Disegno #36

The Journal of Design #36 Autumn 2023

This issue includes: Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku deconstructing a Tokyo house; Hansgrohe and Lovehoney’s entry into bathroom pleasure; Philipp von Lintel’s industrial design for Ableton’s Push 3; a sugared memory courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah; the environmental legacy of the Apple iPhone; Studio Saar’s community centre for Udaipur; online sizegivers with Corinne Quin; humanitarian relief in Brda Foundation’s windows for Ukraine; and Formafantasma’s human-ovine research.

UK £17

ACX Antonio Citterio, 2023



Find an authorized dealer near you at CARLHANSEN.COM

Flagship Store, London 48A Pimlico Rd, London SW1W 8LP

2

PK1 Chair

Poul Kjærholm

NATURAL SIMPLICITY

With a modern idiom and refined combination of materials, the PK1 Chair was designed by Danish architect Poul Kjærholm in 1955 as his first ever chair design. Carl Hansen & Søn has now revitalized the lightweight and stackable chair with a durable, FSCTM-certificeret paper cord weave, adding softness to the stringent steel frame.

FSC-C135991

Introduction

1955

BOCCI.COM

The Scourge of Perfection Words Oli Stratford

This summer I bought a bike, reasoning that urban mobility would be an impressive string to add to my bow. “Well then, here’s a man who can cover a mile in approximately 4.4 minutes in moderate traffic,” I imagined my peers and colleagues thinking to themselves, their minds absolutely fucking blown.

There was, however, an issue. On the first day of riding the bike, I got a mark on the paintwork – a white scuff from where the lock had rubbed against the blue frame.

It was barely noticeable and entirely cosmetic, with no impact whatsoever on those sweet 4.4-minute miles. It meant, I immediately realised, that the bike was ruined for all eternity.

Like many people, I am deeply attracted to perfection in products. I like things box-fresh and pristine, ripe with the sense that they’re going to transform my life. The moment the slightest mark appears to disgrace this idea, the illusion of transformation is lost. The product may remain fully operational – no more but no less than it ever was – but my psychological state has changed.

Suddenly I’m stuck with an expensive hunk of plastic or metal tat, its illusory promise of a better me scuffed out of existence.

Introduction

We all know how this trick works. Consumer culture pushes us towards the new, achieving its aims through a sleight of hand that blurs together the pristine, the perfect and the transformative. A perfect product is a new one; a new product can be life changing. It’s nonsense, but seductive nevertheless. It’s also a hard cycle to break out of. But fear not, because I’m here with a tip.

As Cat Stevens once nearly sang, the first scuff is the deepest. An object’s initial deviation from perfection – that first ding, dent or scratch – is the hardest to bear.

But once the illusion has shattered, any further damage is besides the point. In fact, the more marks that appear, the better things feel. Suddenly the object is no longer a fallen angel, but rather a time-battered faithful friend – a treasured companion whose form bears the slings and arrows of affectionate use.

With this in mind, I’ve set about scuffing up my bike deliberately: clattering it into bike stands, shoving it into a cramped shed at the end of the day, and willingly allowing the scars of regular riding to accumulate across its frame. In so doing, I’ve irreversibly damaged the drivechain and it can no longer make the 4.4-minute mile.

The entire venture has been a disaster.

6

Contents 5

Introduction The Scourge of Perfection

8

Contents

10

Contributors

12

Masthead The people behind Disegno

14

Material As Big as A… The curious phenomenon of online sizegivers

24

Opinion Learning From Failure Adam Nathaniel Furman shines a light on intellectual property theft and cinematic vindication

25

Distribution The Necessity of Uncertainty Windows, Ukraine and architectural reuse

33

Objects in Review Never Static A game of bilboquet with Philippe Malouin

34

Feedback Control The environmental legacy of Apple’s iPhone

48

Opinion Seen on Screen Truth through furniture in Rye Lane

49

Construction Home, Work and Where Else?

Studio Saar crafts a climatesensitive community space for Udaipur

59

Objects in Review Less Volume, More Meaning A slower than instant professional Polaroid

60

Opinion The Parthenon Rhymes with Cinderella Castle Greek classicism and the House of Mouse

61

Context Navigating Friction Yassine Ben Abdallah on letting objects die

71

Objects in Review Glassware is Like Onions Shrek-green glassware from Anna Jewsbury

72

Collaboration Regional Modernisms, Tropical Skins The forgotten art of Nigeria’s modernist architecture

84

85

Objects in Review Motley Leftover fabulousness in the bags of Ayzit Bostan Research Following Whom?

Formafantasma removes the wool from your eyes

8

96

Objects in Review Notes of Mustard Luring back lapsed players with a coat of yellow

97

Philosophy Radically Unfinished Deconstruct, reconstruct, repeat: a new model for Tokyo’s housing

106 Objects in Review Lessons in a Flash(light) Ambessa and Pentagram’s torch for displaced children 107

Economies Keep it Clean Hansgrohe, Lovehoney, and the business case for pleasure

115

Development The Portable Orchestra Ableton pushes the industrial design of musical instruments

124

Objects in Review Lemon Aid Alexandra Hakim’s slice of relief for Lebanon

125

Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

128

End Note No Randomness Why the chocolate bar comes in equal pieces

DISCOVER SAIL, SLIDING PANELS. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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

Contributors Olorunfemi Adewuyi works at the intersection of art and design, investigating waste, post-colonial architecture, and, sometimes, objects. p. 72

Fabian Frinzel is disappointed by the German summer weather; he still hasn’t been swimming in Lake Starnberg. p. 33, 59, 71, 84, 96, 106 and 124

Amal Alhaag lives, collaborates and hustles in Amsterdam. p. 61

Adam Nathaniel Furman is only truly comfortable around canines. p. 24

Selma Alihodžić is tinkering with a linear narration of non-linear events. p. 97

Eshwarya Grover is curating her fall playlist. p. 49

Ọlájídé Aye´̣ni is a media artist telling stories about the built environment and its relationship with people. p. 72

Jonas Holthaus lives in Berlin, loves to photograph people, and is a mediocre bass player. p. 115

Claudia Chanhoi not only draws vaginas and penises professionally, but also made history as the first artist to paint a vibrator and vagina on a public mural in Hong Kong. p. 107

George Isleden sadly does not photograph well. p. 59 Marianna Janowicz proclaims the renaissance of the PVC window. p. 25 Oscar Lhermitte is obsessed with the relationship we have with objects. p. 128

10

Nathan Ma is filling up his eBay basket, again. p. 115 Tetsuo Mukai enjoys sharing his humble opinions, and he’s got a tonne of them. p. 60 Corinne Quin is fascinated by how people arrange things. p. 14 Rupal Rathore is currently on the minimalist lifestyle challenge, Project 333. p. 49 Leonhard Rothmoser is an artist who loves design a designer who loves art. p. 24, 48 and 60 Bachir Tayachi is proud to be a Tunisian culture enthusiast. p. 61

The Journal of Design #36 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

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

Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Distribution and stockist enquiries MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk

Creative assistant Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com

Subeditor Paul Fleckney

Cover The cover shows a still from Tactile afferents, a film by artist Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma, exhibited as part of Oltre Terra at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet. The film explores touch, gesture and proximity as modes of communication between humans and sheep, positioning these interactions as “a way of getting closer to the unknown”.

Thanks Many thanks to Rimadesio for hosting us for the launch of Design Reviewed #2; Marcus and Johanna Agerman Ross for rejigging our office; Naomi Evans, Tom O’Hanlon and Matt Wells for arranging a trip to Daisy; Convene for kindly supporting The Crit; Simen Joachim Helsvig from Nasjonalmuseet for getting us out to Oslo; Studio Saar for covering travel; and Rienke Otten, Delany Boutkan and Joyce Hanssen for transporting a wayward mic back to London via Airbnb.

Contributors Olorunfemi Adewuyi, Amal Alhaag, Selma Alihodžić, Ọlájídé Aye´̣ni, India Block, Claudia Chanhoi, Lara Chapman, Fabian Frinzel, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Eshwarya Grover, Evi Hall, Jonas Holthaus, George Isleden, Marianna Janowicz, Oscar Lhermitte, Nathan Ma, Tetsuo Mukai, Corinne Quin, Rupal Rathore, Leonhard Rothmoser, Oli Stratford and Bachir Tayachi.

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

by Fedrigoni.

Park Communications is a carbonneutral company, with this issue of Disegno printed on FSC certified paper, using 100 per cent offshorewind electricity sourced from UK wind, and vegetable oil-based inks.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Disegno #36 possible – not least to Julius the picnic dog, who was courteous to and inquisitive about the Disegno team on their summer day out, all while his owners performed tantric yoga behind us.

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.

12

Contact us Studio 4 The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London, N1 5SF disegnojournal.com Design Reviewed The team behind Disegno also produce a companion publication, Design Reviewed, which focuses on users’ engagement with design’s cultural, political and social entanglements.

The third issue will be released in December 2023; issues one and two are already on shelves.

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

From ambition to action The six levers designers can use to unlock the potential of circular design

Design is a force for change.

It has the power to reshape our global economy.

Explore tangible actions that will enable designers in your organisation to put design theory into practice.

ellenmacarthurfoundation.org #circulareconomy

As Big As A….

Words Corinne Quin

In 2016, a young woman holds a piece of A4 paper up to her belly. She has an “A4 waist”, which is trending on Chinese social media site Weibo. Two years later, one of my students tells me that the phenomenon has been copied by hundreds of women. As we discuss unhealthy beauty standards, we think, “An A4 waist is skinny, but precisely how skinny? Is it size zero, XXS or 24 inches?”

A4 paper and Yuan Shanshan’s waist (2016).

Image via Weibo.

14

As many designers will know, A4 is precisely 210mmwide by 297mm-high, and is the most commonly used paper size in the world (except in North America and parts of Central and South America). It even carries its own international standard (ISO 216). However, it belongs in the world of printed matter, documents and letters – not of bodies or clothing sizes, where sizing is more commonly a numerical measure of circumference.

By contrast, the A4 waist is not about digits – it’s about image. In particular, it’s about the front-on flat silhouette, an angle that leaves plenty of room for cheating perspective. But the A4 waist inventively misuses the standard as a visual measure, because it can be found everywhere and understood at a glance online.

A couple of months later, browsing eBay, I eye up a lovely little turned wood vase. In the image it’s paired with a can of Coke. The description says that the Coke can is for “scale purposes ONLY, and not included in the sale”. There is something quite sweet and comical about this odd couple, with the Coke can boldly standing in to vouch for the height of its tiny companion. It’s there to avoid misunderstanding, and to ground the image amid the confusion of online space. After all, digital images are sort of elastic. If I can stretch, zoom and shrink an image with my fingertips, it feels like anything has the potential to be any size.

I begin to wonder: what other objects are being used in this way, and who is correlating these images?

As I search the internet for more examples, I realise how much I like looking for things, and how a preinternet adolescence spent scouring charity shops has led me here – to an endless digital pool of things to be screenshotted, liked, watched and hearted online. It’s addictive. And it’s not just Coke cans and A4 paper that I find. People are using coins, golf balls, pencils, hair grips, bottle caps, matchsticks and lighters – everyday objects that don’t change their standard size over time. I find communities reporting the depths of potholes using Coke cans to measure them. I find an office worker measuring the height of her pile of paperwork with a pencil. I find someone scaling their AK-47 with a ping-pong ball on a Reddit gun discussion thread.

Hitting what seems to be the jackpot, I discover a category on Wikimedia Commons called “Images with objects to indicate scale”. It’s not the catchiest of names, but it contains many examples of what I’m looking for, classified alphabetically from AA batteries to shoes.

The images range from the mundane to the fantastic,

including an evocative picture of a cigarette being used to scale a rare Japanese berry branch, by user Namazu-tron, which I save to my archive. Describing my growing collection to a friend at work, we come up with a name – sizegiver.

Over the next year, I notice just how much of everyday life is now navigated through images. From online grocery shopping, lockdown home-schooling, social platforms, and doing everyday work and business, we consume thousands of images daily.

As photographers, however amateur, we constantly create and post images to social networks and forums, so it’s hardly surprising that people are making new kinds of images, trying to give a sense of reality and truth to an image by adding a tangible everyday object – a sizegiver. In his 2003 book Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, Leonard Koren explains that an arrangement of objects is a visual language that communicates meaning.

“Communication systems,” he says, “like natural languages, grow and develop through perpetual use and experimentation. In the process, the communication possibilities are extended.”

Twenty years later, this context of perpetual use and experimentation has deepened. Visual communication feels like our primary mode of interaction. From my collection, I see that sizegiving is becoming an informal practice without particular rules, existing simply to explain something practical – sizegivers often replace the metric/imperial systems of measurement (rulers and tape measures) for speed of understanding. But there is also artistry and creativity in some of the photographs that I find. For example, eBay sellers develop inventive ways to capture the best image of their wares from atop their garage or kitchen table. I notice different stylistic choices through their use of angles, choice of sizegiver, and scale of object – sometimes bizarre, sometimes striking and poetic.

A tennis ball in the middle of a plate (for scale, not for dinner); a Rubik’s Cube beside a white leather handbag; a riding crop lying on a domestic carpet, set alongside a US $1 bill. The practice of object arrangement and visual description is unique to each person.

I talk with some of these people on online message boards to understand more about how and why they do this. Gardener Leo Smit uses a golf ball on a stick to measure the rare peonies he grows in his nursery

Material

Coin and dolls’ heads (2018).

Image via @thehauntedlamp, Instagram.

Coin and hair donation (2015).

Image via @eleniswong, Instagram.

Pen and emu egg (2015).

Image via Vaikoovery, Wikimedia Commons.

16

Pencil and sperm whale tooth (2019).

Image via Akrasia25, Wikimedia Commons.

Golf ball and ribbon reel (2023).

Image via at242, Reddit.

Material

Cigarette and Japanese silverberry (2008).

Image via Namazu-tron, Wikimedia Commons.

Coke can and porcelain tiger (2019).

Image via @vintiquesmidcentury, Instagram.

18

in Nova Scotia. Aptly, peonies begin as golf ball-sized buds, and bloom over a period of days into a dense explosion of petals. He’s been blogging about this process, as well as rare varieties of peonies, since the mid 90s. He tells me that the golf ball is not only for size, but also for white balance and exposure – if the dimples on the golf ball disappear, you can tell the photo is overexposed. We discuss the qualities of a golf ball, its shine, weight and texture, the fact that it is bright and visible against dark backdrops of foliage and earth. Later, I begin to see examples of it being used as an underwater sizegiver to scale coral and aquatic plants. The ball sinks, of course, and it reflects light in murky water. Leo sends me a link to a newly discovered shipwreck, photographed for the local news; its rusty anchor is pictured on the seabed with a golf ball for scale.

I begin to understand there are established methods of sizegiving within particular communities.

Pick hammers are generally used as sizegivers by geologists, being a tool that they carry with them.

Ed Fox (@foxult), an Instagram user, geologist and teacher in Utah, uses a Sharpie pen instead. His close-up images of rocks, cracks and minerals suit the scale of the Sharpie, which is a handy pocket sizegiver (he tells me he also uses it to correct grammar and spelling on handwritten signs that he sees out and about). This type of pocket object appears in other nature contexts too – a lighter is a common sizegiver for rare or giant mushrooms. It feels like a sizegiver is a key part of a good story; its mundanity proves just how amazing the natural phenomenon you discovered actually is.

I find sellers on Etsy and eBay selecting sizegivers for their aesthetic, as well as practical, qualities. Raflees Reclamation in Somerset sells vintage nauticalia and furniture, mainly as props for the film industry. Its co-owner Lee tells me that they use a Coke can as it’s “obviously world-recognised and gives an instant product size perspective”. Many of their items are vintage, so he thinks a modern, red Coke can gives the correct visual look. I notice that Coke red also calibrates the colour balance of the image, acting a bit like an element in a photographer’s colour chart. I ask Griet, who runs Etsy shop Galerie68, why she chooses a Duracell Plus 9V battery to model her collection of beautifully photographed 1960s Italian homewares.

She uses the battery for its universal dimensions, but also because it “does not take up too much space in a photo and therefore does not distract attention from

the object”. Batteries exist to collaborate with other objects, but they don’t fit into the objects that Griet sells. This creates a strange and beautiful relationship between the two. The graphic quality of the battery, juxtaposed with the ceramic, plastic and paint-lacquered surfaces of the objects in her shop, again calls to mind the beginnings of a narrative.

Everyday objects have material qualities that we don’t always consider beyond their function. A cork or bottle cap exist to keep liquid in containers, but could have second lives as sizegivers. In Arranging Things, Koren meditates on the sensorial qualities of an object within an arrangement. I start to consider everyday objects beyond their intended function and instead as part-time models and performers of their own physical characteristics. Just as museums, archaeologists or forensics experts use professional scale and colour charts to calibrate a photograph, could a combination of objects convey something similar, or beyond? What could be the potential of everyday things to vouch for texture, softness, temperature, sound, time or weight in an image? I remember the similes that I learned at school, where everyday things are used as points of comparison to enrich an image conjured up by a text: bold as brass, bright as a button, tough as nails. Maybe the sizegiver is a simile in visual form.

In design terms, the most successful sizegivers are the most common, the most famous, the most iconically everyday things that surround us. You could say that they indicate the material culture of our time. For some products, their “design classic” status has meant they have not changed – a Bic 4-colour pen (designed by Marcel Bich in 1969) is universally recognised. For others (not typically noticed as design objects), it is their standardised nature, or the process of manufacture that lets them be reliable sizegivers, such as a 26mm metal crown bottle cap (British Standard En 17177).

The more virtual the world becomes, the more I can trust objects: real, simple, everyday objects. They tell me what is real and true.

Or perhaps those truths exist temporarily? I’m looking through a Bruno Munari book, From Afar It Was An Island (1971), which plays with the scale of stones found on an Italian beach, and I discover an image and description of small pebbles scaled by a five-lire coin: So many stones all different: one very shiny black one, one dull white one,

Material

Battery and red pots (2023).

Image via Galerie68, Etsy.

20

Sharpie and vintage child’s sweater (2019).

Image via @mindseyevintage, Instagram.

Coke can and fishing buoy (2023).

Image via Raflees Reclamation, eBay.

Material

Golf ball and peony (year unknown).

Image via Leo Smit.

Tennis ball and Bavarian plate (2023).

Image via chris_wain, eBay.

Coke can and mooring rope (2022).

Image via Raflees Reclamation, eBay.

22

one yellow as a pumpkin, one red as a tiny cherry, one is chocolate-coloured, one black with a white stripe, one green with spots in a different green, one grey and black, one gleams as if it contained fragments of glass; so many little stones no larger than a five lire coin.

The coin has a beautiful image of a whale on it, but is now obsolete – replaced by the Euro in 2002.

I have no idea what size it is until I buy one on eBay and it arrives in the post. It is the same size as a British 1p, slightly smaller than a European or American 5¢, and unusually lightweight. I try to remember the last time I paid for anything with coins, but can’t. As we move to a cashless society, perhaps we are living through an intermediate period where the only function of a penny is to be a sizegiver, even if it can only function as long as people have living memories of it.

Would a CD still be recognised by gen Z? Many of the sizegivers I’ve found seem to be threatened by obsolescence in one way or another: pencils and paper replaced by laptops; batteries replaced by charging leads; cigarettes, matchsticks, matchboxes and lighters replaced by vapes. Technology is changing fast. Smartphones, cameras and other devices can’t be sizegivers because they update and re-edition faster than they can become familiar. Which everyday objects will become relics of the past, and which will be sizegivers in the future, I wonder? Which timeless, common things will connect my generation with the everyday reality of the next? What objects will live in our pockets in 30 years time? E N D

Hair grip and mug (2019).

Image via Head Ceramics, Etsy.

Rubik’s Cube and bag (2023).

Image via private seller, Depop.

Material

Words Adam Nathaniel Furman Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Adam Nathaniel Furman launched the Glowbules lighting collection in 2021 with Curiousa. But when pictures of the made-to-order lamps started turning up all over TikTok and Instagram, it became clear they had copycats on their hands.

Slow design is something I’m passionate about, but few are willing to pay for it.

And while designers are often expected to court publicity, sometimes there’s a sting in the tail.

I met Curiousa founder Esther Patterson through Corinne Julius, who curates Future Heritage at Decorex, and who had invited us to create pieces of contemporary craft together. Curiousa is a hand-blown glass lighting manufacturer in England’s Peak District, working with regional artists. Everything is handmade to order – precisely the kind of business model I like to be involved with.

We spent a year developing the Glowbules collection, sending samples back and forth. There were lots of FedEx packages, lots of FaceTimes with glassblowers talking about material

tolerances, and a proper photoshoot.

It was a big investment from both sides.

Glowbules were a real hit at Decorex 2021 – people were fascinated – and then everything went quiet. Probably because they’re price on application and very much aimed at the luxury market. When I started to see photos of Glowbules on social media, I just thought it was nice that Curiousa was getting sales. I never considered any other possibility. Then I started to get messages from people asking, “Have you been sending your lights from China?”

A factory had copied the design and farmed it out to retail outlets. They called them Candy Lights, used all our photos, and sold them at a tenth of the price. They were everywhere, but they weren’t ours. I realised that I have absolutely no recourse to protecting my IP whatsoever.

It was a horrifying shock. When I spoke to Curiousa, it turned out we had sold only a handful of Glowbules. It was so sad. Clearly the lights – if we had managed to reach the right audience – could have done well because they were demonstrably popular. Since these fakes have proliferated, Curiousa has received

24

more interest, although many potential customers are put off by the price. But we couldn’t make them with local glass artists for anything less.

It’s not all been bad news for the Glowbules, however. Last year a movie studio got in touch about featuring the lights in a film. Curiousa signed an NDA, but I’m 100 per cent sure that those are the Glowbules you can spot in the background of a certain pink-themed summer blockbuster.

We can’t publicise that it’s our lights in the film – which goes to show that attention and popularity don’t necessarily create a foundation for one’s career, or income. I’ve had my work featured on the front page of the design supplement of The New York Times, only to get zero client interest and then see the design ripped off elsewhere. So I would warn young designers starting out that there’s very little correlation between public chatter and a sustainable workflow. Meanwhile, I’m determined to stick with designing for brands who care about their supply lines and the people making their products.

As told to India Block.

The Necessity of Uncertainty Words Marianna Janowicz

12 x

The house I grew up in was built by my father, using leftover materials from various projects he supervised at his work as a site manager. I still remember the light orange bricks, the cold, smooth composite stone window sills, and the dark green roof tiles. They were not precious materials – they were sourced, after all, in transformationera Poland, where goods and materials were hard to find – but they are valuable in my memory, evoking a reminiscence of the first home I remember. Almost 30 years later, my father shows me around a new house he is building for himself. In the basement he has used cheap, old, laminate doors reclaimed from an office he owned at least 15 years ago. In his drive to reuse building components, he is not motivated by the climate crisis, it is simply the frugality that he learned during years of chronic supply chain issues and empty shop shelves. That sensibility has stuck with him – he does not like waste.

Distribution

London

The map shown throughout the pages that follow was created for Poetics of Necessity and shows the route through which the windows collected by Brda reach Ukraine. Basel is included to show the work of Re-Win, a similar project in Switzerland with which Brda has collaborated.

Basel

26

All images courtesy of Brda Foundation; illustrations courtesy of Nicola Cholewa, JKL and Widoki.

