Timeline

Roe v. Wade v. data

Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 case that established the right to abortion in the US Constitution, didn’t even make it to 50 years old before it was overturned by the US’s Supreme Court in June 2022. In the intervening months, much has been said about the appallingly retrograde nature of the decision and its assault upon bodily autonomy, but equally worrying are the futures it opens up. The ruling not only once more jeaopardises Americans’ access to safe, legal abortions, but also creates the new nightmare of those seeking the procedure being tracked through their personal data: suddenly, search-engine histories and information inputted into apps and websites may be pursued by law enforcement aiming to prosecute those who have terminations. In such a climate, it becomes urgent for tech companies to redesign their handling of user data (potentially expanding end-to-end encryption such that personal information is not stored by default), because the threat is real – in August, it was revealed that a teenager in Nebraska is to be tried for terminating her pregnancy, with law enforcement having acquired user data from Facebook in building its case. The US may be determined to return to the past, but it is doing so in a disgustingly modern way.

Marcus Fairs (1967-2022)

“Dezeen changed the way people consume design news, and Fairs was undoubtedly one of the design world's pre-eminent power brokers,” concluded the Design Museum’s Justin McGuirk in his obituary for Marcus Fairs, the founder of Dezeen, who died suddenly at the end of June. It’s a neat summation of Fairs, whose embrace of the internet’s breakneck news cycles and aesthetic accelerationism propelled Dezeen to the forefront of popular design journalism, as well as building his personal influence within the field. Fairs was inseparable from the platform he created, with Dezeen's success built around its founder’s keen sense for breaking news, near-total immersion in the discipline on which he reported, and enthusiasm for new financial models for digital media. These were traits that, at various points, drew criticism, but 16 years on from its launch, Dezeen remains essential reading for anyone in the field. More than any of his contemporaries, Fairs saw early and clearly the direction in which 21st-century media was heading.

Wood woes

European timber is one of many commodities whose supply chains have been knocked off-balance amidst the physical chaos and economic sanctions brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A quarter of timber sold worldwide in 2021 was supplied by Russia, Belarus and Ukraine combined, yet sanctions on Russia and Belarus, along with difficulties in exporting from Ukraine, had made their impact felt by the summer of 2022. For designers and architects working with solid-wood and timber construction, this has proven prohibitive: the stocks either don’t exist or else suppliers cannot give cost estimates thanks to the volatile market. In response to this shortfall, Estonia has recently relaxed logging restrictions on state-owned land, whilst Finland expects to increase its timber exports by 3 per cent. Ukraine, meanwhile, has (perhaps understandably) passed martial law to increase logging in its protected forests, whilst the deployment of the nation's firefighters to frontline combat has taken them away from tackling summer forest fires. Short-term supply issues, it seems, have translated into emergency measures with potentially worrying long-term consequences for forests.

New universe, old designs

“Hey @Balenciaga, what’s the dress code in the metaverse?” Meta tweeted in October 2021. The answer, when it arrived the best part of 10 months later, was underwhelming to say the least. In June, Meta announced the launch of its avatar fashion store, which contains a host of outfits designed by Balenciaga, Prada and Thom Browne for use across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. You might be excused for thinking that creative expression in these digital worlds would run wild, generating virtual garments unfettered by IRL factors such as function, self-confidence and material possibility. Well, you’d be wrong, because all three studios simply presented a series of milquetoast digital editions of the same clothes they make all the time: grey suits, logo hoodies and tank tops. The sense of anti-climax was telling, as it is with many of design’s current explorations of digital space. The metaverse may represent a transformative future – forging new aesthetics and functionalities – but its present expression is all too familiar. Call us when the dress code gets weird.

