Design Reviewed #2 by Disegno

DESIGN REVIEWED

BOCCI.COM

USER MANUAL Words Oli Stratford

I never know if anybody actually reads this bit. In theory, it’s the starting point of the publication, and the text that should set the tone or explain everything that follows. But, I mean, come on. It’s entirely pointless! An editor’s letter feels a bit like the instructions you receive with a new product. They’re there, we’d all complain if they weren’t there, but nobody is actually going to read the fucking things.1 Instructions are only really included so that you have something you can peer at angrily further down the line, when said product breaks due to your own incompetence. Sure, if a device is insanely complicated to set up, you might quickly glance over it – nodding sagely at mentions of “battery compartment” or “pairing” – but, for the most part, the thrill is in boldly launching upon the seas of your new television/ microwave oven, gloriously under-equipped to operate it. Figure it out on you own! And, let’s be honest, this publication is called Design Reviewed. How complicated could it be? Let’s face it, nothing I say here is going to provide any useful framing or context whatsoever for anything that follows. They’re reviews. Of design. We don’t use a rating system, but only because we haven’t come up with a satisfactory one as of yet. I used to take part in a book group, in which titles were ranked by an innovative thumbs up process (one thumb corresponding to “heart”, the other to “head”) and this was truly superior as a means of assessment. Were it simple to translate the precise nuance and angles of thumbs into a graphic format, we’d be using that method already. But still, never lose sight of the fact that these are reviews – we’re telling you which designs are good, and which are bad. 1

Since writing this piece, it has been pointed out to me that many people do in fact read the fucking things, rendering this text even more pointless, and thereby proving my point all the more powerfully. Excellent.

Except for the fact that pretty much all of the writers forgot to include this final assessment in their texts (*shakes fist at writers*), so I’m afraid I really can’t help – they’ve ducked the serious business of trying to express in words what can be communicated so clearly by thumbs. As such, nothing I say here is going to let you know which designs are hot, and which are not. The situation is even more hopeless than I had feared, and adjudication of hotness/notness is going to have to be entirely self-initiated. So thank you very much, writers, thank you very much indeed. I’m sorry. I feel terrible about this. I’ve completely failed to provide you with the promised comfort of ignored instructions, and thereby set you adrift on a sea of non-review reviews. My only solace is that you probably didn’t read this bit anyway.

DISCOVER SAIL, SLIDING PANELS. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193

Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com Creative assistant Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross Creative directors Florian Böhm and Annahita Kamali akfb.com Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com Fact checker Ann Morgan

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com Distribution MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk

Contributors Simón Ballen Botero, India Block, Adrienne Brown, Lara Chapman, Natalie Kane, Piti Koshimura, Nathan Ma, Michael David Mitchell, Ann Morgan and Oli Stratford. Paper and print This issue of Design Reviewed is printed by Park Communications on Edition Offset 80gsm by Antalis. The cover is printed on Edition Offset 160gsm by Antalis, with a Tintoretto Gesso 140gsm dust jacket by Fedrigoni.

Thanks Many thanks to Rupert EvansHarding for his superior work as a furniture importer; Assemble for its saffron risotto generosity; Laura Lyman for all her support with fizzy drinks connections; Siska Diddens, Amanda Fitz-James and Die Neue Sammlung for making possible a trip to Munich; and all the team at Rimadesio for hosting our issue launch. We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Design Reviewed #2 possible – not least Ben the labradoodle, debuting in the starring role of Dogegno. 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 4, The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SF disegnojournal.com Disegno The team behind Design Reviewed also produce Disegno, a journal that focuses on designers’ engagement with their field’s cultural, political and social entanglements. Disegno #35 has been in stores since April 2023; Disegno #36 will be released in September 2023. 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 Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

A Life Extraordinary MOOOI.COM

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WASTE NOT, WANT NOT Words Nathan Ma

Image courtesy of Jongeriuslab.

OBJECT Generation T

It’s a Tuesday evening in early May when I slide through glass doors and into Die Neue Sammlung in Munich. To my right, little treats fan out across a conference table: chocolate truffles with miso caramel and Korean gochugaru chilli flakes, purple Turkish delights infused with a butterfly pea flower kombucha, and koji rice petits fours. A photographer darts through the conspicuously well-dressed crowd, dewy with sweat from the first warm day of spring. I stand on one side of an Alfredo Jaar installation under the glass rotunda in the museum’s lobby. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot David Zilber, the Canadian chef and author best known for directing Noma’s Fermentation Lab in Copenhagen. That explains the snacks, I think. We’re here for Munich Creative Business Week, and specifically for a panel dealing with circular sustainable design strategies – a Silicon Valley-adjacent euphemism for recycling. As we snack, we’re invited into a long hallway to see Phoenix – reborn beauty (2023), an installation for which plates from the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory have been arranged into place settings at a banquet table. These plates are old, but were recently refired to set new hand-painted scribbles and splatters that cut across the original floral prints on their surface. Some plates are ringed with waxy monochromatic drips in blue, black or gold glaze; others are adorned with delicate line drawings of the 12 scrappy weeds that are propped up in the narrow planter in the centre of the table. I’m struck by the passing resemblance to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979): we’re not here for a feast, but as observers of a ritual. Among other things, we’re here to think about pretty porcelain plates. To understand porcelain, you must first understand desire. Porcelain is intoxicating to the senses. It can be turned as thin as eggshells, or wrapped thick around an electrical conductor for insulation. Its silk-soft surfaces are so smooth and nearly translucent that, in a certain light, you might catch a faint, fuzzy blue halo reflecting off its glaze. When run 14

under water, stubborn tea rings, rich gravies, and sticky cakes slip off porcelain plates and saucers without leaving a stain. If you strike a true porcelain tea cup, it sings clearly like a bell. When pressed against your tongue, porcelain tastes of nothing. When cupped gently in your hands, its weightlessness hints that yours may be the strongest hands in history. For centuries, royals and rich families organised their cabinetry, their ceremonies, and even their inheritances around porcelain dining sets. To receive one as a gift or bequeathment was a source of great pride. But desire is a fickle, finicky force. It morphs a grandmother’s tea set (tacky, outdated) to our grandmothers’ tea sets (sentimental, priceless), and it can be reversed just as easily. As with gold and diamonds, this socially constructed value can eclipse the material qualities of a substance when cast in the glow of desire. Porcelain can be a wedding gift, but also a dental filling, and a treasure locked in glass cases, a toilet bowl, a family fortune, or a tacky tchotchke at a car boot sale. In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, author Katy Kelleher describes porcelain as having been “a form of consumerist propaganda for the middle-class self” throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Intellectual historian Suzanne L. Marchand, writing in Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, suggests that the production and sale of porcelain is a lens through which we might even understand European economic development from the 18th century to present day, first as a foreign luxury, then a domestic good. Now, porcelain is often considered a piece of worthless tat. Today, consumers favour earthenware dishes, stainless steel kettles, and lumpy colourful vases. We drink our coffee out of KeepCups while commuting, and we eat our toast over the sink. At weddings, my friends collect cash for their honeymoon, or charitable donations. I browse porcelain dining sets for pennies in charity shops, or on eBay, and rummage past them in abandoned curbside boxes in hopes of finding a cast-iron pan. What was once an exotic import – something akin to the tea and coffee with which it was

filled – is now an art form that may soon be forgotten. In 1959, an estimated 31,118 porcelain workers were employed in Bavaria alone, but by 2016 the number had dropped to 3,400. Porcelain, it seems, has lost the lustre of desire. When the panel at Die Neue Sammlung is set to begin, we’re shepherded down the stairs into a warehouse lined with the design museum’s extensive back stock: space-age chairs and Kartell cabinetry, but also Game Boys and bicycles and bookcases, all displayed on tall stacks of industrial shelves. It feels like Costco for post-war product designers, or the Library of Congress but for material fetishists. At the front of the room, the panel take their seats. There’s Zilber, of course, and Kai Langer, the head of design for a BMW sub-brand. Sitting beside them is Hella Jongerius, a Dutch designer and the artist behind the porcelain plates that we’ve been admiring. The conversation is grounded in questions about what to do with waste, or “unwanted” materials. Langer says his work for BMW makes sense of these undesirables by asking, “How can we add value?” The work of a sustainable designer, he supposes, is to work with this trash until “the material itself is then accepted as a premium, almost luxurious product”. He calls it “added intellectual value” – another tech-adjacent euphemism, and one he uses to refer to transubstantiation of plastic from the sea (icky, gross, worthless) into car seat upholstery (cool, sexy, commercially viable). In his view, the designer is a Midas figure, a market force – a change maker, and the source of our desire. To be close to a designer’s product is to break bread with their brilliance. When Jongerius speaks, she concerns herself with design as labour. She refers to newness as a burden, and one that designers should be weary of by now. “We need to develop things that add to the world,” she stresses. Jongerius points out that she’s taken a step back from working with commercial clients in recent years. Her collaboration with Nymphenburg is a rare exception, and

one that she’s proud to put on view at the museum. “I’m happy to dive into materials, and search within these materials to find new ways to show it in museums – to show people what a material or what a craft could be without [having to] buy it,” she explains. It’s an interesting proposition: Phoenix – reborn beauty is effectively a showroom for this collaboration between Jongerius and Nymphenburg, which has been dubbed Generation T. The idea is that anyone who owns or who wants to buy Nymphenburg porcelain will be able to ship their pieces to the manufactory in Munich. For a modest fee, they’ll be hand painted with new drips or sketches of flowers (titled Dripping and Weeds respectively) that Jongerius has designed herself. The goal of the project is to extend the life of porcelain pieces that were once passed down through generations – pieces that have only recently been rendered undesirable by a generation that’s perfectly satisfied with what they find on Wayfair or Zara Home. Jongerius’s designs complicate this absent desire, raising their worth through what Langer might term “intellectual value”, but what Jongerius refers to as “building a relationship” between the consumer and products that they might not want, but reluctantly have. The exemplars on display in the museum were unwanted themselves. She found them on eBay, in attics, or at flea markets for cheap. Design – and especially circular sustainable design – is often framed as a strategy through which we find solutions in a world with too much waste and too few resources. When Jongerius says, “You don’t build a machine to get an answer, but to get another question,” I let the words replay in my head. Jongerius’s project is not a solution to the excess consumption and excessive waste that have come to define our times. If anything, it might accelerate consumption: I can imagine collectors elbowing their way through auctions to find a plate that can be painted for the project. But that’s not the point. The project inspires a series of questions that hang over the audience of well-to-do urbanites with tailored trousers 15

and Apple Watches and spotless vegan-leather handbags: what should we do with what we have, but don’t want? Can we love what we don’t desire? And when what we want (fresh food, new furniture, fast fashion, first dates) just a few clicks away, why would we bother? “New is a qualification – new is nothing,” Jongerius tells me the next day as she leads

organised around authorship and products are an extension of their maker. But good design adds meaning to the world, they argued, and that meaning cannot be added post-hoc. “It is absurd and arrogant to begin the design process with an empty piece of paper,” one section begins. Then: “Cultural and historical awareness are woven into the DNA of any worthwhile product. Otherwise the designer

Hella Jongerius with Nymphenburg porcelain (image courtesy of Jongeriuslab).

me through the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory. We start in the water-powered mill where kaolin clay is pounded to a pulp, then move to the turning shop and moulding shop, where a ceramist shows us a case of tiny porcelain rat arms that will one day hold up rings at Tiffany & Co., and then we enter the painting studio, where a painter is attentively studying watercolour illustrations as a guide for the rainbow stripes she will apply to a ceramic giraffe. Jongerius is famously blunt on what this qualification – this newness – can mean, and what it cannot. In 2015, she and design theorist Louise Schouwenberg released ‘Beyond The New’, a barnstorming manifesto that identified “the obsession with the new” as an animating force in the design industry. The industry is 16

is merely embracing newness for its own sake – an empty shell, which requires overblown rhetoric to fill it with meaning.” As we speak, I notice that Jongerius’s relationship with the language of design expands past the products and material libraries with which she works. Throughout the manifesto, the panel, and our discussion, Jongerius frequently returns to the language of interpersonal connections. Design is all about relationships, aesthetics are a form of communication, imperfection is about humanity. Design is a system of desire, but not one that privileges the designer’s desire for their work, nor the designer’s desire for paying end users. Design is a way to organise our desires, to express them, to recognise those of others, and to respond to them as

well. Above all else, it’s a way we can show that we care. I see this in Phoenix – reborn beauty too; when I ask Jongerius what guidelines she’s set for the application of her drips and drawings, she shrugs and says it’s up to the painters to decide. She trusts them. She repeatedly mentions that introducing drips and drawings to an old plate could commemorate a wonderful memory, or write over a painful one just as easily, if that’s what is needed. When she shows me a few prototypes, she points to one plate where she used stickers and hand brushes to make inky strokes. I tell her it’s beautiful. “I had one at home to try [eating off of] it,” she replies. “You feel like you’re eating mud.” The problem with desire is that we don’t always know what we want. We learn quickly what feels wrong, but struggle to identify what might feel right until we’re granted relief. Then, we get drunk off the pleasure of both knowing what we want, and having it too. When we do name our desire, it can feel urgent. In Kelleher’s book, she posits that “the meaning of [porcelain] has changed”, and what was once associated with family meals and sophistication now symbolises something entirely different. For Kelleher, it symbolises a ritual for which she now yearns. When she reflects on her need for something reverent, she feels conflicted, as I do too. This could be for many reasons. Kelleher suggests that for her, the source of this desire

for tradition may be motherhood and pandemic. For me, it might be commodity fetishism, or ageing, or my fear that – as the people around me couple up, settle down, and plan for their futures – I will be left behind. I worry that the relationships I value might also be governed by fickle, finicky forces, desire being one of them. I fear that the comfort I draw from these relationships may be just the warmth of being desired. But these explanations are all distractions. They refuse to name the root of the issue: that we worry that we might be disposable too, or even disposed of. We hope that we might be outlived by the traditions we participate in, both big and small. We hope that in our absence, these traditions might be revered, or committed to, or at least remembered when we ourselves are not. They’re an offering to those we love. As she reflects on the act of eating together as one of these traditions, Kelleher observes that “while [the figure of the mother] can be polluted or manipulated, there’s always going to be value in the act of caring,” and I’m inclined to agree. We cannot always fix desire, or how or when it’s experienced. But to redress this transience – to make our desire permanent, to commit its warm glow to memory – all we need to do is care. Nathan Ma is a Berlin-based writer and lecturer, and the curator behind Furniture For All.

IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC TOILETS Words Piti Koshimura

Image courtesy of Satoshi Nagare and The Nippon Foundation.

SYSTEM The Tokyo Toilet

Food. Safety. Hospitality. Trains that run on time. Whenever I meet visitors around Tokyo, they invariably remark on the services and facilities that the city offers to meet our most basic needs. To my amusement, they also tend to mention the greatness of the public toilets here. We spoiled residents may take these restrooms for granted, but their abundance, cleanliness and design allow us to move about the city with ease, confident that there will always be a place to go when on the go. In some ways, today’s Tokyo echoes the 1985 experimental project led by famed architect Toyo Ito: Pao I - Dwelling for Tokyo Nomad Woman. Working in conjunction with architect Kazuyo Sejima, Ito envisioned compact, tent-like residences that would provide basic shelter, while the city would then supply the infrastructure for the rest of our needs: eating, shopping, socialising, and so on. Minimal housing for the city had been discussed since the 1960s because of the intense densification of postwar Tokyo, with Kisho Kurokawa’s iconic (and recently demolished) Nakagin Capsule Tower,1 for example, targeting the salarymen who would spend most of their time working at the office. Ito and Sejima’s ideas, meanwhile, were a response to new roles that opened up for Japanese women in the bubble economy of the 1980s, enabling more significant female participation in the workforce and, also, in consumption. This concept of delegating traditionally domestic functions to the city still resonates. After all, Tokyo is a metropolis of tiny apartments with even tinier kitchens, of a transport system that is known for its dense capillarity, of 24/7 convenience stores, of inviting bars and restaurants, of a leaveyour-purse-on-the-table-to-secure-a-seat level of safety. Why stay home if you don’t have to? Easily accessible public toilets are an essential part of this urban fabric, and Tokyo has no shortage of them. A ranking released in January 2023 by QS Supplies, a UK-based bathroom fittings and accessories retailer, 1

See ‘Obsolescent Masculinity’ in Disegno #32.

found that Paris allegedly boasts the highest number of public loos per square kilometre in the world, ranked among 69 of the world’s most popular destination cities. I confess that I was a bit shocked not to find Tokyo at the top of the list. Taking a closer look at the study, I noticed that Japan’s capital wasn’t even mentioned. Well, given that Tokyo, technically, is not a city – it’s a prefecture comprising 23 wards (or districts), each with its own city office – I searched for its most popular constituent “cities”, such as Shibuya, home of the famous “scramble” crossing, or Shinjuku, which features the world’s busiest train station. None were mentioned in the ranking. Considering that Osaka, Kyoto and Sapporo were all listed, Tokyo’s absence almost hurt my feelings. As such, I decided to crunch some numbers myself and see how it compares to the Parisian toilettes. Based on Navitime, Japan’s popular navigation app, there are 186 public toilets in the city of Shibuya, giving us an average of 12.3 bathrooms per square kilometre. If we broaden the search to Tokyo’s 23 wards, we still have a solid score of 8. According to the toilet study, the French capital has 6.72. Touché. Those calculations don’t even include “off-street” toilets, as Clara Greed, a professor of urban planning at UWE Bristol, calls them. “‘Public toilets’ may be defined as comprising both traditional ‘on-street’, local authority public toilets,” she writes, “and ‘off-street’ toilets to which the public has right of access, for example in restaurants, shopping malls, and department stores, which, together, may be defined as ‘away from home toilets’.” In Japan, this second category covers train and subway stations, convenience stores, department stores, entertainment complexes, office buildings and so on. Their design varies from plain white walls, to marble countertops or New York-style tiling, but one can count on them being free of charge, safe and clean. Finding the flush button can be a challenge among the myriad functions of Japan’s famous “washlet” toilets: seat heating, spray intensity and direction, dryer, noise concealing, and emergency (this last one turned what should 19

have been a quick and private relief in a SevenEleven into a rather embarrassing moment). Going to the restroom becomes an experience in itself. Yet not all the public restrooms in Tokyo have such a spotless reputation – a point acknowledged by The Tokyo Toilet (TTT) project. Launched in 2020 to coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics and completed in March 2023, the project set out to change perceptions that the city’s on-street toilets are dirty (kitanai), smelly (kusai), dark (kurai) and scary (kowai) – the four Ks. According to the Japan Toilet Association (yes, there is one!), this quartet of adjectives encapsulated the major concerns surrounding public loos in the 1980s, when the organisation was founded. Even if conditions have improved since then, some people would still use the four K-words to describe street toilets. Some would even add an extra K for “broken” – kowareteiru. To execute its mission, non-profit The Nippon Foundation, in coordination with the city of Shibuya, commissioned 16 leading names from contemporary architecture and design, including some Pritzker Prize winners, to create 17 public toilets. A lavatory designed by Tadao Ando, mastermind of Naoshima’s Chichu Art Museum and many other concrete wonders? Yes please. I had always been impressed with the quality of Tokyo’s off-street toilets, to the point of posting about them on my Instagram. But discovering lavatories on public streets and in parks designed by the crème de la crème of Japanese architecture sparked deeper contemplation of urban planning – and prompted so much Instagram content that a follower called me a “toilet sommelier”. Ando, Ito, Shigeru Ban, Fumihiko Maki, Kengo Kuma, Sou Fujimoto, and cuttingedge designers and artists such as Nigo, Nao Tamura and Tomohito Ushiro all agreed to be part of the TTT project. These creators had to follow three basic conditions: 1) comply with laws and standards set by the government; 2) collaborate with Japan’s luxurious washlet manufacturer TOTO; and 3) include at least 20

one universally accessible toilet stall. In fact, creating facilities that could be used by anyone – regardless of their age, gender or disabilities – was the core objective for Koji Yanai, who is both the driving force behind the TTT project and group senior executive officer at Fast Retailing, the Japanese apparel giant known for the Uniqlo empire. Inspired by a promotional video made for the Paralympics in Rio 2016, Yanai had an early notion to develop a place that could only be used by people with disabilities. His idea was to make something so beautiful that everyone else would be envious. But he recalled a lesson from his father, Tadashi Yanai, Uniqlo’s founder: “Specialness is nice to have, but what’s more important is being made for all.” What, then, could be used by all? No matter where we are from, how much money we have, how old we are, or what we believe, each and every one of us must answer nature’s call. Curious to see what such a stellar team of creators would do with this unusual toilet mission, I’ve been criss-crossing the Shibuya district to check them out. Like many of his buildings, Ando’s contribution to the project draws on traditional elements of Japanese architecture. Consider the engawa, a covered porch or veranda that surrounds a house, usually facing a yard. It can also be a passageway that allows a smooth transition between inside and outside. For his toilet, located in a small park by a busy road, Ando created a circular floor plan, with an outer area that simulates an engawa. The universal stall is at the centre, offering easy access. Going to the rooms for men or women requires taking a few extra steps through a round inner corridor, protected by a cylindrical wall of vertical louvres that let in some light and air. Ando is a master at choreographing how people will access his structures. At UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, the Pritzker Prize winner built a long pathway leading to a meditation space. This spatial gesture is intended to give visitors time to prepare themselves spiritually before arriving in

the meditation room itself. Could public toilets be compared to mediation spaces? One of the most important names of modern Japanese literature had some notes on the matter. In his classic essay In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki stated that the traditional Japanese toilet – essentially an outhouse – “truly is a place of spiritual

– challenging the conventional notion of how public toilets fit into public spaces. Near the sinks, a semi-transparent wall keeps the room bright, while affording users some privacy. Privacy, however, is not a priority when it comes to men’s urinals. Not only in some TTT creations, such as Ando’s or creative director Kazoo Sato’s, but many older public

The interior of Sou Fujimoto’s Tokyo Toilet (image courtesy of Satoshi Nagare and The Nippon Foundation).

repose.” He described it as the “perfect place” to listen to songbirds and chirping insects, or to gaze at the moon while going about one’s business. Ando’s toilet stall does have a small skylight that allows some natural light in, albeit without a view of the moon. Natural light is key in another Pritzker laureate’s TTT creation. Fumihiko Maki has designed an airy white structure in a public playground that is known as the Octopus Park because of the shape of its slide. In keeping with the mollusc theme, Maki created a wavy roof, reminiscent of a squid. The independent men’s, women’s and universal booths are displayed in an organic layout, surrounding an open inner courtyard with a tree in the middle. The layout almost encourages us to look at the other “rooms” (if, of course, the idea didn’t sound creepy). It’s certainly an invitation for passersby to sit down and rest on the bench attached to the construction

urinals in Japan don’t have doors. This can lead to a too-much-information situation for anyone who happens to look the wrong way when walking by, but is actually considered a way to make the cabins safer because users can easily check whether there are any shady characters already inside. Koo Ue, a former chairman of the Japan Toilet Association, told The Japan Times in 2006 that “public toilets have an open design because Japanese want to be able to see inside before entering”. Plus, using fewer construction materials means a lower building cost. Located in a park where kids play, like Maki’s, Kengo Kuma’s contribution to the project is dubbed a “public toilet village” and is one of the few Tokyo Toilets that has a dedicated booth for children, with a smaller bowl and urinal. Vertical wooden louvres are arranged erratically to cover up toilet booths on different levels, creating a forest-like 21

atmosphere. It has become a popular spot for children playing hide-and-seek, according to testimonials shared on the website of The Nippon Foundation. The organisation’s surveys found that people take their kids to that park because the toilets are easy to use. Other users say that clean toilets make it more likely for people to gather in the park.

using an electrical charge that activates the moment that the door is locked. Well, at least it did work that way for a while. Since last winter, Ban’s toilets have been operating only in opaque mode due to a technical problem. As it turned out, cold weather slows the transition from clear to opaque. Twitter users have called it a failure and a waste of money.