There are various different routes to reuse, many of which originate out of particular geographical and sociopolitical contexts. “After decades of chasing the west, we can turn around and see that as a community we have a potential that we hadn’t necessarily previously noticed, one different from conservative dreams,” says Michał Sikorski, one of the curators of Poetics of Necessity, the Polish pavilion at the 2023 London Design Biennale. Sikorski is speaking as part of an interview published in the exhibition’s catalogue and, as I research this piece, I wonder if the sense of resourcefulness that my father exhibits might be part of this potential that Sikorski describes.

Poetics of Necessity is co-curated by Sikorski from TŁO architects, alongside Zofia Jaworowska and Petro Vladimirov from Brda (pronounced br-daa) Foundation.

Upon entry to the pavilion, hosted at Somerset House, the visitor is presented with reclaimed, white-framed PVC windows stacked vertically on standard wooden pallets. The windows are secured with straps and look like they have been prepared for transport. On each pane there is a sticker, with size, specification, name and location of donor – a material passport that is also an expression of solidarity. Zain from Stratford, Steve from Essex and Holly from Wembley, among others, have donated these windows, which will subsequently be shipped to Ukraine to help with rebuilding efforts precipitated by the full-scale Russian invasion. It is, Vladimirov notes, essentially “the most expensive storage unit in London”. Also in the room is a sofa whose form references Maarten Van Severen’s Blue Bench daybed, designed in 1997 for luxury brand Edra.

Here, rather than the original’s smooth polyurethane, the piece is made of blue sheets of foam insulation, held together with oversized cable ties. To create the piece, its constituent standard-sized sheets have been cut in half but otherwise kept intact, such that the insulation can still be used for its original purpose after the exhibition ends. On one side of the sofa sits a 1:1 mock-up of a slanted window, an installation method by which a pane can be installed in an opening for which its size is ill-fitted. Exhibition catalogues are stacked on the wide window sill and, on the other side of the sofa, a film is being displayed, framed by curtains made using construction site tarpaulin hung on a scaffolding pole. The installation, curated as part of the biennale’s theme of “Remapping Collaborations”, set by the Netherlands’s Het Nieuwe Instituut, won the London Design Biennale medal, which was awarded

to the most outstanding overall contribution to the biennale.

Poetics of Necessity stems from a social action in support of Ukraine initiated by Brda shortly after the Russian invasion in February 2022. In spring of that year, Jaworowska, an activist and the founder of Brda, had just emerged from an intensive period of coordinating Grupa Zasoby (Resources Group), a grassroots organisation that rehoused more than 5,500 Ukrainian people in Warsaw. Once the flow of people into the Polish capital had slowed, and all of the rooms and flats that the team could offer ran out, she founded Brda in summer 2022 as a longerterm project to “enhance the quality and increase the accessibility of safe, sustainable and dignified housing”. In July 2023, the Okno (or Window) project crystallised – an initiative devised to collect windows and ship them to Ukraine, to replace glazing shattered during Russian attacks.

Jaworowska developed the idea for Brda following conversations with Ukrainian curator and urban designer Petro Vladimirov and Sikorski, an architect. This all happened following Sikorski’s move in with Jaworowska, which then freed up his flat for resettled Ukrainians.

Vladimirov moved into the vacant apartment (although he had been studying and living in Poland for a while at that point) and, since he also was interested in organising aid, the three began sharing ideas. “Housing has always interested me as an expression of universal human needs – the need for home, security, shelter and belonging,” Jaworowska explains. Even before starting Grupa Zasoby, she had helped initiate Refugees Welcome Polska, the Polish wing of the international Refugees Welcome initiative – a project started with friends and other activists to organise accommodation for Syrian civil war refugees. She quotes her encounters with people’s experiences of homelessness and resettlement as her personal drivers for engagement with the topic of the home. As such, Brda is expressly focused on the built environment, with its broader goal including the improvement of housing in both Poland and Ukraine – a mission shaped partly in response to the Russian war, but also in relation to Brda’s home country, where housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in big cities. This ethos is reflected in the name: a brda is a common type of A-frame timber house, usually used for holiday stays. In Poland, it holds a special place in the hearts of many who spent their summers in these cabins as children. Its construction

Distribution

Warsaw

28

is simple and efficient, and given that the design is not patented, it has been widely replicated – an accessible and recognisable yet humble piece of design, epitomising ideas that stand at the core of Brda’s mission.

“At the beginning, we wanted to ship everything,” says Vladimirov, referring to the multiple building materials that the group had originally considered sending to Ukraine. After speaking to Vladimirov’s friends who were still in Ukraine, however, as well as local organisations rebuilding homes and towns, Brda decided to focus on windows. Glass is first to go in the event of an explosion and, if windows are old or poor quality, even distant blasts can shatter them, leaving the inhabitants exposed to the elements and with no means of locking up and securing their homes.

Temporary solutions, such as cling film or chipboard, have poor thermal qualities and do not allow proper access to daylight and ventilation. It quickly became apparent that reused PVC windows with frames, ones that can open or tilt, were the architectural element most needed by Brda’s Ukrainian partners. They were also low-cost, easy to source, and the project provided a meaningful way to reuse building components that might otherwise end up in landfill.

This is where the Okno project fits into broader narratives around the environmental impact of architecture and construction, and the untapped potential of material reuse. Where it differs, however, is in its interest in cheap, commonplace materials – such as PVC – which are not normally seen as sustainable choices. Most material salvage projects focus on noble and natural materials including stone or wood, but PVC windows are long-lasting and often discarded during demolition of buildings, even in the case of those built as recently as the 1990s. In her 2022 book Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse, architect and researcher Ruth Lang writes about the short lifespan of buildings, with warranties that anticipate 30 years of use, despite the actual durability of materials potentially lasting for 50, 100 years or longer. “Yet fashion and changing patterns of use curtail this lifespan,” she explains, “which sometimes barely stretches to a decade, at huge environmental and economic cost.”

When I first meet Jaworowska at the press launch of the biennale, it seems her mind is already set on the next project and further goals. “We don’t want to do too many exhibitions; we prefer to focus on the aid

projects,” she tells me. She is impatient and driven – the traits of an effective activist – and it is clear that Jaworowska and her team know how to utilise this sense of urgency. On the foundation’s social media channels, I often see calls for volunteers asking people to spend the afternoon packaging and loading windows onto trucks in their Warsaw storage yard. They call it “window crossfit” or “window bikram”. Jaworowska, Vladimirov and Adam Przywara – another member of Brda and an architectural historian – are hands-on in the early stages of the project, driving around Poland, collecting and loading windows. For the logistics to come together, they work with the support of Ukrainian partners such as Unity and Strength in Kharkiv, Our People in Kherson, and Vdoma and District #1 Foundation in Kyiv. These organisations receive and distribute windows shipped by Brda. As to what happens next, we don’t exactly know.

The mode of operation pursued by Brda requires the relinquishing of control, something architects and designers infamously like to keep for themselves. Within this kind of initiative, things happen fast – windows are in huge demand in Ukraine and need to find a way to their new homes quickly. As Jaworowska explains: “If you are an NGO and you are gifting something, it has to be with no strings or expectations attached.” Brda has, however, developed a set of tools to help those who receive their windows fit them. Firstly, the windows come with a description sticker (similar to the one used at the biennale) that includes dimensions, type

“We don’t want to do too many exhibitions; we prefer to focus on the aid projects.”

—Zofia Jaworowska

and donor name. A list cataloguing these descriptions usually accompanies every shipment to support the organisation’s Ukrainian partners in their distribution efforts. The challenge with using reclaimed windows as elements with which to repair existing buildings is that the glazing may not necessarily fit the opening – which is where the catalogue comes in.

Developed during workshops with students at DoFA architecture festival in Poland’s Lower Silesia region, the

Distribution

collaborative Okno catalogue contains multiple inventive methods and instructions for installing ill-fitting windows. The suggested configurations address various potential issues – window too high, opening too short; wall section is damaged; window too small, opening too large – in addition to hybrid applications such as installing an assemblage of smaller windows to fill in a large gap. The instructions feature IKEA-style detailed diagrams, and the catalogue is well designed and laid out. The occasional appearance of a crumbling, partially demolished wall is a stark reminder of the context in which the windows might be used. The instructions are devised to be simple and accessible, featuring a preference for drawings over text, and span the chasm between architectural students in Poland and Ukrainians attempting to repair their homes with all the limitations of being in a warzone. Most proposals, for example, are developed for people installing windows from the inside of a building, which deals with the challenge of repairing upper-floor flats in apartment buildings without access to scaffolding. The instructions also specify the number of people required (usually two) as well as the materials and tools needed. Nonspecialist items such as hammers, screwdrivers and handsaws are given priority, and the materials specified are either generic (a window sill) or accessible (a timber board, a reclaimed car vent grille).

The Okno project considers reused PVC window seriously and multidimensionally. For instance, the team has received a large number of idiosyncratic, magenta-pink windows from the demolition of Atrium, a 1990s postmodern office building in Warsaw, some of which have been used to repair schools and other buildings in Ukraine. But Sikorski has also explored proposing such components for his practice’s high-end residential projects in Poland. These ideas are being

ends and be put to use in Poland. Here, increasingly stringent rules around insulation would mean that the windows from the 1990s no longer comply with building regulations. As such, the architect has proposed a bespoke design with two layers of fenestration, in which a secondary internal window would ensure the required standard is met. This is to say that the materials sent to Ukraine to help with the humanitarian effort are not considered by Brda as being second-rate, spare or lower quality. While the war in Ukraine has provided an impetus to act, the long-term vision of material reuse is a foundation of the Okno project. Sikorski’s practice, TŁO, treats reuse as a necessity, but also a creative opportunity. It is a departure from a rigid, visionary practice, and instead embraces the role of an architect as being akin to a DJ – “sampling different elements and putting them together,” as Sikorski puts it.

In Building for Change, Lang writes about the benefits of reusing building materials over simply recycling them. “[The] recycling of materials into new formats requires more energy for transportation and processing,” she says. “The often inferior quality of the material produced, known as ‘down cycling,’ fails to capitalise on the qualities of the original source material[…].” To an untrained eye, a PVC window is not the most sustainable material choice. But the most sustainable building and, by extension, building component, is one that already exists. Shipping fully functioning, openable windows, and installing them in another building, is the best way of preserving both the energy and resources spent on producing the window in the first place. What both Brda and Lang emphasise, however, is that reuse does not have to be an unwelcome sacrifice for designers, but rather an exciting new way of working and a redefined aesthetic. As Sikorski explains in the London Design Biennale project catalogue: “‘Aesthetics’ is a more capacious term than a mere opinion that something is pretty or not; it is about a more in-depth meaning, woven from different values.”

Developing this deepened vision of the meaning and aesthetic of reuse is important for Brda. While documentation in the case of the Ukrainian rebuilding projects is often limited – Jaworowska explains that they cannot, for ethical reasons, ask the end users for photographs of the installed windows – the foundation places an emphasis on the way its broader work is presented and communicated. At the time of writing, it is developing its next project, titled Budo, which will

“‘Aesthetics’ is a more capacious term than a mere opinion that something is pretty or not.”

—Michał Sikorski

developed in parallel, with the hope that the supply chains of reused windows established during the Russian war can remain in operation after the conflict 30

Kyiv

Distribution

focus on sourcing, cataloguing and selling reused building components to consumers and designers in Poland. This expansive plan for developing systems and infrastructures for material reuse is a logical extension of the team’s work in Ukraine (and clarifies that the donations to its eastern neighbour are not carried out in a neocolonial manner), expanding its ideas around the removal and reallocation of unwanted, spare materials. Any generated profits will contribute to the foundation’s aid projects.

The Budo project is about material reuse: reducing the carbon footprint and environmental impact of the construction industry and supporting networks of reuse in architecture and design, but also helping developers fulfil the requirements of sustainable development and improving their ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals. Members of Brda are aware that developers can be their ideal partners, due to their involvement in the process of demolition, but they require persuasion and incentive to carry out the process more slowly and carefully in order to salvage elements that can be saved. As Vladimirov explains, currently, “reuse and [the] construction industry do not necessarily go together”. Part of Brda’s challenge is to narrow the gap between the two, and enable processes that make reuse easier, more accessible, and desirable for large construction industry players.

Reused materials also need to be re-certified and assessed before they are installed in a new building – the barriers are logistical, financial but also legal.

The team behind Poetics of Necessity joke that the catalogue with DIY instructions should come with a disclaimer: “Don’t do this at home in the EU.” But Vladimirov points out that the aesthetic and spirit of reuse is already present in Ukraine, evident in spontaneous alterations and enclosed balconies.

“The nature of Ukraine is experimental: you are always doing something from scratch,” he says.

building parts morph into different arrangements. There is an element of uncertainty combined with long-term planning that one has to embrace when salvaging and reusing building materials – a faith that they will once again prove useful, in an unspecified, future application.

During a talk about PVC and material reuse at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture in June 2023, the team behind Poetics of Necessity reveals the many unknowns that surround their projects. “We have no idea,” Sikorski replies when questioned about the lifespan of the DIY installed windows in Ukraine. “It’s an answer to an urgency. We’re more full of doubt than certainty.”

“You always have to use everything that’s on hand, stuff that’s already there,” Jaworowska adds. “We will have to compromise one way or another – material reuse is one such compromise.” When quizzed about the carbon footprint of their projects, meanwhile, Vladimirov gives an answer reminding the audience of the acute nature of the war in his home country: “Everything goes. We are in a situation where no rules apply.”

“One thousand windows is a couple of trucks,” Sikorksi adds. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s nothing,” Jaworowska quips in response, “but it’s also something.”1 The way that the Brda Foundation has taken on building networks, mobilising volunteers and donors, and providing urgent aid while developing a long-term vision for distribution of second-hand materials, provides clear evidence: it really is something. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided a context for activism and architecture to work together, with the grassroots, dynamic nature of activism giving a muchneeded push to the slow-moving construction industry.

When released from its own silo and deployed in interdisciplinary collaborations, architecture has the potential to be part of meaningful social change – whether it’s in liberated territories or the salvage yard.

Brda’s multipronged approach shows how design can work fast and slow to help alleviate both the immediate and upcoming crises we face. E N D

Every time I visit my father’s house in the countryside in western Poland, I spot a new outbuilding or shed.

When I ask him what it’s for, he says, “I don’t know, I had some breeze blocks leftover so we put it up.” Dad takes salvage to another level, in which the frugality is perhaps contradicted by the endlessly proliferating structures, sprawling around the house and across the land, between the edge of the forest and the pond. But the instinctual drive to reuse tells him to continue this strange circular economy, where old becomes new and

1

32

As of August 2023, Brda had shipped 1,217 windows to Ukraine. One truck fits up to 300 windows.

Never Static1“In the beginning I had a stick coming out of a ball and was very interested in the movement that I could create with it.”

Philippe Malouin is reflecting on how he settled on the final design for Bilboquet, his new light for Italian brand Flos. “The brief was to make a tabletop light with an accessible standpoint that would appeal to my generation – so millennials and gen Zs,” he says. He then decided to combine this with his interest in movement. He already had the flexibility of a ball on a stick, but felt there was still an element missing. “I’ve previously experimented with things like weight and gravity,” he says, “so I tried to push this somewhere else. That was magnetism.”

Malouin’s route to magnetism was not straightforward, however. The final design is named after a French 16th-century wooden cup-and-ball game, in reference to the basic movement that Malouin had initially been investigating. In a traditional bilboquet, the two elements of the object are attached by a string, and after flicking the ball up, you try to catch it in the cup. It is a design that relies on gravity – the force Malouin was now seeking to replace with magnetism. A transformation was required.

In Malouin’s Bilboquet, the wooden ball has become a magnetic ball joint, sat snug in a cylindrical base. The string, meanwhile, has become an electrical cable, tethered to an identical cylinder that forms the lamp’s head. The head can magnetically click on and off the ball as desired, meaning the light is free to swivel and point across the ball bearing, all while remaining tethered.

At one elevation, Bilboquet is a desk lamp; at another an uplighter, or an ambient light bouncing off the wall.

There’s a playfulness to the joint, underlined by purpose: “I had to go magnetic in order to have the right amount of friction and the right amount of force for the light to stay in place,” explains Malouin.

Bilboquet’s flexible, magnetic construction means the lamp can play the role of multiple different lights, as well as making it easy to transport.

The lamp is priced at £247, but Malouin was also attentive to areas beyond the base price that might make users feel that the design is good value for money.

“It shouldn’t be too big,” says Malouin, “because a lot of people are renting and live in furnished flats, so you have very little that’s yours to actually carry on to the next place.” This, then, is his answer for a light that can appeal to younger generations, untethered as they may be from a permanent living space. “You could put it in a bag with your clothes, pick up and go,” says Malouin. “It’s for people my age, most of whom are still renting or moving around.”

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Words Evi Hall

Objects in Review

Control Words Oli Stratford

In 2017, Deyan Sudjic admitted to a slip. The thendirector of London’s Design Museum was speaking as part of a film made by Dezeen about the museum’s nowdiscontinued Designs of the Year programme. During the course of the conversation, Sudjic confessed that a mistake had been made in judging the award’s 2007 edition. “Of course, we did make a howling error,” he said. “The iPhone was not [the] Design of the Year in the year in which it was launched.”

Daisy, Apple’s robot designed to disassemble iPhones.

34

In that year’s competition, the iPhone lost out to the XO-1 laptop, designed by Yves Béhar for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a non-profit launched by architect Nicholas Negroponte that aimed to produce a $100 laptop for distribution to schoolchildren in the global south. The XO-1 laptop not only bested the iPhone in the programme’s product category, but also claimed the overall award, with judges praising “a fantastic project that is a feat beyond the design itself: a laptop that addresses the educational and technical needs in developing countries”. Today, however, picking it over the iPhone seems bizarre.

OLPC was well-intentioned, but has gone on to be regarded as heavily compromised. The scheme has been criticised both for the design of its device and subsequent distribution to schools,1 as well as its underlying ethos of providing a technological fix to a social issue.2 Writing in 2018, The Verge’s Adi Robertson noted that OLPC had come to stand as “a symbol of tech industry hubris, a one-size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems”. As of 2023, OLPC has distributed 3m laptops to children, having originally estimated that it would ship between 5m and 15m in its first year alone. “The One Laptop Per Child project got the top award – a very worthy and worthwhile idea that you could actually deal with illiteracy and the disadvantages of the third world [sic] by making laptops cheap and available,” Sudjic said. “It was a bold idea but, of course, in the end it was the smartphone that won everywhere.” In the same period in which OLPC shipped 3m laptops, Apple has sold somewhere in the league of 2bn iPhones.

When Sudjic mentioned the triumph of the smartphone he was referring to the typology as a whole, but it’s difficult not to see its success as an individual one too. Sixteen years on, it’s clear that the iPhone is the smartphone – a device whose influence on its field and wider cultural resonance have come to stand as a holotype for the typology. “Nearly everything that was groundbreaking about the iPhone is simply how most things work now,” journalist Matt Buchanan eulogised in The New Yorker back in 2013. “What was All images courtesy of Apple.

1

2

The build quality and final design of the devices were affected by the need to hit the promised $100 retail cost (a price that was never achieved), while a number of proposed deals to purchase the laptops failed to materialise, hamstringing its proposed rollout.

A more contemporary approach to this theme is explored in ‘Lessons in a Flash(light)’, p.106, in which some of the problems of addressing social issues through tech are tackled through the adoption of a co-design process.

breathtaking has become boring – that is the mark of progress.” It is difficult to disagree. The iPhone was the first contemporary smartphone, with previous devices such as the Blackberry having straddled the category as we understand it today and the more traditional button-based mobile phones that preceded it. With its launch, the iPhone introduced a number of features that have since become industry standard (the multi-touch interface chief among them), but the iPhone’s success was also rooted in Apple’s ability to position itself as being somehow more attuned to design than any of its competitors – whatever that might mean. “Microsoft and Google may now have products that are well designed,” Buchanan summarised, “but Apple, and what it produces, is design.” Indeed, the iPhone has come to occupy such an outsized position within 21st-century design lore, that Sudjic was moved not only to note the museum’s failure in not recognising the device, but also to write a playful apology more than a decade later.

“What was the jury thinking […],” he wrote on the museum’s website. “This was the first real smart phone [sic], which the design for better or worse has changed everything”.

While the Design Museum may have been slow to note the significance of the phone upon its launch, it is clearly under no such illusions now. In his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the museum’s 2021 exhibition Waste Age: What can design do?, Justin McGuirk, the museum’s then chief curator, noted that “the iPhone, from about the fourth generation onwards, achieved the platonic ideal of the smartphone”. This wasn’t necessarily a compliment – McGuirk went on to add that the design had nevertheless continued to be “replaced year after year because of software innovations and the need to stimulate new sales” – but his remarks nevertheless hinted at the manner in which the iPhone had captured the zeitgeist of a particular approach towards consumer electronics.

“We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless,” the original iPhone’s lead designer Jony Ive wrote in his introduction to Apple’s 2016 book Designed by Apple in California.

“Objects that appear so simple, coherent, and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.”

Ive’s approach towards consumer electronics was one in which devices’ superabundance of technology would be concealed and softened, hidden behind what designer Dieter Rams, of whom Ive is an admirer,

Feedback

once termed “as little design as possible”. As opposed to complex pieces of technology, Apple’s devices presented as pristine, intuitive objects, with the company aspiring to produce products loaded with nominally emancipatory, open-ended features (Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone as offering “the internet in your pocket”), but packaged up within strict, blanketing radii of pure white plastic, bottomless black glass, and sealed aluminium – a design strategy embodying what critic Edwin Heathcote termed “the contradiction between the desire for freedom and the control freakery that made Apple such a success”.

Even today, four years after Ive’s departure from the company’s chief design officer role, Apple’s products remain function-rich, but formally simple, collapsing hundreds of uses into seemingly elementary physical forms. This approach has been visible across Apple’s product range, but the iPhone was its zenith – a pocket computer that compressed as much functionality into as discrete a form as possible. “An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator,” Jobs intoned at the product’s reveal in 2007. “These are not three separate devices.

This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.”

The iPhone has remained wildly successful across its 14 mainline generations, but there is at least one sense in which the device has dated in the same manner as the XO-1 laptop. “When the iPhone came out, nobody was thinking about the environment,” notes Gemma Curtin, McGuirk’s co-curator for the Waste Age exhibition. “Of course, people had been shouting about the environment from the postwar period, but every generation has its blindspots and there was a sense of people putting their fingers in their ears.” The rise of the iPhone and its kind has, inevitably, seen a concomitant rise in e-waste. According to Waste Age, the global generation of e-waste in 2019 totalled more than 50m metric tonnes, with much of this shipped from wealthy countries to the global south, where it accumulates in toxic e-waste dumps.3 By the 2030s to 2040s, this figure is expected to rise to 100m tonnes, although even this is only the tip of the iceberg. In his essay ‘E-Waste as a Challenge for Design and Society’, geographer Josh Lepawsky notes that “a single copper mine operating for 336 days […] generates as much waste by weight as those 100 million tonnes of postconsumer e-waste projected to arise in the 2030s–40s”.

These figures clearly hold multiple implications for the consumer electronics industry, but one immediate point of action is that the design of devices needs to be rapidly adjusted with the issue of e-waste in mind.

