, with its environmental setting and social impact on the surrounding villages,” says Hedao. “Here’s a city which can present an alternative model to the world since our mega cities are not proving to be the most sustainable.” Auroville has tested many eco-friendly methods of constructing buildings, roads and dams, and is working with the agenda of using solar energy as its prime source of generating electricity. The city is also revitalising natural sources of water and biodiversity, preserving indigenous seeds, and documenting local wisdom around the use of different trees and shrubs, as well as running outreach programmes for health and education in the surrounding villages.

While the Crown Road controversy may have exposed the limitations and challenges

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Worlds Best – worldsbest.dk

Photographer’s note: I was surprised and amazed to find Denmark’s only remaining condom factory in the corner of an industrial cheese production facility. —Alastair Philip Wiper

PHOTOESSAY: POLITICALLY ERECT pp. 25-30

Ahrend – ahrend.com Circuform – circuform.com Ineke Hans – inekehans.com

Writer’s note: After its first launch in 2011, my Rex chair was re-introduced at Dutch Design Week 2021: its name now as intended, the material and design as intended, but produced by a different company. This process has defined my position as a designer in a totally different way than I imagined when I started out. —Ineke Hans

Decolonising Design – decolonisingdesign.com Design Justice Network – designjustice.org Intelligent Mischief – intelligentmischief.com Moms 4 Housing – moms4housing.org

Writer’s note: While researching this piece, I discovered that we are, in fact, already living in the future. In 2015, after watching ‘Be Right Back’, tech entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda brought the story to life. Following her best friend’s death, Kuyda developed Roman Bot, an AI chat bot formed from all their text messages. More recently, in 2021, Microsoft received a patent for software that could reincarnate someone as a chatbot, be they a “past or present entity[…] such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure”. —Bianca Nozaki-Nasser

Writer’s note: With some trepidation, disappointment and annoyance, I shared with Adam Nathaniel Furman

ROUNDTABLE: QUEER REFUSAL pp. 81-96

The Vann Molyvann Project – vannmolyvannproject.org

Writer’s note: The global cast of characters that accompany Vann in this short story represent a set of historical figures who made prolific contributions to the fields of art, architecture, literature, and design.

These voices include Sayed Raza, the Indian avant-garde abstract painter; Ngô Viết Thụ, the Vietnamese modernist architect and urban planner; and Richard Wright, the African-American novelist. As expats living in Paris at the same time, I think it’s possible their paths may have crossed. —Malika Leiper

DESIGN DRAFTS: WHEN THE WORDS DON’T EXIST Design Drafts pp. 26-29

DESIGN DRAFTS: A LOVE LETTER Design Drafts pp. 2-7

OPINION: LEARNING FROM FAILURE p. 24

Writer’s note: This story evolved from a traditional article into a comic-style piece. I used to make original manga-styled comics as a child for fun, but I stopped at age 17 when I was told it was considered fan-art for architecture admissions and was unacceptable.

It evolved into me freehand sketching (acceptable for architecture admissions), which has since become a beloved part of my practice. I decided to merge both styles of my drawings for this piece critiquing the accessibility of architectural education.

—Kathryn Larsen

Writer’s note: There are many stories of a copy being copied in fashion. The following is my favourite. Supreme – the brand with a logo famously and undeniably based on the artist Barbara Kruger’s work – sued another streetwear brand in 2004, claiming its logo had been appropriated. When asked to comment on the situation, Kruger observed, “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.”

—Tetsuo Mukai

AIA – aia.org Apple – apple.com The Bartlett School of Architecture – ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/ architecture/bartlett-school-architecture Dezeen – dezeen.com Instagram – instagram.com Issey Miyake – isseymiyake.com The Line – neom.com/en-us/regions/theline LoveFrom – lovefrom.com Meta – facebook.com OpenAI – open.com RIBA – architecture.com Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de

DESIGN DRAFTS: ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL: PAY TO PLAY Design Drafts pp. 20-25

OPINION: DELFT BLUE RHYMES WITH FAKE HANDBAGS p. 48

TIMELINE pp. 19-22

Index

Tolix – tolix.com

Photographer’s note: The pictures accompanying this essay were shot on one of the hottest days of the summer – it felt fitting to capture a place welding metal.