Fumihiko Maki’s Tokyo Toilet (image courtesy of Satoshi Nagare and The Nippon Foundation).

Following a very different style, designer Nao Tamura came up with a striking red facility with sharp edges, inspired by a traditional Japanese wrapping technique called origata. The toilet is near Ebisu station, close to where I lived when the project was launched, and I have noticed that it is a popular spot for taxi drivers to make quick pitstops before taking their next passenger through the metropolis. If I were a taxi driver, I would certainly try to time my bathroom trips to make use of the cleaner options. Cleanliness was one of the aspects of the project that guided Shigeru Ban, yet another Pritzker winner, in the most talked about project of the series. Transparent walls are not an obvious architectural choice for a public toilet, but Ban’s thinking for his proposal was that they would allow users to easily check if a stall is clean and unoccupied. His trick was a mechanism that turns the glass walls opaque 22

Some would prefer to have access to a more sturdy and “normal” toilet. The project’s PR team, however, assured me that a fix is coming. Compared to other public toilets in Shibuya, TTT facilities receive special treatment in terms of the cleaning routine. There are two companies involved in the maintenance. One is in charge of the regular cleaning cycles, while the other is a consulting agency that inspects the facilities once a month to check for possible defects, odours, stains and ventilation issues. The toilets go through a dry clean two or three times a day, plus a monthly wet cleaning session. An additional annual cleansing covers the ventilation fans and the exterior walls. Besides this more frequent cleaning and the support of the inspection company, another aspect of the maintenance is unique: staff members wear a special uniform. Designed by Nigo, artistic director at Kenzo, the stylish blue jumpsuits carry the name of the project

on their back in bold white letters. On its website, the TTT mentions that workers have reported that wearing the uniform has led to more interaction with users, who approach them to say thanks, or even to offer drinks and snacks. In Japanese society, where we usually stay out of other people’s business – it still surprises me how common it is not to greet a neighbour in the elevator – this means a lot. It’s worth mentioning that the protagonist in Wim Wenders’s new film Perfect Days, which premiered at this year’s Cannes festival and was produced by Koji Yanai as part of the TTT promotional efforts, is a cleaner of the Shibuya toilets. By now you may be wondering, just how clean are the toilets? The last time I visited Ando’s toilet, shreds of paper on the floor and an empty plastic bottle of water left in the cabin distracted from my own moment of repose: even a special cleaning regime involving two companies is not enough if some users don’t do their part. Recently, I found Maki’s squid toilet surrounded by plastic bags, bits of paper and plastic bottles, despite the presence of a recycling bin a few steps away. But in general, after having toured the facilities over the last three years, I can say that the toilets are incomparably cleaner and in better condition than the average street toilet in São Paulo, my hometown. My Brazilian friend Roberto Maxwell refers to those toilets as “no-man’s land”, where one is liable to find “gruesome scenes” or even “surrealist paintings”. No, he’s not talking about Dalí. Another major worry about public toilets in Brazil (and other places), especially for women, is a lack of toilet paper. Find a clean booth with paper rolls and consider yourself a lucky lady. In Japan, I don’t recall any experience where I wasn’t granted this very basic amenity. On the other hand, some visitors here are surprised to find that in a place that seems to think of everything – washlets can even play artificial waterfall sounds to conceal embarrassing noises – one must leave with wet hands after washing.

In Japanese public toilets, mostly the ones managed by local governments, it’s common not to find paper towels or hand dryers. Think of it as your chance to act like a local: keep a small hand towel or a handkerchief as close as you would keep your phone. Amenities are an important part of the bathroom experience, but I’ve come to understand that TTT wants to offer more than an aesthetically pleasant and sanitary relief experience. Design can be a powerful tool that affects how we connect ourselves with our surroundings, while addressing important social discussions. To return to the social changes that emerged in the bubbling 80s, the surge in female inclusion in the workforce pushed legal developments. In 1985, the same year that Tokyo Nomad Woman was showcased, Japan passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in an attempt to encourage gender equity in recruiting, training and promoting women. According to Junko Kobayashi, one of TTT’s creators and the chairperson of Japan Toilet Association, the law helped “increase women’s participation in all aspects of society”, generating an elevated demand for inclusive toilets. More recently, in 2000, the Law for Promoting Easy Mobility and Accessibility for the Aged and Disabled – the “barrier-free transport law” – was enacted to respond to the needs of a rapidly ageing population and demands for inclusion of people with disabilities. In Kobayashi’s analysis, the act was another catalyst for change in public toilets’ design. These transformations are reflected in toilet signage too. Going way beyond the classic Men / Women pictograms of typical washrooms, the TTT project uses 10 other symbols to signal that some Tokyo Toilets can meet very specific needs. To list a few: accessibility for wheelchair users; grab bars for the elderly and people with disabilities; baby changing boards; children’s toilets; facilities for those with ostomies; baby chairs (for kids to safely wait); and care beds (for, say, changing adult diapers). On The Nippon Foundation’s website, Yusuke Ibuki, who is a wheelchair user, says: “When you come across 23

a facility with a sophisticated design that functions from the perspective of people [with disabilities], you can feel that you are part of the city and society.” Especially in a country known for emphasising uniformity, the construction of beautiful universal public toilets highlights the diversity that exists in society and brings Tokyo’s eclectic cast

of characters together – the taxi drivers and the tourists, the young and the old, the cleaners, the Instagrammers and the weary office workers who are finally making their way home. Piti Koshimura lives in Tokyo and produces content about Japan.

DEATH IS IN THE AIR Words Michael David Mitchell

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.

MEDIA

Air

1984 was the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. What the rest of the 20th century couldn’t accomplish with two world wars, the 1980s set irrevocably in motion – a collective death wish manifested through consumerism. Death by shopping if you will. And Ben Affleck’s new film Air, about the birth of Nike’s iconic shoe line, is an accidental homage to a future without a future, a symptom of the fatal disease. I was only five years old the first time that Michael Jordan ran onto the Chicago Bull’s court wearing the now iconic Air Jordans. I was too young to wear the shoes or care much about the NBA draft pick. But before the decade was over, I definitely wanted a pair. The marketing team at Nike had found a vein of pure American desire, a golden seam deep in the psychological tunnels of the collective subconscious. The genius of the Air Jordan line lies within its marketers’ ability to grasp how we are all hardwired the same way – our little biological supercomputers clicked into the same cultural moment, reacting in similar ways to identical stimuli. Whether Black or white, poor or rich, rural or urban, American or European, we all wanted to be like Mike. I never succeeded in convincing my mom to buy me a pair of Air Jordans, and by the time I was buying my own shoes it was too late. I wish I could go back in time to give that Jordan-less child a hug and tell him that having to wear the same shitty shoes until you outgrow them is actually an ecologically responsible thing to do. Tell little Mikey that his bratty classmates and their consumerist families are collectively pulling the trigger on the climate change gun and ensuring ecological doom for future generations. Yet even today, as Air is testament to, sneaker culture is alive and well in spite of its oversized ecological impact. According to a 2018 study by Quantis, an environmental sustainability consultancy, footwear production accounts for 1.4 per cent of global carbon emissions and will increase 49 per cent by 2030. Considering that air travel comprises 2.5 per cent of all emissions, the more than $50bn athletic footwear market is a heavy hitter on the climate change contributor lineup. I nominate sneaker shaming as the new guilt-tripping activity for the activist youth of today. Luckily for those who wish for a return to the blissful ignorance of the true American way for an hour or two, Hollywood has embraced 80s and 90s consumer culture in 2023, producing a heterogeneous crowd of films around the topic. There’s not only Air, but also the upcoming Barbie, the surprisingly entertaining Tetris, the uneventful but ultra profitable

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (over $1bn at the box office), and even a hit indy film about the Blackberry called BlackBerry. The official trailer of the Greta Gerwig directed Barbie leaves little room for doubt that the film treats the 90s and the Barbie-associated toxic tropes with adequate distaste and irony. The quality of writing – the script has been co-written with Gerwig’s partner and longtime collaborator Noah Baumbach (Francis Ha, The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) – can be counted on to weave sufficient satire into the era’s consumeristic positivism. “This is the best day ever,” says one Barbie during a dance party. “I know it is! And so was yesterday and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever,” says another. Followed by, “Have you ever thought about dying?” It will definitely be a fun and existentially engaging movie, but that doesn’t get us any closer to understanding the sudden and intriguing attraction to 80s/90s vintage corporation-inspired filmmaking. If there’s promise in the Barbie premise, one cannot be so kind to Air. It has been released into the wild with all of its naked flaws exposed against the projector’s bright light. “Orwell was right, 1984 is a tough year,” says Nike’s VP of Marketing Rob Strasser, played by Jason Bateman, in one of the films early scenes. But you and I know, and everyone who sits down to watch the film knows, Nike ends up signing Michael Jordan that year to create the Air Jordan line. Affleck and his regular collaborator Matt Damon, who both stars in and produced Air, were tasked with making that proposition entertaining and interesting, spending more than $70m trying to do so. It has been just over 25 years since the early Affleck-Damon cinematographic bromances of Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy. The quarter century in Hollywood has not fostered better cinematography in the creative couple. Chasing Amy, directed by Kevin Smith, was an independent breakthrough film heavy on good writing and light on budget – made for a mere $250,000, it grossed over $12m at the box office. And Good Will Hunting, a true gem directed by Gus Van Sant and co-written by Affleck and Damon, was a huge hit with critics and in the cinemas ($225m), earning the duo an Oscar for best screenplay, all while being made on a $10m budget. Both of these early films had the advantage of small budgets, relying on acting talent and superb storytelling. Air, on the other hand, probably won’t break even and often feels like a feature-length Nike commercial by two ageing, rich, white Hollywood actors.

I wonder who Affleck thought the audience for his film would be. I sparingly evoke the concept of “nostalgia” to begin looking for an answer. A longing to return to a better period, perhaps? Yet it’s hard to see how the 80s and 90s were better than today, unless we see 1984 as a clear inflection point, forward from which everything slowly goes to shit. From this

Designing the Air Jordan (image courtesy of Amazon Studios).

perspective, those were better times only when compared to the collective angst of today, amplified by hyperconnectivity and information echochambers. The more we know today, the greater our fear of a future of extremes grows. The 80s were a time of comfortable ignorance for the American middle class, a luxury they no longer have. In order to grasp how a film like this could ever be made, I think it’s important to look at the origin story of the script by Alex Convery. Written during lockdown and inspired by the Netflix documentary The Last Dance, about the rise of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, Convery thought that a story about the Nike company as an underdog who signs the Adidasloving rookie, thus changing the face of sports marketing forever, would make for a compelling film. It is his first script to ever get produced and was modified by Affleck and Damon in the revision process. According to a Hollywood Reporter interview with Affleck, the original script didn’t include two of the most important Black characters involved in the deal: the Nike executive Howard White and Jordan’s mother Deloris. Affleck added these

characters and their stories to the script after discussing with MJ himself, claiming to significantly change the scope of the film. Affleck contends that only after discussing with Jordan did he understand what the film was really about, that “it isn’t about Nike,” but about the Jordans themselves. Then nothing really explains why 90 per cent of the film is set in the Nike headquarters or else following Matt Damon’s character Sonny Vaccaro, one of the company’s marketing executives. Maybe Affleck wanted to make a movie about how Jordan’s mother Deloris deftly out-negotiated three major corporations to secure a share of the profits – a truly disruptive event in the history of competitive sports. It essentially funnelled billions of dollars away from Nike to Jordan, and set an important precedent. Unfortunately for Affleck, that isn’t the film he made. Deloris’s character and the most important human drama of the story was completely omitted from the first version of the script, only to be unskilfully added during revision. Instead of making a film that centres around the love and intelligence of a mother for a gifted son, Affleck and Damon made a film about Nike and its executives in the 1980s, casting themselves in the principle roles. Perhaps the duo saw an opportunity in reproducing “North America 1984” as a time when a couple of daring white men could really make a difference in the world – a buddy movie with corporate America substituting for the Wild West. The film glorifies risk taking, but only when the risk is potentially loosing a cushy job and perhaps a couple hundred thousand bucks for a billion-dollar corporation. The plot rides on Sonny’s obsession with choosing the right young athlete to bet on. It concludes by leveraging all of the marketing weight of a mega company to create an insanely profitable worldwide fashion phenomenon. In an important way, this could only happen in the 1980s. A unique moment in history – a confluence of Cold War driven consumer culture and raw American talent – that generated massive profits. You have to admit that the 1980s were interesting. We were collectively on the brink of mutual nuclear annihilation and Nintendo was all the rage. The recent 80s revival film Tetris takes this seeming paradox to the next level. Unlike Air, Tetris does what it sets out to do. It tells the improbable and unknown story of the distribution wars for the famous video game. Instead of taking a promising premise and smothering it with uninspired writing like Air, it takes an unlikely premise for a film and

weaves it into a wild ride across the globe and back several times over. It’s easier to tell this type of biographical thriller in the 1980s too. There’s no second-guessing flying around the world, and the tension runs high because the protagonists can’t simply drop a pin or FaceTime when it would be convenient to do so. In high comedic fashion, this point is well made when the protagonist tries to call home from Moscow to warn his wife and is told that he’ll have to wait at least eight hours because “there are very few lines that leave our great country.” Similarly, there are a lot of phone calls in Air. The main character, Sonny Vaccaro, even inconspicuously wears a beeper on his belt, the unsightly black box protruding over his belly. While driving to the Jordans’ home in South Carolina, he calls the office and squawks, “This car has a phone!” The VP of marketing even has a fancy phone on his desk that is contained in a luxuriously designed wood box. The rapidity of technological development since 1984 actually generates an interesting cinematographic opportunity to create historical exoticism for a younger public, while provoking nostalgia in an older one. For it truly was a time when important men had important phones that could do only one thing – make an important call. Some of the most intriguing dialogue in the film is between Jordan’s agent David Falk, played by Chris Messina, and Sonny. Yet the two only meet face to face once in the film. And the final deal between Deloris and Sonny is also made on a landline. In today’s world, there is an unrecognised desire to return to a time of less connectivity, when a phone call was an event. Along the same vein, stories set in today’s world are getting harder to write. The hyperconnectivity of the protagonists makes it very difficult to create suspense and intrigue. Just imagine the film Stand By Me with Google Maps. Likewise, the intrigue that is difficult to muster in storytelling is also fundamentally missing in our daily lives. Like these filmmakers, a part of us would like to set our lives in the 1980s. Our attraction to 80s and 90s culture is perhaps only a healthy reflection of a time before the internet took away our freedom to be unreachable. The photogenic fetishism of early 80s objects in Air is also an expensive way to make an uninteresting film more entertaining. Much like lavish set designs in escapist but entertaining period pieces that take place in Colonial America, Baroque France or Victorian England, the attention to detail in Air is without fault. I suspect that a million dollars alone were spent on reproducing a convenience store used in only two scenes. There are

long shots of perfectly replicated items such as candy cigarettes, magazines, 35mm film, and perfect piles of white Wonder Bread. These painstakingly reproduced everyday lowbrow objects, isolated by the camera and projected onto enormous screens throughout the world, are transfigured into symbols of Reagan-era hyper-consumerism. They represent the destructive forces of extraction capitalism set long ago into motion, encased in shiny petroleum plastic wrappings of dead dinosaur carbon. Air is also the origin story of the ultimate celebrity endorsement. By associating its brand with one of the most iconic and talented basketball players of all time, Nike leveraged Jordan’s star power and appeal to capture the attention and admiration of consumers. Michael Jordan’s athletic prowess, charisma, and cultural influence made him an ideal figure to endorse the sneakers and turn Team Jordan into a multibillion dollar empire. The profit sharing and co-design deal he made with Nike also cracked open the door for cultural icons to collaborate on the design of the objects that carry their name and to eventually create their own lines without the intermediary of large corporations. The influence this pivotal moment in history has had on popular culture, design and power relations is great. But the film, by focusing on the Nike side of things, missed the opportunity to tell a more compelling story of how a poor Black family from South Carolina flipped the script on corporate America. That story should not be a subplot in a film about white men getting richer, but a film unto itself. Instead, Affleck’s film could act more as a divining stick, indicating the year when the collective modern death wish crystallised into the form of the perfect basketball shoe – the Air Jordan. Michael David Mitchell is an indepedent writer living in Ticino.

PITCH DREAMS Words Lara Chapman

Image courtesy of Assemble.

POLICY

Pitch for a Pitch

Solid defence by Toynton, she regains possession of the ball. Passes to Haste. Cueveara. Moving down the pitch quickly. Chapman. Long pass into the box and there’s no one there to receive it! Some hesitation from the defence, they’re not moving. Chapman has continued her run, could she see an opportunity? Oh…YES! She’s nicked the ball from under their feet! AND IT’S A GOAL! GOAL FOR CHAPMAN! GOAL FOR THE HIGH FIVES! Wonderful stuff! Scenes of wild celebration down on the pitch as the score goes to 2-0 in the thirtieth minute. And there’s smiles all round, but none bigger than Chapman’s. We’ve seen her confidence building over the past few weeks, but it’s the first goal after a very, very dry spell. Will this open the floodgates of more goals to come for the number six? Reader, no floodgates were opened. I did not score another goal for the rest of the season and remain firmly stuck in drought. Despite this, the goal lives on in my memory, popping into my head in idle moments – squeezed between a backpack and an armpit on the delayed 7:53am tube to Tower Hill, or in the quick pause between two emails at work. Depending on who I am around, I’ll either smother or indulge the smile of thrilled and, admittedly, smug satisfaction that spreads from the corners of my mouth – “GOAL!” I hear the imagined crowd go wild. And even as I begin to grin, I know I’m being ridiculous. I have no right to feel so delighted by this goal. Truth be told, to anyone watching, it would have been an underwhelming goal. Average, perhaps, at best. You see, I am really quite shit at football and until quite recently, my involvement with the sport has been close to zero.1 On the rare occasions when I had allowed myself to be cajoled into watching games by my football-enthusiastic partner, it was almost always with a sinking feeling of detached boredom in the pits of my ovaries. But in October last year, in a surprising turn of events, I joined a football team: High Fives FC. And each week, for the 40 minutes while I’m on the pitch, playing in our beginners 5-a-side women’s league, I get carried away in the thrill of the game and the unjustified feeling that I am an elite athlete of the astroturf. It is a strangely consuming and powerful feeling – one that quickly dissipates when I catch sight of my red-streaked face and sub-optimal football physique reflected in the window of Sainsbury’s as I trudge to the station post-game. But for just under one sweaty hour, the pitch is a site of transformation and a place of fantasy. 1

With the exception of a brief window at about 17-years-old, which ended with a lost grand final and lifelong ankle damage.