In this spirit, the usual suggestions run something along the lines of: 1) designing for repair such that devices have longer, extendable lifespans; 2) increasing the amount of recycled and recyclable materials in devices’ construction; and 3) improving the ease with which devices can be disassembled into their constituent materials at the end of their usable lives.4 As regards the iPhone, Apple has a contested track record on these issues. Positively, the company has set itself highly ambitious environmental goals that go beyond most of its competitors, committing to be carbon neutral for all of its products by 2030 –5 by comparison, Samsung and Lenovo have given themselves until 2050 for the same target, while Huawei has set a target of 2040. Apple’s environmental plan is focused on improving energy efficiency, examining its use of all material resources, and adjusting the chemistry within its devices’ components, which it broadly summarises as “designing the carbon out of our products”. It’s a revealing quote. As opposed to an inherent environmental problem with producing devices in their billions, Apple frames the challenge as fundamentally being one of design – improving and refining the system, rather than overhauling it altogether. “[The] choice between a thriving business and a thriving planet is a false one,” argues Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, stating that innovations in the ways in which the company designs and manufactures products have already enabled them to make “extraordinary progress”.

Although the 2030 scheme’s ambitions require the use of carbon offsetting programmes, the efficacy of which are controversial, the company has enjoyed clear success in terms of reducing its carbon emission by around 45 per cent since 2015 through increasing its use of renewable energy and utilising more recycled and low-carbon materials, as well as offering public

3

5

4

See ‘e-Waste Agbogbloshie’ by Shawn Adams from Disegno #30.

36

These are likely the more immediate points of action only because the other issues raised by the data are far more challenging to affect. As Lepawsky notes: “Over eighty per cent of the carbon footprint of the latest iPhone comes from manufacturing it while only fourteen per cent arises from its use. No amount of recycling by users of those phones can recoup the amount of carbon emitted during their manufacture.”

The company states that it has been carbon neutral for its global corporate operations since 2020.

Feedback

commitments to use 100 per cent recycled cobalt, tin, gold and rare earth elements in assorted components by 2025. “We’re innovating our way through our 2030 plan, not because it’s an easy thing to do, but because it’s the right thing to do,” the company states in a promotional video – a tone that is undoubtedly suited to PR, but whose optimism does seem to genuinely permeate Apple’s wider environmental strategy.

“The commitment at Apple to focus on environment is deeply felt across the entire company,” says Sarah Chandler, Apple’s vice president of environment and supply chain innovation, “and we’ve made really significant progress, which I want to say because there’s so much doom out there that the climate crisis is here and that maybe it’s not solvable.” Chandler states that Apple would not wish to downplay “the urgency” of the challenges facing the field, but stresses that “this is certainly not a lost cause, because there’s a huge amount of room for optimism and hope”. This optimism should not be surprising. Apple, more than any other tech company, presents as borderline utopian in its operations – an approach that has hitherto served it well – at least commercially. Apple’s products, Curtin notes, have always tied into “a dream of perfection: the whiteness, the slickness, the functionality”, claiming to offer a vision of technology that is clean and precise, and in which design can both serve and reflect our wider ambitions as a society. In the company’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ advert, Apple paid homage to “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world”, intercutting imagery of famous figures from across 20th-century science and culture with a voiceover celebrating their capacity to “push the human race forward”. Those who “think different”, or think better, the campaign suggests, buy Apple. It is an ethos towards products, Curtin notes, that draws heavily upon a modernist lineage, “which is this notion that being somehow intellectually inquisitive, being up to date, can be reflected in the things you have around you,” she says. “Having the latest phone doesn’t actually say anything about what’s going on in your head or your life, but we are conditioned to think that these things do that for us. Apple products have been massively effective in that way.” Utopianism of this form matters in relation to waste, however, because perceptions of progress and development are intimately tied to how we treat the leftovers generated by these same processes. “The ability to eliminate, contain, hide, or transcend landscapes of waste has been one of

the most enduring visual and linguistic signifiers of traditional utopian science fiction,” the academic Brian Thill writes in his 2015 book, Waste, “whereas nearly every dystopia must embed its share of trash, filth, scunge, and wreckage.” In its optimism that it can clean up waste through design, Apple is returning to the utopianism that has long laid at its heart.

Yet, if the company talks positively as regards its wider environmental principles, the details of its operation have frequently attracted critique. Apple’s historic efforts around the recycling, reuse and repair of its devices, for instance, have been widely seen as inadequate and slow to emerge,6 damaged by reports such as a 2017 Vice investigation that found the company had briefed third-party recyclers that there was to be “No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale”.

Meanwhile, although the 2022 launch of the company’s Self Service Repair programme, which covers a limited number of components within a selection of its devices, has been cautiously welcomed as a step in the right direction, it was nevertheless described by the influential iFixit self-repair community as being little more than an example of people within the company “trying their best”, rather than a substantive effort to change Apple’s relationship with repair. In his review of the service, iFixit engineer Shahram Mokhtari argued that the professional repair tools on offer through the scheme were “clearly ridiculous” for an average user to operate, and that there remained a need to “escape Apple’s stranglehold on repair”. Most controversially, the scheme employs parts-pairing, in which any new component needs to be configured to the device’s IMEI (international mobile equipment identity) number using a software tool that Apple controls –the company has to authorise any new component if the phone is to work as intended. “Can we talk about parts-pairing for a bit?”

Mokhtari noted. “Like how they try to control the market by disabling functionality if a screen or battery is replaced without Apple’s authorisation? Who owns this phone, anyway; didn’t I pay for it already?”

Apple’s relationship with reuse and repair is highly controlled to say the least, but control has long been 6

38

Which is framed politely. A large number of people have instead perceived the company as actively hampering these processes through decisions such as a 2018 agreement with Amazon that only allows “authorized resellers” to sell Apple products on Amazon Marketplace. “Fundamentally, it’s about who owns our devices and who controls what we can do with them,” repair advocate Kyle Wiens told the Los Angeles Times at the time.

“In the old world, the answer clearly was you.”

central to Apple’s design ethos. The company’s products are designed to form a closed ecosystem of Apple services, software and hardware, and this approach is further visible in the devices themselves. When Don Norman, Apple’s former vice president, was asked about the company for a 2007 essay in the MIT Technology Review, he was unequivocal about the ethos driving the company’s design work. “[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained,” Norman said. “Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone’s opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.”

It is a derivation of this ethos that seems to have shaped the company’s focus on controlling the repair of its devices. In 2017, for instance, activist group the Repair Association criticised the company for the design and repair of its products being subject to overly tight internal control, arguing in its report, ‘Electronics Standards Are In Need of Repair’, that the company (among others) had simultaneously dented efforts to impose meaningful external industry-wide standards. “U.S. green standards,” the report’s author Mark Schaffer concluded, “have not kept up with the rapid pace of innovation in the electronics market[…]

Unfortunately, manufacturers have consistently opposed stronger reuse and repair criteria.” Schaffer issued particular criticism for the manner in which products from Apple and its competitors were able to receive a gold standard from the Green Electronics Council’s Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT),7 despite shipping with glued-down lithium-ion batteries, a design decision that was in conflict with the standard’s requirement that devices’ batteries should be easy and safe to remove. In response, Apple released a statement reiterating its commitment to sustainability efforts, but specified that it would still maintain tight control over how its products are made and repaired. “Highly-integrated design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also durable, so they can last for many years,” the company said, adding that it was “pioneering a closed loop supply chain where products are made using only renewable resources or recycled material to reduce the need to mine materials from the earth”.

7

One of the first fruits of this effort appeared in the public eye the following year.

Since 2018, Apple has operated Daisy, a robot that the company designed to take apart 23 different models of iPhone in a random order and disassemble them into discrete components, spitting out brokendown devices at a rate of one every 18 seconds.

At present, there are two Daisies – one in Texas, the other close to Breda in the Netherlands – each of which is capable of disassembling 1.2m iPhones a year. Developed out of two previous disassembly robots (Liam 1.0 and Liam 2.0), the Daisies are intended to recover materials that are otherwise not secured in sufficient quality or quantity by more traditional recycling methods.8 “We are aiming to use only recycled or renewable materials in our products and to obviously continue to make long-lasting products that are repairable and that are recyclable at the end of their lives,” says Chandler, who is robust in her belief in Apple’s efforts in this area. “Last year, 20 per cent of the material that we shipped to customers came from recycled material,” she says, “so this does work, but only if you focus on designing long-lasting products that make the most of those materials inside them.” Daisy, she argues, is an attempt to make more of those same materials by extracting them from devices that cannot otherwise be repaired or reused.

While the company says that it aims to keep existing iPhones in circulation for as long as possible (“the real message,” Chandler says, “is that if you have devices, the best thing for the planet is for those devices to be in use”),9 Daisy exists to capture phones once they have moved past that point. “Daisy is a last stop.”

The majority of smartphones don’t ever reach that point, however. According to the International Waste 8

9

An issue compounded, Schaffer notes, by the fact that “electronics manufacturers now constitute a large voting bloc on most U.S. green standards groups”.

Feedback

Apple currently focuses on 14 materials that form 87 per cent of the product mass that it ships to customers: aluminium, cobalt, copper, glass, gold, lithium, paper, plastics, rare earth elements, steel, tantalum, tin, tungsten and zinc.

Which is no doubt true in the abstract, but the company does still fuel the cycles of desire that prompt people to abandon older phones in favour of newer ones. More pointedly, the company admitted in 2017 that one of its iOS software updates had intentionally slowed the performance of older phones (although it argued that it did so as a result of their deteriorating batteries and denied “intentionally shorten[ing] the life of any Apple product, or degrad[ing] the user experience to drive customer upgrades”): at the time of going to press, the company is expected to pay between $310m and $500m in claims as part of a settlement.

It is also under investigation in France following a complaint by Halt Planned Obsolescence that the company “wishes to obstruct independent repair and the development of reconditioning”.

40

Electrical and Electronic Equipment Forum, 5.3bn mobile phones were expected to become waste in 2022,10 while recycling rates remain comparatively low.

“At the European level, [50 to 55 per cent] of e-waste is collected or recycled,” Kees Baldé, senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, told Agence France-Presse in 2022. “In low-income countries, our estimates plunge to under 5 percent and sometimes even below 1 percent.”

Should an end-of-life device beat the odds and avoid ending up in storage, landfill or else being sent to an e-waste dump, it will likely be sent to an industrial recycling facility, which partner with companies such as Apple on the recycling of devices. These recyclers typically use tools such as shredders, sorters and magnetic separators in order to break devices down into fragments, which are then sifted for materials.

These tools are not adapted to specific products, but rather general enough to apply across devices, allowing them to be applied to whatever arrives at the facility.

As such, components often remain tangled up with one another even after processing, rendering the return rate of high-quality materials low. “We have to recycle rare earth magnets [for example], but nobody thinks that you can do that from consumer electronics,” says Chandler, “so why is that?” The issue, Apple argues, is with existing methods of recycling, which have not kept pace with the intricacy and small scale of contemporary electronics –11 a source of both environmental and economic concern for the company.

According to its internal calculations, one tonne of salvaged iPhone components, carefully processed, contains the same amount of gold and copper as you would otherwise find in 2,000 tonnes of mined rock.

If iPhones can be processed differently, the company’s argument runs, they might become a valuable source of materials that would otherwise be mined. “So part of [Apple’s] goal is to end our reliance on mining,” Chandler says, “because mining is carbon-intensive, 10

11

This includes old devices that consumers have stored at home but no longer use – a resource that is sizeable. Andrew Abbott, a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Leicester, told New Scientist in 2021 that it is estimated “that there are more technology critical metals in household drawers than in Europe’s largest mines”.

This point is not uncontested. Speaking to iFixit, Craig Boswell, president of asset management firm HOBI International, said, “I think often [manufacturing engineers] look at the materials recovery space and feel it has lacked effective R&D investment.

This is far from the truth.”

it’s detrimental to communities and ecosystems, and it’s not sustainable.”12 Although the issues that Daisy attempts to tackle are, ultimately, environmental and social in character, its response is essentially technical. “The more we got into this, the more we realised that it’s actually a challenge in the recycling industry,” says Chandler.

If recycled materials are to be used in consumer electronics, they need to be collected from devices at a level of purity that is difficult to maintain for current designs using conventional recycling methods. “For years, we really struggled with how [to] use recycled aluminium without having trade-offs,” Chandler explains, “because the standardly available recycled aluminium is not as durable.” This, she explains, is down to different alloys of the metal becoming mixed together during the recycling process, which lowers the grade of the resultant recycled metal – maintaining clear separation is crucial. A similar story presents around rare earth minerals. “The rare earth magnets in consumer electronics are brittle, they break, they stick to the ferrous material separator,” Chandler says. “So [rather than shredding], how do we extract the parts that contain the magnets and isolate them?” The idea that Daisy proposes for accessing these resources is to improve the precision of the recycling process, which it achieves through greater control – control that is simultaneously technological, environmental and economic.

Waste, Thill notes, “is every object, plus time”.

If the objects that we covet as consumers are those which seem to temporarily satisfy our “endlessly cascading microdesires”, then waste is what happens to those objects “once desire has been squeezed out”.

Under this framing, waste is “the unsatisfactory and temporary name we give to the affective relationships we have with our unwanted objects,” which we then “hope and assume, naively,[…] are carted off to some enormous invisible dump somewhere, and more or less erased from our daily lives forever”. This cycle of 12

Feedback

It is also inequitable, with a high percentage of the minerals used in consumer electronics mined in the global south, where their extraction has been linked to various environmental, labour rights, social and humanitarian scandals. “Across Latin America, Asia and Africa, more and more community lands, rivers and ecosystems are being despoiled and devoured by mining activities,” Philippe Sibaud, a trustee of the Gaia Foundation told The Guardian in 2015. “The rights of farming and indigenous communities are[...] ignored in the race to grab land and water. The hunger for these materials is a growing threat to the necessities for life.”

consumption and disposal, Thill says, is a “fantasy of expulsion and removal,” but it is a fantasy to which Daisy’s real-world execution adheres. Central to the premise behind the Daisy programme is the idea that while a consumer’s desire for a particular iPhone may have faded, Apple’s has not. If devices can be retrieved and properly harvested, Apple is left with a ready supply of components from which it can extract materials that could be subsequently used to produce new models of iPhone, or else which can be “returned to the market, making the material available to others”.13 Desire feeds upon desire, the company’s environmental impact is reduced, and the cycle of consumption that forms the economic backbone of the company remains unbroken.

It is clearly a kind of corporate utopianism (if such a thing isn’t a contradiction in terms), but Apple is not alone in seeing promise with the idea. “Some estimate that by 2080 the largest metal reserves will not be underground but in circulation as existing products,” McGuirk notes in his introduction to Waste Age’s catalogue. “About seven per cent of the world’s gold supplies, for instance, are trapped inside electronics.

Suddenly the notion of ‘above-ground mining’ starts to make sense.”

Seen in person, Daisy is undeniably technologically impressive – which it has to be, given that the robot is receiving phones that are “not eligible for reuse”, Chandler explains. “Some of that stuff is not in pristine condition, so designing a robotic disassembly process for [phones in variable condition] is a unique challenge.”

The European Daisy has been built in an anonymouslooking factory space, where it manifests as a series of robotic arms and conveyor belts housed within self-contained workstations operated by three to four members of staff. The machine is fed by a container of iPhones, which pass along a belt into its belly, where they are scanned to determine the precise model of phone that Daisy is dealing with. From there, the screen is prised off; the phone is chilled to -80°C to weaken the adhesive connecting the battery, which drops out once the phone is slammed downwards; and every screw is automatically punched out of the phone’s construction. After these processes have 13

been completed, components are shaken out of the device’s housing, followed by the insertion of a rotating spindle to knock loose any that remain. At this stage, the individual pieces can be sorted. Surrounding Daisy are a series of oversized plastic-lined cardboard boxes, all of which are filled with heaps of carefully separated components. Looking through the remnants, there are mounds of different iPhone housings (separated due to differences in the metals and alloys from which they are produced), camera modules, screens, coils, speakers, receivers, haptic modules and more. From here, the different components can be sent on to third-party recyclers for material recovery, while a selection of Daisy’s output can be broken down further by two additional Apple robots, Dave and Taz, which dismantle the iPhones’ taptic engines (the company’s term for its haptic units that provide tactile feedback to touches on the screen) and audio modules to retrieve rare earth magnets and assorted metals. “[We’re] accelerating our work with new goals to use 100 per cent recycled cobalt, tin, gold, and rare earth elements in key components by 2025,” Jackson states in her foreword to the company’s most recent ‘Environmental Progress Report’. “The strides we’re making play a huge role in driving down our emissions even further, reducing our reliance on energy-intensive mining, smelting, and refining.” Daisy is presented as a standard-bearer for this approach and, compared with the outputs of much traditional recycling, which the company displays in a short quasi-exhibition in the space leading up to Daisy,14 the elements that it salvages are remarkably uniform and pure. There can be little doubt that Apple’s process is a clear technical advance on that which has come before. It is a fabulous piece of engineering.

There is much to admire in Daisy’s operation, then, not least in its foundational idea that a device should be processed for recycling by those with an awareness of its internal architecture to guide their efforts accordingly. “It’s great if manufacturers are starting to recycle their own products, because that’s the way to do it,” notes Curtin, who adds that the field has until now been blighted by the tendency of countries in the global north to simply export their waste to dumps in the global south. According to a 2011 UN study, for instance, Ghana alone receives 150,000 tonnes of e-waste a year, which typically arrive in the form of

The company states that materials harvested by Daisy can be put back into its products, but only certain ones are at present. “The specific answer is different by material, “Chandler says, “and the reason [for that] is economics, to be honest.” Some materials, she explains, require additional investment in order to set up scalable, certified supply chains.

14

42

Given that Daisy is housed within a controlled facility to which public access is forbidden, and security is tight even for invited guests, it’s unclear who this is for.

“donations”, a mode of export that skirts the 1989 Basel convention’s ban on “transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal”.15 “If we had to recycle everything on our doorstep, it would change attitudes,” Curtin summarises, before adding that even when devices are processed for recycling in facilities based within the regions in which they were likely first sold, the issue raised by Apple still rears its head.

“If you go through central recycling, everything gets mashed up, whereas if it’s your own product, you can take it apart nicely and design it for disassembly.”

This idea of designing products such that they can be broken down at the end of life is a powerful one, but not what is going on in the case of Daisy. Rather than an example of designing for disassembly, Daisy is best seen as designing the disassembly of the iPhone – a difference far greater than that which the language suggests. In the case of designing for disassembly, McGuirk defines the phrase in Waste Age as referring to an approach in which products are “designed for easy disassembly and recycling, which means [for example] not fusing different plastics or metals together so that they cannot be recycled”. In practice, this means making devices that can be straightforwardly taken apart by those with the requisite knowledge and tools, both of which should be set at a relatively low bar. Yet there is nothing straightforward about the disassembly process that Daisy puts iPhones through, as proven by the fact that there are only two machines in the world capable of doing it. Daisy is a means of disassembling an iPhone, but not one that opens itself up to those without Apple’s resources.

The argument in favour of Daisy’s approach is that the complexity of the devices it deals with means that a highly specialised tool is required to process them effectively. “If we’re just designing products for today’s recycling technology, we will always be where we are today,” says Chandler, “and we know that’s not working.

So how do we push further?” This is not, however, an argument that carries water with activists. “I’d say it’s the other way around,” notes Janet Gunter, the cofounder and former director of the Restart Project, a social enterprise focused around consumer electronics 15

The health consequences of this are as dire as you might expect, with the report acknowledging that the “known health problems” precipitated by the dumping and processing of e-waste in Ghana “include acute damage to the lungs,[…] [intellectual disability] in case of lead exposure in children, damage to blood cells and the kidney and predisposition to cancers”.

and repair. “They’ve designed these devices so they’re impossible to deal with.” Rather than designing specialist recycling methods to suit the growing complexity of devices, repair activists such as Gunter argue that it would be more impactful to design products that could be more successfully processed by widely available recycling facilities. Either methodology would, admittedly, work in principle, but the debate around recycling does not start from a place of principle – it is a real-world issue that needs to engage with the realities of the field as it stands. By contrast, Gunter argues, Daisy operates from a place of fabulation – a world in which Apple is capable of securing all of its devices at the end of their lifespans and overseeing their disposal through proprietary technology. “[Daisy] is basically a Kickstarter video,” she says, “something that is supposed to represent the ideal – the thing that they want to sell us – but what is actually being delivered at a global scale [has] nothing to do with it at all.”

To give credit to Apple, it is beginning to take some steps towards meeting the challenge set out by Gunter – at least in relation to repair. Changes to the interior architecture of the iPhone 14, for instance, were hailed by iFixit as being the “most significant design change to the iPhone in a long time” and praised for making the device “the most repairable iPhone in years”. Chief among these changes is the ability to open up the phone relatively easily from either the front or the back, which iFixit hailed as helping the device to “last longer and reduce its overall impact on the planet. With any luck, it will inspire other manufacturers to follow suit.” Meanwhile, as regards Daisy’s focus on adapting recycling methods, Apple argues that innovation in this space has to start somewhere before being scaled up. “We want to get to using more and more industry scalable solutions,” Chandler says.

“So when you see us design an [aluminium] alloy that we use in, for example, our MacBook Pros, then that [material] is actually more tolerant of recycling.

You’ve got to work on all sides of the equation. But the goal is: can we go to recyclers and say, ‘Hey, look, we know that you weren’t able to keep alloys separated.

What if you use something that keeps them separated from the beginning?’”

Nevertheless, there is still considerable bite to Gunter’s challenge. Since Daisy’s launch in 2017, the company has expressed its desire to build more robots, but acknowledges that it will not do so until the demand is in place to justify their deployment – five years on

Feedback

devices to Apple, but customers in India (where iPhones accounted for 11 per cent of all secondary smartphone sales in 2022) are redirected to the websites of thirdparty recyclers, those in Argentina are offered an email address, and Apple users in La Réunion are simply advised to head to local municipal collection points.

The company’s trade-in scheme is clearly laudable and valuable, but achieving its smooth rollout worldwide is not without its challenges, particularly given that Apple often sells its older devices on the secondary market to countries in which coverage for their eventual recovery may be less extensive, or less intuitive, than those nations in which its phones are more frequently purchased new. Yet if Daisy is to have a meaningful impact, it requires clear pathways for all iPhones to return to Apple and enter into its recycling system.

“Which I think speaks to this wider delusion Apple has around controlling the whole value chain,” says Gunter. “There is a notion that they can put hundreds and millions of devices into the world, and that they can have full control over them from the beginning to the end of their lives.”

In its efforts around recycling, Apple appears to go further than many of its rivals (at least in terms of what it presents publicly), but its initiatives frequently attract high-profile critique. In 2019, for instance, iFixit deemed Daisy “a stunt” and “a recycling PR move”, while Greenpeace argued that “[rather] than another recycling robot, what is most needed from Apple is an indication that the company is embracing one of its greatest opportunities to reduce its environmental impact: repairable and upgradeable product design”.