Bartlett bombshell

In June, University College London made a formal apology to current and former students of the Bartlett School of Architecture, admitting that they had been subjected to “unacceptable behaviour”. A lengthy investigation from independent specialists Howlett Brown brought to light a catalogue of horrors, with students subjected to psychological and physical abuse from staff members, and minority students and women enduring racist and sexist treatment. UCL provost Michael Spence decried a “pernicious underbelly of bullying” that had festered at the school for decades. The alarm was raised back in 2021 by fashion

designer Eleni Kyriacou, an alumna of the Bartlett, who shared online her negative experiences at the school two decades prior. In her search for justice, she put together a dossier of people’s testimonies. After pressure from the press, the investigation began and an open secret was finally formally documented. In response, UCL has promised to change the school’s culture and has removed several staff members.

The cloud ate my homework

The shift to cloud-based software services is gaining pace, with subscription models offering regular updates and access from anywhere (and, of course, setting the user up as a cash cow for the provider). Yet in June, a Chinese novelist writing under the name Mitu was locked out of a million-word novel draft that they had been writing on WPS, a cloud-based word-processing programme from Chinese software company Kingsoft. Mitu claimed that WPS had been “spying 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 Economic Observer reported similar incidents of other novelists who had been locked out of their drafts by WPS for unknown reasons, with discussion coming to centre around the need for Chinese companies to comply with state censorship laws (WPS itself has been supported by government grants and contracts). It’s a story that highlights the two-way nature of subscription services: how many of us are confident, or even care, that our cloud-based subscriptions are entirely private? A sobering precedent.

JULY

Build better, build twice

“A house is a work of art,” said Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara on completion of his Umbrella House in 1961. Umbrella House was, in part, a rejection of the tenets of the metabolist movement and presented instead Shinohara’s “First Style”, which borrowed cues and geometric forms from traditional Japanese architecture. Good news, then, that the Vitra Design Museum has acquired Umbrella House and transported it from its original site in Nerima, Tokyo, to its campus in Germany. The house had been due to be demolished to make way for a new road system, but the museum collaborated with the Tokyo Institute of Technology to move the building, dismantling the structure in the summer of 2020. The move was aided by Shinohara’s consideration of construction. Umbrella House is made of cheap, widely available materials such as cement fibre boards, and utilises a wooden post-and-beam building method that meant that it was easy to construct in 1961 and easy to deconstruct, ship and re-build 60 years later. It’s testament to an architect who is influential in Japan, but who has not yet been widely recognised internationally. Here’s to Umbrella House and a very well-deserved second housewarming.

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

Sometimes, as a design critic, you just have to stand back and applaud. Since its ill-fated opening in 2021, the Marble Arch Mound has been the subject of more spilt ink than its creators MVRDV would care to remember. “[Thin] sedum matting clinging desperately to the sheer walls of the structure,” wrote The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright of the installation; “part of a new era of wholly aimless global attractions designed to be climbed and take selfies on,” offered Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times; “like a turd falling from a dog's arse,” summarised the University of Westminster’s Sean Griffiths. You would have thought that there was nothing left to say, but as the great 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, some things can only be shown, not said. Step forward video-game designer Dan Douglas, who set Twitter alight when he revealed that he had coded the Mound into his patched version of Duke Nukem 3D (1996), offering players the chance to blow it up. “To me, the Mound represents a total failure of concept, planning, execution and aesthetics, a literal monument to ugly unnecessity,” Douglas told Dezeen. But, actually, no explanation needed to be given: Douglas’ critique was perfect the moment the Duke pushed the plunger. Here at Disegno, we raise our hats to him.

Press button for more art

As sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke once said, “[any] sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It certainly seemed magic when DALL-E 2 – and its smaller sibling Craiyon (formally known as DALL-E Mini) – launched in July, machine-learning models that let people create fantastical images from text prompts, no matter how off-thewall. A portmanteau of surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and animated anthropomorphic robot WALL-E, DALL-E can manage photorealism or any number of art styles, giving users free range for their most maniacal mashups. If you want an impressionist painting of Minions climbing the Eiffel Tower or Soviet-era propaganda posters of cats, they’re just a few clicks away. Architecture Twitter amused itself

endlessly by feeding the AI prompts for mundane locales designed by famous architects. OpenAI developed DALL-E by feeding it a concentrated diet of publicly available digital images, which has presented a number of ethical conundrums, particularly for artists and designers whose work may have been used to teach a machine that can make “original” images for free, potentially putting them out of a job. Most of the images are so cursed, however, that we don’t think we’ll be replacing Disegno’s photographers and illustrators with robots any time soon.