This level of delusion isn’t unique to me. Football performs a cheeky back-heel that convinces many average Joes, and more recently Joannes, Johannas and Josephines, that they are God’s gift to the pitch. Eleanor Watson, curator of the Design Museum’s 2022 exhibition Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, which is now on a global tour, believes that “a lot of people’s experiences of football are not real, they’re in their imagination.” She describes the sparkles she noticed in peoples’ eyes when describing a historic match play-by-exciting-play, or a particular detail in a new kit design, or an unbelievable goal they saw last weekend, “and it’s because they can imagine themselves doing it. People really willingly insert themselves into the game.” Even Zinedine Zidane, one of the GOATs of the football world, indulged in a similar level of fantasy as a child. Watson tells me about an interview she came cross where Zidane speaks of how he would imagine the voice of a famous French commentator in his head each and every time he played. If it worked for him, maybe it will work for me too. Football, Watson says, more than any other sport, has an aspect of fantastical projection, from its most ad-hoc grassroots level all the way to its billion-pound top because “it’s simple to follow, simple to play and simple to understand how to play it from watching it”. This ease of engaging with the sport makes it accessible, but also leaves room for imagination and creativity, both on and off the pitch. This unique mixture of simplicity and imagination is heightened by the fact that, on the most basic level,“there are almost zero barriers for involvement,” says Watson. All you need is a ball, a clear space and something to mark out a couple of goals – a few jumpers or water bottles will do. “But then there’s the ultimate reward for being at the other end of the scale,” she adds. “You can be a demigod if you are the best football player in the world.” Ultimately, however, you are still playing the same game, with the same parameters. This simplicity plays out across a huge spectrum of abilities, conjuring a magical sense of possibility. It is also what makes people so engaged with the sport. Across the globe, and in the UK specifically, Watson says, the “level of existing knowledge [about football] for the general population is incredibly high. Higher than any other subject matter.” With 5 billion football fans worldwide (if FIFA’s statistics are to be believed) it is unsurprising that people are engaging with the game so extensively. The combination of all of these factors creates a particular sense of “I could do that” and “I am a part of that” that underpins the so-called “beautiful game”.

It is in the spirit of this “I could do that” attitude that Assemble – a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art – launched its project Pitch for a Pitch in 2022, which seeks to “make a sports facility specifically catered to women and non-binary football players.” The project is in early stages – if it were a football game, the players probably wouldn’t have even left the changing rooms to parade, single file or with a child clutching their hand, onto the pitch. At the time of writing, there is no site for Assemble’s pitch, no confirmed stakeholders, and no money to make it happen. It currently exists in the form of a 25-page vision document that describes the collective’s goal of creating a grassroots football space and contains calls for collaborators to help them facilitate it. It exists as hundreds of conversations and it exists as thousands of emails. It is still fairly intangible, but Assemble believes it is achievable. “There is a bit of, maybe, misplaced confidence,” explains Emily Wickham, the architect and footballer who is leading the line of Pitch for a Pitch, when I ask how Assemble is going to achieve the project’s goals. When she expands on where this confidence comes from, however, it doesn’t seem so misplaced to me. Assemble has a wealth of experience realising community-based projects in its 10-year-old portfolio. Most relevantly to Pitch for a Pitch, Assemble has founded, and now runs, three affordable workspaces in London that have provided studio spaces and workshops to hundreds of creatives. These initiatives grew from a similar “we could do that” mentality. The Blackhorse Workshop, for example, is an open-access community space in Walthamstow, London, that was set up in 2014. It came into being after two of Assemble’s team said “we’ve got this idea of a collectively run workshop that anyone can use,” explains Wickham. The next step, was “finding enough people who are interested in helping us to do that and then it became a project.” “So, maybe by accident,” Wickham summarises, “Assemble has become a workspace provider as well as an architecture firm.” Now, the collective seems to be one or two passes away from becoming a sports space facilitator, too. But why should it fall to an architecture firm to initiate, fundraise, design, build, and potentially manage, women’s and non-binary football pitches? My entry into the High Fives unfolded in the spirit of access and imagination. It began because my good friend Fern Toynton was one of the 11.7 million people in the UK who watched and cheered as the Lionesses

– England’s national women’s football team – kicked their way to victory in the 2022 UEFA Women’s Euro final against Germany. She has been watching women’s teams grow and play since childhood, and had been toying with the idea of setting up a team for a number of years. Inspired and encouraged by friends’ newfound interest in the sport, she thought it was perhaps the right moment. So, one quiet Wednesday evening, I received a WhatsApp that read “Are you keen?” attached to an invitation that said: “Victoria Park, 16.08.2022, 7pm. We are starting a woman’s (& non-binary) 5-a-side football team called the ‘High Fives’! As many of you know it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while and with the winter league starting in October we thought now could be a good time to get something together!” It included a few other details about being beginners, what to bring and, importantly, plans to go to the pub after the first training session. And I thought to myself, “Why not? Maybe I could do that.” Within a week we had a team and a logo, and had joined a competition called the Super 5 League. We are now 30 games into our burgeoning football careers, playing week in, week out, come rain, weatherwarning winds or -4°C frosty temperatures. But while my experience of getting onto the pitch has been as smooth as a well-controlled pass back to the keeper, this is not the norm for women and non-binary players. It is not the norm today and has not been the norm historically. Despite its outward gloss of simplicity and easy access as a sport, football has a grim history of putting up deliberate barriers for those of us lacking a pair of (biological) balls. Our almost total exclusion from the game has been swept under the pitch’s perfectly laid turf. Because it always comes back to the pitch. In 1921, women’s football was booming in England, having been played on and off since the 1870s. In the First World War, as women took on more physical roles in factories that had been vacated by men on the front, they also formed football clubs made up of factory workers who played against each other. “The most famous team was born in the Dick, Kerr [and Company] factory in Preston,” writes Suzanne Wrack, The Guardian’s women’s football correspondent and author of A Women’s Game: The rise and fall and rise again of women’s football (2022). The Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club was a team of 11 women who worked in a railway and tram plant turned munitions factory, and who played football in their tea and lunch breaks before going on to compete locally, nationally and internationally, boosting

morale in difficult times. At the height of their popularity in 1920, one of their games drew a crowd of 53,000 spectators with “another 10-15,000 supporters turned away from the at-capacity ground,” writes Wrack. In just a few years, the team raised £83,000 (£5.16m in today’s money) for charities that supported injured soldiers returning from war and, later, other causes, including supporting striking miners and their families.

High Fives FC and Hackney Parrots (image courtesy of High Fives).

Women’s football clubs were closely linked to the suffragette and labour movements. Threatened by growing calls for equality that were amplifying after the war, the powers that be began to panic and football became tied into the perceived threat. In 1921, the Football Association (FA)

of England, made an official statement that football was “quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged” and effectively banned women’s involvement in the sport. Other countries soon followed suit. However, the FA “did not have the power to ban women from playing football outright – that was impossible,” writes Wrack, “so instead they ruled that women’s games were barred from FA affiliated pitches.” Heavy-handed fines were doled out to FA clubs who let women hire out, play or train on their pitches. So for nearly 50 years the pitch became a powerful mechanism of exclusion. It was not until 1969, amidst a backdrop of the resilient international growth of women’s football and the second wave of feminism, that the FA quietly rescinded its ban. The legacy of its policy, however, lives on, as women remain mired in a struggle to level the playing field, trying to fit into systems and economies that have grown exclusively to support men’s football. Unequal access to football pitches and facilities, in particular, continues to present huge barriers to playing at all levels of the women’s game. Take, for example, Liverpool FC’s £50m, state-of-the-art AXA Training Centre. Completed in 2020, it is considered one of the best training facilities in the world. It includes tennis courts, a swimming pool, a volleyball court, television studios and more – but no space for the Liverpool Women’s football team to train. For now, the women’s team continues to train at a ground that they share with the Tranmere Rovers men’s team (who are in the fourth division of the men’s league), while the youth women’s programmes use three different split venues. Although, since the AXA training ground opened, plans have been put in motion to find a training ground for the women’s team and academy.2 Likewise, Manchester United Women’s team, who were only reestablished in 2018 – having been disbanded for producing a lack of profit in 2005 – were initially given a training ground with inadequate pitches, leading to a number of preventable injuries. To mitigate this, they were moved to the men’s Aon Training Complex in 2021, but had to fit their training sessions in between the men’s senior, under-23, and under-18 sides. At this site, the women’s toilets were a ten-minute walk from the pitch and, after training in their gym in a tent, the team could not have a shower between sessions and meals because there were no women’s showers. The lack of pitch access and basic facilities were factors cited by Casey Stoney when she quit as the team’s manager in late 2021. At the regional level, a lack of pitch equity for women’s teams is also common. Just a few weeks ago (at the time of writing) Colney Heath 2

As Design Reviewed #2 went to press, Liverpool announced that it had bought back its old Melwood training ground, which it had sold in 2019, to serve as a base of operations for the club’s women’s first team and professional game academy.

Ladies FC, who play in the Premier Division of the Eastern Region Women’s Football League, tweeted: “We are genuinely upset to have to inform you that @ColneyHeathFC decided that a bouncy castle takes precedence over a Women’s Football Match at tier 5. We were informed that we had to play on a park pitch today. We apologise to our opponents @bowersladiesFC.” In this instance, a community fundraiser by the club took priority over the women’s game, without consultation or communication. Between writing and editing this piece, the team have removed their initial tweet and accepted the club’s apology in a statement in another tweet on May 9 concluding: “We acknowledge the apology and hope everyone can learn from this incident, ensuring women’s football is rightfully developed and promoted, together.” Although not necessarily malicious in intent, these oversights, and many more like them, are born from a casual and persistent lack of respect for women’s teams at an institutional level, which has grown from the deliberate decisions to undermine women’s right to play football on the same grounds as men. Actions have been taken in each instance to apologise or attempt to remedy the situation, but it all feels far too little, far too late. At the opposite end of the women’s football spectrum, grassroots football faces similar challenges. “The lack of pitch space is a huge barrier to the growth of women’s football across the whole country [the UK],” wrote Fleur Cousen in her article ‘How can Women’s Football Grow When We Can’t Get on the Pitch?’ published by iNews in 2020. Cousens founded Goal Diggers FC, a non-ability based team for women and non-binary people, (for which Wickham plays in midfield) in 2015. It took her more than five years to secure a stable, safe and decent-quality pitch for her club to train and play on, and she writes of other clubs who have faced similar lengthy and expensive struggles to find pitches. They are journeys full of compromise and frustration. At a grassroots level, the problem of pitch access persists because booking systems privilege longstanding and existing teams – in effect, this means that men’s teams or small groups of (usually male) friends who have held booking slots for decades (or have cash in the bank) receive priority. Pitch spaces owned by schools, local councils and leisure centres across the UK, and especially in London, see their booking systems managed by thirdparty, for-profit sports facility providers, who rent the pitches at inflated prices on first-come-first-served rolling and block bases. Given that women’s grassroots football is relatively young (thanks FA!), the slots, particularly at

prime times after work on weekdays between 7-10pm, are almost impossible to come by. Cousens writes that the current booking system is “outdated” and “prevents teams that are new to the sport from getting a look in.” It is a system that functions to maintain the status quo, even when the demand for grassroots women’s football is at an all-time high and is set to grow further as the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup kicks off in July. This begs the question: why maintain a status quo that is broken for half the population and exclusionary when something more inclusive, equitable and potentially profitable could be built? Powerleague, one the UK’s largest for-profit sports facility providers, says that the issue is one of occupancy. The company notes that “growth in female participation is a key objective for our brand and has been for several years” and adds that all of its “products and services are available for anyone in our communities, regardless of gender, age, or ability.” But the company also acknowledges that its pitches at super-peak periods are currently at over 90 per cent capacity and, as such, it is difficult to meet the huge demand for grassroots football across all genders and abilities. Within this problem of occupancy comes an additional issue of distribution. Dean Griffiths is the regional leagues operations manger for the south at Powerplay, a subsidiary of Powerleague. His role, he says, is “to actively encourage anybody to play football – that could be walking football, it could be playing disability football, student football, women’s football – whatever it is [that serves] to increase football is great.” Griffiths says that although pitches are available for anyone to book on a first-come first-serve system, women often feel that the spaces aren’t for them. “A lot of women see a football pitch and say to themselves, ‘That is where men play football, we won’t be able to get in there,’” he says. “And that is an awful perception that has been created, because that’s not true.” This perception, as well as other barriers that women face in getting onto the pitch, he says, is “something we need to drastically change.” Powerplay notes that it is “proud to offer women’s leagues, tournaments, mixed leagues and facilities to try to encourage female and non-binary participation,” but across the field there is a certain amount of juggling between making grassroots pitches available and welcoming to women’s teams, while ensuring profit margins are maintained. Griffiths explains that opening pitch spaces exclusively to women’s leagues can be seen as coming with “business risk” because it entails cutting down on

guaranteed male pitch bookings. “Now, if we don’t get women to play,” he speculates, “we obviously have missed our business goals, and through that comes financial loss.” In other words, it would be easier and economically safer to stick to the existing game plan and distribution, which is based on a customer base of 95 per cent men. “It makes business sense to keep things fully booked: we make money and the business succeeds,” Griffiths summarises of this particular school of thought. Yet there are clear counterarguments, he notes – both economic and social. “There’s a 50 per cent split of women and men in the country,” Griffiths says, “so we’d be foolish not to go after that[…] One day it [women’s football] will be as profitable as our current system.” Particularly given that women currently make up about 1.5 per cent of the 4,000 teams that play in Powerleague and Powerplay, improving this mix and broadening the company’s offerings for women, Griffiths says, “is generally better for everybody.” “We want to fight for equal opportunities, equal places,” he says, “not because we’re trying to tick a box, but because it actually does benefit everybody, it does benefit the business, it does benefit the local communities. I don’t see why we can’t do that.” Strange as it seems, my team and I are beneficiaries of this longstanding system that favours men or teams who have been involved in the sport for years. The High Fives play on the Mabley Green pitches in Hackney Wick at 7 and 8pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively. We have access to these prime slots because Shahid Malji (or Shazz as he’s known to everyone on the pitch and sidelines), who founded the Super 5 League in 2016, has held these bookings for about 14 years. He first gained them when he set up an informal men’s league for his office colleagues and contracted operative staff at Hackney Council. Then, when he decided to quit his job and devote himself to championing women’s grassroots football full-time, he secured these slots for the following year by putting down £10,000 of his own money. “I took a gamble,” says Malji, who wasn’t sure if there was the demand for grassroots women’s football at the time, but has slowly cultivated a community by offering mentorships and creating new economic models such as half-seasonal payment options to take down some of the barriers to entry. He explains that established men’s teams (who have years of playing under their elasticated waistbands) may have this kind of cash in the bank – or else established pools of resources, sponsors or contacts to draw from – but for new women’s and non-binary teams who are attempting to

get involved in a sport that has historically been hostile toward them, this is a huge and prohibitive sum. This economic barrier trickles down to the individual players, who are often required to pay large deposits very quickly to secure spots that are in red-hot demand. This is all before they have ever properly played a game and tested their feet in football’s muddy waters. In a very deliberate departure to how pitch systems currently work, Assemble and Wickam envision a pitch space with booking systems that would position female and non-binary players first, rather than profits. They are exploring all avenues as to how this could unfold. “We need a site that: has existing pitches and space for a new building or has existing pitch space and an existing building that can be adapted or space for a new pitch space and a new building,” their vision document reads. In the ambiguity of an early-stage project, there is room to dream. “The ideal scenario,” explains Wickham, is folded into Assemble’s hunt for a new office space and workshop for itself – the collective is about to be moved on from the meanwhile space3 that has housed the studio and one of its affordable workspaces for the last few years. If (and it is a big if given London’s soaring prices and lack of outdoor spaces) they can find a new space that also has enough of an outdoor area to be converted into a pitch and whoever owns the site says “I’d really like to make this project happen”, then from that point onwards they could move forward. Wickham says that, with these all factors in play, Assemble could “apply for funding” and “be able to contact all sorts of teams and get official confirmation that they would use it”. Assemble might then manage the site with dedicated staff, in a manner similar to which it runs its workspaces. “If we did that, we’d have quite a lot of control about how it worked,” Wickham says, before adding that there are “pros and cons to that [approach], because there might be a whole load of more appropriate people to run it.” The options remain very much open, a blank pitch. But finding space isn’t simple. Large facilities providers can devote substantial time to scouting, approaching, negotiating and securing spaces for sport. Powerleague, Griffiths’ reports, has about 14 people who do so, for example, and there are also specialist companies who collate and sell data about pitch space availability and new sites. Wickham, meanwhile spends “about half a day a week” on the project, juggling it between other projects and responsibilities. Competition is tough. This unequal competition could be mitigated by the FA, and equivalent national bodies elsewhere, stepping up to the task of creating 3

A meanwhile space is a commercial space let out on a temporary contract to small businesses, community groups or individuals to allow them to use vacant sites until they can be brought back into commercial use. They are let on the understanding that the users will leave within an allowed period of time.

pitch and booking equity. Malji believes that it is essential the FA buys or rents new pitches before the big bookings companies get in there. “They’ve got money,” he says, “why don’t they spend a million quid to book the prime times out, promote the hell out of it, and give women first refusal? If they don’t do that, then as soon as the organisations hear about a new pitch, it’s a battle with them all outbidding each other to get that slot.” But instead, he says, “I have seen nothing” from bodies like the FA and FIFA to support women’s football at the community end of the spectrum. He feels that any interactions he has had with them have amounted to nothing more than “a tick box exercise.” The case for the FA, FIFA and other international bodies paying substantially more for women’s football is highlighted by sports writer Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski in their 2022 re-edition of their book Soccernomics and a summary article published in the Financial Times. They calculate that reparations of billions of pounds are due to women’s football because of the 1921 ban that courts today would consider “an unjustified violation of competition laws, probably on the grounds of limiting markets. After all, some teams (but not others) were excluded from profit-making activities. The bans could also be an abuse of dominance, given that the football federations had market power and could in effect dictate the rules of competition.” While they believe that a retrospective antitrust case would be very difficult to bring to court, “under the EU Damages Directive, time still runs for historic violations with continuing effects until they cease. With interest, damages awards could be even higher than fines.” In summary, Kuper and Szymanski feel that there should be “a large-scale programme of investment in the women’s game, paid from men’s football’s revenues, to start redressing the damage.” It seems appropriate that that they should focus these funds on the mechanism of exclusion that was used in the first place: pitch access. Perhaps these bodies could pay some of their dues by investing in projects such as Pitch for a Pitch. In light of the FA’s lack of support, Malji is pursuing another route towards pitch equity by working with existing sports facilities companies, such as Powerplay and Powerleague, to silo women into their systems. He and Griffiths have collaborated to launch a short-term 7-a-side women’s league in Stratford, which plays at prime time on Tuesday evenings. Malji recounts discussing the idea with Griffiths: “I said, give me a discounted rate, forget about earning money for now, see how it goes over a period of time, build

a relationship and be visible[…] This is your opportunity, as powerhouses, to come into my world, build relationships with my community and understand what they want, what they need.” From its side, Powerplay has demonstrated a desire to help establish the women’s grassroots game further by opening up a popular pitch venue at prime time to a new community of players that will reduce short-term profit margins.

An image from Reframing the Pitch, part of Emily Wickham’s MA graduation project from London’s Royal College of Art (image courtesy of Emily Wickham).

“We are not getting the fulfilment that that we normally would and [at the time of writing] we are making a financial loss every week,” says Griffiths, yet the initiative has been supported by the company because “we can see that the potential and the feedback from the women is great, so it’s worth doing.”