Critique in this area is always important, particularly given widespread suspicions of greenwashing, but the criticism that Apple receives also seems to flow from the flipside of the company’s success in positioning itself as being more attuned to “design” than its rivals: if your success has been built upon a perception of high design standards, then those same standards generate expectation. Apple is aware of this and frequently utilises its prominent position to present itself as a trailblazer – “we do the work and we show our work, because we want to be the ripple in the pond that creates a broader change,” says Jackson – but the company is clearly vulnerable to the fact that critical perceptions around what contemporary design should be have changed drastically in the years since the iPhone’s launch. Descriptions of Ive’s and Apple’s designs vary dramatically – within the pages of

from launch, the two existing Daisies are still not at capacity, which means that despite producing more than 200m iPhones a year, the company is annually processing fewer than 2.4m devices via its robots. Even if other older phones are being resold or repaired, the ratio still seems askew. While the move towards more circular modes of manufacturing and recycling clearly takes time, the current figures suggest a utopianism at the heart of the idea that is difficult to translate into reality: Daisy is only an effective above-ground mine if it actually has things to mine, and this is before even getting into the issue of Apple’s other products requiring their own versions of Daisy if they’re also to be effectively dismantled. In response, Apple says it is aware of the statistical mismatch, but argues that it needs to drive awareness among consumers of the Daisies’ existence, with the iPhones processed by the machines predominantly arriving with Apple through the consumer trade-in process that the company offers both online and in its stores. “Our customers play an important role in continuing the growth of these programs,” the company writes, “and we encourage them to engage in these programs by returning devices after use.” Daisy is not the only strand of the company’s recycling work – it also seeks to “maximize the potential of the recycling materials stream” by “[working] with best-in-class recyclers”, to whom it provides recycling guides for specific models of its products. All the same, its efforts remain dependent on being able to successfully collect end-of-life iPhones. It is a process in which the company is at the mercy of its customers’ actions: it does not have full control.

For consumers in countries such as the United States, Apple’s trade-in process works relatively well, particularly if they live in cities and have easy access to an Apple store: phones are easy to trade-in, with customers receiving store credit if the device is new enough to be reused.16 Yet even on Apple’s websites, the process becomes more challenging as you move away from nations in the global north. The majority of European nations, for instance, can click through to dedicated webpages to arrange the return of their 16

Which is a good move, and one that could provide an effective incentive to donate phones, although critics have noted that old iPhones are typically worth more on the used market than the material cost or Apple’s trade-in value. It is nevertheless worth noting that older devices (those that will go to Daisy) are not paid for, even if “you can still recycle it with Apple for free”. If Daisy is aiming to procure materials that can be reused in future products, there is an argument that this policy should change.

44

María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas.

Feedback

The New Yorker alone, the products have variously been described as “emotionally warm modernism” and designs possessed of a “sinister beauty” – but their austere aesthetic and unashamed minimalism is undoubtedly an awkward fit with the rise of the DIY culture of the right-to-repair movement and design’s growing attraction towards more legible, less perfect, forms. “We’re coming out of an age where modernism was dominant and the look of things was all important,” notes Curtin. “Maybe the new design age is looking at the impact of things, you know: what is the effect of things? How do they affect us? How do they affect the environment?” These questions are more complex than those surrounding functionality and aesthetics, but amount to the new standard that companies must meet if they are to be seen as embracing the potential of the discipline. Apple may have secured its position through control, but the traits required by the challenges of the 21st century are different.

Recycling, for example, is a messy process, but the infrastructure and systems that surround it are messier still. Apple holds five patents on Daisy and says that it is “willing to license these to researchers and other electronics manufacturers that are developing their own disassembly processes”. The technology that the system uses is essentially universal, so a Daisy could be programmed to dismantle a Samsung or Huawei phone just as readily and carefully as it does an iPhone. Yet despite these good intentions, Apple states that no company has taken up its offer as of yet. For its rival tech giants, there may be an element of professional pride at stake, but in the case of dedicated recycling facilities there are obvious barriers to entry in terms of cost. Apple has not publicly disclosed the price of building a Daisy, but given the sophistication of the technologies involved, it is clearly not cheap. “Apple is claiming that it’s recycling rare earth minerals at a much higher rate [through Daisy], but is that profitable?” asks Gunter, “because that is ultimately the reason that [recyclers] would want to use a Daisy. If recouping these materials is not itself profitable, however, then ultimately Daisy is a PR exercise for Apple. At scale, it could make a difference, but it’s not going to spill over if nobody is going to pay for it.” As things stand, Apple acknowledges that it has no straightforward answer to this question, but argues that the Daisy programme is still developing. “In everything that we do on the environment, we are always trying to get to a scalable solution,” Chandler says, “and, very bluntly, the best

way for something to scale is for it to be economically viable.” In this respect, Apple seems to have little issue with presenting the scheme as still being something of a tech demo, as opposed to a fully fledged industrial process. “For Daisy specifically, the way we look at it is, ‘Let’s show what’s possible,’” Chandler says, “‘and then let’s figure out how to scale.’”

Keeping control of the billions of pieces of consumer electronics being pumped out into the world is a difficult thing to maintain, as shown by the 50m tonnes (and rising) of e-waste that the world generates each year.

In response to the scale of this crisis, the world clearly needs more control – control of what is being extracted, of what is being produced, of what is being consumed, and of what is being discarded – but the form that this control should take is a point of contention. To Apple, it entails maintaining control over its products to ensure their disposal; to critics, it involves designing devices in such a way that the company surrenders control, allowing more people to repair and recycle them effectively. “When we think about control, especially control of a material thing, we immediately think of socialism, right?” Gunter argues. “The command economy, where we know exactly where and how many nuts and bolts are going to be at each different point in the economy.” This form of control, she notes, was long presented in the US as being dystopian. “And yet when it comes to Apple, which has good UX and good branding, everyone’s like, ‘Awesome!’ It’s suddenly seen as utopian, but it won’t work for precisely the same reasons that the socialist command economy did not work.” The idea of a company taking responsibility for its waste is no bad thing, but whether the exertion of this level of direct control is workable at the scale required is dubious.

To those working at Apple, the waste issue can be effectively tackled through design – e-waste is a prompt to create new processes through which devices can be precisely dismantled, and their constituent elements and materials kept within the company’s value chain.

“How do we take those steps so that when we look back, we can say that we really catalysed these changes, and scaled them to industry,” says Chandler, “so that it is possible to build recyclable products and realise this dream of a closed loop product cycle?” It is an ethos, you suspect, that provides one reason as to why Daisy is called Daisy – an Apple-style name for a recycling process that would otherwise remain mute and anonymous. “If Apple said, ‘We’ve increased the 46

amount of recycled aluminium we use by 40 per cent over two years,’ no one would give a shit,” summarises Gunter. “People think in terms of products, and Apple knows that.” By naming an element of its recycling operation, the company is, among other things, offering a form of PR-friendly reassurance to customers – the idea that Daisy is here to clean up after our consumption, and that our waste is being dealt with appropriately.

In this sense, Daisy is itself a classic Apple product – complex internally, smooth and friendly on the outside – and given the realities of the world’s e-waste issue, this kind of messaging is no doubt alluring to consumers who may be increasingly anxious about their impact on the environment. “If the mass of consumers truly beheld the gruesome nature of production and effluent on either side of the sites of consumption and use enjoyment, the entire system would collapse,” Thill writes. “We do not often see or smell or taste the garbage in our air, our soil, our water, and so we keep breathing and drinking”. Instead of grappling with the realities of what is happening around us, we have allowed waste to become “something for someone else to eliminate”, comforted by the idea that our “collective mountains of rubbish [are] located somewhere vaguely ‘out there’”. In Daisy, Apple has gone one better. “Out there” suddenly has a name.

If the idea behind Daisy worked at scale, it would represent a real, concrete place to which old phones might pass for meaningful action at the end of their lives. To Apple’s critics, however, it is an application of the company’s familiar control to a problem that resists a top-down design solution – it is too large, too messy, too variable. “It’s utopian,” Gunter says. “And I think it’s absurd.” It is a reasonable charge, but one to which members of Apple do, at the very least, seem to be alert. “When you stand in front of Daisy,” Chandler begins, “it’s like … you know, she’s fun, she’s impressive, she has a personality, so it’s very easy to be really enthralled and overwhelmed by her. But my whole point here is that she is [only] a piece of the puzzle.”

Daisy attracts a degree of attention (which Apple has done little to minimise) that it cannot actually bear, particularly if singled out from surrounding initiatives.

Questions around the programme’s decision to design a disassembly method, as opposed to improving the baseline recyclability of products, are, Chandler notes, “fair criticism”, but she believes that Apple’s efforts provide a basis for further investigations into recycling technologies: “We need to improve material recovery

not just for our own products, but for the whole industry.” Daisy may not progress industry-wide as a unified solution, Chandler accepts, adding that the company is testing as to whether industry-standard shredders could take on elements of the design so that they work more “in the way that Daisy does”. “It’s about how we put together all the pieces of this puzzle so that you’re not trading off between things,” she concludes.17 When Sudjic acknowledged that the smartphone had “won everywhere”, he was no doubt correct that the iPhone and its kind had become the defining products of the early 21st century. Yet over the years, the central challenge to the field has become grappling with quite how everywhere these designs have become.

“There is no human-made object so well travelled, so ambient, as waste,” writes Thill. “It fills the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every sea’s floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world.”

In determining how to deal with its role in this crisis, Apple is doing what it has always done – doubling down on control and presenting a vision of design that hopes to resolve a seemingly intractable problem. But the application of technological fixes to social issues does not always age well. “The power of product design also has its limits,” Lepawsky writes. “Pollution and waste arise from industrial systems[...] Designing clean(er), green(er), more efficient and repairable appliances while manufacturing ever larger numbers of them in an industrial system premised on growth is unlikely to overcome the challenges of pollution and waste arising from electronics.” As Apple continues developing Daisy and its efforts in this area, a word of warning may emerge from its past, drawn from the very design that once pipped it to the post as Design of the Year. “[A] symbol of tech industry hubris, a one-size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems” – these were the words that once damned the OLPC scheme. Today, their echo presents a challenge for any tech company seeking to control its own legacy.” E N D Apple paid for Disegno’s travel to visit Daisy in Breda.

17

Feedback

Just as this issue went to press, Apple announced its support for California’s SB 244 bill, which would require manufacturers to give customers and repair shops the tools, manuals and parts needed “to effect the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of [their products]” – a move that suggests the company is making positive progress in its wider strategies around these issues.

Words Lara Chapman Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Designed by Michel Ducaroy in 1973, the Togo remains incredibly popular.

At 50-years-old, it’s still a best-seller for manufacturer Ligne Roset. The 2020s has seen the couch go viral on TikTok, while also cameoing in films and series including Spiderhead (2022) and White Lines (2020). Recently, the Togo has taken on a more serious role in its career as cinema guest star in the wonderfully colourful sets of Rye Lane (2023).

Directed by Raine Allen-Miller with production design by Anna Rhodes, Rye Lane is a romcom centring on two people who meet at a gallery, then spend a whirlwind day together navigating recent breakups while (spoiler) starting to fall in love with each other. Dom (David Jonsson), is a sweet-hearted accountant devastated by his girlfriend’s infidelity, while Yas (Vivian Oparah), an aspiring costume designer, summarises the end of her relationship in a sharp one liner: “He was trying to dilute my squash and I was like, ‘Not today Satan!’”

The Togo makes its first appearance around the 37-minute mark, when Yas

yields to Dom’s requests to detail her relationship’s breaking point. The film cuts to a flashback played out on a theatre stage that has been set up as a bare-bones living room. Dom observes from the theatre’s balcony as presentday Yas narrates. The scene involves said sofa, some homemade hummus and a not-so-equal (and rather awkward to watch) sexual exchange that culminates in Yas’s epiphany: “If you make the hummus, you should get the head.”

Time to go! Goodbye Togo!

It’s at this point that you start to wonder how reliable Yas’s narration is.

If you interrogate the Togo’s presence, something feels off. A Togo is a joyful thing – hardly a prop for conflict.

Furthermore, at the risk of overanalysing, the Togo’s extra-low and extra-deep form, combined with its serious softness (a result of having no internal structure, only foam), doesn’t feel like it would make this particular act particularly comfortable or practical. Just saying 🤷‍♀️ . Perhaps the Togo is trying to tell us something…

About 15 minutes later, the Togo re-enters the frame when Dom and Yas break into her ex’s apartment to reclaim

48

a record. Feathery artworks occupy obscene amounts of the flat’s floorspace and sculptural candles too beautiful to burn abound. The centrepiece? A very orange, very large Togo. Judging by the man’s styling, he does seem a bit of a prick. Perhaps Yas was telling the truth… but then the ex and his new girlfriend return unexpectedly and, long story short, reveal that Yas was the dumpee, not the dumper. Yas is shame-faced; Dom betrayed. All this time, the Togo was lounging like an elephant in the room, hinting at Yas’s lack of integrity – its soft insides an apt metaphor for her lack of ethical backbone.

Yas’s explanation for her behaviour?

“I just didn’t want to be sad anymore, and so I lied and you called me iconic and I liked that you saw me that way.” As far as explanations go, it’s not bad – who doesn’t want to be an icon? But the moral of this romantic tale is that, if you get caught faking your iconicism, you might be left without a leg to stand on. And, while it’s fine for a sofa to be foot- and fancy-free, sometimes humans need to sit with some discomfort. Only by growing a spine can we attain Togo-level status as a true icon.

Home, Work, and Where Else?

Words Rupal Rathore Photography Eshwarya Grover

I have come to appreciate my parents’ choice of location to build our house 15 years ago, in what seemed at the time a far-flung residential colony sandwiched between two national highways. For any Disegno readers who might turn up at my door, the view from the terrace is quite pretty – a range of continuous low hills that turn from brown to green as the rains arrive. The change in season is marked by spurts of harmless wildfires in early summer, and herds of white sheep grazing happily in late monsoon.

Construction

When we first moved to this northeastern edge of Udaipur, Rajasthan, boring essentials such as a vegetable shop and pharmacy had been preceded by landmark developments: two prominent schools, a multi-sport stadium, a craft and vocational training centre, and an indigo dyeing workshop and production house. Over the years, however, the area has attracted several commercial and residential investments, defining a new direction for the city’s growth. Owing to Udaipur’s proximity to the airport, highways linking it to nearby cities, and its small-scale factory setups, locals have found more and more reasons to live or work here. The latest addition is Third Space, a multipurpose community centre for learning and culture, designed by Studio Saar.

coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, the building aspires to align with what Oldenburg described as “the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy”, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day. In the last decade, cafés and restro-bars of all shapes and sizes have cropped up across Udaipur: on the rooftops of buildings that offer magical views over the city’s lakes; in old havelis that still have the nostalgic charm of lime-plastered walls and stone ceilings; and, more recently, in speedily erected steel-and-glass sheds with glossy interiors. These are the third spaces that Udaipur currently offers – places where people meet to discuss ideas, talk shop, make introductions, plan events. But currently all of these require some kind of financial outlay to occupy space. Thinking back, all the documentary screenings or talks that I’ve attended in the past six months borrowed a commercial venue in the hope of attracting a young, art-minded audience. In this context, Third Space could fill a void and slowly develop into a vibrant community centre, one that is consciously designed around people creating instead of consuming.

Udaipur has more than 600,000 permanent residents and more than 1 million annual visitors.

Its economy is largely dependent on tourism, closely supported by manufacturing and the processing industries of marble, minerals and chemicals, as well as handicraft products. In this historical city, whose urban fabric includes several major lakes, a royal palace, and rolling hills, it is fairly common to find imitations of ornamental elements from older structures adorning new hotels and homes, built out of the popular and readily accessible combination of brick, concrete and steel. However, Third Space goes several steps further than the standard construction quality and architectural style of recent additions to the cityscape, combining tradition and technology in ways that are climate-sensitive, and illustrate sustainable application of locally available materials and construction techniques.

Udaipur has increasingly been subjected to havoc caused by off-season rains and intense winds coming in from the western coast, most recently cyclone Biparjoy in June 2023. Global heating is disrupting monsoon patterns – warmer air holds more moisture,

“It is a place for people to come together and feel like they are a part of a larger community.” —Ananya Singhal Third Space is one of three under-construction buildings that I have been watching go up along National Highway 58 over the past year. Situated only two lanes away from where I live, the community centre stands out thanks to its reinforced concrete cement frame that, unlike its neighbours, has not been wrapped in walls made using aerated concrete blocks – the trendy material that has replaced traditional clay bricks in tall buildings across India.

This departure from predictability has inspired much breakfast table conversation at our house, during which we have rejected the possibility of it being yet another office or apartment building.

Our curiosity was put to rest when I finally entered Third Space in July 2023 to be shown around by one of its architects: Ananya Singhal, co-founder of Studio Saar. “It is a place for people to come together and feel like they are a part of a larger community,” says Singhal, who is also the managing director at Secure Meters, his family-owned company that commissioned Third Space. “It is the third space for students and creatives to come to,” he says, “the first being your home, and second your school or workplace.” Putting a spin on the idea of the “third place”, which was

50

Construction

52

creating dry periods followed by extreme downpours.

While the city is not presently challenged by extreme waterlogging or flooding, thanks to its efficient network of inter-connected lakes, erratic monsoons and powerful storms have led to the disruption of farming cycles in the surrounding areas. In addition to an increased vulnerability to the changing climate, a spike in the city’s population has created an urgent need for architects and urban planners to rethink their approach towards balancing ecology with density. In this context, Third Space serves as a timely precedent for the city, responding to these shifts by taking a closer look at locally available resources and not simply going about business as usual. While the scale of Third Space may appear superfluous to some, it is worth reflecting that this multifunctional facility will be used by the people of Udaipur who currently do not have anything close to a community centre.

Its 170,000 sqft plan is designed to welcome around 1,000 to 1,500 people per day.

Although Third Space broke ground in January 2021 and has progressed steadily ever since, it is not surprising that my parents and I were initially uncertain as to what it was. The building only acquired the distinct air of a cultural centre in July 2023, when prefabricated, perforated screen panels appeared on all sides of the facade. Hoisted up on a metal support system, these panels resemble a prominent feature of heritage architecture in the region – handcrafted stone jaalis that act as a veil between the street and the house. Jaalis serve the dual purpose of ensuring privacy and compressing the hot air that passes through their tiny carved openings, naturally cooling it in the process. “Feel that breeze?” enquires Singhal as we pause for a moment on the second-floor corridor to experience the subtle effects of this simple, indigenous mechanism applied to a 21st-century building. Viewed from the exterior, these panels line up to create horizontal bands alternating between pristine white laser-cut metal and greyishwhite waterjet-cut marble. “Oh, and the marble off-cuts were used as chips in the flooring,” he adds.

There is something thrilling about touring a building that is only weeks away from launch, even more so when the floors haven’t been swept clean and welding sparks are flying about as handrails are ground smooth. As an architect myself, I instantly tuned in to the excited fervour at Third Space as multiple agencies worked simultaneously to meet

their deadlines. After walking across all its floors, basement and terrace included, we made our way into the makers’ workshop at ground level to find some quiet and admire the framed view of green fields abutting the plot’s boundary.

“Can we stop making buildings here with steel and concrete? No. Can we make more informed decisions? Yes.” —Ananya Singhal “There is not just one problem that we are trying to solve here,” begins Singhal, putting away his can of Diet Coke and propping himself up on a high stool.

“The climate crisis in this country cannot be addressed in isolation. There are also health, literacy and socioeconomic issues entangled in it.” He gestures at the exposed concrete columns, cast with a mixture that replaced half the cement with marble dust. With Rajasthan being one of the largest exporters of marble in India, the dust was a waste product, acquired for free from nearby workshops. The new mixture proved to have greater compressive strength than standard concrete when tested in a laboratory – a significant finding that owes a debt to the freedom to experiment afforded by the unique client-architect relationship in the Third Space project. “Can we stop making buildings here with steel and concrete? No,” Singhal tells me. “Can we make more informed choices? Yes.” The centre echoes the layout of the havelis in Rajasthan, townhouses that typically have rooms arranged around a top-lit courtyard to allow hot air to rise, escape, and be replaced with cooler air (a passive cooling technique explained by the Venturi effect).

The building’s perforated marble-and-metal skin envelops a series of internal volumes, all of which are made distinct through changes in proportions, the quality of light they receive, and, most clearly, their programme.

Third Space will be a learning and creative hub run by Dharohar, the not-for-profit arm of Secure Meters, which has been conducting a series of outreach programmes in public schools in and around Udaipur

Construction

A weaver working on Third Space’s bamboo canopy.

The stepped floor of the amphitheatre.

Marble off-cuts were used as chips in the flooring.

Construction

56

for more than two decades. The space’s complex programmatic mix, partly informed by Dharohar’s previous education-related initiatives, includes an amphitheatre covered in white mosaic for open performances (which also serves as the main entrance plaza), a locally operated cafeteria, a store, exhibition spaces, workshops, activity areas, conference rooms, a single-screen theatre and library. “There is a lot happening here so that everyone in town can find something to relate to,” says Jonny Buckland, Studio Saar’s other co-founder, who spent six months in Udaipur in 2017 for the initial design conceptualisation of Third Space. My personal favourite might be the semi-open reading space next to the library on the top floor that overlooks the amphitheatre. The amphitheatre itself has a stepped surface that takes its cues from ancient stepwells – the subterranean water-storage tanks with corridors of steps leading down to the water – which are found across western India. At roof level, the landscaped terrace of the building has dedicated play areas for children and a large expanse of flexible open space shaded by a lightweight canopy structure.

The steel-and-bamboo canopy, yet to be erected when I visited, will be installed in October, postmonsoon. Currently in its place is a temporary roof made of tensile fabric and steel cables, which was one of the initial iterations of the canopy’s design.

Stretching over the open-to-sky, central courtyard of the building as a precaution against heavy rains, this will be folded away and brought out during special occasions, such as the private launch party hosted two weeks after my first visit to Third Space. As a long-term and low-carbon solution, the architects arrived at a canopy system that is designed for continuous repair to cope with the cyclones that Udaipur has been experiencing in recent years. “The ratio between covered and open spaces in the building is roughly half and half,” says Buckland. “This [steel-andbamboo version] was thought to be one of the best ways to convert a large area on the terrace into a usable space that is aesthetically pleasing and protected against unpredictable weather.”

The design employed skilled craftspeople in the city who made mats out of cross-woven bamboo strips that will weather over time and biodegrade once they finish their useful life. Using lightweight bamboo mats as the canopy’s infill has dramatically reduced the amount of steel required to build its support structure,

and simplified the installation process onsite. Studio Saar brought in London-based Webb Yates Engineers to design the structural system for the canopy, which was virtually tested through computer simulations for its ability to withstand external pressures. Spanning 24m, the 1m-deep steel truss is to be fixed on reinforced concrete cement beams to allow for a column-free

“We’re not used to designing systems for failure. But by creating a weaker link, we have ensured that those junctions fail first.” —Ananya Singhal space below. Each of its 2x2m internal divisions will have the bamboo mats clipped at four top and bottom points to form a twisting shape.

“We’re not used to designing systems for failure,” says Singhal as we stride across the uncovered terrace.

“But by creating a weaker link between the bamboo mats and the steel supports, we have ensured that those junctions fail first while the rest of the canopy stays intact.” The system is designed to “fail safely”, meaning that if damaged or ripped loose by strong wind or heavy rain, the bamboo mats won’t pose a threat to people and property. Once the winds die down, they can be clipped back, repaired, or remade by local weavers who have been practising the craft for generations. Not only was this found to be more cost-effective than using off-the-shelf replacements, it also best demonstrates the fusion of the old and new (both materials and knowledge) that the centre hopes to promote through exhibitions and activitybased workshops.