—Philippe Thibault

ESSAY: THE EVERYWHERE CHAIR pp. 33-47

Andra Formen – andraformen.se

Writer’s note: When the members of Andra Formen first heard about the scooters in Malmö’s canals they attempted a DIY recovery mission. “We went out and tried fishing them up with a rope and a hook in the winter,” Svensson told me. “It was super cold, and we were quickly disappointed at how hard it was.”

—India Block

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: ONE STARTUP’S TRASH p. 32

@afffirmations – instagram.com/afffirmations @avocado_ibuprofen – instagram.com/avocado_ibuprofen @neuroticarsehole – instagram.com/neuroticarsehole

Writer’s note: There was a song that inspired my text: ‘Irreplaceable’ by Beyoncé. In this breakup song, Queen Bey insists on the replaceability of her ex. Musically, however, there is a strong emphasis on the words: “you’re irreplaceable.” Through this ambiguity, Beyoncé showed me how to respond to a deceptive lover in a way that both expresses anger and admits heartache.

Even when that lover is design. —Gijs de Boer

DESIGN DRAFTS: BETWEEN FOX TRAPS AND HERO BAIT Design Drafts pp. 14-19

Browns – brownsfashion.com Daniëlle Cathari – daniellecathari.com Disruptive Berlin – disruptiveberlin.com HURS – hurs-official.com Luisa Via Roma – luisaviaroma.com Matches Fashion – matchesfashion.com Moda Operandi – modaoperandi.com Net-A-Porter – net-a-porter.com We Are Not Really Strangers – werenotreallystrangers.com

Writer’s note: My piece originally set out to disorient the reader, but during the research and writing process I ended up massively disorienting myself. On the day of the final deadline, I received a newsletter from Lotte. V1, an online styling service: “[It’s] time to introduce a deeper discussion; the emotional side of dressing[...] This week, slow down your morning and ask how you feel. Use that feeling (maybe one of romance) to guide your dressing.” It left me wondering what to wear for the feeling of knowing that I was about to miss my deadline; I decided that I didn’t own any specific garment that resonated with failure. As such, I got lost on Ssense trying to find the perfect fabric to comfort my mood. I’m still waiting for my order – I think UPS lost the package. —Chinouk Filique de Miranda

Writer’s note: I don’t think I’ve ever actually tried pastis, but I like how it looks like boozy milk or poppy latex.

—Oli Stratford

Hay – hay.dk Julie Renault – julienrenaultobjects.com

DESIGN DRAFTS: IDLE BROWSING Design Drafts pp. 8-13

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: ESSENTIAL FORMS p. 31

Nothing – nothing.tech

Writer’s note: I once owned a pair of Nothing’s Ear (1) headphones and liked them very much. Alas, I accidentally washed the bastards and they’re now dead. Perhaps opaque plastic would have better repelled the oncoming tide of Persil. —Oli Stratford

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: TO BE CLEAR p. 97

Adam Nathaniel Furman – adamnathanielfurman.com Dhiren Borisa – instagram.com/chiffon_evenings Gabriel Maher – gabrielmaher.xyz Kareem Khubchandani – kareemkhubchandani.com KNeo Mokgopa – instagram.com/they_kneo Mycket – mycket.org Vqueeram Sahai – instagram.com/vqueer

one of the many rejection emails that I received in response to my pitch to review Queer Spaces. Adam wasn’t a bit surprised at the vagueness of the rejection, and we raged about how people were pissed at the book for absurd but typically normative reasons: it lacked academic jargon (so it had to be stupid), it lacked deliberate taxonomy and was too fluid (so how could it be comprehended by the cis-hetero sensibility?), and it lacked the dominant North American spaces (so how could it be relevant?). —Aastha D

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A. A. Spectrum – aaspectrum.com A.W.A.K.E Mode – awake-mode.com Bridges & Brows – bridgesandbrows.com Helmut Lang – helmutlang.com