It will be a long game to redistribute in-demand pitch spaces and cultivate communities who feel a sense of shared ownership of those spaces and who will eventually use them at capacity. On top of this, more pitch spaces across the country are needed because the demand is already too high across all grassroots football for existing capacity. Wickham, with an admirable measure of fairness, highlights that the FA, the premier league and the UK government have recently launched a new website for their joint charity, the Football Foundation (FF) which she feels is “really new and really great.” In addition, according to its website (the FF declined an interview for this piece and Wickham is also struggling to reach it), the FF aims to build 1,000 new artificial-turf pitches in the next 10 years, provide financial support for improving existing grass pitches, and in 2020 pledged that any new-build pitch spaces have to include provisions for women and girls. Good news. However, if its website, whose presentation of the women’s game is largely illustrated by photos of elementary school girls with cheesy grins in oversized bibs playing football, is any indication of its plans, the investment seems to be aimed at the very young. While admirable, Wickham feels that it leaves out a huge number of women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and upwards who “missed the opportunity at school to feel like football was something that they could do.” We discuss whether the money spent by the FA to support sub-20s grassroots football might be justified in terms of potential investment for the future. It comes down to motivation, says Wickham. “If your thing is about getting young girls to become professionals,” she reflects, then this approach is fine, but she stresses the equal importance of “making a really lovely space for women to come after work. Women who are never ever going to be professional, but have gained this real sense of community and empowerment that they wouldn’t have had otherwise from discovering football as young adults.” It is this space that we see on the cover of Pitch for a Pitch’s vision document, which features an image of a football changing room, filled with women and non-binary players in various stages of gearing up and winding down from games. Football shirts hang from the ceiling, a large, glossy drinking fountain takes centre stage, colourful posters line the walls. Beyond the foregrounded changing room, we look out onto an expanse of pitches where people are playing, walking, juggling balls and chatting. It is a busy scene brimming with a sense of community and ease. It is also a scene of fantasy that Wickham has created by carefully piecing together

existing images assembled from a number of grassroots women’s football teams. Gathered from many fragments, the scene doesn’t quite exist yet, but it represents something that could. And if it does, then what? The cynic in me cannot help but wondering whether one new pitch, founded on radical ideas, democratic ideals and a not-for-profit model run by people who are passionate about building communities of women and non-binary footballers, would really make a difference? Of course, and very importantly, a small community would benefit. However, if the powerful players in the larger game of football economics and politics simply continue on their merry (cash, cash, cash, men, men, men) way, the culture will never shift. Pitch access is ultimately not a design problem, at least not in the conventional understanding of design being about building objects and spaces thought-up by designers and architects. “It is a societal problem and it is a policy problem,” says Wickham. “It’s a legislation problem.” She feels design, and architecture, are “tools to help consolidate new legislation that could then be put in place,” but that it comes down to ensuring the right policies are introduced and upheld. Cousens advocates a similar policy-first approach after finding the institutions’ responses to her persistent calls for pitch access “patronising at best.” She highlights their outrageous inadequacy through the example of frankly condescending guidelines published in 2016 by Sussex County FA, a not-for-profit governing body of football, which, Cousen writes, “advised pink whistles, lighter balls and giving out pink compact mirrors” as solutions to increasing women’s involvement in the sport. Instead of banging her head against the FA’s walls, Cousens is now focusing her efforts on pressuring local councils to instigate change. Goal Diggers FC are calling for councils to introduce quotas and policies to ensure that women have prioritised access to pitch spaces. She cites three factors that should be taken into consideration to create a policy for allocating pitches. “Firstly, numbers. Currently some 11-a-side pitches are used by roughly 20-30 people booking,” while clubs (like the Goal Diggers FC) could triple this number. “Secondly, gender. It’s a truism in women’s football that you can’t be what you can’t see. Visibility is crucial and this is as true in your local park as it is on TV during the World Cup. If young girls see women play football, they will want to join in. They will realise that football is a sport for them. But at the moment the vast majority of pitches are used by men every night of the week. The effect of this is catastrophic. It means these spaces are seen as masculine and this

simply re-enforces the harmful narrative that football is a man’s game.” And, “Finally, community.” She believes that cost and booking practices means that the current focus leans towards individuals rather than teams or communities, and that this must change. With all this in mind, Pitch for a Pitch could be read as a statement, even in its unrealised form. It is a statement that asks: Why do we have to do this? Whose job should this be? Who bears the responsibility to ensure that grassroots teams have access to pitches? In the long term, when the pitch is built, the space could serve as an example of best practice from which others could learn, a prototype of a dream that could help shift reality into something more inclusive, but it needs to be backed up by those who have the power to make policies around football for all. In writing this piece, I have wondered what I would have done if my entry into football hadn’t been so smooth. If people like my friend Fern and facilitators like Malji hadn’t put in the hours to make it simple for me to join the High Fives and the Super 5 League; if they hadn’t worked so hard to cultivate a sense of enthusiasm; offered free tickets to Women’s Super League4 games; provided half-season payment options; found sponsors to subsidise our kits. If I hadn’t had a pitch where I felt safe, comfortable and welcome to play, would I have ever played at all? The truth is, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It may sound shallow or lazy, but football wasn’t a world that I thought I wanted to be part of or could be part of. And my life would be less rich for it – I wouldn’t have a wonderful new group of friends; I wouldn’t have reconnected with old ones; I’d have far less to talk about with new acquaintances and colleagues and, as a result, likely many more awkward silences in my life; I wouldn’t be gearing up for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and feeling a newfound patriotism for the Matildas and Australian soccer from afar; nor would I have visited Wembley to watch England take on Brazil, winning by the skin of their teeth in a penalty shootout, while I held my breath and cheered with a temporary community of 83,000 other people; I wouldn’t feel a bit healthier and a bit fitter – more able to run for a bus at least. I wouldn’t have a smile of smug satisfaction lingering at the sidelines of my mouth, ready to strike at inopportune moments – something I could maybe live without, but now wouldn’t want to. I feel a deep disappointment for players who have been discouraged by barriers they may have faced getting into football, whose enthusiasm has lost momentum because it was too hard, too expensive or 4

A gendered league title that points to the ongoing disparity in football. The equivalent men’s tournament is simply called The Premier League. As Wickham points out in her MA dissertation on the subject, “the common assumption is that ‘football’ refers to the male sport. The female equivalent must be specified through the use of a gender signifier: ‘women’s football’.”

too intimidating to get onto a pitch. For all the teams never formed, all the goals left un-shot, all the post-match beers never drunk, relegated to dreams rather than realities, I feel incredibly sad. Then I think back to my heartening conversation with Wickham. She says that beyond the challenging practicalities that Assemble faces of first finding, and then constructing, and eventually running a pitch site, she is “most excited to design something that is really beautiful, a really nice space to go and play football, and a really nice space to go and watch football specifically in the grassroots setting.” It will be, she says, a space “where you could sit on a bench and have a barbecue and be next to the people playing football because football is really embedded in what’s there, whether you’re playing or not.” The idea is that it will act as a kind of civic public space. “I think that’d be really nice,” concludes Wickham, a faraway glint in her eye, before adding that “for it to be really proudly catering to women and nonbinary players, I think it would be a really radical project. I think it would be a great success, basically.” The fantasy is palpable – I feel she could do that. I hope that Assemble can and will do that. Emblazoned above the collage on the cover of the vision document, in a large all-caps font, the document reads: PROVIDE THE STAGE AND THE PEOPLE WILL PLAY. The pitch is a stage that is full of contradictions and gender politics, and mess and mud, but it is also a space full of joy and dreaming and empowerment. What is most powerful about this as-yet unfinished project is its belief that, by imagining and then doing, we can make football – and perhaps society more broadly – more equal one pitch at a time, or more importantly one pitch policy at a time. Architects and designers can keep passing the ball and momentum of women’s football forward, setting examples and applying pressure where it is needed so that, hopefully, one day, projects like this won’t need to exist at all because pitch access has become equal for everyone at all the levels of the beautiful game. That would be the ultimate goal. The crowd goes wild... Lara Chapman is the creative assistant at Disegno and Design Reviewed.

BUILDING INSTRUCTIONS Words India Block

Image courtesy of Takt.

INTERFACE

Takt

This may be one of the more controversial opinions I have committed to print, but I love furniture that comes with instructions.1 I am the person friends call when they have a pile of bits and pieces that needs to be assembled by following a baroque series of pictograms. I will actually read the booklet and spend many happy hours manoeuvring it all into position. Scoring second-hand bargain Ikea furniture on Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace, then carting its component parts home to reconstitute on my living room floor is my idea of a fun afternoon. There is a heart-deep satisfaction in making something out of, if not nothing, then nothing that resembles anything useful at the start. If you’ve built something with your own two hands (and the odd allen key) you can’t but love it. The high-brow interpretation of this fetish for self-assembly furniture is that I am channelling the impulse, if not the letter, of Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, the 1974 manual for building basic furniture from wooden boards and nails. Mari believed that only by making an item of furniture yourself could you genuinely relate to it. I realise that if Mari could read this, he would probably yell at me, then revoke my communist card for buying readymade flat-pack furniture instead of building it all myself from pre-cut timber. And anyway, if I’m honest, my impulse to build-along with the instructions is actually rooted deep in my childish id. I am a child of the 90s, and the 90s were halcyon days for toys that came with an instruction manual; if you wanted to play, first you had to build. My Barbie Travellin’ House Trunk (1995) and Barbie Feeding Fun Stable (1995) required 1 2

Unlike my esteemed colleague, yes I actually read the fucking things (see ‘User Manual’, p.3). My father is an ex-military engineer, which probably explains a lot about why both of us are the way we are. I got worried he missed building our toys on Christmas last year, so splashed out on the Lego Technic Land Rover Defender set for him. It came with an instruction manual split into four volumes – delightful.

assembly, plus the judicious application of stickers to the correct location. I have vivid memories of my dad spending an entire Christmas morning delightedly2 putting together my brother’s Playmobil 3781 Hook and Ladder Fire Engine Truck (discontinued in 1996, according to Klickpedia: the definitive Playmobil-pedia), while my prized Playmobil Camper Van (1997) also required a fair bit of meticulous snapping together. Lego, of course, is the ur-building toy, with its colourful step-by-step manuals that become more like books when you get into the really large, serious sets. We were a big Lego household. So, with these happy memories of childhood so close to the surface, I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to try my hand, literally, at putting together a piece from Takt. This Danish furniture brand launched in Copenhagen in 2019 with three core chairs: the Soft Chair by Thomas Bentzen, Tool Chair by Rasmus Palmgren, and the Cross Chair by Pearson Lloyd. They’ve since branched out with more chairs, tables, a coat rack and, next up, a sofa. (Remember Chekov’s sofa, we’ll be coming back to that.) Takt wants to make designer furniture that is as sustainable as possible, and the flat-pack model is baked into that. Not only is shipping a piece in the smallest box possible the most energy-saving way to distribute furniture, but learning how to interface with your chair by putting it together yourself is key to Takt’s Perpetual Sustainable Design (PSD) system, which aims to keep the furniture in circulation for as long as possible. As Takt founder and CEO Henrik Taudorf Lorensen says: “If you put it together yourself, then it’s also quite easy to fix it yourself.” This perpetual-ness is the key to PSD for Lorensen, who founded Takt out of a sense of injustice at how the furniture industry had been responding to the climate emergency in the mid to late 2010s. “I felt it was not being taken very seriously,” Lorensen tells me over Zoom from Copenhagen, where he is sat in front of three large framed portraits of Takt chairs. “I was personally a bit upset at the sustainability collections that were being launched back then, which were really just

the same pieces but with a fabric [made of] 10 per cent recycled something.” Rather than trying to score points for repurposing waste from other industries, he believes that furniture needs to get its own house in order first: “The amount of furniture being thrown out is just staggering.” A 2017 report from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) estimates that over 10m tonnes of furniture is thrown away annually in EU member countries, ending up in either landfill or incinerators. The EEB identified lower quality materials, poor design, and high costs of repair and refurbishment as some of the main barriers to creating a circular economy of furniture. “The challenges for furniture are not so much about how can we help other industries get rid of their waste, but how do we make sure we don’t generate waste,” says Lorensen. “That needs to be the starting point.” In order to design furniture that people want to keep, Takt had to be the opposite of the 10m tonnes of furniture that is decidedly not kept each year. “What are the reasons why people throw stuff out? Something breaks, you can’t afford to fix it. So you just throw it all away,” says Lorensen. “How can we create furniture that doesn’t end up in landfill?” The ready-to-assemble furniture movement, born out of convenience and cost-effectiveness, has directly fuelled our addiction to fast furniture. There were several predecessors, but it was, of course, Ikea that brought it into the mainstream when it began selling flat-pack furniture in 1956. Like the other FFs – fast food, fast fashion – flatpack furniture’s compartmentalised production and cheap ingredients make it convenient but disposable. Flat-pack fast furniture’s lifespan is limited by the low quality of its composite materials that means it breaks faster, while simultaneously making it harder to repair. Takt wants to design flat-pack furniture that can offer a direct counterpoint to the destructive tendencies the typology spawned. Despite the fancy name, Takt’s PSD is a fairly simple concept. You order, receive and assemble your Takt furniture, then go about your life using it. If it gets a little dinged up, you can order a Care Kit to re-oil the wood (which

has been sourced from FSC-certified forests, natch). For bigger issues, you can order a replacement part – say, a new seat or backrest. Takt encourages you to keep your piece in the family for generations, or, if it no longer fits with your lifestyle, give it away to friends and family. If you struggle to dispose of it, they’ll take it back off your hands, fix it up and give it a new lease of life. Pieces are deliberately made of mostly mono-materials such as wood and steel, so that if it’s truly beyond salvaging,3 then each component part can be easily recycled at a municipal level. Takt also has a dedicated product support hub (taktcph.com/productsupport/) where you can find resources for care and recycling options, as well as get access to all its Building Instructions, the title Takt gives its instruction manuals. If you are as much of an instructions nerd as I am, then it’s a delightful piece of internet to click around. Encouraging your customer to keep and repair your product completely upends the dominant business model of contemporary design. Usually, the brand commissions a designer to create something beautiful and useful, markets it to the consumer, and then the relationship is over. Profit is made, on to the next product. What subsequently happens to that design is entirely in the consumer’s hands, whether they cherish the piece for a lifetime or leave it out on the curb in the rain. What Takt aims to offer with PSD is an interface – two separate entities, consumer and brand, invisibly connected by a piece of furniture. If I drew you an instruction booklet diagram for PSD, there would be a line drawing of very tasteful chair with a figure representing its owner on one side, and Takt’s logo on the other, connected by a big circle. When the chair arrives at the Design Reviewed offices, I’m shocked at how compact the box is. Takt has sent me the Cross Chair designed by Pearson Lloyd, a design studio that’s based right around the corner from 3

Goodness knows what kind of abuse you’d have to put it through to reach that stage. Let’s assume an enraged woodcutter came at it with an axe, or a large bear broke into your house and sat on it, reducing it to matchsticks.

where I live. This chair has had a much longer journey, though, from Takt’s factory in Latvia via their office in Copenhagen and finally back to east London, where its form was first sketched. A plastic flex handle turns the brown cardboard outer layer into a carry case; you could easily take it home on the bus, if you haven’t skipped arm day as often as I have.4 Inside, the four pieces that will form the chair are nestled in practical cardboard and that grey foam pipe packaging that resembles depressed pool noodles. Resting on top is a handwritten note from the Takt team. “This Cross Chair has been assembled and disassembled (and used) quite a few times,” it reads. “Hope you relish the assembly process and find it enjoyable.” I have clearly found my people, because I am indeed relishing this prospect of assembly. I set a timer, and dive in. Of course, I check the instruction manual first. It’s minimalist, with line drawings of the individual pieces on one spread followed by pages of step-by-step instructions. Under the heading ‘Important Notice’, which of course I read first, because I am afraid of breaking the rules and need an unblemished record of gold stars, it tells me: “Only use the listed tools. Do not use power tools. Tighten in accordance with the building instructions. Avoid over-tightening. There is no need for strong force.” I do actually have a power tool that accepts Allen keys, because that is how into furniture assembly I am, but I didn’t bring it in to my workplace, where there is an ongoing cold war over noisy power tools during business hours.5 Anyway, I shall follow instructions and use only gentle force. I am almost disappointed by how little there is to assemble. Just six steel screws, four washers and four metal collars. The cross of the base slots together easily, although I am briefly bamboozled by which way round to turn the seat, not twigging from the isometric drawing that the narrow end points towards the back. To screw this on, the instructions visually illustrate I must flip it over onto a table to screw in the screws, before righting it to 4 5

Just kidding, I don’t have an arm day to skip. Building furniture is the only workout I require. Don’t ask.

pop in the back. It clicks into position with a satisfying sound. Lorensen has thought a lot about that click. “When you click in the backrest, it’s got to feel like ‘Ah, that was well thought through,’” he says. “You want to create a nicely designed experience.” The final page of the Building Instructions instructs me to “enjoy your new chair,” and I do. For those keeping score, it took me all of 12 minutes to build. I was getting heavy Lego vibes from the Building Instructions, and that’s not just me projecting. When I tell Lorensen that they reminded me of my childhood toys, he informs me cheerfully that he actually used to work at Lego prior to setting up Takt. He seems to have brought that spirit of self-made play with him. “When you open the box, and there’s the little booklet, that’s our nod to Lego,” he says. “If we can aspire to have that kind of fun with our furniture, I think that’s the right thing to go for.” In flat-pack terms, chairs and tables are easy mode. A proper sofa that can be assembled at home and easily repaired or reupholstered throughout its lifetime is a much harder ask for designers, manufacturers and consumers. Sofas are high-traffic furniture that need to be comfy to park oneself on, and contemporary lounge chairs usually achieve that via large quantities of polyurethane (PU) foam padding.6 While this foam is flexible and squishy, it tends to make sofas a nightmare to integrate into any kind of circular economy system. “They’re a large combination of many, many types of materials that are glued and stamped and soldered together, and for that reason, they’re completely impossible to recycle,” sighs Lorensen. Contemporary sofa construction also makes it difficult to pass these pieces along to someone else without an expensive or potentially impossible reupholstering, or at least a deep clean. Culturally, we’re pretty squeamish about second-hand soft furnishings. If they’re hard to disassemble, they’re hard to 6

See ‘What Lies Beneath’ in Disegno #29.

clean, and their upholstery provides the perfect warm and dark place for all manner of mites and bugs to hide. I am a big proponent of adopting street furniture, and have carted home many a bookshelf, chair and, on one memorable occasion, a basically new clothes rail I found next to the bins. But I would never take a street sofa in, for fear of creatures. Loath as I am to admit that I used to watch The Big Bang Theory, The Chair of Death from ‘The Infestation Hypothesis’ (which first aired in September 2011 as episode two of the fifth season) has always stuck with me. Penny retrieves a comfy armchair in red velvet from the street, prompting Sheldon to become increasingly paranoid about it bringing bugs into the apartment block. This is played for laughs, until at the final moment when Amy is bitten by what’s implied to be a rat nesting in the upholstery. Shudder. Over a decade later, street sofas are still controversial. In May 2023, when TikTok user Amanda, who goes by @yafavv.mandaa, found what she believed to be a genuine Bubble sofa by Sacha Lakic for Roche Bobois, which retails for over $8,000, abandoned in the rain in New York, she grabbed it and took it for herself. Viewers were horrified, a minority of them furniture fans insisting it was actually a fake Bubble as closeups of the fabric didn’t appear to match the honeycomb-esque Techno 3D jersey and wool fabric developed for the original,7 but the majority of them because, well, ew. You literally don’t know where it’s been and what could be hitching a ride into your home. As one commenter succinctly put it: “bed…bugs…” But Spoke, the new sofa designed by Anderssen & Voll for Takt, is designed to be recovered and even reupholstered with ease. Lorensen set Torbjørn Anderssen and Espen 7

Sensing a viral marketing opportunity no doubt, Roche Bobois’s marketing team reached out to Amanda and confirmed her street Bubble is the genuine article, just an early edition made with a different fabric. They also sent her some cushions and a matching pouf as a gift so she could film an unboxing video in front of the now internetfamous blue couch.

Voll what he describes as an extensive set of “boundary conditions”. Not only did the sofa have to flat-pack, it needed to be as comfortable as a standard designer sofa. The covers needed to be easily removable so they could be put in a domestic washing machine, cleaned and put back on, and the upholstery foam panels had to be monomaterial and easy to replace once they eventually wear out. Lorensen approached the Norwegian design duo because, he says, they’re “arguably the most accomplished Nordic designers around” and he knew he was making a tough ask. Plus, flat-pack furniture adds an element of unpredictability, given that the piece doesn’t leave the factory in its finished form. “It’s a new way of making furniture. You don’t have the final piece that the manufacturing plant can look at and say, ‘Is it stable?’ Suddenly, you’ve got to make sure that all the different elements keep to the tolerances, because you can’t glue it all together at the end.” The result is a minimalist sofa that has clear nods to mid-century Scandinavian design – without looking too retro. The spokes that give Spoke its name are slim bars slanted at a roughly 45° angle, supported by a frame that cradles the cushions. Looking at it, you wonder why so many sofas need to go about the rigamarole of bolting PU foam to the frame in the first place. But behind the pleasing simplicity of Spoke, Takt found the devil was indeed lurking in the details. “You learn something when you get involved in a new category,” says Lorensen. “Spoke has taken longer than any of our other pieces.” Finding the right material for the washable cushion covers was a particular challenge. Wool would have been nice as it’s biodegradable, but it’s carbon intensive to farm and a pain to wash and dry quickly. But Lorensen was wary of a polyester mix with “a plasticky feel to it”. In the end they opted to use the Cura and Cyber fabrics from Gabriel, a Danish textile brand, which feel like wool but are made from recycled plastic bottles. Importantly, they can be put through a washing machine at 40°C. Enthused, I tell Lorensen that Spoke is perfectly designed for the street furniture economy – you can leave it out and someone 53

can take it, order new foam, and bung the covers in the wash! Wearing a politely pained expression, he informs me that you’re “actually not allowed to do that in Denmark.” OK, so no furniture left out on the street in the land of hygge and work/life balance. But Takt also offers a product that won’t just look nice then quickly fall to pieces – something that has become increasingly hard to find in a globalised market full of any product you can dare dream of, but where quality of materials and designs are set on a race to the bottom. In a piece for Vox published earlier this year, Izzie Ramirez lays out that yes, ‘Your stuff is actually worse now’ thanks to consumer norms that have been shunted sideways by corporations. “We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked – for far longer than the last decade – into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way,” Ramirez writes. “By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have.” To whit, that doyenne of flat-pack furniture Ikea has begun to cut serious quality corners. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Trefor Moss went behind the scenes at the Swedish furniture retailer to discover how they’re redesigning their mainstay pieces to keep costs low in the face of inflation, supply chain disruption, and rising material costs. Today, instead of wood veneer a Billy Bookcase is covered with paper foil, while a Rönninge dining table now has hollow veneer legs instead of solid wood. Takt, on the other hand, has to promise quality, because its products remain as a portal between brand and consumer that can be activated whenever they need to refresh a cushion colourway, or replace a worn-out part. The point of sale is the beginning of a relationship, rather than a single transaction.

To this end, great attention has been paid to the user experience for the ‘Spare parts’ section of its website. Individual parts are denoted by technical drawings of each element and laid out on the shopping page with the clean simplicity of the Building Instructions. “When we look 20 years ahead, a substantial part of our business will actually just be about maintaining the furniture we already put out there in the world, selling these replacement parts and upgrading people’s furniture,” he tells me. This process is already in motion when it comes to the upholstery padding Takt offers for its dining chairs. “We are actually already seeing our first customers coming back, typically families,” he says. “When they first buy it, they’re worried about the kids with their spaghetti and tomato sauce and what have you, and now they’re coming back and buying replacement upholstery.” There’s still risk and uncertainty involved, as there are when any two disparate entities interact. Customers have to trust that Takt will keep operating, that there will always be a system of repairs and replacements to plug into when the time comes. And Takt has to trust that people will keep and care for the pieces rather than discard them. For the circle to remain unbroken, people need to feel an emotional attachment to their objects. For Lorensen, the key lies in the flat-pack. “How do you fall in love with the piece you have at home?” he asks. “I think one of the elements is that if you actually hold the pieces and you value the materials and the craftsmanship, when you put it together, you’re a step ahead in terms of that connection.” When it comes to falling for furniture, perhaps it’s as simple as following instructions. India Block is the deputy editor of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

BEYOND THE PURSUIT OF EL DORADO Words Simón Ballen Botero

Image courtesy of Juan Silva and Fango.