“I reckon the urban applicability of a lightweight, shading structure like this can play a part in countering the increasing heat-island effect in our cities,” says Buckland as we catch a few moments of conversation in one of the protruding bay seats, or gokhras, an hour before the launch party. Meant for friends and relatives connected with the Singhal family, as well as the staff at Secure Meters and Dharohar associated with the project, the event was held to introduce Third Space and also celebrate its near-completion. “There is an

Construction

opportunity to create more usable space for people within existing buildings with such flexible, adaptable canopy systems – much like what I’ve observed in Udaipur, especially in the older, denser parts of the city,” continues Buckland, as a gentle drizzle slants across the terrace.

The centre is set to open to the public in October 2023, when most facilities are being made available to all for an annual membership charge of ₹3000 (£29) – a nominal fee for the working population in Udaipur against what is being offered by the space. While the entrance plaza and amphitheatre remain freely accessible to all non-members, the entire building will be largely reserved for schoolchildren free-of-cost on weekday mornings. “I am both excited and nervous to present Third Space to all of you today,” announced Dharohar’s head, Shivani Singhal, at the launch, which was followed by a series of talks and the opening of a photography exhibition documenting the making of the building. “Nervous because, well, look at the scale of this project that we undertook as a team and as a family … [and] excited to see what this place becomes over the years.”

In many ways, Third Space has already built a strong local community comprising workers, craftspeople, designers and coordinators who have worked on the project for a solid seven years. What remains to be seen is how the centre evolves with the people it will host and vice versa. “Udaipur is the kind of place where you would always work or socialise with someone you already know through friends or family – perhaps your grandparents knew theirs,” says Aditi Babel, a Udaipur-based artist who is also a close friend of Singhal. “The society’s quite closely knit.”

Babel was commissioned to supply a limited stock of handcrafted books that she makes with local artisans for the store at Third Space. “In that sense, I hope that the centre provides the chance to connect with likeminded people who get to know you independently, as an individual or professional,” she says. “This town could really benefit from a place that allows for that kind of honest exchange.” E N D

Ananya Singhal of Studio Saar.

Studio Saar covered the photographer’s travel and accommodation to document the building.

58

Words George Isleden

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Less Volume, More Meaning-When Polaroid launched its first SLR instant camera in 1972, its appeal was clear.

“It started out being the most instant way to create and hold a photograph in your hands,” says the company’s CEO Oskar Smolokowski. “It was weeks faster than the standard way people experienced photography back then.”

Today, not so much. The rise of smartphone cameras wiped out the USP of instant cameras almost overnight, leaving the technology in search for a raison d’être. “Over the last 15 years, smartphone photography took the throne for the ‘most instant’ experience,” Smolokowski explains.

“Not only do you get to look at your photo within the same second after taking it, you can share it with millions of people (if they care to look at it) within the same minute.”

Not that Polaroid was around for this change. The original company went bankrupt in 2001 after a series of poor business decisions, and it was only the painstaking work of Smolokowski and his Impossible Project – which from 2008 manufactured film for old Polaroid cameras – that enabled the company to relaunch under his leadership in 2017.

In the intervening period, however, “the instant photography experience [had] changed in relation to the world around it,” Smolokowski says. “We [were] no longer the most instant way to create and hold a photograph, but we became one of the most meaningful.”

An instant camera, he adds, has instead become “something you reach for more rarely in the world of photography, but very deliberately”.

This ethos is in full effect in the I-2, a new camera from Polaroid and the company’s first to have inbuilt manual controls. Compared with Polaroid’s other cameras, the I-2 is intended as a tool for those who treat analogue photography as an art form, be they professionals or keen amateurs. It is a camera whose design flags its

seriousness by emphasising the lens front and centre. “I tend to believe that the best design is as honest as possible,” says Smolokowski, “[and] the design we arrived at in the end is extremely honest – the lens is the absolute centre of this new camera.”

Whereas instant photography carries connotations of the cheap and cheerful point-and-click, the I-2 is a premium product that rewards experimentation through its various settings – an approach in which Smolokowski sees the medium’s future. “The sea of digital photographs and videos we create on our phones means they become less meaningful and less likely to be experienced beyond the moment of creation or instant sharing,” he says. “The few you bring into the real world with your Polaroid camera will live with you in the physical world; in your environment, not behind glass.”

The instantaneousness of instant photography may have been overtaken by digital, but the physicality of the medium remains. The I-2 is an unashamedly material object, with its aluminium lens barrel, cherry-red shutter button, and black plastic casing, and the images that eject from its outer shell are just the same. “You create less Polaroid photos and put more effort inside each one – that’s where the meaning comes from,” says Smolokowski. “You can’t edit them the way you can add a filter on a digital photo, or use AI to create a fake beautiful situation – that’s the honesty and imperfection.”

Objects in Review

Words Tetsuo Mukai Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Upon visiting the Parthenon in 1841, Hans Christian Andersen wrote that “Every little feeling was dead in my breast; I was filled with joy, peace, and happiness; and I bent my knee in this immense solitude.” Even though the temple had fallen to pieces by then, it still seemed to exert a powerful grip on Andersen, who fittingly called the Acropolis a “ruined fairy world”.

Completed in 432 BCE, the Parthenon is a temple dedicated to Athena, a grand marble structure made to inspire the population through its ornate details and perfectly proportioned columns and facades. Perfect, not because they were physically so, but thanks to its architects’ ability to take advantage of how our eyes and brains interpret shapes. The temple’s columns slightly taper inwards, while the stylobate is subtly curved, making them appear perfectly straight when seen together.

We can only imagine how the Athenians must have felt upon seeing this building – not the ruin we perceove today, but a perfect, seemingly permanent and

absolutely dignified composition intended to reflect the qualities of those in power. Architecture, especially on a scale as vast and prominent as this, has an ability to convince us of the existence of something superior.

Another, more modern, example of this architectural sleight of hand is Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, designed by Herbert Dickens Ryman and fellow Disney “imagineers”. Constructed in 1971 from concrete, steel and lots of paint, the castle is a centrepiece for the park and can be seen throughout the resort.

Here, however, we are tricked by our preconceptions about how the appearance of objects changes in relation to their distance from us.

Seemingly reaching much higher than the structure’s actual height of 189ft, the topmost sections of the castle have been painted in a slightly desaturated colour, while architectural features, such as windows, become smaller the higher up they are. The street that leads up to the castle has been designed to achieve a similar effect through reducing the size of the upper levels of its buildings in order to make them

60

also seem taller. Combined with the castle, this tableau creates the illusion of a longer street and larger castle in the distance. Maximising the intellectual properties it controls in an attempt to maintain their relevance is something that Disney is good at, but the castle stands out as a physical adaptation of this method – something we can actually interact with and experience.

Both the Parthenon and Cinderella Castle try to physicalise myths, a means of building legacy that manifests as a fairytale and influences our perspectives of reality. It’s rare to find these kinds of wild optical manipulations employed in contemporary buildings, but it’s all too easy to see a similar desire to push a narrative through colossal and eyecatching buildings. We can still be blinded by the projected immensity and grandiosity of these structures. After all, large buildings are an inescapable and in-your-face communication tool – designs that can blur the line between reality and fiction without us realising the mechanics and intentions that lurk behind them.

Navigating Friction Introduction Amal Alhaag Portrait Bachir Tayachi

A dialogue is a beautiful holding space for candid thoughts and questions tracing the intricacies of material culture, memory, and design. For me, conversation is also a site for memory work, interweaving different dialects, oral traditions, references, insight, contemplation and laughter. During this particular conversation, designer Yassine Ben Abdallah unveiled the complexities of his practice and offered a set of questions and thoughts on the intersections of identity, heritage, design, and research.

Context

In 2022, then a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven’s Geo-Design MA, Ben Abdallah presented The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation at the school’s graduation show during Dutch Design Week.

Set up to resemble a museum archive, the project saw Ben Abdallah place a series of machetes he had cast from sugar upon metal shelves, where they melted away into sticky pools over the course of the exhibition.

The piece was a reflection on the colonial history of La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that is governed as an overseas départment of France, having previously been a French colony. La Réunion’s official language is French, but Réunion Creole is more widely spoken, with its mixture of French, Malagasy, Gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, and Tamil revealing the multiethnic makeup of the island’s inhabitants. Ben Abdallah grew up on La Réunion, where his family had moved in exile from Tunisia, and become interested in its history of sugar plantations, and the enslaved and indentured labourers forced to work on these sites.

La Réunion’s history has been shaped by sugarcane, but Ben Abdallah discovered that few material traces from the historic plantations had been conserved – bar for objects that had once belonged to the island’s white masters.

Ben Abdallah’s machetes, tools of the plantations, were designed to question what is, and is not, preserved from contested histories. The project re-formed elements from La Réunion’s past that have hitherto been absent, but allowed them, in turn, to perish and slip away. Ben Abdallah received Design Academy Eindhoven’s 2022 Gijs Bakker Award, a prize given to an MA student whose final project “[demonstrates] outstanding skill and imagination, tenacity and originality, personality, and relevance to the profession and the outside world”, and was selected in 2023 as part of France’s prestigious Design Parade Hyères competition for young designers – a competition in which The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation won the overall Grand Prix du Jury. Off the back of this success, Ben Abdallah is due to spend much of the coming year participating in residencies with ethnographic institutions and manufacturing centres across France and the Netherlands. His work will come to occupy the same institutional spaces whose colonial legacies it criticises.

To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories. It was

a delight to have an unfiltered, critical and joyous conversation, one that navigates the challenges posed by the hegemonic, colonial and Eurocentric value system, and its attempts to erase marginalised people, their realities, knowledge systems, and lifeworlds.

Within his research and practice, Ben Abdallah delves into the essence of what the writer Saidiya Hartman has termed “the afterlife of slavery” and colonialism, working and thinking through how societies define and preserve their stories, and how objects both

To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories. embody and transcend the passage of time and space.

Preservation and archiving come to the forefront, echoing the sentiments of Hartman in Patricia J. Saunders’s 2008 essay ‘Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman’, published in Anthurium. “I try to make a statement about the cost of not imagining,” Hartman tells Saunders, “and I ask: can critique just be another way of remaining faithful to the limits of the archive.” To what extent can designers and makers critically and unapologetically reflect and engage with archives and histories, without fetishising or commodifying the violence of these histories and archives? Can we be less faithful to “the limits of preservation” in the Western sense, remembering that in caring for these histories and material cultures, the oppressed often still elude tangible representation? And where can imagination find pockets of space for artists, designers, activists, writers or hustlers to dream out loud or breathe freely?

These are the questions that I am concerned with.

The art, design, and heritage worlds are intertwined with a hyper-individual and neoliberal capitalist market and politics. It is this tension between dreaming, realities, and histories where imagination goes to work – where some of us dismantle our conditioned design sensibilities, while engaging with the vivid colours of our migrant heritage. We open up a reservoir of aesthetic value that might not be easily digestible or graspable. In our conversation, Ben Abdallah

62

Context

The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, exhibited at Design Parade Hyères.

64

Images by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.

touched upon the capacity of objects to encapsulate life, memory, and pain – a profound comprehension of the intricate dimensions of identity and lifeworlds.

I am grateful for his openness, curiosity, and deep research that challenges the conventional boundaries of design, art, and academia, while also forging a path for vulnerability, doubt, and humbleness.

To speak about exile, colonial conditioning, and absence or loss is never a trivial matter. The weight of violence is ever-present, casting its shadow over artistic and design practices, shaping everyday realities and collective memory. Amidst this heaviness, storytelling emerges as a potent force, carving a space for dialogue – a space where oxygen and laughter rejuvenate, paving the way for alternative ways of being together across time, dialects, and differences.

Amal Alhaag I’ve been thinking about something I read on your website a while ago, which I reread yesterday.

In your description of The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, it says: “The history and culture of the oppressed are rarely embodied by material objects.”

I felt that was such a clear statement and says so much about your practice.

Yassine Ben Abdallah That sentence is one I took from Françoise Vergès, who is a theorist from La Réunion [the sentence is drawn from ‘A Museum Without Objects’, Vergès’s contribution to The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (2014), ed.]. I think it’s a strong sentence.

It’s this thing of growing up as a minority: what are you left with materially? My family are Tunisian, but we grew up in exile in La Réunion. So there’s this intersection of different minorities and a question of how we hold memory. For example, I saw my mother building an Arab home nearly 10,000km away from Tunisia. Objects became so important for her, as well as being a source of tension because she was hoarding them. We had so many Arab rugs, but I realised how important it was for her to have a materialisation of her own identity and culture. In La Réunion you go to French school, you have French history, and specifically the history of the kings, yet you have no traces whatsoever from the population who sustained that system. We did not feel recognised in that history.

Amal In the Somali context, the materialisation of our life is language. It’s not tangible, but at the same time it’s sensory. So I often think about what it means to not have access to a material culture, and to hold onto

an oral tradition because it’s the thing that can travel with you. But having material [residues] from those places – you know, having the carpet, the rug, or the curtains – is interesting. In my conditioning from growing up in the Netherlands, you develop a certain idea of design. And then you’re like, “Oh my God, these curtains are so ugly, they’re gonna give me a headache. Why does it have to be so over the top?”

It was only later when I was like, “Actually they’re quite a funky colour.” You know, other designers are now trying to aim for these kinds of colours, but migrant communities already have them on lockdown!

So I’m interested in the value that is in those pieces as objects that don’t enter the Eurocentric value system, because for the Eurocentric value system they’re useless. They don’t create any type of aesthetic value, or cultural, corporate or neoliberal capitalist value.

Unless they’re performing that ethnographic dream of Moroccan carpets or Persian rugs – well, I don’t have to tell you.

Yassine Exactly.

Amal It’s the aesthetics of working-class migrants.

Françoise’s work has also been fundamental for me, because I feel like she somehow speaks into existence the language that many of us are looking for to address the dreadfulness of our social condition.

She’s writing about things that very few others are, such as the social conditions of cleaners in France [see ‘Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender’ from e-flux Journal #100 (2019), ed.]; there are very few people writing about that who have the understanding of their racialised position. This also speaks to and about labour. You and I have a shared interest in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism, and labour as an afterlife of that, so I’m interested in how you relate to that through the materials you work with. They’re so loaded with history and pain – laborious pain.

Yassine Most of the stories I collected were from people affected by the plantation system. Because there is no material culture left, the only thing you’re left with are the stories, but these kinds of voices are not considered legitimate enough to exist in an institutional space. That’s where I feel there’s a way to use the materialisation of stories through the sugar machetes. Those machetes melt, so they challenge this institutional system that always wants to preserve, immortalise, and control. It’s this tension that I wanted to play with. In terms of labour, most of the labour in France, for example, in the ethnographic museum

Context

[the Musée du quai Branly, ed.], are people of colour.

Two years ago I went to Palais de Tokyo for a beautiful exhibition about African artists, where I saw that all the visitors were white, but all the museum’s guards were Black. There’s this duality of what it means to exhibit Black art in white institutions when this is the social reality. Lately, I’ve also been reading about how in the Musée du quai Branly, some cleaners don’t want to go to certain spaces because they’re loaded with stories of ghosts, stories of haunted spaces, and specifically with objects that were stolen, but which are still exhibited. The people who feel this discomfort are those lower down on the social chain. It’s not the curators, it’s not the people in the offices.

Amal An ethnographic museum has objects without their people. To then have people forced to work in those spaces is a continuation of the colonial relation.

So there’s a lot to say about ethnographic museums, but I also feel that at least with an ethnographic museum you know what the conditions are, whereas contemporary art spaces behave as if they’re not part of the same type of European, ethnographic, modernist project. For me, Palais de Tokyo is a synopsis of racial relations in France. You have the Black security, and then you have all the white citizens who are very accommodated in the space. But the moment I entered with my small child and my partner, the guards were trying to control us. Sometimes we don’t need white overseers, because we have people who look like us who enact the plantation system in the present. It’s like how you have security at airports and they treat you more shittily if they’re a person of colour.

Yassine Always.

Amal Because the dynamic is that if they treat you well, it might look as if they’re giving you favours. It’s the internalisation of supremacy. It’s the policing of the body, which has a genealogy of colonial policing. So the question for me is what it means for us all to be so invested in a modernist project, when it has done so little for us besides making us sick and dismantling our cultures. I’m also thinking about you as a designer and a researcher. When it comes to an ethnographic museum, everything is dismantled. These objects have been put in a very beautiful building – a colonial, spectacular building – and there is nowhere else to research them. You have to go to this place where they’re behind bars and you cannot touch them. So there’s a cut-off lineage. You might want to know how they were made, or the craftsmanship behind them,

but all that knowledge has disappeared. The object remains, but the knowledge fades out.

Yassine About disappearing knowledge, I feel that as minorities we’ve learned to mourn. I watched my parents let go of a country that was once theirs and seeing them mourn that was memorable. I feel that death is quite present in our culture – we saw in France just lately, for example, when a young Arab kid was shot by the police [in June 2023, Nahel Merzouk, 17, was shot dead at point blank range by police during a traffic stop; his execution prompted widespread riots around France, ed.]. Death is omnipresent. So there are all these questions about preservation, but one of the strengths we have, which white culture seems to have completely erased, is this need and ability to mourn. How do we collectively mourn the stories that are gone, and through this mourning, what is the possibility of building new ones? Saidiya Hartman talks about using critical fabulation while researching the Middle Passage [published as ‘Venus in Two Acts’ in Small Axe #26 (2008), ed.], because there are no stories, so fiction became a way to tell those stories.

The use of design is this possibility to create new stories and build on new things.

Amal I actually bought Saidiya Hartman’s book, so it’s nice to hear you mention her work. There’s a quote from ‘Venus in Two Acts’, which goes: “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it?” I was curious if you see your work

“How do we collectively mourn the stories that are gone, and through this mourning, what is the possibility of building new ones?”

—Yassine Ben Abdallah

as stories, because it’s interesting to think about objects and their making as the idea that Hartman is addressing.

Yassine I didn’t originally study design. I studied social sciences, where you learn about how we shape each other as human beings within societies. But I

66

later realised that objects do the same. Eating with chopsticks or eating with a spoon completely changes the experience of eating, for example. The obsession with the chair in design says, I feel, a lot about the Western centrism of elevation, whereas in other cultures we sit on the ground and we sit collectively.

Objects tell stories, they’re building ways to see reality.

There’s a certain sensibility too, because you build a relationship to an object through touching it. You touch it and when you touch something, something

“What I really love about these places is that they’re one of the few places in the West where you read that they don’t know something.”

—Amal Alhaag

touches you back. There’s a certain power in an object and maybe that’s why there is so much fuss around ethnographic museums. What do we do with past objects? What are the stories behind past objects?

How do they touch us in the present?

Amal You’ve made work around the fabulation of the ethnographic museum, and I’m interested in the way you have circumvented the white gaze.

Personally, I’m always interested in thinking about how artists cope with it, sidestep it, or return it.

Yassine I like this idea of having a divided gaze.

I grew up in a culture that is Western, but Creole culture is also mixed between enslaved people and the white masters. From the beginning, this culture acknowledged that it has confrontation within itself. One of the people I interviewed told me that her grandmother was white and had married an indentured labourer from India. Each time they would go to visit her, the grandma would shout “Oh, the maids are here to help me,” to make sure that everyone would think they were servants.

Creole culture is all about this ambiguity, these kinds of confrontations even within families. Creole is about friction. But the white gaze prevails. The question then is, how do we hold this friction in a certain way to, I would say, reclaim the awkwardness, and make white people uncomfortable?

Amal How do you approach that in your work with

institutions? How do you engage with that and still keep a form of materialisation in the practice?

Yassine I’m really conflict averse. I try to handle things diplomatically and there’s a lot of code switching.

Coming from the social sciences, this idea of having academic language gives me a certain security while navigating museums. But my work is always about smuggling something in. Machetes for me are so embedded in agricultural culture and the culture of La Réunion, for instance, but at Design Academy I had a Dutch teacher. When I showed some machetes in the class, he told me that he was really scared by the fact that a student could bring machetes into school and see no problem with that. He was deeply uncomfortable, because he was seeing weapons.

Which I could understand, but he was seeing them from his own gaze as being dangerous, whereas for me they’re agricultural tools. I wouldn’t say I have the answer to your question, but the only solution I have found is to play with ambiguity. The machete is an ambiguous form, which is why I chose it.

Amal It’s funny you brought up this practice of smuggling, because I often speak about the work I do as a form of scamming. I’m interested in the way that these institutional spaces are transformed by you arriving there and your body being there. The body hasn’t even produced anything like labour yet, but it already does a lot of work by just being present.

Yassine Could you expand on that, because you were part of the Research Center for Material Culture [an institute within the Netherlands’ Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Wereldmuseum and Afrika Museum ethnographic institutions, ed.]. How was that?

Amal For me, an ethnographic museum is a very pragmatic space, where we see an accumulation of colonial practices. Spending time there, I’m not really learning about the objects. Most of what I’ve learned isn’t about becoming a better researcher. I’ve learned much more about whiteness, preservation, collection, and tradition. I’ve learned about the politics of all that, but also how much of it is just theatre and spectacle. Édouard Glissant [a Martinican philosopher and poet whose book Poétique de la relation (1990) called for the “right to opacity for everyone”, ed.] talks about how it’s OK to not know something, and what I really love about these places is that they’re one of the few places in the West where you read that they don’t know something. They know jack shit, so in the classification of an object it will often say: “We don’t know.”

Context

like they’re spaces you need to dismantle for something new to arise. I’m more interested in what could grow in the ruins of the ethnographic museum. I do believe in the notion of restitution, but allowing things to die is also important. For example, I believe that Burkina Faso is currently asking for the return of certain funeral masks, because they’re considered to be magic and they need to be buried [the ‘Rapport Sarr-Savoy sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain’ (2018)

by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, commissioned

by French President Emmanuel Macron, notes that “[in] a number of African societies, statues also perish.

They have a certain lifespan and are caught within a regenerative economic cycle founded on a fluid materiality and ontological identity,” ed.]. For this reason, the museum [that currently holds them] refuses to give them back, because [Burkina Faso is] planning to bury, rather than preserve them. So that begs the question, what’s the status of those masks now? Are they in agony in the museum because they’re not allowed to die? As designers, how do we allow objects to die, especially in the story of industrial design, where the pretentious modern dream was that these objects would last forever. Perhaps we don’t need cultural institutions to show all of our objects; we need funeral institutions to bury them. I’m really curious as to what this idea of object burial might look like in the West, and this is in the context of the questions around monuments during Black Lives Matter, when everyone wanted to put them in museums. Maybe it’s not a museum we need, but a place where we allow them to be let go.

Amal It’s funny that you brought that up, because I’ve said a few times that museums are places where objects go to die. I think what you’re suggesting means that you think of them in a circular way. They’re part of life and life moves on. But in a material culture, and a place where accumulation is the highest achievement, dying is the worst thing that can happen. When you make these machetes out of sugar, the material itself has the potential of melting away or no longer being remembered beyond what we have in our mind. But in art and design, everything is stacked up – there’s just more and more and more. Everyone wants to do the same thing and the economy around it is not sufficient to sustain the accumulation. With my friend Maria Guggenbichler, I opened a space in Amsterdam called Side Room and, after three years of operation, we closed it with a burning ritual where we invited

There will be some nonsense, like a classification of what the object could be, but it’s entirely fabrication.