Photographer note: What looked like a pleasant summer’s day ended up being a battle against heat. Well done to our models for casually wearing warm fleece-like clothing and big leather boots. —Theresa Marx

MATERIAL: FIBRE TO FORM pp. 99-112

Writer’s note: One of the most pleasant parts of looking out over the rolling hills outside La Grange was to see a herd of white cows move closer and closer to the house as the day wore on. They started off at the edge of the forest and ended up just outside the back door by dinner time. —Johanna Agerman Ross

INTERVIEW: BETTER SENSATION pp. 132-146

The Architecture Lobby – architecture-lobby.org Architectural Workers United – architecturalworkersunited.org Future Architects Front – fafront.co United Voices of the World Section of Architecture – uvw-saw.org.uk

Writer’s note: It’s always an honour as a reporter when people trust you to tell their stories. There were so many shocking details that I couldn’t include because the behaviour from famous studios was so egregious it would have identified my sources. But you can’t libel the dead, so I can put Frank Lloyd Wright on blast for using his students at Taliesin West – who paid for the privilege – as free labour on his projects. Exploitation has been baked into the system for decades, but it’s not too late to redesign it. —India Block

Writer’s note: While the Pot Variations are painstaking pieces of kiln-cast glass art, the last thing J. Hill’s Standard founder Anike Tyrrell wants is for pieces like Hopstep to sit in a cupboard for most of the year.

“I don’t believe in only pulling out the crystal on special occasions,” she says. “Use it; enjoy it; make it a part of your life, even if it’s putting your teeth in it at night.”

—Lauren Yoshiko

Aldo Bakker – aldobakker.com J Hill’s Standard – jhillsstandard.com

REPORT: UNITED BY DESIGN pp. 123-131

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: PIPE DREAMS p. 98

Bocci – bocci.ca p. 15 Brunner – brunner-uk.com pp. 6-7 Carl Hansen – carlhansen.com pp. 2-3 Convene – convene.com p. 18 Ege Carpets – egecarpets.com pp. 4-5 Laufen – laufen.com p. 17 Maharam – maharam.com outside back cover Muuto – muuto.com p. 8 Poliform – poliform.it p. 13 Rimadesio – rimadesio.it p. 11 Vitra – vitra.com p. 1, inside front cover Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de inside back cover Zanat – zanat.org p. 23

ADVERTISERS

Writer’s note: I couldn’t believe that there’s no definite inventor of googly eyes. Learning that has added an air of mystery to their plastic gaze. I also learnt that the largest pair are 3.6m wide. If you could stick them anywhere in the world, where would you choose? —Sharon Lam

OPINION: SEEN ON SCREEN p. 168

Auroville – auroville.org

an organic farm cultivating locally found ingredients to a paper mill where artisans folded dyed scraps into sculpture that echoed the light, leaves and petals that framed my time in the town. —Rebecca Conway

Index

ArkDes – arkdes.se Design Museum – designmuseum.org

Writer’s note – While researching the ear-cleaning genre of ASMR videos, I was reminded of a time when someone I was dating asked, suddenly brandishing an otoscope, whether they could perform an ear exam. I turned him down, doubting his IRL skills, but could definitely picture his ASMR video now. —Sophie Tolhurst

REVIEW: EMBRACE THE WEIRD pp. 114-122

Ariake – ariakecollection.com Inga Sempé – ingasempe.fr

Writer’s note: Ariake worked hard establishing a rapport between their Japanese and Italian factories despite contrasting manufacturing systems. Tan described how “the Italian factory is more like a finishing factory which does assembly, painting and lacquering,” working in conjunction with smaller workshops. He cited the case of “a guy with a CNC machine in his garage. Apparently he can produce 200 chair parts a day!” The Japanese factory, by contrast, is an attuned hub: “You have 25-50 people working, each one specialised, but all wearing the same uniform.” —Evi Hall