ECOLOGY

Ibuju

I have never set foot in the Amazon rainforest. Nevertheless, the mythical image of this region captures the wildest corners of my imagination. I can only picture its vastness and wonders through the stories that are told about this place. Often described as a land of mythical creatures and natural mysteries, the Amazon rainforest takes its name from the legendary female warriors of Greek mythology, the Amazons, who were said to have cut off one breast to master archery. When the Spanish colonisers first explored the lengths of the Amazon River in search of El Dorado, a rumoured golden city, they witnessed fierce battles between indigenous tribes and faced hostile encounters with bows and arrows. They drew a parallel between these warriors and the mythical Amazons and, consequently, the area came to be referred to as the “Amazon”. These tales of epic encounters served as propaganda to finance the colonial agenda and exploit the lands in the quest for the legendary city of gold. Yet the Amazon is only one part of Colombia, the country of my birth. From the majestic peaks of the Andes Mountains to the breathtaking Caribbean coastline, Colombia boasts a whole tapestry of sceneries that captivate the senses. And as I delve deeper into the history of Colombia and its ecosystems, I have stumbled upon the stories of two influential figures in the field of botany: José Celestino Mutis and Alexander von Humboldt. Mutis was a visionary 18th-century botanist, who promoted the ideas of independence and the rediscovery of Colombia through an understanding and documentation of the country’s abundant resources and biodiversity. Similarly, Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer, embarked on an extraordinary expedition to South America in the early 19th century. Humboldt’s firsthand experiences in Colombia allowed him to witness the unparalleled richness of the country’s natural environment, which greatly influenced his theories on ecology that revolved around the interconnectedness of nature and the importance of studying ecosystems as a whole. The ideas of independence and the intrinsic value of nature championed by figures like Mutis and Humboldt have left a lasting impact on Colombian culture. These radical thinkers recognised the importance of scientific knowledge and emphasised the significance of the natural world that later supported the ideas of self-governance and emancipation from colonial ties. Their ideas and discoveries sparked a sense of appreciation for the natural biodiversity of Colombia, shaping the country’s cultural

identity and artistic expression. In Colombian design, this influence is often discussed in relation to the connection between materials and the local environment, the incorporation of nature-inspired motifs, and an interest in sustainable practices and indigenous making techniques. This, however, has not always been the case. The history of Colombian design is characterised by a clash between traditional craftsmanship and industrial development. In the 1950s, the country experienced a wave of modernisation and mass production that promised a future that never fully materialised. The emphasis on rapid industrial growth shifted the focus from rural to urban areas, from tradition to the false promises of modernity. This, combined with an inferiority complex influenced by its colonial past, made the country overlook its own heritage and traditions in pursuit of an external identity it did not possess. Local design companies such as Manufacturas Muñoz and Scanform brought Italian-influenced furniture and Scandinavian-style woodwork to Colombia, compounding a strong feeling that validation and inspiration were to be sought from abroad, rather than from ourselves. For many years, Colombian design, design education and even manufacturing were heavily influenced by international codes and models. I distinctly recall a teacher during my university years in Medellín saying, “Quítenme estas montañas que no me dejan ver” (Take away these mountains that obstruct my view), implying the need to look beyond the valley and seek inspiration abroad. This tendency may be fed by the fact that the city of Medellín is literally nestled between mountains and, due to both its geographical location and the impact of the drug war in the 1980s and 1990s, has remained isolated from the world. This isolation resulted in a culture that turned inward, relying on itself for everything except, perhaps, sources of inspiration. In the absence of external imports, the country instead started to copy international styles and trends with local techniques and materials. In recent years, however, Colombian designers have been stepping out of the valleys to get inspiration, not from abroad, but from the rainforest. They are climbing mountains, exploring mines, harvesting materials, and working in the field to learn from indigenous knowledge that has been restricted to remote corners of the country. The indirect influence of figures such as Mutis and Humboldt is visible within the work of a new generation of Colombian designers who now find themselves on a similar path,

seeking inspiration in nature and embracing the authenticity of traditional craftsmanship, while redefining Colombia’s identity. Creatives are shifting their focus inward, recognising the potential of the country’s own wealth of natural resources and knowledge, giving rise to a unique aesthetic rooted in Colombia’s diversity of landscapes, crafts, materials and techniques. One designer who embodies this spirit of rediscovery is Francisco Jaramillo, the founder of design studio Fango. Born and raised in Medellín, Jaramillo started studying product design engineering in Colombia and later moved to study furniture design at Elisava in Spain. After gaining experience working for studios abroad, he recognised the untapped potential of the Colombian design scene and decided to return to his homeland to establish his own studio in 2017. Since then, Jaramillo’s work has moved around the exploration of materials and cultural narratives. Jaramillo’s growing international recognition is closely tied to his exploration of Colombian culture. In parallel, the international design scene is shifting its attention away from a Eurocentric perspective and embracing a broader understanding of design that recognises diverse voices and regions in the world. This shift has opened up opportunities for Jaramillo (and other designers) to showcase the unique aspects of Colombian design and contribute to the global dialogue. There has been a paradigm shift in which Colombian designers no longer seek to mirror the coloniser or follow trends from abroad, but strive to focus on the possibilities of our own local resources and tell our own stories. One example of this is Jaramillo’s new Ibuju project, which delves deep into the intricacies of the yaré vine and its relationship with the Amazon rainforest. In the indigenous language of the Joti, “Ibuju” signifies vine or liana – an ethnobotanical category exclusively used for plants that require external support to sustain themselves. Scientifically known as Heteropsis Flexuosa, the yaré is a hemiepiphytic plant that germinates in trees before sending roots down to the ground, and is a species that thrives in the tropical zones of the Amazon rainforest. Indigenous communities in the Amazon regions of Colombia, such as the Murui, Coreguaje, Muinane, Bora, and other settlers, have long utilised native vines for crafting purposes, including the creation of hats, brooms, baskets, and other carrying items. Outside of the Amazon region, yaré has also been employed for many years in various craft techniques such as wickerwork and woven furniture. Yaré species have a consistently good

yield of raw material throughout the year, offering a domestic alternative to similar vines such as rattan or mimbre. Jaramillo’s introduction to the yaré fibre occurred while visiting a family of weavers near Medellín. Initially intending to develop a project using rattan, he realised the potential of the yaré vine and its versatile

Production of Francisco Jaramillo’s Ibuju furniture (image courtesy of Yohan López and Fango).

applications, which he felt “could reduce the need for importing other fibres and subsequently lower the carbon footprint associated with transportation”. Conversations with the craftsmen revealed that local artisans had been using yaré for over 20 years, and that there has been a shift by domestic customers to prefer more locally sourced materials. Rattan, a plant fibre

widely used in furniture production, comes from a group of climbing palm species found predominantly in Southeast Asia and also imported from that region. However, despite the previous popularity of imported rattan, the artisans say that domestic yaré is now in high demand. Motivated by these findings, Jaramillo embarked on researching this Amazonian fibre. His Ibuju furniture collection embodies this exploration, featuring a series of volumes inspired by log furniture that draw a direct association between the vines and the trees that support them. Rather than focusing solely on form, Jaramillo prioritises the material. The resulting tables, benches, and chairs utilise cylindrical structures woven in yaré fibres as a “symbolic replacement of solid blocks of wood”, establishing a connection between wickerwork and ancient forms of wooden furniture. Through his work, Jaramillo not only offers a new platform for yaré, but also fosters an appreciation for the cultural and ecological significance of this traditional resource. Jaramillo aims “to draw attention to the balance between utilising natural resources and preserving the world’s ecosystems.” While the yaré vine offers a sustainable alternative to materials linked to deforestation, its potential for exploitation raises questions about the fragile equilibrium between alternative production methods, material availability and our responsibility to protect the environment. The fragmentation of natural forests, for example, mainly caused by extensive cattle raising and deforestation, reduces the habitat of the yaré. Additionally, the supply areas for this raw material are growing more distant from urban centres where the country’s artisan workshops and commercial activities are located. As a result, artisans often rely on indigenous people and farmers in the outskirts and marginal areas of the jungle to acquire the vines, making it increasingly challenging to source reliably and sustainably. Jaramillo emphasises that the disappearance of an ecosystem leads to the loss of numerous species, including traditionally used lianas. “Preserving the Amazon is not only about protecting the environment,” he says, “but also safeguarding the species and crafts that have existed for generations.” The Amazon has often been reduced to a mythical land, which is why it is important to move beyond the romanticised notions that have grown up around it in order to critically examine the relationship between design, exploitation, and ecosystem. The exploration of non-wood forest products and diversification of materials in local production systems takes centre stage in Jaramillo’s

work, and his shift towards rediscovering and embracing the country’s cultural identity and local resources, and exploration of the yaré vine responds to a growing awareness of the environmental impact of materials. The Ibuju project can be seen as establishing new narratives that promote the value of traditional craftsmanship and local materials in a country where mass-produced goods and foreign international styles have often overshadowed authentic cultural and craft expressions – by harnessing the potential of these materials and promoting local production systems, Jaramillo has shown that designers can create exquisite pieces that work to celebrate Colombia’s natural heritage. Nevertheless, as a designer, I believe that mere representation is not sufficient: designers must actively engage in transformative practices. While narratives play a role in shaping perceptions, stories alone yield little impact. Designers must transcend surface-level aesthetics and delve into the complexities of cultural, social, and environmental contexts. Genuine collaboration and a commitment to shared decision-making with local communities are essential to foster meaningful change. Work of this kind has become common the world over, with designers increasingly interested in creating objects in partnership with local communities that make use of indigenous materials and traditional craft techniques. It is a mode of working that can provide a counterpoint to more familiar methods of industrial design production, but one that can nevertheless replicate equally familiar power structures if the designer is not alert to this danger. Frequently, for example, the designer’s name will be pushed to the forefront of the project, while the artisans who actually produce the work recede into the background. This is a common dynamic within industrial design – manufacturers, for example, rarely disclose their suppliers – but for projects that have more explicitly social ambitions, it quickly amounts to a lack of meaningful representation of the artisans: rather than collaborators, they become producers. Objects can tell powerful stories, but more powerful still are the ecosystems of production and communication that surround them. This is the challenge facing this kind of design practice, wherever it operates. Design should neither exploit nor overshadow craftspeople, but rather amplify their voices and recognise their agency – something that is particularly important given that the work of indigenous people and artisans has often been utilised in design – whether consciously or unconsciously – as

a form of exoticism. In addition to being nameless, makers have often been pushed into the position of representing ambiguous notions of indigenous communities that may be every bit as mythical as perceptions of the Amazon

Unravelling the Coffee Bag by Rosana Escobar (image courtesy of Rosana Escobar).

itself. This, in turn, perpetuates a narrative of these communities’ supposed sustainability and harmonious coexistence with nature – a narrative that raises the commercial value of the resultant design, but which the makers themselves are not necessarily the beneficiaries of. While some indigenous communities may embody these values, it is essential to recognise that

such generalisations oversimplify the complex realities they face, and we should also question as to whose advantage these narratives are being employed. This form of design has the potential to bring astonishing craft capabilities and material innovation to broad publics, but in doing so it must walk a tightrope of ensuring that it does not inadvertently romanticise the craftsmanship or indigenous sourcing that it sets out to promote and platform. If this balance is unsuccessful, design can ultimately devalue these communities’ cultural contributions and overlook the challenges that they continue to confront in the face of environmental degradation and ongoing marginalisation. Fortunately, a growing community of Colombian designers have taken up this challenge, actively exploring local materials and traditions. Susana Mejía, for example, is a Colombian artist who has worked with plants and materials from the Amazon over the course of more than two decades. Susana’s project Color Amazonia offers profound research into the untapped potential of native plants used to produce dyes. Mejía has documented, preserved and innovated with natural dyes while developing an extensive library of colours using traditional indigenous methods. Mejía highlights the collaborative nature of her work and pays tribute to the Huitoto indigenous community whom she has worked with from the beginning of the project. While talking with her, she listed the names of some of the Huitoto people with whom she has worked – Kasia, Tomasa and Kathy – and adds that she has collaborated with ethnographers, anthropologists, and chemists to create a colour palette solely based on plants from the Amazon. Mejía’s decision to name all of her collaborators demonstrates that the work is not solely the result of an individual effort, but rather a collective endeavour involving multiple perspectives, skills, and talents. The unsustainable extraction of resources, the introduction of monoculture agriculture, and the intrusion upon indigenous lands have all contributed to the degradation and loss of the Amazon’s biodiversity. To ensure the long-term continuation of her project, Mejía has established a delimited land area and dedicated farm plots for the cultivation and preservation of native species, from which she can obtain colour pigments for herself and the communities involved. Her work is an ethnobotanical exploration of the Amazon through colour, with an emphasis on process and experimentation, rather than a focus on designing final outcomes.

Another Colombian designer who closely intertwines materials, landscapes and community is Rosana Escobar. Based in Berlin, Escobar creates work that focuses on investigating natural materials and fibres in relation to their ecosystems. Initially trained as a biologist, Escobar later graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven and her work demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the relationship between materials and the natural world. In one of her projects, Unravelling the Coffee Bag, she delves into the materiality of coffee bags, both figuratively and literally, by exploring the origins of the fique plant. This endemic succulent plant has been used by indigenous peoples for centuries, long before the arrival of the Spanish, to make garments, ropes and hammocks. Now this plant has been relegated to the far ends of the global production chain of coffee bags, entirely losing its value as a raw fibre. In response, Escobar has established connections and built networks with local stakeholders and various individuals engaged in the production process, ranging from sourcing to large-scale industrial production and disposal. Additionally, she has set up working groups with artisans and Albeiro Camargo, her main collaborator, to explore the potential of design as a tool to give value to the raw materials. In her own words, she seeks to understand everything as part of a living tissue – a human tissue, a material tissue. These perceptive individuals, among many others,1 can be seen as trailblazers in the exploration of local materials and the revitalisation of traditional practices with a contemporary twist, resulting in designs that resonate on a global scale. They possess qualities akin to anthropologists, botanists, silversmiths and scientists; my peers and colleagues are reshaping the perception of Colombian design and underscoring the immeasurable value embedded within our materials and traditions. Their designs transcend mere aesthetics, imparting narratives and moving beyond the limitations of local production, all while remaining deeply rooted in our connection to nature and ecosystems. In light of these works, this article serves as a personal attempt to explore the complexity of what Colombian design may mean today by examining the perspectives and works of my fellow designers, rather than providing a definitive definition. To speak of Colombian design should extend beyond a mere superficial appreciation for nature. It requires an understanding of the local limitations and a comprehensive grasp of the country’s complex history. Colombian design should reflect a nuanced 1

For those who wish to dive deeper, the work of Camila Pardo, Daniel Ramos Obregón, Natalia Criado and María Cano also deserves recognition.

response to social, environmental, and economic challenges, acknowledging the struggles and aspirations of the diverse communities that shape its identity. We have moved beyond the hopeless pursuit of El Dorado, and now draw inspiration from the depths of our forests and the landscapes around us. Driven by the allure of wealth and riches, our obsession with finding this mythical place blinded us to the true wonders and diversity of the lands that surround us. In an era of globalisation, where cultural boundaries are increasingly blurred, recognising the worth of our own materials and establishing a distinctive design identity becomes an act of defiance against homogeneity. It is a process that is almost the same as the manner in which Colombia achieved its independence: instead of aspiring to be something else, we are discovering and embracing our true nature. Simón Ballen Botero is a Colombian designer and researcher whose work focuses on materials.

NO FIDGET SPINNERS Words Adrienne Brown

Image courtesy of Mobile Makers.

SPACE

Mobile Makers

Attending the Virgil Abloh exhibition Figures of Speech at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019, I was not very moved by the work. While I could catch the genius of his approach in glimpses – most powerfully in his early work, in which he wielded his hunger, youth, and Blackness like a knife – the later pieces felt too shaped by a palpable desire for monumentality. But as fashion critic Rikki Byrd pointed out to me, what distinguished the exhibition was who it brought into the museum: huge numbers of young people – particularly young men – came to the show in droves to pay homage to work that moved them. Recalling the streetwear-clad teens and twenty-somethings intently studying Abloh’s creations, I can think of no recent visual artist who touched so many under the age of 25. Maya Bird-Murphy, too, knows something about how a passion for design can light up a certain kind of kid moved by the look of things, be it a sneaker or a planter, a skyscraper or a public park – even if they might never use the word “design” to describe this passion. Mobile Makers, the organisation she founded in 2017, runs design-focused workshops in Chicago and Boston where students from diverse social, economic, gender, and racial backgrounds learn not just what design is, but what it can do and how to start doing it themselves. When I visited a Mobile Makers workshop at the iconic Wrigley Building in the Chicago offices of architecture practice Perkins & Will, what most lit Bird-Murphy up that day (and, soon enough, me as well) was the prospect of sneaker designer Chelsea B attending a design summit that Mobile Makers is hosting in the fall. Below us lay the Magnificent Mile, Chicago’s downtown crown jewel and the recent subject of much panicked theorising about the crisis of American downtowns at large, given the number of retail vacancies and uptick in crime. But Bird-Murphy’s vision aimed elsewhere, as she imagined how to bring the city to Mobile Makers’ West Side headquarters in Humboldt Park to rethink design and architecture. Not for the last time in my stint with them, I sensed that the future of cities – and who designs them – was being

radically remade by Mobile Makers, one workshop at a time. While Mobile Makers has received much coverage through the architectural press, it’s important that architecture is not in the organisation’s name, nor its named priorities. Despite her personal love for architecture, Bird-Murphy “can see it for what it is”– a profession that is often ego-filled, competitive, performative, and doing little to solve the world’s most pressing problems. And yet her frustrations with architecture come from her deep awe for what it can do. “Architecture is life and death,” as she says. “People are dying and architects have every skill needed to do something about that.” She particularly hates it when architects claim to be powerless, fashioning themselves as mere cogs in the machine run by clients and capital. Mobile Makers instead approaches architecture as a set of superpowers that can help solve just about every problem imaginable. Part of their mission is to arm a new generation of residents and makers with the awareness of this power to better harness it for themselves and their communities. But while Bird-Murphy cares deeply for architecture, she is careful to disaggregate her personal penchant for it from Mobile Makers’ commitment to many forms of design. The “mobile” in Mobile Makers marks the range of design practices their workshops teach, but also their multi-site strategy. Bird-Murphy began the organisation out of a delivery van she converted into a classroom, enabling her to hold workshops anywhere in the city. And even with their recent move into a new permanent location, Mobile Makers remains committed to running workshops in multiple places. When working in schools, for instance, Mobile Makers can reach kids who might never think to sign up for a design class, while at Perkins & Will, teens from across the city get a taste of what it’s like to work in a global firm. Bird-Murphy eventually imagines Mobile Makers expanding to support multiple tracks of design interest, from introducing kids to the concept, to helping students assemble portfolios and research design schools. 67

At Perkins & Will, the Form Work workshop that Mobile Makers ran takes place adjacent to what I can only describe as a shrine to diversity, kitted out in masquerade masks and Chinese calligraphy. Photographs of staff celebrating Diwali sit on shelves next to framed printouts of the company’s “JEDI strategies”, which stands for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. A nearby placard touts the firm’s fellowship opportunities for underrepresented students, while another proclaims, “We believe diversity drives innovation and inclusion sparks creativity.” Holding the workshop in the shadow of these declarations feels a little on the nose, but the kids pay it no mind as they work intently on their own plans to reimagine nearby DuSable Park. One student, for example, works on a model for a new Native American museum incorporating elements of indigenous design; another envisions a public space that could serve those in search of music and quiet simultaneously (she was particularly keen to stack different shades of plastic in her model to conjure a rippling pond). This diverse array of students have travelled from across Chicago and its suburbs for these sessions. To enter this architectural mecca, a guard in the lobby checks their IDs and their names off a list. The tension between this inaccessible space proclaiming its accessibility seems to be part of the lesson; this is one route that design can take amongst many others. As the kids worked on their models, Bird-Murphy and I chat about the uptick in interest that Mobile Makers received from architectural firms after the murder of George Floyd. She describes being flooded by requests from firms to speak, hold workshops, and generally buttress their various JEDI, DEI and D&I commitments. But this surge has since turned to a trickle, Bird-Murphy notes, a fact that is unsurprising if no less disheartening; I experienced a similar surge and decline of interest in engaged work by firms and schools in my roles as both a scholar of race and architecture, and faculty director at Arts & Public Life, an initiative that is similarly committed to introducing youth in Chicago to civically-minded design and arts practices. 68

Such predictable patterns only reinforce that “changing things from the inside doesn’t work,” Bird-Murphy insists. Hiring a few Black or Brown designers at majority white firms will do little to transform the demography of architecture, never mind its mission and approach. Mobile Makers is, instead, an effort to change things from multiple outsides – outside of firms, outside of architecture alone, from the literal outside through workshops hosted in parks and parking lots, and outside and beyond the racial homogeneity dominating most architectural spaces. Despite the downtick in interest from firms, Mobile Makers remains busy. In a year, they can easily run 150 workshops, and demand from schools, organisations, and students remains fierce. Unlike the monumental digs of Perkins & Will, the group’s Humboldt Park offices feel lived-in and decidedly local. Spilling out from every corner of their large loft space are a gaggle of past projects held together with glue, decorated with markers, or fabricated in-house in plastic. This space will soon come to look a bit more firm-like. Bird-Murphy shares with me the renderings for the imminent renovation that will separate their current large undifferentiated space into distinct sections including a lobby, classrooms, a conference room, and a library (architecture books are expensive and hard to access, she reminds me). While I’m excited for what the space will become, I’m no less charmed by the space as it is. As Bird-Murphy narrates some of the past projects on display, we admire a cardboard structure representing a design for a new backpack made for firefighting, while nearby sits a “Purring Station” meant to house a robot cat. By the 3D printers we see remnants of mini-planters from workshops past. Kids come to know the spaces here, allowing them to feel ownership over both what they make and where they make it. But even as this space in Humboldt Park is refurbished, the core of what’s taught here will remain the same. Bird-Murphy describes introducing students in workshops to the concept of design by starting with their own sneakers or bedrooms. I can’t help but think

of my own younger brother who, as a teenager, braved long lines for sneakers or the latest Apple drop. Though he would have never described himself as someone “into design”, he devoted precious time and even more precious resources (he worked at a local diner after school to afford these luxuries) to these objects whose every curve he had studied.

grounded by its principles. Bird-Murphy is not interested in teaching design for design’s sake or fetishising design as an autonomous art object to be worshiped in isolation. The things students make in Mobile Makers workshops must have use and meaning. Projects should be aimed toward transforming communities, be it in the form of self-watering planters or

One of the organisation’s mobile workshop spaces (image courtesy of Tom Harris Photography and Mobile Makers).