It’s not even fabulation because it’s just telenovela nonsense – you know, something someone wrote in 1919 that has since become fact. It shows the arrogance of the West to think that not knowing anything is expertise. Ethnographic expertise is just having been places and documented what you extracted. So it has made me think a lot about abolition work and what it means to rethink the industry, because the ethnographic project is also an industry. There are so many people and governments invested in not returning these objects because people would lose their jobs. But these ethnographic museums are founded on the cornerstones of colonialism: missionaries, business and the state. That’s a toxic cocktail for me, so it’s very interesting that more and more artists of colour, people from marginalised backgrounds, are engaging with these places and becoming tricksters.

Yassine But the closer you get to an institution, the more you become dependent on it because it has money and power. How do you hold space in those institutions and what’s your agency at the end of the day?

Amal I was at the Tropenmuseum seven years, but always as a freelancer. For me, it was a place of mutual aid where I had access to resources to move them around – if I could create cultural capital for other people, that could be useful. I approached it in that way, because I knew that an institution always takes something from you, so it’s a negotiation. What are you willing for it to take, and what are you willing to take from it? I have a very simple rule, which is: “I’m always ready to get fired.” It’s a very liberating way of being, because you don’t really care, so you can stick to your strategies. I’m not saying it’s not been difficult – museums and institutions are really tough places in general, and in an ethnographic museum you’re reminded every day of what has been stolen. You’re in the violence and you can’t even fake the funk. It’s not like a contemporary art institution, which you know is violent, but at least things are pretty!

Yassine For me, it’s this notion of demonic ground.

I’m really fascinated by the ethnology of preservation.

Why are we obsessed with preserving things? There’s probably something linked to this idea of property and owning certain things. I don’t know if I care what the future of ethnography museums is, because I feel

68

Context

This page: image by Florian Lafosse, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah. Next page: image by Femke Reijerman, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.

participants to bring things along to burn. Some people wanted to burn white supremacy, others letters to ex-partners, whatever! There was this breath of oxygen that came from letting go.

Yassine The possibility of death is also the possibility of life. When my grandmother died, it was a really painful moment that was felt collectively within my family. But it was one of the moments where we laughed a lot while we remembered her. When we allow someone to pass away, we are left with the life. But we are in a society that has accumulated so many things. Even in the creative world, people are afraid to create because everything has been done, everything has been made. And you’re like: “What’s next? What space is left for us?” We’re still in adulation of the past. This is where there’s a certain sensibility in oral culture, because oral culture transforms things, there’s a shape-shifting – even in the objects. Things can pass away and new things emerge.

Amal I think that’s beautiful. That’s why for many years, I’ve only been doing very ephemeral things, like staying within that oral literature. All the artworks would be in the moment and then disappear, with minimal documentation. But value is produced through accumulation and repetition in the art world, right?

It’s also present within the idea of the single author.

If you have one way of making, you cannot change your practice, because then people don’t recognise your practice and you do not accumulate value.

Yassine I think that’s a big thing. I cannot sell anything, but that’s not the purpose of my work. I had galleries asking me if there was a way to preserve the sugar machetes or make them out of resin. But that doesn’t make sense because I’m talking about something that disappeared; I’m talking about something that is changing. I also feel deeply uncomfortable trying to make money from these stories that I’ve collected.

And this is why there’s a certain small window to, as you said, scam institutions to get funded research opportunities. I do not want the objects to become collectibles and accumulate, because that’s what I’m criticising.

Amal There’s friction in that space. Many of us have complex relations with the neoliberal capitalist machine, but at the same time we do have to find ways to pay our rent and survive in that system.

You have to find ways to be in relation with it that do not undermine your spiritual politics and wellbeing in a society that makes it quite toxic.

Yassine For me, my whole questioning is about what it means to be a designer in a post-colonial society.

As a designer, what is my role in my community and how can I tell these stories? Maybe there’s also this notion of time, which the academic Rolando Vázquez writes about really well [in ‘Modernity, Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time’ (2009), published in Sociological Research Online #14(4), Vázquez writes that “chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the modern/colonial systems of oppression”, ed.]. In modern society there’s this idea of linearity of progress and a future that is going to be brighter, whereas in some indigenous cultures, the past is in front of you. You go in behind your ancestors and they’re the ones that open the door.

This is what I relate to. I’m not creating anything new, I’m just speaking about the past of the ones who went before me. That’s comforting, because you’re a continuation of something – you’re not something more or something less. E N D

70

Words Lara Chapman

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Glassware is like Onions-What’s chunky, heavy, and acidic green all over? You may be thinking of a certain misanthropic ogre who lives alone in a swamp and plays the title role in the Dreamworks classic Shrek (2001). And you’d be right, but this description also fits Thaw, a collection of glassware

by London-based jewellery and homewares brand Completedworks.

Unlikely companions though Shrek and luxury tableware may be, their green bodies are not the only things they have in common. Like Shrek, who subverts audiences’ expectations of ogres as being ugly and mean, Thaw seeks to overturn preconceptions.

Anna Jewsbury, founder and artistic director of Completedworks, describes her process as taking a traditional medium such as luxury glassware and “subverting it to a place of newness, making it very slightly strange or a little bit unexpected.”

The sturdy glass forms in the Thaw collection “imitate a much softer or more supple material”, says Jewsbury.

Indeed, the bulky jug seems to relax into the slump of gravity, while the accompanying goblets’ stems ooze downwards and spread sloppily into their swampy bases. Their odd shapes are visceral and tempting, as if a magic spell has been cast over them. “They look almost alive,” Jewsbury remarks, “which I really love.”

Thaw’s use of highlighter-green glass adds to the enticing sense of oddness. Unmissable and zesty, this shade is created through the use of recycled glass from broken windows and bottles. These waste streams combine to create a “really lovely aqua” glass in the recycling process, says Jewsbury, to which pigments are added. It all amounts to waste transformed into a striking, limey, slightly unusual treasure.

The intended effect of this visual strangeness? “I think it creates this relationship with the person who is observing or interpreting the qualities of the material,” says Jewsbury.

“It makes them look twice at the piece.” There is more here than meets the eye. This lesson in finding value in unexpected places was also imparted by Shrek, when, about halfway through his reluctant (though some might say fortuitous) adventure with his sidekick Donkey to save a princess called Fiona from her dragon-guarded prison, he surmises that “ogres are like onions”. Beneath their stand-offish demeanour and bulky form, should you take the time to look within, come surprising layers of emotional vulnerability, varied skillsets and a wry sense of humour. Glass is not just fancy crystalware; ogres are more than just monsters.

Towards the end of Shrek, Donkey catches a glimpse of Fiona’s hometown, Far Far Away, as the three travel towards it to reunite the princess with her family. Upon seeing the giant castle in the distance and the wide palm tree-lined boulevards, Donkey exclaims: “It’s gonna be champagne wishes and caviar dreams from now on.” Writing in Paste, TV and film journalist Adesola Thomas posits that “[the] line is an effective signifier of the change in class environment that our dynamic trio experiences”. It is a moment when the viewer is asked to question who and what is welcome in a luxurious royal kingdom, and why. Likewise, Jewsbury invites us to rethink what we might find on high-end dinner tables by embracing the weird and boldly wonderful. Perfection, Thaw shows, is no longer the only marker of luxury goods.

Instead, objects that make us think about them more deeply can be desirable too. Let’s cheers our chunky, acidic-green goblets to that.

Objects in Review

Regional Modernisms; Tropical Skins Words Olorunfemi Adewuyi Photographs Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni

From Islamic influences to Portuguese-cum-Afro-Brazilian imports and the arrival of modernism, Nigeria has seen more than its fair share of architectural styles. Each of these additions to the nation’s built environment has been laden with its own nuances and forerunners, but perhaps the most-discussed has been the tropical style – an offshoot of the international style propagated

by European figures such as Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

72

Collaboration

Lagos’s Independence House (1961), designed by Augustine Egbor.

secretariats, such as the University of Lagos and the Nigerian External Telecommunications (NET) building, signalled a turn toward progressive ideals and, in turn, accelerated the development of the style. Wealthy private clients engaged the services of architects for office developments, and a good number of these buildings were also commissioned by British companies who were continuing operations in Nigeria, post-colonisation.

This derivative of international architecture continued well into the 1980s, before most of its early practitioners – who were mainly European, bar a few indigenous architects – either returned to their home countries or became inactive in the profession. After about 30 years heralding the post-colonial drive of African nations, the style’s demise was caused by “its ballooning costs, an investment the continent could never really afford,” as architect Ola Uduku writes in her paper ‘Modernist Architecture and “the Tropical” in West Africa’. The style had, however, enjoyed socioeconomic success, inasmuch as it was instrumental to developmental infrastructure in the region, as well as having evinced a form of environmentally responsive design through its use of strategic orientation, double-skin facades, breeze blocks, fair-faced concrete finishes, and brise soleil, among other architectural features. In addition, these material experiments and the successes of the style have hitherto eclipsed modernism’s integration with art in the literature, despite art having been an important anchor of cross-cultural collaboration while attempting to ground modernism within its context.

My first encounter with tropical modernism came in 2015, beyond the walls of the university classroom.

As a third-year architecture student, I had been taught Gropius but not Oluwole Olumuyiwa, a central figure in Lagos’s 20th-century architecture. Wandering through the city’s marina, I encountered a series of concrete buildings with distinctive shading features – the interesting mix of planes elicited by the screening elements drew me in, and I was particularly fascinated by the double-skin facade. Perhaps my internship at James Cubitt and Partners’ Lagos office heightened my interest, especially after I discovered the practice’s Elder Dempster building (1964), which has now been remodelled and looks nothing like its old self. Since then, I have spent years researching the style more formally, trying to understand it and its proponents as part of an attempt to re-centre the lost voices of

Modernism came to African shores following the founding in 1954 of the Department for Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in London, motivated in part by discussions between Otto Koenigsberger, a leading European figure in the development of tropical architecture, and Adedokun Adeyemi, a Nigerian student at the Manchester School of Architecture. The continent came to be seen as an experimental lab for early pioneers of the international style, as evidenced in the discussions around the CIAM’s (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) 1933 Athens Charter, which labelled buildings from this period as “laboratories for living”. The international style was promoted through CIAM and its growing international reach, while British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (of Fry, Drew and Partners) led its institutionalisation in Africa, having worked in west Africa under its colonial governments just prior to independence, where they attempted to adapt European tenets of the style for export to the colonies.

Within Africa, modernism arrived on the back of colonial politics, before developing along a geographic trajectory. In global architectural history, its political origins have been explored and its responses to the climatic conditions in the then-British colonies extensively analysed. The style’s colonial origins and links were critically examined by architect and educator Hannah le Roux in a 2003 paper titled ‘The Networks of Tropical Architecture’, while Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa, an exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, has investigated the transitional nature of modernism in Africa as nations shifted from colonial rule to independence, with a view to centring African voices in the development of the style. Yet the primary analysis of the tropical style has remained chiefly interested in its geographic adaptations.

In Nigeria, tropical modernism’s formal introduction came in the early 1950s, shortly before the country’s full independence in 1960. As a country coming out of its colonial era, and having discovered oil in the late 1950s, Nigeria had both the will and economics to support efforts to reframe its society, architecture and culture away from colonialism, and towards new meanings as a sovereign nation building its image afresh. The newly independent government’s commitment to building megastructures for both educational institutions and governmental

74

Nigerian architects. Through research and constant engagement with the buildings, the involvement of architecture with art in the tropical modernist period has started to become clear to me – particularly after I encountered a mosaic mural on the top of Itiku House, a 1960s tropical modern building. The mural – framed in between the structural bays formed by the beams that support the cantilevered structure – consists of figurative humans, a mask and an embryo of sorts, all executed in glazed mosaic tiles and set against the muted colours of the building. Featuring a vibrant shade of indigo – an important colour in west Africa –1 it convinced me of the importance of art’s connection with architecture. Although obscured from the primary views of the building, the mosaic felt like an integral part of the composition, having been created by the artist Jimoh Buraimoh, a member of the Mbari Mbayo group, who worked in collaboration with John Godwin and his partner and fellow architect Gillian Hopwood.

Almost lost to the vestiges of the past, the mural – like many other murals and the buildings they adorn – is sadly ill-maintained, either due to ownership tussles or negligence by managing authorities.

Art and architecture have an inseparable history, developing along the same trajectory and continually cross-pollinating. In modernist Europe, for instance, art and architecture took on a new meaning and social purpose, reframing a world devastated by war.

Modernist architecture developed as a response to postwar reconstruction and followed a clear moral imperative – its goal was to strengthen a collective identity for the inhabitants of cities. This, its early proponents believed, could be successfully achieved by incorporating architecture with art, with the social nature of art capable of creating a sense of community and place. It was an ethos that informed professional development at the Bauhaus, where the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art), led the school’s founder Gropius to call on practitioners to “create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity”. Outside Europe, modernism had to adapt to climatic conditions, leading to regional modernisms, while the cultural limitations of the style also began to be addressed through integrating local art with architectural responses. In Latin America, for 1

See ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ by Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie in Disegno #19.

example, this idea of cannibalising ideas from colonising countries and asserting local culture against postcolonial cultural domination was termed “anthropophagy” by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago. Similarly, in Africa, the social and economic ideals of modernism appealed to newly formed governments, suggesting ways to build a new image for cities after the devaluation of our culture due to colonisation. This meant that the newly adapted style, although responding remarkably well to climate, had to further adapt to fit the cultural and emotional life of the people. Art could help with this adaptation.

A major aspect of postcolonisation in Nigeria was adapting European tenets and decolonising leftover systems. In art, this was evident in the pushback against the country’s dated academic curriculum, which still focused on European ideologies of art and neglected local ideals. This led to the 1958 formation of the Zaria Arts Society (popularly known as the Zaria Rebels) at the Technical College in Zaria, a group of artists who sought to localise art to respond contextually to its place and people. Within this framework, art was given a huge role in connecting the newly sovereign nation to its culture, spurred by the deplorable looting and bastardisation of art from the continent by European governments and institutions during colonisation. The nexus between art and architecture in this period was crucial, and simultaneously social, cultural and economic. Together with art, architecture began to transcend functionality and technique, and instead attempt to shape the emotional life of society by rendering the tropical style sensitively within its cultural context to offer a sense of community.

“Art was a critical aspect of Nigeria’s development post-colonisation,” says Oliver Enwonwu, an artist and gallerist, and the son of Ben Enwonwu, a pioneering African modernist artist whose murals and sculpture adorned significant buildings of the period. Enwonwu describes the social role that art played at the time of independence as being to “direct people in light of postcolonialism through peaceful existence.

Following this need, art was explored across different media, currency, music and eventually architecture.”

Enwonwu believes that this integration happened seamlessly, with art and architecture having developed along the same social, economic and political lines, and uses the term “independence artists” to describe the social and political characteristics of his father’s

Collaboration

The base of Independence House, covered in grafitti.

Sango (1964) by Ben Enwonwu, made for the headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria.

The 1964 headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria, designed by Oluwole Olumuyiwa and Watkins Grey.

Collaboration

Felix Idubor’s 1965 bas-relief sculpture on Independence House.

78 Jimoh Buraimoh’s mosaic mural atop Itiku House.

work as well as the work of his contemporaries. He includes Sam Ntiro of Tanzania and Kofi Antubam, a Ghanaian artist whose mosaic mural adorns the Fry, Drew and Partners Community Centre in Accra, within this category. Expanding on the idea, he recalls Mbari Mbayo, an art collective in Osogbo, Nigeria, which was active between 1962 and 1966, and which “imbibed art into architecture to give aspiration to the people”. The importance for the artists, it would seem, was to use the buildings which they adorned with murals and sculptures as a canvas for showcasing their work and speaking to society.

Nike Davies-Okundaye is a textile designer who was active within this initial postcolonial period.

“The commissions helped artists to get new work,” she explains. “At the time, expertise was mostly spread by word-of-mouth, especially for upcoming artists.”

This was especially important because of the lack of dedicated spaces to display artworks from the early 1950s to the 80s. Given this absence, the collaborations between artists and architects rendered buildings as urban galleries. During the peak of the tropical style in Nigeria, there were a significant number of prominent artists who collaborated with architects and were commissioned to produce work that might ground new structures, including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Jimoh Buraimoh, Felix Idubor, Erhabor Emokpae, Francis Idehen, Yusuf Grillo, Susanne Wenger and Paul Mount.

These are only a handful of names: there are many others who have yet to be identified, in part due to the demise of the style and its subsequent abandonment, with the situation exacerbated by corruption, Nigeria’s civil war, the widespread demolition of buildings to make way for skyscrapers, and poor documentation.

In Lagos, many of these buildings dotting the marina lay abandoned and now play host to street markets.

Until 2022, a significant sculpture, The Drummer Boy by Ben Enwonwu (a large, bronze piece showing a boy beating a drum) still hung at the southeastern corner of the Nickson and Borys-designed NET building, which was completed in 1979. The abandoned 32-storey tower, which sits on a corner with Broad Street to the northeast and Marina Road to the northwest, occupies prime real estate in downtown Lagos, offering views towards the marina. Its spire is conspicuous from all around Lagos Island, and it was described as the city’s emblem of modernity in a 1983 article by Alan Cowell for The New York Times.

That same year it was rechristened Necom House in

the wake of a fire in the building that was reported to be an attempt to cover up corruption by government officials. It has lain derelict ever since.

Commissioned by Nickson and Borys, The Drummer Boy was a sculptural interpretation of an African mode of communication. Enwonwu, his son Oliver explains, attempted to use the sculpture to explain the purpose of the building, as well as re-centring Nigerian culture in the midst of its mass concrete and steel spire. In a 2017 post by Lasgidipix, a Facebook account dedicated to photos of Lagos, The Drummer Boy’s impact on the architecture was described memorably: “It was iconic and made more so by that famous Drummer Boy sculpture made by none other than the incredible legendary Professor Ben Enwonwu, one of the greatest artists this country and indeed Africa has produced. The Drummer Boy is significant in our culture because we use the drum for communication and celebration. It was such an apt concept for the then Nigerian External Telecommunications, NET.” Today, however, the sculpture has been removed (although it can still be seen on Google Street View), with no one certain of its whereabouts – a confusion sown by the neglect of the building amid legal battles surrounding its dubious acquisition in 2007 by a privately held company. The sale was later revoked by the Nigerian government.

Necom House also features other artist collaborations.

Around the podium are two resplendent but badly worn murals – the one on the northeastern end shows human figures wielding traditional communication instruments such as a gong and drums, while the mural on the southern end depicts a congregation of people. The authors of the murals are yet to be identified, a situation entrenched by the lack of documentation of the work’s development.

Eight-hundred metres east of Necom House is the Olumuyiwa and Watkins Grey-designed headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (now Power Holding Company Nigeria), a building fronted by a 1964 figurative sculpture by Ben Enwonwu that was christened Sango after the Yoruba god of lightning and thunder. Cast in bronze, this work was intended to evoke traditional sensibilities, linking the electricity generated by the commission to the cultural context of power. “Integrating these sculptures with the buildings helped ground the buildings in context and were an attempt to decolonise them,” explains his son Oliver. For Enwonwu, who was a modernist,

Collaboration

80 Necom House (1979), designed by Nickson and Borys.

Tafawa Balewa Square, which received design updates from Isaac Fola-Alade in 1972.

“The art played a bigger role than [just] embellishment, as it was important to translate concepts of decolonisation.”

—Bruce Onobrakpeya

Itiku House, designed by Eric Morgan, John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood in the 1960s.

it was important to situate African culture within modern architectural responses. His statement at the first Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, hosted in Paris in 1956, encapsulates his standpoint: “I know that when a country is suppressed by another politically, the native traditions of the art of the suppressed begin to die out.” The criticism of tropical architecture as having neglected African culture – which was advanced by figures such as Ulli Beier, who worked closely with the Mbari Mbayo cultural group – was being addressed through the introduction of art as a way to sensitively engage with context.

Papa Omotayo, a contemporary Lagos-based architect and curator, says the integration of art and architecture was mainly taken on by the more sensitive practitioners of the time. He suspects, however, that the demise of the style limited the development of these collaborations, “not enabling them to resolve [more than] skin-deep issues” – as positive as the integration of art might have been, Omotayo believes that only a few practitioners were able to explore its greater potential. Nevertheless, it is evident that the integration of art in tropical architecture fostered cross-cultural collaborations, allowing practicing architects from the period – who were primarily European – to engage with local artists.

More than the architectural product, however, these collaborations helped to foster a pan-African ideology, creating links between Africa and its diaspora. Another of Enwonwu’s bronze sculptures, Knowledge, is at the NIIA (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), which was designed by Design Group Nigeria in the 1960s, along with Progress, a bas-relief sculpture by the revered Erhabor Emokpae. Another building from the period that features both sculpture and murals is Independence House (1961), also known as Defense House, a gift from the British government that was gutted by fire in 1993 as part of another spate of corruption. The building, designed by Augustine Egbor, the then-director of public buildings for the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, features a bas-relief sculpture by Felix Idubor, depicting the union of three men representing the largest tribes in Nigeria. Laying in a state of disrepair after the fire and ongoing mismanagement, the building also features a mural by Yusuf Grillo, a member of the Zaria Rebels.

Many buildings from the tropical modernist period are being similarly mismanaged, the effect

of which is a loss of architectural and art heritage.

One such case is the sale of Tafawa Balewa Square, a popular landmark and a Grade I-listed site under Lagos state law, which features sculptures by Ekwere Ebong and British artist Paul Mount among others.

The square played host to Nigeria’s independence celebrations, as well as several other important nationwide events, and was originally built in the colonial era as a racecourse. It was rechristened in 1972, having previously been called Lagos Race Course, following design updates by Isaac Fola-Alade, who occupied the same role previously held by Egebor.

Recently, however, its gates – which had been a prominent feature of the development for decades – were demolished. The gates had been designed by Mount and built in collaboration with local artists, and the integration of art within the architecture had elevated the character of the square, serving as a marker for the development. As such, the demolition drew attention from many circles, with bodies such as Legacy 1995 – of which Godwin was a founder – issuing letters to dissuade the government from allowing the destruction to go ahead. Yet Tafawa Balewa Square is simply one among a growing list of well-known buildings from our recent postcolonial history that have been altered significantly or face demolition. Our collective heritage is being lost without having been studied extensively within Nigeria, especially given the poor state of archiving within the country and the fact that most of the relevant archives remain abroad. The situation is dire, both culturally and pedagogically.

The crucial role that art played in tropical modernism, especially in Nigeria, has historically been decentred and dismissed as tokenistic in relation to the true advancements of the architecture of the time. But as Bruce Onobrakpeya, a key member of the Zaria Rebels, points out: “The art played a bigger role than [just] embellishment, as it was important to translate concepts of decolonisation,” he says.

Onobrakpeya’s own work used art to decolonise prevailing social tenets, as seen in his murals for churches where he represented Black bodies as well as re-interpreting biblical concepts, and he contextualises his argument through the historical development of formal architectural education in Nigeria. “In the past there was no architecture department [at the Technical College in Zaria],” he says, “[so] the architecture students came out

82

of the arts,” citing Demas Nwoko, who won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale as a prime example of this trajectory.