Ive had enough

It’s the end of an era. In July, rumours began to swirl that Jony Ive’s 30-year association with Apple was coming to an end, with the pair agreeing to terminate the contract they signed in 2019 when Ive stepped away from his in-house position at the tech giant to found his LoveFrom design agency. It brings to a close a period that saw Ive’s work help lead Apple to a (at one point) $3tn market value; vastly raise the standard of design across consumer electronics; and launch the iPhone, arguably the defining product of the 21st century to date. Yet Ive may be leaving at the right time. Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple’s work on hardware design has slowed considerably, with the company focusing greater attention on software and subscription services such as Apple Music and Apple Fitness+. Similarly, questions may be asked as to whether Ive’s design sensibilities remain as fresh as they once did. While his original 1998 iMac was radical in its language, resplendent in translucent Bondi Blue plastic, Apple’s more recent product launches have felt increasingly corporate in their familiar reliance upon black glass and milled aluminium. As digital cultures embrace the aesthetic plurality favoured by online, perhaps it’s simply time for Apple to also explore some new perspectives on design.

AUGUST

Stay warm to keep (the planet) cool

We’re entering the catch-22 phase of the climate crisis. Parts of the world are becoming unbearably hot during the summer months, but turning up the air-conditioning to cool down buildings consumes more (increasingly costly) energy that burns the fossil fuels that are driving climate change. Spain introduced new rules at the start of August limiting both the heating and cooling of public buildings. Railway stations, cinemas, shopping centres, airports and theatres can’t be heated above 19°C or below 27°C, in an attempt by the government to reduce gas usage by 7-8 per cent as part of Europe’s move to wean itself off Russian supplies. The rules will remain in place until at least November 2023. While tourists have already begun complaining of too-hot hotels, there are some eminently sensible parts of the regulations, such as the stipulation that lights in shops have to be turned off after 10pm. In France, shop lights must be turned off past 1am, and those who haven’t been complying found themselves targeted by roving gangs of youths this summer. Young French people have invented a new sport: a variation of parkour that involves running and jumping up the sides of buildings to hit the interpompier – an external light switch. It’s a Tiktok trend that would make Greta Thunberg proud.

Oki for president

Since 2016, most election results globally have vacillated between the least-bad option and actively-openinga-hell-mouth, so it was a relief/a bit weird to hear of a vote that was all around good news. Muyiwa Oki has been elected president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and will serve his term from 2023 to 2025. It’s a major role in UK architecture, and as the 80th RIBA president Oki has already made history in more ways than one. He will be RIBA’s first Black president in the institution’s 188-year history and, at 31, he will also be its youngest. Traditionally, the presidency has gone to senior architects who have often founded their own practice and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Oki rode to victory on a grassroots campaign and a platform of being an early-career architect who will look out for the rights of his fellow workers. In a previous role at Grimshaw, Oki founded a multi-ethnic group and allies network for the practice. Hopefully he can continue his mission of cultural change at RIBA, which failed to keep its first diversity director in post for longer than a year. This is one presidency we are excited about.

Issey Miyake (1938-2022)

“Anything that’s ‘in fashion’ goes out of style too quickly,” Issey Miyake told Parisvoice in 1998. “I don’t make fashion. I make clothes.” It was with huge sadness that the design world learned in August of the death of Miyake, a designer whose attention to materiality, wearability and experimental process attracted adherents from across disciplines. Having founded the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo in 1970, and begun