Mobile Makers introduces design to students as a practice that already touches their lives. And in the same way that choir club and team sports forge communities of like-minded doers, Mobile Makers seeks to facilitate forms of belonging around design. The coming renovations will allow for more hanging out space so kids can geek out together over this shared passion. The organisation’s location in Humboldt Park – a historically Puerto Rican neighbourhood that is now being gentrified – is also key to the community they hope to magnetise. White families are willing to drop their kids off here, Bird-Murphy notes frankly, even as the neighbourhood remains majority Black and Brown. Workshops bring together students who might not otherwise meet, especially within the still deeply segregated city of Chicago. In addition to its commitment to both roving and rootedness, Mobile Makers is

public structures. One rule for Mobile Makers’ 3D printing workshops proves illustrative: no fidget spinners. “We’re not making shit just to make it,” Bird-Murphy underscores. Every workshop connects back to the world, while still making room for fun and beauty and meeting students where they are. Given that Bird-Murphy’s training is in architecture (she has an MA in architecture from Boston Architectural College), her approach to curriculum-building has evolved through trial and error over many long hours. When creating new workshops, her team generally begins with the contours of a studio project and then boils it down to its essentials. Unlike high school architecture programs that tend to focus on technics, Bird-Murphy has found that such a rigid emphasis can turn kids off design before they even start to grasp its power. “Teaching a high schooler to work to scale,” she insists, “is counterproductive.” She instead 69

starts by asking what is actually relevant to the lives of young people and builds projects and prompts from there. I caught a glimpse of this strategy’s pay-off when talking with a student at the Perkins & Will workshop. Asked what session she most enjoyed, she described an activity in which they transformed a sheet of paper into a functional form by bending and curving it, off-handedly referring to this as an exercise in which “form meets function.” This insight was gleaned not from reading Louis Sullivan or studying architectural textbooks; it came from experiencing it herself while making a structure for a park she observed, studied, and then reimagined. Her keenness brought

to mind the young men I had earlier observed worshiping at the altar of Virgil Abloh, as well as my own sneaker-and-tech-loving little brother – each of whom seemed to be finding new ways of living, touching, and feeling in and through design, even if that was not yet a term they used. Mobile Makers helps students find and wield the language of design, not for recitation’s sake, but to use it for themselves, their communities, and – if they decide to share their talents with the broader world that has so frequently refused to share with them – to solve the life and death problems that design is inherently equipped to transform. Adrienne Brown is a professor living in Chicago.

SUGAR/NO-SUGAR Words Oli Stratford

Image courtesy of PepsiCo.

PHENOMENA

Soda rebranding

Mirinda! Goût fraise and boisson gazeuse, sat pertly on the corner shop shelf, gleaming. It’s pink and chaotic (and, presumably, French), with graphic fuchsia strawberries that bob on curlicues of sticky-rose viscera. Overhead, the lights catch the aluminium of the can, bringing out its fizz-pop best in chunky green lettering that declares “Mirinda”, a jaunty leaf replacing the dot on the second i. Mirinda! I want to drink Mirinda! I don’t know what Mirinda is! That’s besides the point: the only thing I need to know is that Mirinda is for sale at Loco Local, on display with all my pals. It’s sat next to Tango Berry Peachy, whose pink and honey trappings are slashed across a matte black can. Berry Peachy is a near neighbour to Dr Pepper, whose white on burgundy best suggests all the gravitas of a medical professional. Next up is Fanta Limón, effervescent in their Euro vibes, sat alongside the silvered elegance of Diet Coke, who is a multipack can not to be sold separately. Uh oh, unspecified corner shop retailer.1 Hunkered down in the basement shelves, meanwhile, are teenage cans of Monster and Relentless, gothically brooding. Sat haughtily above, slim and Mediterranean, San Pellegrino Pompelmo. And on the very top shelf, far left, is the drink that started it all: Coca-Cola.2 Our fizzed Methuselah. If someone wanted to know about contemporary design, I think they could do worse than look at the drinks section in a corner shop (although stay out of Loco; I don’t like it when it’s busy). The soft drink displays in these places are trash-gorgeous, 1 2

That should cover me legally. Please ignore the fact I just said it was Loco Local. A clarification: Coca-Cola wasn’t the first drink of its kind by any means, having grown out of a long history of health tonics and precursor sodas (it itself was based on a drink called Vin Mariani), but it does seem to have been the first to fully tap into the mixture of advertising, design and distribution that is now distinctive of fizzy drinks.

bursting in colours, noise, logos, and design. It’s the perfect distillation of the commerce and consumerism that bestrides the wider field, while also showcasing the sophistication and ingenuity of the design strategies that have grow up to enable this. “Iconic” is a term I dislike in design writing, but the branding of drinks such as Coke and Pepsi is a rare occasion in which it’s merited – Coke red and Pepsi blue are identifiable the world over, as are the former’s swirling script and the latter’s tricolour globe. These products exist amongst an obscene level of competition3 – even if many of the smaller, seemingly independent brands are actually owned by the Coca-Cola Company or PepsiCo – and at a price point that means that people slip rapidly between drinks. “[Choices] concerning carbonated soft drinks can easily be fluid (pardon the pun),” writes Judith Levin in her illuminating book Soda and Fizzy Drinks: A Global History, “because the choice of a fizzy drink does not involve a long-term or expensive commitment to any product or identity[…] choosing a soft drink isn’t like buying a car, and we can drink 3

And always have done. In his excellent book For God, Country and Coca-Cola (to which this essay is indebted), Mark Pendergrast lists a number of the early competitors/knock-offs that Coca-Cola faced. The list is long, and reproducing it in full is a bit self-indulgent, but I can’t help myself because I love it so much; it reads like poetry, albeit poetry about selling syrup: “Afri-Kola, Cafe-Coca, Candy-Cola, Carbo-Cola, Celery-Cola, Celro-Kola, Charcola, Chero-Cola, Cherry-Kola, Citra-Cola, Co-Co-Colian, Coca and Cola, Coca Beta, Coke Extract, Coke-Ola, Cola-Coke, Cola-Nip, Cold-Cola, Cream-Cola, Curo-Cola, Dope, Eli-Cola, Espo-Cola, Farri-Cola, Fig-Cola, Four-Kola, French Wine Coca, Gay-Ola, Gerst’s Cola, Glee-Nol, Hayo-Kola, Heck’s Cola, Jacob’s Kola, Kaw-Kola (‘Has the Kick’), Kaye-Ola, Kel-Kola, King-Cola, Koca-Nola, Ko-Co-Lem-A, Koke, Kola-Ade, KolaKola, Kola-Vena, Koloko, Kos-Kolo, Lemon-Ola, Lime-Cola, Loco-Kola, Luck-Ola, Mellow-Nip, Mexicola, Mint-Ola, Mitch-O-Cola, Nerv-Ola, Nifti-Cola, Noka-Cola, Pau-Pau Cola, Penn-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Pepsi-Nola, Pillsbury’s Coke, PrinceCola, QuaKola, Revive-Ola, Rococola, Roxa-Kola, Sherry-Coke, Silver-Cola, Sola-Cola, StandardCola, Star-Cola, Taka-Kola, Tenn-Cola, TokaTona, True-Cola, Vani-Kola, Vine-Cola, Wine Cola, Wise-Ola.”

Ramune Hello Kitty today, Irn-Bru tomorrow and Bionade Zitrone Bergamotte soda the day after, without consequences.” Which is why a corner shop is one of life’s great pleasures. Multiple shelves of functionally identical cans, all trussed up in different shreds and patches of design so as to vie for attention in an effervescent market. Some promise energy, others no-sugar, maybe CBD, caffeine, no-caffeine, but all are telling you something, even if that something is as banal as Fanta now coming in Fruit Blast flavour. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that Coca-Cola and its brood are supremely successful design objects:4 products that are distributed worldwide, sold from every point of retail imaginable, and available with such ubiquity that many restaurants don’t even bother putting them on the menu – it’s simply assumed that they’re for sale. Regardless of the context – department store food hall, crummy bodega; Michelin starred restaurant, neighbourhood café – sodas are present. They are among the most widely distributed designs of the 20th and 21st centuries, into which vast quantities of advertising, branding, graphics and packaging design have been poured – all in aid of selling a product that, truth told, we know isn’t very good for us. “[Coca-Cola] is a story,” noted journalist Bob Hall in 1977, writing in the cultural journal Southern Exposure, “of the most incredible mobilization of human energy for trivial purposes since the construction of the pyramids.” I wonder if Bob ever tried a Mirinda? I drink fizzy drinks every day. Come 1pm, I like to leave my desk and take it to the Max, by which I mean I buy a 75p can of Pepsi Max from the shop. Max! I love Pepsi Max. On a normal day, I’ll supplement my 1pm beverage with another can or bottle later in the evening,5 because 4

Commercially and creatively; I’m not getting into the issue of sustainability or the wider ethics of this stuff. Which, having put it down in writing, sounds uncomfortably like the feeding pattern of a baby.

Pepsi Max is absolutely delicious and offers a brief note of fizzed excitement in an otherwise humdrum life – which can’t come as a shock to you, given that a sentence ago I admitted to structuring my day around a can of Pepsi. It’s not just Pepsi Max that provides this thrill either. I love the rest of the gang too: Coke, Fanta, 7up, Sprite. They’re all terrific, each and every one of them, and I have absolutely no idea what any of them taste like. I mean, what does Coca-Cola taste like? What even is Coke, because the ingredients list isn’t helpful at all: “Carbonated Water, Sugar, Colour (Caramel E150d), Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavourings Including Caffeine.” The drink’s name, picked in 1886 by the Coca-Cola employee Frank Robinson, was once descriptive of the kola plant and coca leaf that were included within Coke’s original formulation, but the company no longer uses either of these ingredients, and I doubt the drink ever tasted much like them anyway.6 Admittedly, I haven’t tried either, which I regret in the case of kola, and am grateful for as regards cocaine, because I’m clearly already addicted to Pepsi Max so probably shouldn’t start on anything harder. But the more general point is that Coca-Cola is quite monolithic. For a drink made up of many different ingredients, it tastes almost atomic: it’s just Coke. Sweet, tart… brown? Pepsi is a little sweeter, but also overwhelmingly brown, while the other drinks all taste pretty much the same too, providing you mildly adjust the ratio of sweetness to tartness, and replace “brown” with whatever colour that drink is: orange, yellowish, transparent. They’re basically the same product, which Levin describes as “a beverage made of water, fizz and something sweet”. I like how simple this 6

In 1959, the Coca-Cola Company’s president Robert Woodruff described the drink’s title as a “meaningless but fanciful and alliterative name”. In part this was likely an effort to get away from the legally problematic but persistent idea that Coke was full of coke, but the 1880s undeniably had a real taste for alliteration. There were also products such as Goff’s Giant Globules, Copeland’s Cholera Cure, and Dr Pierce’s Pleasant Purgative Pellets. I’d like to try them all.

is, because it shows how complex selling them must be. Back in 1920, the advertiser Archie Lee inadvertently summed up this overwhelming sense of familiarity. “It is hard work,” Lee wrote to his parents, “giving a different dress to many stories about the same thing.” Lee was speaking about the work of advertising Coca-Cola,7 but he might as

their symbolic meanings are far more complex than the water, gas and sugar that form their corporeal substance.” In the interests of transparency, I‘ve been drinking a Pepsi Max throughout those last three sentences. When it comes to soda, the drink itself is not offering you anything meaningful on a physical level, bar maybe a hit of sugar

The Fanta redesign, executed by Jones Knowles Ritchie (image courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company).

well have been discussing soft drinks period: they’re the same thing in a different dress. That gets to the heart of soda, insofar as soft drinks actually are very different because it’s the dress that people are buying anyway. What prompts me to buy a Pepsi Max every day isn’t the taste (honestly, slightly watery and unpleasantly synthetic now I think about it – God I want one), but because I like its teenage-moody black branding; I like the inanity of “Max” as a synonym for “no-sugar”; I like the pleasing crack-hiss of the can; I like the nostalgia of having had it at the cinema when I was little; and I like the idea of having a treat a day for 75p a pop. Other people will have different reasons for liking these drinks, I’m sure, but I suspect that most will swirl around factors like these, rather than zeroing in on a particular flavour profile. “All foods are embedded in culture,” explains Levin, adding that “for carbonated sweet drinks,

or caffeine. “Many of us live in a world of consumer goods that do a lot more than is necessary,” Levin writes. “We’re sated – hence the ever-widening diversity of drink flavours, packaging and advertising.” But even the attachments that we form to particular formulations as a result of this panoply of design are frequently misleading. “[In] blind taste tests,” Levin continues, “consumers not only reliably fail to distinguish their favourite cola from any other, but they sometimes fail to distinguish cola from ginger ale.” Anecdotally, I can confirm that. In the early days of Disegno, Design Reviewed’s sibling title, the publication’s three editors did a blind taste test of CocaCola, Diet Coke, and Coca-Cola Zero, examining our claims to variously prefer Diet and Zero. It was a slow, delicious day. Of the three participants, two inadvertently identified regular Coke as their favourite, while only the third correctly selected Diet.8 The point

Which he was very good at given that he was the man who created the red Coca-Cola Santa.

And that third participant, dear reader, was me. The champion.

being, it’s not necessarily the drink that you’re actually responding to, but rather its connotations, associations, and the ways in which it has become tied up with your own sense of identity. “I’m always going to be searching for emotion,” Pepsi’s advertising guru Phil Dusenberry once told reporters. “In an age when most products aren’t very different, the difference is often in the way people feel about [them].” It’s an odd aspect of the field, but the drinks themselves are basically the sidehustle, secondary to the more serious matter of typefaces, graphics, distribution and adverts. In a legal dispute with bottlers over changes to Coca-Cola’s formulation in the 1980s, the company’s CEO Roberto Guizeta argued under oath that Coca-Cola should be understood as whatever the company said it was, answering “Correct” when quizzed as to whether an earlier, only recently abandoned formulation of Coca-Cola was therefore no longer Coke. That wasn’t just legal posturing either.9 In researching his book For God, Country and Coca-Cola, the author Mark Pendergrast was inadvertently given a copy of an early formulation of the Coca-Cola recipe: something that the company has always kept secret, cryptically labelling the flavours that give Coke its taste “7X”. Learning from the recipe that said Xs were oils of orange, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, neroli and – most likely – vanilla, Pendergrast asked a company spokesperson what would happen if he published the recipe. Wouldn’t rivals “decide to go into business in competition with The Coca-Cola Company?” The exchange that follows is great. After Pendergrast suggests the name Yum-Yum for a knock off,10 Coke’s spokesperson is impressively blunt about its chances for success. “What are they going to charge for it?” he asks Pendergrast. “How are 9

Although it was a bit – Guizeta was trying to secure more favourable terms for the company in its contracts with bottlers. Which was not just a flight of fancy: Yum Yum was the name that Coke’s founder John Pemberton gave to the rival soda he developed having sold his original business.

they going to distribute it? How are they going to advertise it? See what I’m driving at? We’ve spent over a hundred years and untold amounts of money building the equity of that brand name. Without our economies of scale and our incredible marketing system, whoever tried to duplicate our product would get nowhere, and they’d have to charge too much. Why would anyone go out of their way to buy Yum-Yum, which is really just like Coca-Cola but costs more, when they can buy the Real Thing anywhere in the world?” Like I said, it isn’t about the drink. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot recently, because 2023 has been a weird year for soft drinks. Within a couple of months of one another, Pepsi, 7up, Fanta and Mirinda (!)11 have all announced complete redesigns encompassing packaging, logos and all brand assets, while Coca-Cola and Sprite did the same thing in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Suddenly, every big-name soda seems to be rebranding. There must be something in the water.12 The redesigns, to my soda-addled eye, are all very nice. They make me want to drink the stuff, anyway, so that’s the first hurdle cleared, even if said hurdle is alarmingly low. *Immediately opens a can of Sprite Zero.* Most of the rebrands focus on stripping away the excesses of their earlier designs, while still retaining the emphasis on flat design that entered the industry’s palette in the mid-2000s and 2010s.13 The new designs have a continuity with what has come before, but they’ve also ditched a lot of the graphic perkiness that had emerged in recent years: the cute illustrations of citrus wedges plastered across 7up have 11

12 13

Apparently it’s PepsiCo’s long-running Fanta rival – I had never heard of it before (nor had anyone else in Design Reviewed’s office), but I now see it absolutely everywhere. Mirinda! Probably fuckloads of sugar. Which scoured the field of the Y2K bombast that had dominated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and which I quite miss if I’m totally honest – overblown is a good aesthetic match for soda.

been deemphasised; the big red disc across Coke’s formulations jettisoned; the sea of thrashing pink gore on Mirinda drained. Indeed, many of the rebrands are billed as acts of graphic restitution: designs that recover abandoned elements from the drinks’ pasts, or which eliminate more recent additions to create simpler reflections of the brand. In part, this move is a concession to the fact that these drinks are now sold and advertised through multiple physical and digital channels, so designs need to be simple enough to work at thumbnail size, while also being capable of scaling up into something richer in-person. Pepsi, for instance, has abandoned the smile motif that has featured in its globe logo since it slipped into the drink’s design under a 2009 rebrand by Arnell Group.14 Instead, the brand has turned to a simpler, bolder roundel that recalls its designs from the 70s and 80s, and which looks like something you’d see slapped on the side of an oil barrel (in a good way). It’s beautiful work and, as such, I intend to singlehandedly fund the Loco-based portion of its global distribution strategy.15 “In approaching the new design, we asked ourselves: how do we take everything we love about Pepsi and its past, and create something that transcends?” replies Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s chief design officer, when I ask about his work on Pepsi and 7up – the latter of which builds its new design around graphic slabs of green tones. “With the new 14

A design whose brand manual reportedly leaked on Reddit in 2009, and which is so insane that many still believe it must have been a hoax because there’s no way professional designers could be that mad. The document is freely available online and is absolutely amazing – it includes mention of “Pepsi Energy Fields” that mirror magnetic fields, and its proposed brand identity claims an aesthetic lineage stretching from vastu shastra, via Vitruvius, onto the Modulor, before finally arriving at Pepsi. Personally, I think they were definitely that mad. My very favourite Pepsi can is the class of 1991: a white can with blue typography, whose only embellishment is a graphic red ribbon sat vertically beneath the logo. Bring it back, you cowards!

visual identity we created, we’ve borrowed equity from our history and blended modern elements that signal our bold vision for the future.” Brand-speak, undoubtedly, but it nonetheless captures something of the challenges that emerge when giving a different dress to the same product, particularly given that these drinks have long – and frequently cherished – brand histories.16 Paramount in Porcini’s thoughts, he acknowledges, was creating a design that lends itself to both physical and digital marketing: the logo intended to do double duty as a digital sticker that can be slapped atop photography and films on social media. “It’s important for our brands’ visual identities to flow freely between the increasingly digital world and the physical world,” he says. “In digital spaces, the revitalised and distinct design introduces movement and animation into our visual system.” Fanta, meanwhile, has sought to develop its previous 2017 redesign by Studio Koto with the introduction of a more cohesive design identity across its many flavours. The result, which has been developed by The Coca-Cola Company’s design team in conjunction with creative agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), uses an elegant colour coding system that brings rationality to the portfolio, without skimping on the sense of fun that probably should be present if your product is basically fruity-fizz syrup. Orange is orange, raspberry raspberry, peach peach, and so on, but with clever use of secondary and tertiary colours to make the whole thing a bit more complex than just naming fruits. “Could we keep that sense of play which was a bit unconventional,” asks Lisa Smith, executive creative director at 16

This isn’t hyperbole. People absolutely lost their minds, for example, when Coca-Cola introduced New Coke in 1985. Here is one response, reported by Pendergrast, that was sent to Coke’s offices in protest at the change: “My littele sisther is cring because coke changed and she sayed that shed is not going to stop cring every day unitl you chang back. . . . I am geting tryer of hearing her now if you don’t chang I’ll sue evne if I’m just 11.” It sounds like one of the Jack the Ripper letters.