Onobrakpeya points to Nwoko’s work as an exemplar of the integration of art and modernism, while another architect whose work embodied this approach is Alan Vaughan-Richards, who commissioned and worked with several artists including Onobrakpeya while working at Architects Co-Partnership in the 1950s. The evolution of Vaughan-Richards’ work as a solo practitioner within Africa, following Architects Co-Partnership’s withdrawal from Nigeria in 1961, has been described

by Ola Uduku in her 2013 paper ‘Other Modernisms: Recording Diversity and Communicating History in Urban West Africa’ as the beginning of “a distinct other, more hybrid Modern style” in Nigeria. In his 1965 Ola-Oluwakitan Cottage, for instance, VaughanRichards collaborated with Onobrakpeya and Francis Idehen to develop a sculpted entrance area. And in Ghana, the work of Fry, Drew and Partners evolved to incorporate African art symbols in its breeze-block compositions, which became the poster child for tropical architecture in international media. Hannah le Roux, in an essay published by Bauhaus Imaginista titled ‘Tropical Architecture / Building Skin’, ascribes this integration as “a search for transitional metaphors to indigenize modern design”. The use of the breeze blocks as a skin for architecture has been suggested as having increased the affinity that people felt for the work, because of the history of patterns and art inscriptions in traditional African architecture.

The omission of collaborations between the two fields from discussions around tropical modernism has also impacted negatively on contemporary architecture – these kinds of partnerships are now comparatively rare. Robin Johnston, an architect and the chairman of Design Group Nigeria, suggests that the contemporary downturn in architect-artist collaborations “may be due to economics”, while Onobrakpeya asserts that the lack of dialogue has impoverished the field. Onobrakpeya again references Nwoko and his design of the Onobrak Museum in Agbarha-Otor, Delta State – an example, Onobrakpeya argues, of art and architecture being in synergy to produce “contextual modernism”. It is a feeling shared by contemporary practitioners. The cross-pollination between disciplines that happened in the immediate

postcolonial period, Omotayo says, “was important to ground the work then, and is still an important tool if Nigerian architects are to develop sensitive architecture that engages with the emotions and responds to place.” He uses his studio’s collaborations with artist Olu Amoda as an example of the way in which constant engagement with art and artists can be a way of thinking and conceptualising architecture.

Chuka Ihonor, an architect who worked with Godwin and Hopwood, agrees with Omotayo. “This might not mean embellishments, although that was a significant aspect of our traditional architecture,” he says, “but constant engagements between artists and architects would foster new ways of thinking and representation that ultimately benefit our architecture.”

In 2017, Christian Benimana, the senior principal of MASS Design Group, noted that: “If we are to develop solutions unique to us[…] we need a community that will build the design confidence of the next generation of African architects and designers.” Part of this mission is the need to address the dearth of a sense of history that has grown up among many young architects and architecture students across the continent. As such, in 2019 a group of independent researchers (of whom I am one) launched the Nigerian Architects Renaissance Project (Narp). Currently, Narp’s research encompasses digitising tropical architecture and art that is in danger of demolition. We are interpreting, analysing and mapping thousands of images of these buildings in their current state, all in order to generate 3D models that can be used as tools to enable students and practitioners alike to engage closely with buildings that have hitherto been overlooked by Nigeria’s architectural curriculum. In this respect, we follow Uduku’s assertion that “with digital technology, the architectural history of Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa can be recorded and archived”. By employing more accessible, manageable and transferable methods of documenting architecture, we are preserving examples of cross-disciplinary practice for new generations. Concerning ourselves with history is a tool for the future. E N D

Collaboration

Words Oli Stratford

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Motley-There’s something incongruous about Ayzit Bostan’s Metallic bag. It’s a straightforward tote with clean lines and no embellishment, making for a design that is perfectly utilitarian.

“A small bag, but it holds a lot,” the designer explains. But the bag’s fabric?

Well, the fabric is pure party.

Metallic fabrics have an appeal that is difficult to capture. They shimmer and glint, draping into deep shadows and crests of light. As fabrics, they’re all ornament – colour and decoration woven into form – which makes it curious that Bostan picked them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with ornament, but it’s easy to imagine fabrics as exuberant as these having been cut into a more ostentatious bag.

Yet Bostan is clear in her ambitions.

“The bag shows the fabric very purely,” she says. “There’s no design, because the colours are mega beautiful. And a little bit kitsch as well.”

The bags are made from two-tone jersey – the outer fabric made from polyester and elastane, the lining from acetate. It is not a fabric that Bostan says she would work with regularly.

“It’s nothing special and these types of fabric are not really sustainable,” she says, “but they’re nice for an object.”

However, the textile’s fabulousness disguises the story of thrift that lurks behind the design. Bostan’s bags have been produced from leftover fabrics used for Top, a design that she created for the Textile Worlds exhibition at Munich’s Die Neue Sammlung design museum. The commission had come about when Bostan was visited by the museum’s director, Angelika Nollert, who took a shine to a particular object in her studio. “A small ball,” Bostan notes, “that I had won at a fairground in Italy. She told me I should make a really huge one for the exhibition.”

Top, made from patches of metallic fabric in imitation of the carnival-esque original, is 2m in diameter. “Angelika tells me that whenever she’s in a bad mood, she goes to the ball to cheer [herself] up,” Bostan quips. But given the scale and construction of the

exhibition piece, a large quantity of material remained unused. “So I had the idea to make some bags, because the fabrics are just so colourful,” Bostan says. “They put you in a good mood whenever you see them.”

Bostan’s design may be outwardly glamorous, but it is grounded in responsible use of material. Exhibition design is a notoriously wasteful field, and Bostan has mitigated that by converting leftover textiles into smallscale accessories. These are patchwork designs, using up the remnants of material that would otherwise go to waste. The complete set forms a harlequin’s motley of colourful cuboids – granny smith green, burnt orange and plum purple – every bit as technicolour-gorgeous as this suggests. Because responsible stewardship of materials doesn’t need to be boring – utilising materials that would otherwise go to waste can be giddy, disco, glitzy and fun. Bostan’s bags are a case in point. They are gleaming gems, formed from the pressure of using up what would otherwise be left behind.

84

Following Whom?

Introduction Evi Hall

In my early twenties I spent a long summer in the Scottish Borders working in a burger van run by a local farmer.

That summer I flitted across the Borders smelling faintly but inexorably of grease, chatting to whomever was driving the van. Our conversations would inevitably settle upon the farm’s day-to-day work. They bred a small number of pedigree sheep for shows and, given that I had grown up in the suburbs, this was sufficiently novel for me to take an interest. Over time, I picked up a passing knowledge of the physiological merits of various sheep breeds: which characteristics fetched the most money; which were the best mothers; which could lamb outside and which struggled. By the end of that summer, I considered myself an armchair expert.

Research

86

Exhibition images by Gregorio Gonella, courtesy of Formafantasma.

As such, I’d been interested in Oltre Terra for some time, even before it opened at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet in May 2023. Developed by Formafantasma, the design studio co-founded by Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, the exhibition bills itself as an investigation into “the history, ecology and global dynamics of the extraction and production of wool”. Visitors who saw Formafantasma’s earlier work in Cambio – an exhibition that focused on trees, timber and the timber industry, first hosted at the Serpentine Galleries in 2020 – will recognise a family resemblance. Oltre Terra is to wool what Cambio was to timber: an expansive research programme into the ecosystems through which we extract materials, informed by collaborations and interviews with experts across a range of disciplines. In Cambio, this meant botanists, artists, policymakers on illegal logging, philosophers and manufacturers. In Oltre Terra, meanwhile, the cast of collaborators includes evolutionary biologists, shepherds, textile manufacturers and anthropologists.

In some ways, the Nasjonalmuseet team suggests, Oltre Terra can be seen as a sequel.

The exhibition and its research, much like what it is dealing with, form a complex ecosystem, but the core philosophy driving the project is that it is not about “using wool”. Instead, it’s looking at how we used to live and make things with sheep, how this has changed in contemporary society, and what’s left to us when these close relationships mutate. This is why the project is called “oltre terra”, the Italian term for transhumance, which refers to the movement of humans and sheep to follow the best grazing pastures throughout the seasons. In light of this, it’s worth noting that while Nasjonalmuseet bills the show as Oltre Terra. Why Wool Matters, Formafantasma simply refers to the research programme as Oltre Terra. No doubt this is a practical move on the part of the museum, bending to the need to clearly signpost exhibitions and ensure they are appealing to visitors.

But it also shows our tendency to think of sheep solely as a source of wool – at least within the context of design. “As an exhibition,” Farresin and Trimarchi write in their introduction to its catalogue, “Oltre Terra aims to redesign how materials, objects and technologies are presented in exhibitions as separated from other-than-human beings that equally contributed to their production.” It invites us to consider the other players involved in wool production – namely sheep – and offers a critique

of the design field’s tendency to lean towards a material-only mindset.

Oltre Terra’s exhibition design takes its cue from dioramas, the dusty glass cases found in natural history museums that are dressed with fake foliage, taxidermy and waxy models suspended in time. In the case of Oltre Terra, the exhibits are laid out atop a large steel and glass grid, suggesting that the walls of the diorama have been pushed down and the viewer invited in.

Seven models of different sheep sit among the exhibits and are surprisingly kitsch in their hyperrealism, rendered life-size in a plasticky looking resin. They sit above the paraphernalia that has evolved as these sheep have arisen: shearing scissors; a woollen flag; a printout of a sheep’s genome; a shepherd’s crook; a document outlining the standards of sheep care as set out by Animal Health Australia. The conventional diorama format is a “traditional image construction based on the differentiation between background and foreground (object and subject)”, Farresin and Trimarchi write. As such, it “fails to represent the complex entanglements between species and their mutual, in-becoming relation to the landscape”.

Oltre Terra, then, is an exhibition that explores humans’ relationship with sheep; how this has changed and developed throughout history; and how the rise of industrialisation affects how sheep live with humans in an ecosystem today. The studio posits that humans and sheep developed – along with the ecosystems they found themselves in – more mutually than we tend to assume. For Formafantasma, understanding the origin story of our relationship with sheep, as well as our use of wool, demands rethinking the ways we interact with the species.

In this respect, Oltre Terra feels a long way from my more practical conversations in the burger van.

I don’t know whether the farmers ever felt that they were part of a complex entanglement between species, though I’d be interested to ask. There was however plenty that I learned, practically and philosophically, from Oltre Terra. Due to the sheer amount of water needed to wash wool to prepare it for manufacture, for example, the EU classes wool as having a greater environmental impact than synthetic textiles. I learned too that some sheep will “heft” to a piece of land, tying themselves to a particular area and passing this knowledge of boundaries down to subsequent generations. It is a behaviour that dictates how they are shepherded – an affecting concept of belonging

Research

to an ecosystem, but one which in turn is economically beneficial for shepherds since hefted flocks are easier to manage.

Throughout the conversation that follows – hosted with Trimarchi, Farresin, and Formafantasma studio members Gregorio Gonella and Alessandro Celli, who also worked on the project – you can see these dual strands of the practical and the conceptual at times combining, at times unravelling. Formafantasma has a philosophical desire to reframe how we think about our relationships with sheep, but also a practical bent towards working with these animals in a way that is both efficient and respectful. “[Oltre Terra begins] with the position of understanding sheep, while also embracing the economic and ethical implications of extracting material from living creatures,” write Farresin and Trimachi. For Formafantasma, understanding sheep better doesn’t exclude making use of the materials they produce. Rather it is a form of acknowledgement and respect for these animals and for the relationship we have – or might begin to have – with them.

Evi Hall You describe the exhibition design of Oltre Terra as an open diorama, and you were interested in using this as a device to explore the amount of attention that museums and humans typically give – or don’t – to domesticated animals such as sheep. Why do you think we spend less time thinking about these kinds of animals?

Simone Farresin Hanne Eide [curator at the Nasjonalmuseet] came to us with this commission to research wool because she was interested in Cambio and its structure, where the main objective had been not to glorify the applications of a material, but instead to question the creation of certain modern ideologies through the production of things. How can you deconstruct what it means to produce an object? We have been fascinated by dioramas for a long time and we’re interested in what provocations we could create around the concept, because typically what you see within a diorama is what is considered wild and pristine. I think the reason why sheep have been overlooked is because, metaphorically, they sit on the other side of the glass, along with humans. They are the fruit of human invention. So we’re fascinated by this idea of a diorama as an illustration of what we perceive as nature. It’s a format that is very closely tied to natural history museums, but which portrays nature as being “still”, which is bizarre if you think about it – it implies a stable environment that humans rule over. So we wanted to use this typology that is traditionally used to present nature in museums, as well as exploring the typologies of how objects are presented in museums of applied arts. We wanted to create a hybrid of these two typologies in one environment.

Evi Oltre Terra is conducted in the same spirit as Cambio and you applied similar research methods to both. How did you find the research process differed for Oltre Terra? You’re looking at fauna not flora – does presenting a natural material like a plant feel different to an animal?

Gregorio Gonella The research methods were similar to Cambio, which is interesting, because one of the fascinating parts of that show was digging into the idea of plants as living beings. This concept of seeing plants as living creatures is quite recent and only started developing at the beginning

88

Elements from Formafantasma’s animal reproductions at model maker Ecofauna’s workshop in Prato, Italy.

Images by Gregorio Gonella, courtesy of Formafantasma.

of the last century. Before that, plants were considered midway between living beings and stones, whereas with animals it’s clear that there is a stronger relationship with humans. However, particularly for domesticated animals, we found that there were commonalities of snobbery in how humans treat them. One of the highlights of the research was exploring the process of domestication and how this is perceived.

Simone In Cambio, the exhibition concluded with a film, Quercus (2020), which was a collaboration with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and this very anthropocentric attempt to give a voice to another creature [an oak forest in Virginia, USA, ed.]. At the same time, it was thinking about what it would mean for that creature to have a conversation with humans. During the development of Cambio, our understanding of ecology evolved to become much more complex – it evolved our concept of what it means to be a designer. I think there is this human condition to feel solitary within the universe, which is perhaps due to our lack of observation of the other creatures we share the Earth with. This sense of solitude has an existential dimension, but it’s also a way of seeing the world. That has led to this idea of a very user-centred design, where you think there is just “a user”. But of course, whenever you produce something, whether it is a system or an object, you are going to intersect with many different communities that are not only using the object, but who are also producing it, refining materials and so on. These communities aren’t only humans, they’re also made up of animals and other species. So when Hanne said “wool”, from the beginning that meant sheep in our minds, and we wanted to focus the exhibition on understanding our relationship with the animal. It’s bizarre how design is always presented as disjointed from the other creatures involved in its production. How can you talk about wool without talking about sheep? How can you not think that there is a process of design there too, and that the evolution of the animal and the evolution of techniques for working with wool are all bound up in one unified story?

Evi I felt like the leaping-off point for the exhibition was domestication, which is traditionally presented with the human as dominant: humans bred sheep to become the way they are. Through your research, however, you discovered there’s actually some ambiguity about how the process of domestication came about, with a suggestion that it may be more mutual.

Alessandro Celli We started noticing that there are so many different perspectives; there is no single unified vision of domestication. If you look at the domestication of sheep, it’s the oldest domesticated animal after the dog. So this relationship has around 10,000 years of history behind it. In recent history, it’s obviously undoubtable: humans developed more intensive farming and started to engineer animals for exploitation. But throughout the rest of the previous 9,000 years or more, it’s not really clear who drove the domestication process. For instance, we were speaking to scientists, or anthropologists and other researchers, and some were saying, “You know, it was humans that got in touch with sheep and started grabbing them to keep in their village to start growing their own meat.”

But others would tell us it was the other way around: that sheep got close to humans for protection and that’s how this bond was created. Despite the research, it’s still not clear how it started. There are points in time

Research

A work-in-progress ram’s head model.

such as the development of scissors that became key case studies for us to understand what triggered wool as we know it today. Did sheep stop naturally losing their fleece because humans invented shears and were cutting it off? Or was it the other way around? You could get either answer depending on how you look at it.

Simone It’s bizarre, because even internally when we have to name this relationship, we still use the word “domestication”, even though we’re constantly questioning it. It’s interesting when we get critiques on this because some people interpret our position as if we are saying that animals contributed to or chose to be domesticated. Some people have seen this as a way to create excuses for brutality towards animals, but that’s not what we’re trying to say. We just want to say that relationships between humans and other species evolve. They can start off as loving and turn abusive. One moment when we started to really question these worldviews was when we were trying to find an evolutionary biologist who was an expert on sheep. We couldn’t find one. When we started speaking with other evolutionary biologists, it became clear that sheep have been disregarded [by the field] because they are domesticated. So we have a theory that sheep have become part of human invention, because the process of domestication is seen as different to the study of evolution.

Think about Darwinism, which always starts with the observation of wild species in specific environments. We started to spot certain biases, and that’s what we wanted to deconstruct.

Evi What impact do you think these biases have? What are they obscuring?

Simone At one point we were discussing the difference between domestication and symbiosis. Symbiosis is a term you use when two animal species in an environment both benefit from living together. You could describe that as the beginning of the relationship between sheep and humans, where the sheep probably benefited from human presence, in terms of protection and maybe feeding on our leftovers. In turn, these animals provided heat with their fleece and presence. So [they’re offering] comfort, milk and meat. When this relationship started it created some form of bond, but when a human is involved in a relationship with another species, you typically don’t talk about symbiosis, you would talk about domestication. So this is clarifying a bias which sees an intelligent species deciding to domesticate another. We almost felt that there is an evolutionary pact, a genetic pact, between humans and sheep. There is a responsibility we have towards these animals. Another example featured in the exhibition is around textiles. We could argue that humans invented textile making, but the spinning of wool is very simple – you just need to roll wool in between your fingers and, because of its structure, it very quickly spins itself. Without the contributions of certain features of sheep, such as wool, we would have never colonised certain territories; we included a Viking sail made of wool as an example that even travelling came to exist because of wool.

Evi I’m interested in that tension. Andrea, you spoke at the opening about the fact that there are no cases in nature bar humans where one animal enslaves another – this is a uniquely human thing. But there are cases that suggest the relationship is more mutual. Do you think

90

Transhumance from Austria to Italy in Val Senales, South Tyrol, Italy.

Images by Alessando Celli, Gregorio Gonella and Ibrahim Kombarji, courtesy of Formafantasma.

it’s impossible to move away from this privileged position of dominion or responsibility?

Andrea Trimarchi It’s a matter of how you narrate things. For me, what is interesting to note in both Oltre Terra and Cambio is that these are design exhibitions, but you don’t see objects. You see everything that lies behind the object. It’s about changing this narrative, so that you have a different understanding of these realities.

Simone I think these ideas are becoming more mainstream, but I should say that our view is a very Western position. I think that if we had other communities here at the table, they would be saying, “Hey, white man, we’ve been saying this for a very long time.” We’re aware that we always talk from this very Western position, within a capitalist system and so on. We’re not here claiming to not be within that system. But I think that putting out these narratives is a way to start looking at things differently.

Andrea It’s also a process of love. When we began work on Cambio, I started to fall in love with trees and notice trees, and the same goes with sheep.

Now that we have been going through transhumance ourselves and meeting sheep, we have found cuteness and love in sheep. It’s now very difficult for us to order mutton or lamb, for instance. It’s reminiscent of the relationship we have with dogs. We love dogs so much that we don’t kill them, and while I think this idea of love may be a bit animistic, it’s something that should be nurtured much more.

Evi You mentioned transhumance and you explore this with the case study of sheep moving with shepherds to new pastures in the Alps, but within the exhibition you have other ideas of movement with sheep – the Viking sail, or the way that merino sheep were taken to Australia during British colonial rule. These could almost be seen as different forms of transhumance, playing out in different spheres. Did you feel from doing the research that there are better models of working with sheep? There’s a clear sense that colonialism and industrialisation have led to exploitative and unfair biases, but does transhumance feel like a better model?

Gregorio Transhumance was really important for the research, because it was a key moment in human history and the history of our relationships with these animals. And it’s not only with animals, because transhumance also explains this idea of ecology. When you’re doing transhumance in the Alps, you’re waiting for a glacier to melt so that the path opens. So you start to question who’s leading whom? Is the landscape leading the animals? Are the animals leading the human? Or is the human leading the animals? It’s a conversation between a lot of different elements. But the transhumance taking place today, at least in Europe, is mostly related to heritage and tourism. Contemporary capitalistic society and the modern structure of states and borders just don’t allow this system to exist anymore.

So transhumance in Europe is something that more and more belongs to the past, but it’s important to understand how a more complex relationship with the elements in our environment was previously maintained. I think that the world is falling apart because we are not considerate of these relationships anymore.

Alessandro European transhumance is becoming a heritage practice, but places such as Mongolia largely still practice nomadic pastoralism today.

Research

Sheep being moved between Austria and Italy.

It’s very dependent on the location. In Italy, for instance, there are problems with the politics of land ownership and moving sheep across different areas, so it’s difficult to answer this question of whether transhumance is a better model. During one of our last visits to the Alps, we travelled along a drove road that was built for transhumance. It goes across the border and had almost become a ruin, overridden by modern infrastructure and transport corridors, but the freeway actually follows a very similar route.

Simone I never thought about the practice of taking sheep from Europe to Australia as a form of transhumance. For me, transhumance is really just the strict relationship between humans and sheep moving to different pastures in different seasons, according to the needs of the animal. When you take the sheep to another land, that’s different. So the practice of transhumance for us was interesting because it’s most likely that humans discovered territories because they were following the needs of sheep and following them in this process of finding pastures. So it comes back to this question of who is leading whom? So the work of the shepherd is also a form of mediation and there is a process of listening at play. In the Oltre Terra book, there is a wonderful text by Vinciane Despret [‘Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ by Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret (2023), ed.] in which she describes experiments where French farmers retrained to become shepherds for sheep who had been farmed indoors. Moving outdoors, both humans and sheep had to relearn what they were supposed to do. For instance, originally the sheep were scared of touching grass because they had never felt the texture before.

Sheep are very sensitive to the tactility of the surface they walk over.

Similarly, the shepherds had to relearn how to create a conversation with another species. It’s these various reasons why we named the exhibition after transhumance because it seems like transhumance could be a model for how to approach making things “together with”. It’s a form of understanding things together with something else. It’s not a form of imposition – it’s a mediation or dialogue.

Evi I remember that example really struck a chord. The shepherds had to learn what kind of routes the sheep would follow to graze well and the sheep, who were so used to being indoors, had to learn to be comfortable with the outdoors, and with humans and dogs. They adapted together with the shepherd to become a new flock with new behaviours.

Simone Maybe we’re romanticising, but it’s really about entering into a conversation that is much more in-depth with the other and listening to mutual needs. Think about the specific architecture that humans had to build to follow sheep. You don’t have a very specific typology – it’s a very erratic, humble vernacular – but these structures allowed humans to be with sheep. It’s a beautiful model to observe, because it’s providing answers on ways of living together. Modern humans have started to disregard these ideas because of efficiency. In Europe, we farm sheep only for meat and milk production, since the wool from European sheep is too coarse and itchy for making clothing by commercial standards. By contrast, Australia is focused on rearing sheep for wool production, hence you have this disruption of a system that was basically perfect in terms of efficiency. We have fragmented them into different industries.

92

An unknown artist’s This Celebrated Ewe was

Bred and Fed, by Mr. Wilcox. and Francis Juke’s Portrait of a Two-Year-Old Ewe, of

the New Leicestshire Kind (1802), courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Research

Evi At the heart of the exhibition you feature a CC-Tapis rug made using European wool – material that would usually be considered waste. It feels like you’re offering a way of working with these animals and using this material whilst still acknowledging the relationship. How difficult was it to make this rug into a fully realised object both politically and practically?