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: IT HIDES A MESS! p. 113

Manu Atelier – manuatelier.com Nike – nike.com Zoe Horgan – zoehorgan.com

Photographer’s note: In woodland and at the end of winding trails, Auroville’s crisp and sometimes otherworldly buildings peek through branches and hover above a riot of flowers – a visual metaphor for the community’s quest to develop a utopia that honours the environment, and where photography took me from

TRAVELOGUE: THE ROAD TO UTOPIA IS NOT SMOOTH pp. 148-163

Muuto – muuto.com Tom Chung Studio – touching.net

Writer’s note: An idea Tom Chung had when developing Piton was to produce an open-source zine, inspired by 80s DIY books, which would feature a breakdown of hacks and rigs. “But it’s hard to combine a commercial product with something that’s a bit more conceptual,” he told me. “Especially now, with so many similar objects coming out so quickly, it’s difficult to get people to slow down and look closely at a project in a way that isn’t just… ‘Oh, there’s another lamp I can buy.’”

—Kristina Rapacki

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: CLINGING ON p. 147

Le Dévéhat Vuarnesson Architectes – lvarchitectes.com Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec – bouroullec.com

Seen on Screen

Words Sharon Lam Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser There is a lot happening in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the arthouse sleeper hit from directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. There are onyx butt-plug trophies, erotic sausage-fingers, dogs used as nunchucks – all set across a gazillion universes. Amongst all of this, however, is a deceptively simple object that comes to represent the spiritual message of the movie – the googly eye.

We first see googly eyes early in the movie, when Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) sticks them to laundry bags in an attempt to bring some levity to the daily stress of his wife, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh).

At this point, however, Evelyn has no time for whimsy and simply brushes off Waymond’s plastic interventions: they serve no function in Evelyn’s world of laundry and taxes.

For all the googly eye’s famliarity, no one seems to know who invented it. There is no patent, no record of a designer. At most, there is the early 20th-century comic strip character, Barney Google, whose hallmark gaze

brought the term into the mainstream.

There is also the Weepul, invented after a bored toy factory heir glued googly eyes to a cotton ball: a design typically credited as the first to maifest the wobbly gaze in a physical medium.

Googly eyes are an emotive motif that runs through the core of Everything Everywhere. As Evelyn is introduced to the multiverse that is central to the movie, she begins to see Waymond differently. Amongst Evelyn’s multiversally misguided decisions and their daughter Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) fast descent into nihilism, Waymond’s kindness moves from childish play to a source of strength. In cinema’s most tear-jerking silent conversation, in which Joy and Evelyn are embodied as two rocks, Everything Everywhere gives both boulders googly eyes. It’s just the two of them, but it’s the kitschy eyes – symbolising Waymond’s presence and, therefore, the presence of empathy – that allows the rocks to see each other.

Comedy pieces of plastic tat come to embody a love that can span a million parallel universes in the film’s climactic fight scene between Evelyn and Jobu

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Tupaki, Joy’s alter ego. During the fight, Evelyn attaches a single googly eye to the centre of her forehead – the third eye. Usually invisible, the third eye represents extraordinary vision and perception. The googly eye is about as non-traditional a third eye as you can get, yet Evelyn is now able to replicate Waymond’s belief in kindness. Evelyn fights off Jobu’s followers with empathy, eyes exploding from her body as she sees them for who they are. Jobu, by contrast, sports a bagel topknot. It’s a black circle vs. a black bagel; a central solid vs. a central void. Jobu’s bagel has everything on it, and nothing at its heart.

The googly eye is nothing except heart. In our own universe, there were reports of googly eye shortages following the film’s release, with fans raiding craft stores to get their fix. This demand may suggest that kindness could be all around us, yet the object’s plastic reality also offers a warning: kindness can become disposable. It is a teetering perception.

Perhaps the world’s googly eye shortage is because of supply-chains issues; or perhaps it’s because everyone everywhere is seeking kindness all at once.

Hello, Robot.

Design between Human and Machine 24.09.2022 – 05.03.2023

#VDMHelloRobot #vitradesignmuseum www.design-museum.de

An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, and the Design Museum Gent

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