JKR, “but do it in more of a strategic way?” Smith and her team’s design is essentially a wayfinding system that helps customers find Fanta from among its many fruit soda rivals, while also providing clearer identification within its own absurdly bloated range of flavours. I’m not even sure how many flavours Fanta has worldwide, but online sources suggest more than 200 over the course of its history. In the promotional images for the new design identity, I can count at least 20, including a kiwi flavour that I’m sure is truly horrible, but would absolutely love to try. Its colour? Inexplicably, yellow.17 Whereas the other drinks in the CocaCola portfolio – the Coke and Sprite families – have more obviously pushed towards cleaner, minimal designs (shifting their logos to the top of the cans, and leaving more of the surface area free of graphics), Fanta faces a different challenge. “The others are so minimal, whereas we have to celebrate flavours,” says Smith. “So there’s language and illustration and there’s pop and there’s a fizz.” JKR’s design has retained much of the irreverence of Studio Koto’s earlier work – which was inspired by paper craft and saw the studio make its iteration of the logo out of paper cutouts before digitising it – but has also aimed to adjust the former’s focus on a younger market. “We wanted something that was aged up and broader in its appeal,” Smith notes. The new design is recognisably a continuation of what came before, and Fanta remains busier than Coke and Sprite, but the general aim of the new design is one that aspires towards the essential. “We believe in this Oscar Wildecoined term of being yourself,”18 Smith says. “We want Fanta to be its best self, so we did a global audit of its previous designs and then retained elements or optimised them – it wasn’t just throwing everything out with 17

Just as we went to print, my colleague Lara Chapman revealed to me that there are, in fact, yellow kiwis: a complete game changer, from which I am unlikely to recover for some time. I’m not totally sure which quote she means, but at a guess it’s “To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.”

the bathwater and creating something new for the sake of it.” When I ask Smith why these redesigns have all come at once, she suggests I shouldn’t read too much into it.19 “There’s a lot of stuff coming out at a similar time, but there is definitely more coincidence than anything about that,” she explains. “Some of these projects happen fast, other take a very long time.” But there is at least one respect in which these designs all seem to be responding to the same thing. Each of the redesigns positions the zero sugar formulations of the drinks front and centre, or else narrows the gap between the drinks’ sugar and zero sugar versions. 7up’s zero sugar version, for instance, reverses two shades of green from the main design and adds a small “Zero Sugar tab”,20 while Pepsi Zero Sugar’s can (which is the North American version of Pepsi Max and therefore, to my mind, an abomination for not declaring Max!) is the same as mainline Pepsi’s, but black instead of blue. Zero Sugar was used as the lead drink in the rebrand’s marketing campaign, and is now prominent enough in the overall product range for its black tone to have been added to Pepsi’s logo for the first time in the company’s history. “From a design perspective,” Porcini notes, “the addition of black in Pepsi’s visual identity was a creative choice to bring more boldness and contrast to the logo, while also representing Pepsi Zero Sugar.” The Coca-Cola Company drinks are even more explicit in the similarities between their sugar/no-sugar variations. Fanta’s are identical bar switching the logo from white on blue, to blue on white; while both Sprite and Coca-Cola simply shift their script from white to black. In Coke’s case, the switch is particularly notable. When launched in 2005, Coca-Cola Zero was presented as its own drink: it had a black can, with a name that suggested an identity that stood apart from mainline Coke. Today, 19 20

Too late! I’m 3,690 words in! They pretty much all do this, but it gets boring typing it out each time, so just assume that they all have “Zero Sugar” written discretely on the can somewhere.

however, its can has been adjusted so that it currently stands as a mere variant on its progenitor’s Coke-red packaging, while its name was tweaked back in 2017 to become Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.21 The intention, it seems, it to stress that Zero Sugar is not a distinct drink that forms a carbonated Holy Trinity with Coke and Diet Coke, but rather that Zero Sugar just is Coca-Cola, every bit as much as the original. “It’s definitely a strategy to have them closer,” says Smith of the same move having been made within the Fanta design. “It’s an A or a B thing, instead of feeling like its own thing. More and more often, Zero Sugar will be put as the lead product. I think there’s a lot of us who like Zero Sugar, but want to feel like you’re still buying into that brand.” This shift is pretty clear if, like me, you’re spending a lot of time with the cans in Loco. The sugar/no-sugar versions of Sprite and Coke sit side by side on the shelves and are largely indistinguishable when you’re absentmindedly grabbing your 5pm fix.22 As regards 7up, well, I don’t even know where to begin. The two cans’ reversed shades of green look beautiful, but the designs are so similar that telling them apart at a glance is, I believe, impossible for human beings. It’s like asking a dog to detect irony. But then, as Smith has explained, the name of the game isn’t drawing distinctions – companies are specifically trying to bind these drinks closer together. And that’s fine, but not how things used to be done. When Coca-Cola first explored a no-sugar drink in the 1960s, for example, its CEO John Paul Austin explicitly forbade use of the suggested Diet Coke title. “To lend the magical Coke name to any other soft drink was heretical,” Pendergrast notes, with this 21

Whereas Zero is a name – a dorky one, admittedly, but a name nonetheless – Zero Sugar is a description. Other drinks have also made this change: 7up Free has become 7up Zero Sugar; Pepsi Max has transitioned to Pepsi Zero Sugar in the North American market; and both Sprite and Fanta replaced “Zero” with “Zero Sugar”. I was not entirely honest earlier about how often I’m having a soft drink.

proposed secondary use of the parent identity seen as likely to “dilute the brand” and “confuse consumers”. As such, Coke’s eventual no-sugar soda was christened TaB. When Diet Coke was finally introduced in 1982, it employed a different flavour profile to Coca-Cola (it tastes like a piece of zinc has been dissolved in Coke – unsurprisingly, I absolutely love it) and adopted an alternative brand identity that has since come to be based on the idea of blue-collar men swallowing Diet Cokes while being peered at through windows by white-collar women. But sexy-swallowbased differentiation belongs to an older brand playbook. Today, sugar and no-sugar sodas are rapidly merging in terms of both their flavour and their design values. CocaCola Zero Sugar is explicitly marketed as tasting identical to Coca-Cola,23 and while Smith assures me that subtle colour reversal shows up in consumer testing as the most straightforward mode of visual differentiation between drinks (“We tried out all different versions and the clearest one for consumers was when you flipped it”), I’m not so sure – I think this is probably only true if you’re sticking to the competing criterion that the zero sugar version not feel “like its own thing”. To my eye, the zero sugar formulations are just becoming the mainline drink and this worries me, because I really don’t want them to take away the Max! on the side of my can. Given everything I’ve said, you may be surprised to learn that I vehemently dislike the regular versions of most sodas. They’re nasty, thick, headachey things, which make your teeth feel wooly and tentative, as if you’ve done something orally sinful. In general, they’re just too decadent to work as a regular treat, particularly given that a single can of many sodas contains more added sugars than the daily maximum recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). “If governments tax products like sugary drinks, they can reduce suffering and save lives,” said Douglas 23

It doesn’t, but a 2007 advert for Zero featured Coca-Cola’s lawyers attempting to sue the drink for “taste infringement”.

Bettcher, director of the WHO’s Department for the Prevention of NCDs (non-communicable diseases) back in 2016. “They can also cut healthcare costs and increase revenues to invest in health services.” Which takes some of the gloss off having a Fanta Limón. Bettcher’s recommendation seems to be being heard. As of early 2020, Levin notes,

we attach to essentially identical drinks, so it’s a bit fiddly for brands to begin complaining when this process starts to run in the reverse direction.24 Zero sugar versions of sodas are now a faster growing market than their sugar equivalents, with one suggested explanation for this being that younger consumers are more sugar averse than previous generations.

The 2023 change to the design of Pepsi (image courtesy of PepsiCo).

around 40 countries have specific taxes on sugary drinks, with Mexico, France, Hungary, Chile, Samoa, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, India, Peru, the UK and Ireland among them. In an exceedingly rare display of national competence, the UK seems to be at the vanguard of this movement, with its version of the tax taking the rare step of tracking in accordance with the amount of sugar included in a drink. “This has resulted in national and international brands reducing the amount of sugar in drinks to be sold in the UK,” Levin explains. “Irn-Bru by more than 50 per cent, San Pellegrino by 40 per cent.” Which is generally good news, but also brings complexities. Many of these laws, the UK’s included, target sodas but not fruit juices, which actually contain an equivalent amount of sugar to Coke and its ilk. “[To] tax a fizzy drink differently from a fruit juice,” Levin notes, “is a value judgement about soda.” But, then, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Soda’s whole schtick is selling products based upon the different values that

“The modern war against fizzy drinks is part of the opposition to the seeming power of sugar,” Levin writes, and this war is being fought differently on different fronts. With fruit juices, it’s easy to think of the constituent sugars as natural, healthy even, whereas their presence in fizzy drinks frequently carries different, less favourable connotations. Levin observes that soft drinks can be “familiar and reassuring, full of sugar and meaning”, but sugar is full of meaning too. It is an ingredient tied up with health scares, with monoculture farming, and with the shameful history of the transatlantic slave trade. Sugar, notes scholar Ulbe Bosma in his book The World of Sugar, is an ingredient that has “fundamentally changed how we feed ourselves, has deeply affected human relations through its close relationship with slavery, and [which] has caused extensive environmental degradation”. The ingredient’s 24

Although, of course, they have, with Coke’s then-CEO Doug Daft labelling proposals to tax fizzy drinks back in 2003 as being “absurd and outrageous”.

present ubiquity in industrially produced food and beverages, he adds, means that its entanglement with “modern consumption, global inequalities, and the emergence of modern capitalism,” are all part of its meaning. For many, processed sugars are the defining

symbolically, metaphorically, literally – don’t want to drink that.” I suppose this is why a lot of the newer drinks I’ve seen on the shelves of Loco are specifically Not-Cokes: drinks that define themselves in contrast to their more corporate

The Mirinda redesign (image courtesy of PepsiCo).

ingredient of fast food, of mass manufacture, of corporate America – the list goes on – and fizzy drinks have been pressed into service as its standard bearer. Coca-Cola executives have notoriously described their product as “the nearest thing to capitalism in a bottle” and as being “the sublimated essence of America”, with the drink’s heavy use of sugar being a major part of this. Is it any surprise to learn, then, Levin points out, that “Coca-Cola encounters resistance among people who – 80

rivals and which are “being sold, in part,” Levin notes, “on the basis of what’s not in them”. Dalston’s, for example, bills itself as a “soda with soul”, which contains “no refined sugars”, “real fruit” and “sparkling water”.25 25

Which seems an odd thing to trumpet given that all sodas are basically fizzy water with things dissolved in them, but which does go some way to suggesting a healthier drink. It also goes some further way to suggesting a much more middle-class drink.

The Dalston’s drinks are “made by chefs” and come in faintly faffy flavours such as “Real Squeezed Rhubarb” and “Real Pressed Elderflower”. On each can, the brand’s graphics show stylised hands doing said squeezing and pressing, and I assume that the overall impression it’s aiming for is of a drink that is altogether more legible than the sense of mystique cultivated by its corporate rivals. In contrast to what Pendergrast calls Coke’s “air of mystery, with a touch of sin”, Dalston’s wants to suggest that it’s a soda that is simultaneously artisanal, local, and transparent about the ingredients it contains. It’s “real”, in other words, whereas Coke and its ilk are represented, by comparison, as being synthetic in every sense. Dalston’s isn’t the only soda pulling this trick.26 Levin notes that “Posh Pop makes ginger beer with chilli, pear and elderflower”; Dry Soda produces “lavender and rhubarb fizzy drinks”; GuS (Grown-Up Soda) sells “Meyer lemon, pomegranate and blackberry fizzy drinks”; and Glam Cola is “a somewhat bitter, colourless, clear, cola-lemonade-ginger-flavoured drink” that “describes itself as ‘elegant’” and which is additionally “vegan, halal, kosher and without phosphoric acid”. Purdey’s range of sparkling fruits juices, meanwhile, “[believes] in burning bright, not out,” according to its website. “By harnessing the power of nature within all our drinks, Purdey’s Natural Energy range has been created with you in mind.” This power of nature, it would seem, largely consists in featuring “natural fruit sugars” and bunging some ginseng in there – the wellnessification of contemporary soft drinks every bit as absurd as the 1885 claim by Pemberton French Wine Coca (Coke’s immediate predecessor) to be “the most remarkable invigorator that ever sustained a wasting and sinking system”. All 26

Although it’s worth noting that this isn’t the only game in soda town. A whole range of new energy drinks such as Prime have forsaken any notion of “authenticity” or pretences towards health consciousness in favour of designs that feed upon ideas of hyped-up masculinity and swaggering machismo. They come worryingly close to being a kind of liquidised Andrew Tate.

of the new breed of sodas seem to underscore the fact that fizzy drinks sell not purely because of their flavour, but also as a result of their cultural and social connotations, and the manner in which they flatter our own sense of identity. Market research conducted by the advertising agency Litas back in 1984, for example, found that the average Coca-Cola drinker lived in a “traditional reality based on early experiences, stereotypes and cultural generalizations”, and believed that the world was ruled by “certain self-evident truths.” That’s almost certainly psycho-babble, but there may be something in it regardless – a sense that we pick the sodas we do because of what they embody. Either way, there’s good fun to be had in imagining how your average Purdey’s drinker views the world and their place in it. If its online marketing copy is anything to go by, the word “thriving” will feature heavily. These changes to consumer tastes are not absolute. It’s not as if the entire soda market has suddenly given way en masse to drinks that act as if they’re bottled by hand in inner-city orchards. But the increasing presence on shelves of drinks that want to talk about ingredients, and which aim to move away from the idea of sodas as sugary bellywash, does suggest that changes are afoot. Across the industry, there is a greater attention towards what goes into the drinks we buy, and greater preferences as to what should not go into them. Just as importantly, there is a greater appetite for communicating this through design. “We’re always listening to our fans,” says Porcini of the way in which a behemoth like PepsiCo, which posted revenues of $86.392bn in 2022, navigates some of these changes to its products. “We have a strong suite of capabilities in place that help us stay years ahead of their changing preferences, and the signals are clear that zero sugar is where they’re headed.” Well, if there’s anything that sodas do, it’s follow the market. After all, the drinks themselves are nothingy: they’re changeable and secondary, vectors for the overarching brand, rather than sacrosanct recipes in their own right. “We’re selling smoke,” the Coca81

Cola ad man Paul Foley is said to have once quipped. “They’re drinking the image, not the product.” So if no-sugar is the image that consumers want, then no-sugar is what they’ll get, because it really isn’t about the drink itself and, actually, never has been. “I don’t care if the consumer wants carbonated sweat in a goatskin pouch,” Pepsi’s CEO Alfred Steele told his salesforce back in the 1950s. “If so, this side of the room go looking for goats and this side start running fiercely in place.” Which is not the worst idea in the world now that I think about it. Get the design right, the marketing in place, and I can see it selling. Maybe a health drink: all a bit natural, all a bit tangy like kombucha or kefir, designed to deliver essential, natural fluids into your body, wrapped up in packaging sourced from sustainably managed herds.

You know: goût de chèvre and sueur gazeuse, sat leathery on the corner shop shelf, bristling. It’s brown and musky (and, presumably, fetid), with hairs that twitch as curlicues of sticky-aqua perspiration roll within. Overhead, the lights warm the hide, bringing out tanning scents from the recesses of stamped lettering that declares “Carbonated Sweat in a Goatskin Pouch”, a droplet of sweat replacing the dot on the second i. Carbonated Sweat in a Goatskin Pouch! I want to drink Carbonated Sweat in a Goatskin Pouch! I know what Carbonated Sweat in a Goatskin Pouch is! Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

SEEING THROUGH THE HYPE Words Natalie Kane

Image courtesy of XReal.

TECHNOLOGY

XReal Air

Anyone who ever wants to design a convincing future should work a retail job, suggests futurist and science fiction writer Madeline Ashby, and my God she’s right. When we watched Tom Cruise seamlessly glide his hands through future crimes in Minority Report, we never imagined that the journey there would involve a busy Sunday afternoon in the Westfield Stratford shopping centre, sat with a slightly exasperated retail assistant trying extremely hard to get the latest in cutting-edge augmented reality tech to work. I was there to try on the NReal Air,1 the latest in augmented reality from the recently rebranded Beijing-based company Xreal. It had been remarkably hard for me to get my hands on a pair of them to review, so the last resort was to find the only demo pair in London. However, like many technological aspirations, it was failure to launch – the demo software that was wheeled out with the pair normally encased behind glass didn’t work. I told them I’d come back another day; they looked at the bundle of cables and plastic in their hand with a defeated, “If it works next time?” Heralded as the next thing to keep augmented reality alive, the Air launched in China, South Korea and Japan in December 2021, before launching in the UK in May 2022 under an exclusive contract with mobile network EE. They appeared in the US later, in September, although it has been extremely tricky to trace exactly how and when they came on the market, because they often disappear as quickly as they arrive – even the staff at the Stratford store mentioned supply issues. Worn on your face like any other pair of sunglasses, they run on a compatible Android device by plugging directly into your phone through a USB-C. You’re also able to plug them directly into your computer, so you can have a true, high fidelity email experience – something we’ve all written to Father Christmas about – or use on the Steam Deck games console. You’ll have to get over the fact that true immersion comes with cables. The Air requires you to be hooked in, Matrixstyle, which might cause problems depending on how energetically you like to do spreadsheets. There’s a lot invested in their ability to be portable, cool and as far away from a clunky VR headset as possible, choosing an aesthetic heavily reminiscent of Raymond Stegeman’s classic Wayfarer design for Ray-Ban to disguise a series of angled displays. On my second, quieter attempt at trialling the Air, the demonstration didn’t work again, but the very nice man who half-heartedly handed me the same handful of electronics elected to play a YouTube video for me instead. I can’t remember the film I watched the trailer for, but for 1

Until 25 May 2023, Xreal was known as Nreal, when the company launched a rebrand with the release of its Xreal Beam gaming accessory.

the first 30 seconds I had the typical problem that I have as a glasses-wearer when wearing any headset technology: delicately balancing two objects on top of each other so that neither destroys the other, while still letting me see whatever is in front of me (XReal does provide a frame insert for prescription lenses). The display projected centimetres from my eyeballs was as crisp as you’d expect from XReal’s immersive HD “birdbath”2 optic technology, although I struggled slightly to enjoy the transparent OLED screens that are some of the device’s main attractions. You are able to block out light using what is essentially a set of horse-blinkers for humans that clip over the top, as XReal are yet to make an optic system more powerful than the sun or, in this case, the fluorescent lighting of Westfield Stratford. I sat there, nodding in the direction of the man who was clearly not entertained by my visit, and thought about how I must look to the other people in the shop. However uncomfortable or awkward the whole exchange was, this experience felt far closer than any of the futures that the technology companies are trying to sell us. It wasn’t seamless or polished, and it certainly wasn’t one that Xreal had dreamed up for its debut. It was mundane, anticlimactic and riddled with unexpected complexity – this is living immersed in reality. My AR experience came complete with some gold medal-winning small talk in which I asked the poor fella tasked with supervising me whether the Air glasses were popular (they weren’t available to buy at that point) and if they liked them (they weren’t sure, but had heard they were good for gaming), before I got the hint and yanked them out of my hair. I said my thank-yous and left as quickly as I could. The technology futures that are marketed to us by companies typically remain firmly in the realm of the speculative, and this is nothing new – it’s in their interest to keep you guessing. The history of augmented reality is one of failure and assimilation, starting from its origins in the 1960s when the first heads-up displays were developed for both the military and entertainment, although the idea was around earlier. In a 1962 Time article about the Hughes Aircraft Company’s Electrocular, one of the first head-mounted display units, it was the potential application for television that captured the public’s imagination: “TV-addicted schoolboys equipped with Electroculars could pore over their homework while one eye kept track of the good guys gunning down the bad guys.” This future was about doing more, extending our capabilities, becoming bionic. Yet being too expensive to become our own personal cinemas, devices such as the Electrocular were 2

Yes! A real term. A “birdbath” is a form of optical structure used in AR where a beam splitter directs light into a concave mirror and reflects it, at an angle, back into the eye. This is an incredibly untechnical explanation – smarter internet people will explain it to you better.

ultimately put to use to extend soldiers’ sight on the battlefield, with most early AR technologies becoming the assistants of war. Fast forward a few decades, where consumer electronics have become a little lighter and a little cheaper, and companies have once again tried in vain to occupy our eyelines. In 2013, Google released the Explorer Edition, the first version of its Glass smart glasses, to developers in an attempt to bring about some kind of integrated, seamless digital life. In his TED Talk (remember them?) Google co-founder Sergey Brin hailed the Glass as freedom from the isolation that the mobile phone had created, providing the ability for notifications to become an ambient part of a user’s everyday life – there’s no irony lost in creating a solution for a problem you helped create. This great ambition, however, didn’t quite stick – we weren’t ready for it yet – and Google discontinued the product just two years after it began. It released a non-consumer-facing model in 2017 and tried the market again with the Enterprise in 2019, before giving up the ghost earlier this year. In its brief lifespan, the Glass did bring about one of the saltier terms from technology lexicon history – Glasshole – which describes the negative social stereotypes we have around a person wearing a Google Glass, particularly in public. I remember being at a conference around 2013, and several attendees loudly moving out of the sightline of an attendee wearing one, desperately bringing attention to the security concerns that the device had. Over the last 10 years, other glasses have raised similar concerns around head-mounted cameras and privacy. In 2022, for example, Sunday Times journalist Valerie Flynn was able to take Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses, which boast full audio and video recording, into “a shopping centre, a café, ladies’ lavatory, a playground and into an in-session courtroom at the Criminal Courts of Justice, where recording is forbidden” without anyone noticing. Snap Inc.’s Spectacles, released in 2016, also raised fears around consent, even if they were fitted with a somewhat obvious recording light, thanks to their marketing being targeted towards young audiences – and the fact that they immediately upload recordings to social platforms. In both cases, technological features were implemented that perhaps did not consider the context in which they might be used (the Ray-Ban Stories do have a small recording light, which the spaces Flynn visited were not aware of). We are still grappling with technological literacy around these subjects, and software features are often well-meaning but clumsy sticking plasters, covering over years of confusion around privacy and consent.

What’s interesting about the Xreal Air is that although they aren’t really like the Snap Spectacles, or the Google Glass, or the Ray-Ban Stories, inasmuch as they don’t offer the ability to accidentally become embroiled in a privacy incident, they are sold like them. They are marketed as a lifestyle product, even though the majority of early adopters seem to use them solely for gaming and watching films on planes. So much of what the Air plays into is the ability to experience a private, immersive world in the highest definition possible. On one of the promotional images for the Air on Xreal’s website, a pair of sunglasses perch on a picnic box next to two bottles of Fentimans

The Apple Vision Pro (image courtesy of Apple).

lemonade. I’m slightly baffled by this scenario because it feels so strange. For any other sunglasses advert this would make sense, but does Xreal want me to do my emails on holiday? Is the future just all of us holding hands, in Wayfarers, watching different films from one another (I know for some of you that is ideal)? For other smart glasses, such as the Snap Spectacles, so much of their marketing and design has hinged on sharing and being social, so did we just give up? Perhaps it was one of the most significant events of the last three years – a pandemic – that caused the turn inwards, with technology companies taking advantage of our isolation to create further places for us to retreat to. The shift to home and mobile working has created further commitments to devices and platforms that bring our bodies, our money and our attention to the possibilities anticipated between the digital and the physical realm. One word that I haven’t mentioned yet, however, is the M-word, The Metaverse, and it’s one that Xreal doesn’t use either. You won’t find

it anywhere on its website, and it doesn’t seem to want to talk about its product in the same, hyped-up breath in any of its marketing. Plenty of companies have invested in The Metaverse and, for some in particular, the stakes are high. Meta is spending roughly $1bn dollars a month on its version of Metaverse, despite losing $700bn between October 2021 and October 2022 and executing eye-watering layoffs. Meta has invested heavily in platforms such as Horizon Worlds (which is where that hilarious “metaverse selfie” with Mark Zuckerberg and a clumsily rendered Eiffel Tower was taken in 2022), yet one of its first consumer-facing forays into the Metaverse was with RayBan Stories. Ray-Ban had clearly taken the hint after enough technology companies had copied its iconic 1952 design, and joined up with Meta to release its own pair in 2021, even launching a special edition for Coachella the following year. Surely pairing with one of the most popular eyeglasses brands in history would create overwhelming success? Almost a year after launch, sales tanked – for some reason, people still don’t want to wear a camera on their face. However, hell-bent on having an “iPhone moment” (his words not mine), Zuckerberg bragged that his company was spending tens of billions of dollars on its own soon-to-be released AR glasses, due any day now (it could be 2024, 2026, or 2027 according to multiple reports). Zuckerberg will no doubt build his Metaverse, but as to who will be there is another question. At the Xreal launch at the AWE 2023 AR and VR expo, founder Chi Xu talked about the move towards the “Spatial Internet”, a reference perhaps to the “Spatial Web” idea of Gabriel Rene, which links to a “multidimensional network” of “people, space and assets linked together”. To Xu, the Spatial Internet is the gradual interjection of a lot of holograms around you all the time, which to be honest sounds a lot like what designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda was warning us about in his 2016 film Hyper-Reality, in which the citizens of near-future Medellín can’t go shopping without augmented reality bombardment. The Air seems to be some sort of future portal, though resolutely in the “Sit down and enjoy your nice game” camp, rather than, “You’re in the Matrix, Neo.” Whether it will make it or not, or further contribute to our growing electronic waste landscape,3 the Air still seems to be enjoyed by a small minority of developers and enthusiasts, mostly on Reddit, keenly hoping to have been there first. Alongside housing a huge number of tech support requests, these communities provide an opportunity to watch users 3

See ‘e-Waste Agbogbloshie’ in Disegno #30.

live and create with their Airs. It’s like watching an alternate future in which the Air has already made it, a brute forcing of its devotees own personal realities alongside our own. Interest in the Metaverse seems to be slowing as interest in artificial intelligence accordingly booms, although integration of AI technologies into smart glasses is still giving a few weak signals, even if not all of them are particularly inviting. Recently, for example, development studio XRAI Glass released a “subtitles IRL” service for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing community that is integrated into XReal glasses, adding closed captions to the glasses and using machine learning to identify speakers. However, as highlighted by Haben Girma, human rights lawyer and author of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, most machine learning technologies for autocaptioning don’t even remotely accommodate d/Deaf communities’ needs – she recently pointed out, for instance, that auto-captioning turns her name into “happen grandma”, revealing the biases within these technologies at work. Additionally, this software is expensive, with a tiered pricing system for access that is, at its top range, $50 a month – another reminder that being d/Deaf and disabled has a tax. Much of artificial intelligence and smart glasses integration seems to want to fix this particular “problem”. On searching further, I found a number of assistive integrations that utilise this brand of technological solutionism. One recent example is Envision Glasses, whose object and text detection was built into the recent, brief rebirth of Google Glass Enterprise Edition – it may now be essentially useless with the device due to go offline in September 2023. Projects like this are what design critic Liz Jackson has called “disability dongles”, well-meaning but badlydesigned tech fixes that are often created by non-disabled designers. As disability and technology scholar Ashley Shew has underlined in her work, these disability dongles are rarely commercially viable and don’t consider the real needs of disabled people – it is hard to access high end, affordable disability technologies But perhaps this is better than the other options I’ve seen in our continued race to place glasses in some kind of future – Stanford student Bryan Chiang recently shared his smart monocle (honestly) rizzGPT, which uses chatGPT to help you out if you get stuck on a date, something he calls “CaaS” or charisma-as-a-service. Someone hasn’t gotten over Her. Meanwhile, as I was finishing the article, my partner messaged me to tell me that Apple had come out with “some sort of horrid VR thing”,

which meant that the company’s long-awaited AR glasses, Vision Pro, had been revealed at its Worldwide Developers Conference – Apple’s annual dystopian rodeo. Following a presentation in which the company relentlessly celebrated wellness apps, gratitude journals, and the ability to set more than one timer at a time on an iPad (finally!), Tim Cook announced its investment in spatial computing. Lending a death blow to anyone still trying to make Metaverse happen, this fancy term likely refers to Simon Greenwold’s 2003 paper detailing “human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces”. Pinch-tozoom, basically, but this time with huge floating screens. The Vision Pro, which definitely does not look like a scuba mask, is a much more impressive version of the Xreal Air, but at $3,500 you’d probably expect something more than a pair of sunglasses. It may not offer the Air’s ability to be subtle about watching Paddington 2 while on your lunch break, but perhaps you don’t want subtlety at that price point. It seems that with every new hype cycle we find something else to leave behind, new goalposts to shift, and something new to put a price tag on. We can’t seem to leave our dreams of digital immersion to history, however many stories of failure lay in its wake. Perhaps we all want to feel like the master of our own private, digital, universe. But I’ll be honest, one of the things I was most looking forward to for this review was seeing what it would be like watching films lying down. I spend a lot of time in bed as a disabled person and what’s one problem that we haven’t solved yet? Your phone falling on your face. Natalie Kane is a curator and writer based in south London.

TIME FOR A CHANGE Words Ann Morgan

Image courtesy of Valeria Mitelman and Sumo.

BODY Sumo

Full disclosure: despite being the mother of two small humans, up until a few weeks ago, I’d never had anything to do with reusable nappies. This is not because I’m a rabid climatechange denier or any more ignorant of the pernicious legacy of single-use plastics than the next person. It’s simply that reusables have never really been on my radar as a serious

for her master’s in product design at ECAL. When considering how she might apply SeaCell, an absorbent algae- and eucalyptusbased fabric she had been working on in conjunction with the Deutsche Institute für Textil- und Faserforschung (DITF), Kahlfeldt thought she might develop a mattress or period-proof pants. It was her tutor, Sebastian

Luisa Kahlfeldt and Caspar Böhme of Sumo (image courtesy of Volker Conradus and Sumo).

option. If anyone had asked me to consider adopting them as my daughters’ births approached, it would have seemed unthinkable and mildly masochistic – introducing yet another layer of complication and logistics into an already extremely challenging situation, all for the sake of an environmental benefit that was surely negligible when practically every other family seemed to be throwing nappies away. Oh shit, I thought, when the invitation arrived to trial a new reusable nappy with my three-month-old daughter Amelie for this article. Literally. I’m not the only one surprised to find herself working with reusable nappies. Berlinbased designer Luisa Kahlfeldt was similarly blindsided when the possibility of creating one presented itself while she was studying 92

Wrong, himself a parent, who steered her towards nappies instead. “Initially it came from Sebastian and then I looked into it,” says Kahlfeldt, who found herself taken aback by some of the more garish, kitschy offerings on the market. “I was really fascinated. But I thought: container design. Why does this look like this? If you want something natural as a mother, you don’t want red polyester with, you know, angels printed across it. Maybe you want something that communicates that this has as much natural material as possible.” Sustainability was another important consideration. In the UK, an estimated 3bn disposable nappies are thrown away every year and although parts of the Global South are far less-reliant on them, single-use nappies

are used throughout the world. Given that even eco-friendly disposables, which often consist of no more than 60-80 per cent plantbased material, have been found to take 50 years to decompose, this is a big problem; the most plastic-heavy products, with their polyethylene waterproof back layers and polypropylene inner layers, could still be around in half a millennium. “The very first plastic nappy invented some time in the 50s is technically still rotting away in a landfill somewhere (and will continue to do so for another 430 years),” says Kahlfeldt. “And then think of all the babies in diapers that have been around since then! This very graspable image just stuck with me and made the whole problem so concrete.” What’s more, although numbers vary, even when you factor in the energy required for washing and drying them, reusables consistently come out on top: a 2023 report commissioned by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) found reusable nappies to have 25 per cent less global heating potential compared with single-use nappies. But it was another kind of global crisis that enabled Kahlfeldt to take her concept into the commercial arena. When the pandemic hit and she was furloughed from Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, the possibility of founding her own company arose. This she did with creative director and cultural entrepreneur Caspar Böhme, setting up Sumo in 2020. Sumo? “I didn’t really choose [the name],” says Kahlfeldt. “I guess because the corduroy-like material [of the nappy] looks a little bit like tatami [the material used to make traditional Japanese mats] and because of the tying [reminiscent of loincloth fastenings], a lot of parents were like, ‘Oh my God, my baby looks like a sumo [wrestler] wearing your diaper.’ And I thought it was a really catchy name. I am though very aware[…] of not wanting to appropriate any culture.” It’s for this reason, says Kahlfeldt, that the company

steers clear of using sumo references in its marketing. “We try not to draw too many parallels. We would never, you know, have a sumo ring.” Parental feedback has been a key part of the product’s development. Kahlfeldt has been keen to bring customers and potential collaborators with her on the journey, conscious of the fact that coming from an industrial design background makes the company something of an outlier in the baby-product market, where innovation is often driven by parents and carers identifying a need (Pampers itself proudly trumpets Viktor Mills’s development of the disposable nappy for his grandson in 1956 as its origin story). The Sumo website talks of its mission to develop products and services that elevate daily rituals and support the environment. “If you are a scientist, cloth diaper coach, parent, child, student, researcher, content creator, professor, policy maker, journalist, midwife, investor, designer, shop owner, or simply an enthusiast and want to join our quest, we would love to hear from you!” it reads. It’s an approach that seems to be working: not only has the company expanded to a team of four and garnered several awards – including the Techtextil Innovation Award for work in collaboration with Kelheim Fibres, and a Red Dot Design Award – but in July 2022 a Kickstarter campaign raised more than €23,000. This was enough to help the firm produce its first batch of 1,000 nappies, a sample of which Kahlfeldt sent me to try with Amelie. The package arrived. Featuring one of Sumo’s Starter kits, it contained three mediumsized outer nappies with waterproof inner pouches, six absorbent inserts known as Ufos (apparently because that is what they look like), a roll of Dreamliner (a flushable insert meant to catch the “big business” produced by babies eating solid food), and Kahlfeldt had also thrown in an additional Schlepp bag that is designed to store soiled nappies before washing. Schlepp, I thought grimly. Sounds about right. 93

Still, there was no denying the beauty of the product. Beige with grey-green ties and edging (a colour that seems to have been supplanted by navy, brown and white in the company’s current offerings), the outer nappy was stylish and appealing – a world away from the gaudy, novelty-printed efforts Kahlfeldt encountered when she began her research. The outer shell’s zinc-treated blend of cotton and Lyocell – a textile made from bamboo or red birch used in place of the original SeaCell – felt beautifully soft and every bit as likely to reduce rashes and eczema as the marketing material promises. Meanwhile the waterproof pouch, made from a blend of Lyocell and Modal, gleamed like the inside of a shell. Even the thin waterproofing layer of polyurethane and the white plastic poppers at the hip creases – the product’s two non-sustainable elements – couldn’t spoil the nappy’s good looks. The Ufo inserts were reassuringly sober too. Appearing more like heavy-duty sanitary towels than UFOs, they consisted of two linked beige pads lined with pure Lyocell, which Sumo claims can absorb moisture 50 times more effectively than cotton. Inside, layers of Galaxy and Bramante – trilobal and hollow-fibre cellulose fleeces developed with Kelheim Fibres and the Sächsische Textilforschungsinstitut – promised impressive wicking, absorption and retention. The idea that you might be able to reuse the outer nappies two or three times between washes and simply change the inserts seemed ingenious, and I was relieved that the accompanying booklet and single-page insert of dos and don’ts looked easy to follow. “It is such a difficult task [to write instructions],” says Kahlfeldt. “On the one hand, I want to inform customers. But on the other hand, I want to create a product that’ll be like an Apple product, right? You open it and kind of intuitively know what you have to do.[…] I always find it very tricky to know what is too much information, almost a burden.” And you do need to read the instructions because it turns out that the Sumo can’t be unboxed and used straight away. The outer nappy and inserts must all be prewashed three to five times. 94

Three to five times!? It’s because of activating the cellulose in the absorbent core and removing the resins on the outer fabric, which would otherwise cause liquid to pearl and run off, Kahlfeldt explains in response to my incredulous email. One potential hack would be to soak the nappies overnight and then do one wash. This should ensure that the inserts are fully absorbent for the first use. Sumo has looked into prewashing the inserts as part of the production process at their manufacturer in Serbia, but the cost of this would make the retail price prohibitive. It was also for this reason that Sumo abandoned SeaCell, the algae-based fabric that was the original impetus for the project. “We are always on the lookout for sustainable algaebased fibres and fabrics with interesting properties,” says Kahlfeldt. “I do however have a much better understanding now of what parents expect in terms of performance and price point of diapers and baby hygiene products as a whole. I would say there is still much work to be done in the industry before we can offer a diaper made from algae that people can afford, or are willing to pay for.” And the nappies are not exactly cheap now. The Starter Kit Kahlfeldt sent me retails at £168. Starter being the operative word, because, as any aficionado of the changing table knows, six nappies won’t get you far with a baby. My husband Steve and I are both veterans of the 10-poo change and, my friends, we are not alone. Assuming zero leakage, you would need at least double the number of inserts to be confident of getting through the day with a baby younger than a year. (Nighttime is a whole other question, requiring multiple inserts and layers; Sumo is currently developing a night nappy, but it is common for parents to use different brands during the hours of sleep.) And, when you consider the time needed for washing and drying, the numbers really start to rocket. Even with the inserts divided into linked pairs, it took 24 hours for them to dry on an indoor airer on a rainy day – for those living without access to outside drying space or with poor ventilation, this could prove

particularly challenging (Sumo nappies can’t be tumble-dried as the heat might compromise the material). The All-In Kit that the company offers for £897 (reduced to £605 at the time of writing) comprises 12 outer nappies and 25 inserts, which would probably be just about enough to manage. Crucially, though, it only includes one Schlepp bag, meaning that you would need to purchase at least one more plus a wet bag for travelling, or else invest in a storage pail or two on top. Plus the nighttime nappies. And the energy costs for laundering. Given that the UK government’s MoneyHelper service puts the average overall cost of using own-brand disposables at £1,875 per child, Sumo may not save users much money in the long-run. The kits can be reused on younger siblings, of course, and selling nappies on after potty training offers the option to recoup some of the cost, but the initial outlay will prove too much for many. To be fair to Sumo, it is not alone in this. Although its prices sit at the premium end of the market, reusable nappies are notorious for requiring a considerable upfront investment (MoneyHelper estimates an average of £300). In an effort to circumvent this barrier to entry, certain towns in Germany offer grants to help families afford the initial outlay, while in the UK some local authorities run reusable-nappy incentive schemes featuring vouchers and free tester kits. There are also nappy libraries, through which prospective users can lease different models in order to trial them ahead of purchase – a prudent move if you consider that, in Germany at least, 11 per cent of families try reusable nappies but only 7 per cent stick with them. So how did we get on? Well, the nappies leaked. Not always and not, crucially, on the occasions when we had a code brown, but probably about half the times we tried them, making it impossible to reuse the outer diaper on more than a handful of occasions and also necessitating the additional washing of several mats and changes of clothes. By mid-afternoon on the first trial day, we had exhausted our supply of outer nappies. The problem was the fit. Although Amelie is well within the 4-11kg

weight range suggested for the medium Sumo, and although we had the nappy on the smallest setting and did our best to tuck the edges into the skin folds as the instructions state, the leg holes weren’t as snug as they needed to be to keep the moisture in. This, says Kahlfeldt, is feedback she hears regularly. The Sumo team is working to address this with its next prototype. However, the problem may not be purely a design issue: in the world of reusable nappies, it’s never a case of one size fits all. The variables are so fiendish that there are even tools, such as the questionnaire at thenappylady.co.uk, designed to help prospective users identify the products likely to suit them best, according to their child’s build and family’s lifestyle. You also have to factor in issues such as whether parents are devotees of Clean Cloth Nappies (which promotes particular sanitisation methods) or planning to practise elimination communication – the art of reading your baby’s signals that it is about to excrete and putting them on the potty from as near to birth as possible, a method that may sound daunting to many in the Global North but is common in other less industrialised cultures. So it’s conceivable that even with substantial reworking, the Sumo may never fit Amelie perfectly. She may be more of a Charlie Banana girl or a bumGenius or a wearer of Little Lovebum. Sumo, you see, does not have the monopoly on unusual names. What surprised me, though, was that the leaks bothered me far less than I expected. This was in part due to the Schlepp bag, which, far from being hard work, proved a revelation. Lined with the same blend of Lyocell and Modal as the Sumo nappy’s waterproof pouch, it is designed to store soiled diapers for up to three days and then be chucked wholesale into the washing machine to emerge pristine along with its contents after a single prewash and wash. This it duly did, making the business of handling accidents pretty effortless. What’s more, when I wasn’t able to use Sumo, I found that I was far more conscious of how many changes I was doing and the number of nappies that I was throwing away. 95

Kahlfeldt says that this kind of increased mindfulness is a common result of engaging with reusables for parents and babies alike. Indeed, when it comes to children, a greater awareness of being wet (rather than the oblivion that can often follow from using disposables, with their chemically aided wicking that keeps moisture from the skin) can have the surprising bonus of making potty training easier and earlier. My limited survey of friends who had used cloth nappies bore this out, with several reporting that their children had spontaneously opted to start using the potty at relatively young ages. Given that she’s not yet sitting up, it would have been a bit much to expect Amelie to wean herself off nappies by the time I had to write this article. Still, not jettisoning a soiled nappy at every change was very satisfying – so much so that I have found myself continuing to use Sumo when we have a stretch of time at home. Although this current iteration and fit would not be sufficiently reliable for us to consider using it out and about, it is reliable enough and the consequences of it failing are negligible enough to warrant keeping it in the mix. This kind of approach, says Kahlfeldt, is becoming increasingly common. In recognition of this, Sumo even offers a Part-time Kit for £237, aimed at families keen to mix and match. Indeed, with many health-professionals recommending that reusables only be used once the umbilical stump has detached five days or so after birth, and NHS advice being that soiled diapers should be discarded outside the home for a week after babies receive the live rotavirus vaccine at eight and twelve weeks, it is technically impossible for anyone keen to adhere to medical guidelines to use washable nappies exclusively. “The reality is that most parents use a hybrid model,” says Kahlfeldt. “I don’t know a single cloth diaper mother

who doesn’t have a pair of disposables in her handbag.” Because, although nappy-changing is a shared enterprise chez Amelie, it is still mothers doing the majority of nappy changes and associated chores. A 2020 study by the Resolution Foundation found that while men in the UK put in an average of 16 hours a week of unpaid domestic labour, women clock up 29 hours in the same period. As a result, any products that increase the workload associated with childrearing or tie the primary carer more closely to the home inevitably risk setting back gender equality. But if Sumo is successful in helping to normalise a hybrid approach, with parents opting for the greener option when circumstances allow and then bringing out disposables when logistically necessary, it’s conceivable that more people might at least try them. Such perceived flexibility would also reduce the initial expense, opening up reusables to lower-income households. And while this wouldn’t eliminate the issue of single-use nappies mouldering in landfill for centuries to come, it might begin to reduce the 5,000 soiled disposables that each UK baby is estimated to generate. That, surely, is good design in the broadest sense. It has certainly shifted the dial on our thinking. Preparing to go on a family holiday last week, I found myself eschewing the disposable swim nappies that I would normally purchase in favour of a reusable pair. “One plastic bottle is saved from landfill with each TotsBots Swim Pant,” reads the product’s label. A drop in the ocean in the face of the 10,000 or so disposable nappies that may prove to be my longest-standing legacy, but maybe that’s how lasting change starts. Ann Morgan is an author, editor and blogger, whose latest novel, Crossing Over, is out now.