Gregorio An important aspect of how these research projects work is the people who help us. This can’t be overstated. The CC-Tapis rug was actually quite easy, but only because a lot of incredible people helped make it happen. It started with Anna Kauber, who is an Italian director who made a beautiful documentary about women shepherds in Italy [In Questo Mondo (2018), ed.]. We were in contact with her after watching the film and she connected us with people working with the kind of wool we were interested in. So it was easy because this network of people were willing to help. However, it would be very difficult to reproduce the rug ordinarily, because of the lack of infrastructure for collecting, sorting and washing that wool. The market for wool in Italy is basically nonexistent in this regard. There’s a textile industry in Italy, but it uses wool from Australia, so the fact that this carpet is unique speaks a lot to the market that we have completely neglected over time.

Simone This idea of unwanted wool is an ambiguous description, since the wool we’re talking about, which we sourced from Italy, may be coarse in parts, but there’s good quality wool in there too. So the issue is that even if [European] farmers have sheep that could provide high-quality wool, it would be a struggle to get this to a stage where it could be used as a textile because of the lack of infrastructure to process it. There are very few centres for washing wool, which is one of the most important aspects of the process. Dirty wool contains bacteria and is considered a hazardous material by the EU, so it needs to be properly processed or disposed of. If the wool isn’t washed, you can’t move it. So moving wool becomes a cost and a complication.

Alessandro It’s insane how an entire supply chain was abandoned, but many people are trying to make it work again. There was one person we spoke to about the [Italian] wool he had in his huge warehouse, which he still had to sort and wash, which was going to take a lot of time and money. But he got really pissed off if we referred to it as waste. He was frustrated by the fact that, just because we don’t want this wool to be in contact with our skin, we don’t use it at all. There are so many other uses for this wool over clothing. I think that’s why there were lots of people who helped with this carpet, because for them it was a better option than just burning the material.

Andrea A rug is also very functional – the type of wool we used is great for this kind of application. It may not be comfortable to wear because it’s itchy, but you just have to think about alternative uses. CC-Tapis have been amazing because, by chance, they had just bought this machine with a robotic arm for wool tufting. So they used that to make this huge carpet.

Simone CC-Tapis generally produces carpets by hand in Nepal, so when we were looking into the fact that they bought this machine it suddenly made sense to say, “Well, if you’ve got this arm here in Italy, why not use it on local wool that is otherwise unwanted?”

94

Bales of recycled woolen material at Manteco in Prato, Italy.

Image by Alessandro Celli; film stills from Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma’s Tactile afferents, commissioned and co-produced by Nasjonalmuseet, co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, with creative producer Alessandro Rabottini.

Andrea For me, what’s important when we do a project like this is that it informs the other parts of the studio – these projects are essential for us to deepen our work in the commercial world. I think it’s very interesting that we can take this thinking and research that is free from any kind of commercial outcome and then translate it into the commercial side of the studio and more practical applications.

Simone The carpet is a way of applying this research and applying materials that are valuable. They’re valuable not just for symbolic reasons, but also because it is absurd to waste materials such as wool. It’s a perversion of an economic market that does not make sense. So dealing with this is a form of responsibility towards the animal, the environment, the farmers, and, honestly, it’s also a form of self respect. We have these animals, we eat their flesh, we drink their milk, so what do we do with their wool?

Evi I found the strand looking into breeding and genomics in the exhibition complex. How sheep are bred has allowed people to select beneficial traits for commerce and for the health of the animal, but how do you feel about the increasing technicalisation of breeding? In the publication it almost felt slightly hopeful or optimistic. Do you see it as a form of design?

Simone When we publish something in the catalogue, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we see that as correct. We don’t necessarily take any position in the catalogue towards the breeding of animals for wool production, although I’m not necessarily fully against it. What I find problematic is this attitude that any problem can be solved in a technocratic way.

Everything becomes quantitative and numeric, and apparently objective, but it’s really not objective at all. I’m quite critical towards that, but not necessarily in relation to breeding.

Gregorio I wouldn’t necessarily say that breeding is designing – I think they are two different things. It’s more the aim of the breeding that is the problem, because breeding is just a selection towards exaggerating some characteristic of the animal. In that respect, dog breeding is no different to sheep breeding. If you breed a dog that can’t breathe properly because its face is too squashed, then, of course, the aim of breeding is disturbing.

Simone I’m critical when these techniques and research are transformed exclusively into tools for exploitation and capital accumulation. I can’t give a specific answer, but I do find it disturbing when I look at a website like sheepgenetics.org.au and see this process of production having been engineered to such a specific degree. It’s the search for efficiency taken to an extent that is so absolute.

Andrea And it was very important to show this multiplicity through how the exhibition was set out. We have seven models of sheep breeds, and they’re the guiding animals throughout the exhibition. But these are only seven of the hundreds of sheep breeds that exist in the world. When we think about sheep, we typically imagine a classic, archetypal sheep with a white, fluffy fleece, small horns and that’s it. But really there are different breeds with different personalities that come with them. It was important for us to tell all these different stories of domestication. E N D

Nasjonalmuseet paid for Disegno’s travel and accommodation to visit Oltre Terra.

Research

Stills from Tactile afferents, a film by visual artist Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma that was commissioned by Nasjonalmuseet for Oltre Terra. The film examines the way in which touch, gesture and proximity may mediate the relationship between species. The work asks questions around the potential to frame physical contact as a form of communication and power relation, as well as a mode of developing understanding between species. A still from the film forms the cover of this issue.

Words Oli Stratford

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Notes of Mustard1There is a surprising number of “people who can play the piano [to a high level], but who have lost the habit,” says Shuhei Nakamura, a designer at Japanese tech company Casio. The problem, he suggests, is partly one of decor.

“Conventional pianos, given their large, boxy structure, can feel oppressive,” says Nakamura. As such, Nakamura and his team in Casio’s product design department set out to interview lapsed players to see what kind of instrument might lure them back. Traditional upright pianos, they found, were deemed to “stand out [visually] in a space”, with some of the company’s interviewees additionally disliking the manner in which they are designed with “the assumption of being placed against a wall” – a setup they found solitary. “We realised,” says Nakamura, “that a high-performing instrument alone may not entice people to play again.” What was needed instead, the team reasoned, was a more contemporary, domestic take on what a piano could be.

The final result of their research is the PX-S7000, a high-performance digital piano intended to fit more sympathetically within domestic spaces. “When you think of a piano, you might imagine a large, decorative object with black, curved lines,” says Nakamura, “but the PX-S7000 does not incorporate such elements.”

In place of these more traditional elements, the team’s design centred around conceiving of the instrument as a mobile piece of furniture. The piano has splayed wooden legs, while the instrument itself has been stripped down to a more reduced form, with the intention that it can then be moved around freely, serving as one element within a space, rather than a dominant presence. “One of the points we were most mindful of,” Nakamura concludes, “was reinterpreting the piano as a modern object.”

The PX-S7000 is available in black or white, but, as part of Casio’s drive towards modernisation, a third colour

has also been produced: “harmonious mustard”, a gloss yellow that has comfortably outsold the other two colourways.

Harmonious mustard, Nakamura says, is a colour intended to “leave a mark on people’s minds”, but also a shade that was only enabled by changes to the piano’s form. “There’s an issue with surface area when it comes to home pianos,” says Nakamura. “As most pianos are structured like large boxes made of panels, if you decide to adopt vibrant colours, the colourful surface area becomes too expansive and [it] ends up becoming an eyesore.” With the PX-S7000’s reduced form, however, a judicious serving of mustard becomes more appropriate.

This, then, is the design lesson behind the PX-S7000.

It’s a piano, but a modern one, rendered in glorious yellow – comparatively modest changes to a timeworn form, but tweaks that have nevertheless proven sufficient to lure back pianists. “[As a field,] I think we have a stereotype issue,” Nakamura explains. “We often place high importance on traditional values, and the general impression of a piano is that of a shiny black instrument intended for the correct performance of classical pieces.” By changing some of these presuppositions, the PX-S7000 seeks to connect with those who have otherwise tired of playing. There’s nothing like mustard for livening up a staid dish.

96

Radically Unfinished Words Selma Alihodžić

I first encountered Holes in the House at Voice of the Earth, a 2018 exhibition at the Architectural Institute of Japan in Tokyo that aimed to address the pressing issues raised

by Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which in turn triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Among the various architectural models on display, one stood out: it was the only one painted red.

Philosophy

rapid urbanisation in the 20th century. Nishi-Ōi grew up in the postwar years, providing cheap housing for workers at the nearby Nikon factory. With the opening of the elevated Tōkaidō Shinkansen Nishi-Ōi train station in 1986, the neighbourhood began to flourish even further, with additional small manufacturers growing up around Nikon. Tsuneyama and Nousaku’s house was built in those years, when housing projects followed a typical layout comprising shops and small workshops at ground level, storage spaces on the first level, and clearly divided living spaces above.

Housing stock in Nishi-Ōi was not high quality.

Historically, Japanese architecture had existed in a constant state of replacing itself within short cycles, with fires and other natural hazards repeatedly eating up the country’s traditional timber constructions. This approach was consolidated in the postwar years by building code revisions introduced after natural disasters to improve resilience, along with rapid population growth. Nationwide, buildings were being constructed quickly, cheaply and in low quality, with the raze-repeatrebuild mindset developing as a means of making properties marketable for resale. Yet when the Nikon Ōi plant moved out of Nishi-Ōi in the 1990s, people moved away too. Vacant buildings in the neighbourhood remained unmaintained for years, unable to meet the newest building code revisions, while the lack of incentive to make lots marketable for resale meant that demolishing to build anew was also not an option – there was simply no demand for housing in a former industrial neighbourhood.

It was in this context that Tsuneyama and Nousaku came to Nishi-Ōi. While working on an earlier project (House for Seven People, 2013), the architects had begun to study Tokyo’s housing market. In 2017, they discovered a property that was not officially listed for sale, held little value on the real-estate market, and would not be easy to develop because of its hilly topography. This was the plot in Nishi-Ōi. Typically, this type of building would have been torn down when interest in the site developed, so why did the architects decide to keep it as was? “Investing myself into this project is my personal mission as [an] architect and citizen to commit to a structure that is still usable,” Tsuneyama tells me.

Today, most of the storefronts I see in Nishi-Ōi are covered by shutters. Faced with this anonymity, I begin to understand why Tsuneyama and Nousaku decided to keep the original colour of the house’s facade. Its neon-yellow paint fills the quiet, as if screaming “hello!”

“This project is my personal mission to commit to a structure that is still usable.”

—Mio Tsuneyama

the only oddity about the house: its floor slabs had vast holes cut into them; a stairway led from street level all the way through the building to its roof; a drainage pipe to catch rainwater seemed to end in the shower head on the ground floor; and another pipe led to what looked like a traditional Japanese tatami room on the first floor. The windows and doors were all different sizes and there was no obvious kitchen. The home, the exhibition explained, was being inhabited under a state of constant de- and re-construction.

I was already intrigued by the project, but became even more so when I discovered that the home was a 30-year-old building in Tokyo’s industrial Nishi-Ōi neighbourhood, and that Nousaku and Tsuneyama had started their practices (Fuminori Nousaku Architects and Studio mnm) in 2010 and 2012 respectively, making them part of the first generation of Japanese architects to emerge in the aftermath of the Tōhoku disaster. The project struck a chord with me. Knowing Tokyo and its signature raze-repeat-rebuild development model – in which homes become valueless after 20 to 30 years, before being demolished to make way for a new building when their owner moves out – I was curious, but also a little sceptical. Why had Tsuneyama and Nousaku chosen to keep this 30-year-old house? Which parts of the house were original, and which had been constructed anew?

And why had they chosen to constantly make and remake it? I had to see the project for myself.

To experience Holes in the House, I take a long metro ride out from Tokyo’s centre to reach Nishi-Ōi. Situated in the south of the city, it’s a typical example of Tokyo’s 98

Image courtesy of Studio mnm / Fuminori Nousaku Architects.

Instead of exhibiting commissioned or theoretical works, architects Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku had decided to exhibit a model of their own home: a red, four-storey, steel skeleton, which didn’t feature a single wall. As I got to grips with what was being exhibited, however, it became clear that this wasn’t

The exterior of Holes in the House.

Philosophy

The stairway that leads from the house’s ground floor to its rooftop.

100

Image by Jumpei Suzuki.

to the world, a bright grin against all the odds. This relationship to the street is, in fact, essential to the project. Holes in the House is named after the first, and most obvious, set of interventions that Tsuneyama and Nousaku made to the building: cutting open the house through a series of large holes. Given these gaps, the house appeared to the surrounding neighbourhood as a construction ruin, but was actually already a functioning home and workplace. Tsuneyama and Nousaku had moved into the property right after removing large parts of the ground-floor facade that had previously sealed off the house from the street. Covering this initial hole with a blue tarpaulin, they lived with this opening for a year, experiencing both summer and winter breezing through their house, before finally covering it over with a glazed facade. Upon learning this, my question from 2018 shifted. What had prompted Tsuneyama and Nousaku to live in this radically unfinished house, and how did they make themselves a home in such conditions?

When the architects purchased the property, they saw potential in the resources already on-site, as well as the house’s pre-existent qualities: its orientation; its sun exposure thanks to its corner location; the fact that it has a small, quiet side-alley, as well as a large ground floor that connects the house to the neighbourhood.

All of these traits became ripe for experimentation.

The house’s steel structure still seemed solid enough for modification, despite its age and the impact of the 2011 earthquake which had damaged buildings across Tokyo. “My role as the designer-architect shifted to the role of a building inspector,” Tsuneyama says. “Scouting for solutions to make the best out of what [was] already there became a personal quest to cut costs while doing something good for ourselves, the neighbourhood and the environment. I had to be really clear about what was important in the project, and what ideas were [simply] ‘nice to have’, since those usually cost the most.”

But even if budgetary considerations for a personal project were a factor, they were not the determining force in the trajectory Holes in the House followed. “My priority in design shifted totally,” Tsuneyama explains.

“As homes are organically connected to our lives and we are inseparable [from] and intertwined with them, I thought: ‘What if we could create a kind of wild connection between our lives, evolving needs for space, and our house? Could we discover a new way of living? A new way of being at home? A new way of being in architecture? What would that look like and how do we make it a reality?’”

When I first saw Holes in the House at Voice of the Earth, its red model was exhibited alongside a poster, printed with big, red letters reading “Holes in the House” and “Urban Wild Ecology”. The poster showed an axonometric section drawing of their house and its holes, yet in contrast to the neat emptiness of more

“My role as the designerarchitect shifted to the role of a building inspector.”

—Mio Tsuneyama

familiar architectural drawings, this one featured a series of hand-drawn illustrations, with “how to”-style accompanying details explaining what the architects had done. The home and its surroundings were depicted as being full of people of all ages, animals and lots of plants, and with no passing cars, as if the house were located somewhere in the countryside. From every line in the drawing I could sense the architects striving to establish their own position: people inside and out were interacting with the architecture, and the house was merging completely into its environment.

Cutting holes into a facade and slab looks effortless on a poster, but the reality demands thorough inspection and careful engineering. This process uncovers multiple layers of built history, demands messy calculations based on estimates and, above all, seeks to avoid any structural risks that could mean collapse. On top of that, Tsuneyama and Nousaku tell me, they had to think about fire-proofing and earthquake resilience, finding ways to meet all the latest building requirements, while still leaving room for future iterations. Cutting holes makes this difficult – destroying any remaining property value and limiting usable square metres – but it was, the architects assure me, an essential act. “The physical holes in the slabs are also notional holes that attack the existing system of housing,” Nousaku explains.

By cutting open the slabs and adding staircases to the holes, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have created a void that connects the ground floor all the way to the rooftop, transforming the building into a single unit and bringing accessibility, light, sound and airflow to all spaces equally. Upon entering the house from street level, I can instantly feel a light breeze. If I stand in the

Philosophy

we experienced inflation and food shortages, we wanted to revitalise the soil underneath the asphalt and use the space for our own food production,” Tsuneyama tells me, “while also adding an element of a playfield for our son.”

Restoring nature to the parking lot became important to the architects, particularly given that Nishi-Ōi, as a semi-industrial neighbourhood with a lack of green space, has become an urban heat island. Residents had previously attempted to resolve this by putting out small potted plants and occasionally watering the asphalt to cool the streets. Tsuneyama and Nousaku, however, trusted in their ideology of holes: they decided to knock open the asphalt with their own hands and on their own terms.

Central to the architects’ plan for Holes in the House is their notion of urban wild ecology, the term that had appeared alongside the name of the project on their initial poster. “Thinking, making and creating one’s own life autonomously generates the power to live,” Nousaku tells me. “This is urban wild ecology.” The idea behind the concept, he explains, sits “between the two ends of the spectrum of political ecology and deep ecology” – that is, an understanding of environmental change as being driven by political, economic and social factors, and a belief in the value of nature as independent of its utility to humans. “We see ecology in the urban setting, where people like us enjoy the comforts and convenience of life in the city,” Tsuneyama explains, “and we seek to bring out the wilderness that every one of us instinctively has, but which has been forgotten in everyday life due to the comforts of our consumerist society.” This notion of urban wild ecology is not, she adds, a static definition, but is instead actively explored. Parking lots on streets, for instance, are normally under the jurisdiction and planning authority of the city ward; with the destruction of the asphalt outside of their property, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have entered semi-legal territory. But with each breakthrough in the asphalt, they have invited neighbours and friends to celebrate their progress.

Instead of the more traditional house-warming gift of a bottle of sake, one guest brought earthworms to one of these celebrations – creatures intended to help bring life back to the newly uncovered earth. To help water the earth naturally, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have reclaimed the street gutter, allowing water to reach the soil and reactivate micro-organisms with rainfall.

The soil has now recovered to the extent that it has proven possible to plant a tree.

Making holes has also extended from the house to the surrounding city. After becoming parents, Tsuneyama and Nousaku turned their attention to the asphalt surrounding their house. “Luckily the side-alley of our house is a dead-end street, forming a safe zone for play,” Nousaku says. But the pair’s ideas about their outside space were simultaneously being shaped by the high levels of inflation and growing levels of food insecurity that Japan has suffered in the 2020s.1 “After 1

Japan imports a high percentage of its food and, as such, its supplies have been severely affected by the global rise in energy costs.

102

Images by Jumpei Suzuki and Studio mnm / Fuminori Nousaku Architects.

right spot, I can see the sky through the top-floor skylight, which ventilates and naturally cools the entire space using the temperature difference between the first and fourth floor: a zero-energy AC. I recognise the red steel structure from their architectural model, with layers of flooring, dangling electric cords, fragments of insulation and personal items positioned here and there. While the holes may have decreased the home’s financial value, they are aimed at providing a different kind of value: for everything in the building and the surrounding area to be seen as simultaneously in relation to one another, just like in their drawing.

“Holes in the House is a symbol of reconnecting with resources,” says Tsuneyama. “The sun, air, water and soil. It’s tapping into what is already in abundance.”

Strangely, despite the mess of a construction site, being inside the house does not feel like standing in a ruin. Even if I close my eyes briefly, feeling the airflow, hearing voices from interconnected spaces, catching the ticking of the clock on the upper floor, I can still sense the scent of fresh earth from the plants on the ground floor, mixed with traces of paint and lunchtime cooking. The house is filled with life and, surprisingly, feels like being in a traditional Japanese countryside home. Without the holes, you could never experience the richness of moment-to-moment spaces, and the visual connections that become apparent as you move around. The inside and outside become one, opening up the house to its surroundings, just like in the poster and red model. I had not expected to find traditional spatial qualities of Japanese architecture translated into a 30-year-old house, with its openness, the distribution of light and shadows, the micro-climate, the flexibility to transform spaces. Here in industrial Nishi-Ōi, I was discovering Japanese tradition and minimalism – just a little rough around the edges.

A living space in the house.

The tree planted outside the house.

Philosophy

The bedroom.

A working space.

104

Images by Jumpei Suzuki and Ryogo Utatsu.

This attention to ecology also stretches inside.

Tsuneyama and Nousaku have restored the traditional Japanese tatami room on the building’s first floor using biodegradable materials such as mulberry paper and konnyaku potato paste, as well as repurposing discarded materials from their house or rescued from other construction sites. They have made use of solar and thermal power, collected rainwater, and begun to deconstruct what it means to build a house in Tokyo.

“Tinkering with ready-made tools and doing small agriculture in the city without going back to ancient times, tapping into leftover resources and repurposing what others discard: that is what we understand as ecology and what has been separated from our profession,” Tsuneyama tells me.

During the formative years of Tsuneyama and Nousaku’s architectural education, the concept of Wa (和), with its suggestions of peaceful harmony and philosophy of emptiness, had brought serene minimalist spaces to the forefront of contemporary Japanese architecture. The popularity of Wa peaked in 2009 when Kenya Hara published his book White, which presented a view of architecture as a blank piece of paper, waiting for its inhabitants to fill it with life.

Simplicity and subtlety meant that structural elements and anything that might disturb the eye were neatly hidden in walls, ceilings and floors as if spaces magically supported themselves. Yet the devastation brought about in 2011 by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami marked a turning point. Not only did the disaster damage buildings, but it severely affected the collective self-image of Japanese architects. Suddenly, the architecture created in Japan prior to 2011 felt distant from societal challenges, and was interpreted as having descended into formalism. Meanwhile, for the first time in its history, Tokyo began to experience a rapid population decrease, making it the world’s first shrinking megacity. The same trend was occurring across Japan as a whole, too – its population has now dropped below 125 million, and is on course to be down to 88 million by 2050, with a third of its inhabitants aged over 65. At the time that I visited Voice of the Earth, vacant housing was almost 14 per cent, and estimated to rise to around 30 per cent by 2038.

Given these ongoing challenges, what is possible for design at the frontiers of uncertainty?

Holes in the House is one suggestion as to what form this could take: an architecture that is less perfect, but which aims to reach out to the society

and environment surrounding it, and which restores a sense of agency through hands-on engagement with the discipline. It understands architecture not as finished work, but rather as a process of constant becoming, led by the needs, budgetary possibilities,

“We want people to rediscover their own sense of wilderness and what it means to be human in the city.”

—Mio Tsuneyama

available resources and lifestyles of its inhabitants.

It aspires to lift the discipline away from the burden of having to come up with a masterplan to change the whole planet, and instead argues that small steps in the here and now can have a large impact on ourselves, our neighbourhoods, and perhaps even our cities. “We want people to rediscover their own sense of wilderness and what it means to be human in the city,” Tsuneyama tells me. “Our life in Tokyo depends on infrastructures such as electricity, gas, water and transportation and industrial products. While industrialisation has improved the convenience of our lives, the things that support our lives have become black boxes.” In this regard, Holes in the House is highly informed by the experiences of 2011. “Our practice began right after the disaster, when we started researching and rethinking the origin of our resources and finding alternative ways to make,” she says. “Our house became an attempt to create a fully self-sufficient cycle in the city while getting back our wild senses.”

As we stand on the rooftop, surrounded by solar panels and a small garden, the full scale of what Holes in the House means in Nishi-Ōi becomes clear. The house’s rooftop and parking lot are the only patches of nature amid a sea of visibly deteriorating building stock. It is scenery that demands that something be done. “We know that we cannot undo the past all at once,” says Tsuneyama. “So we seek what we can change today, realistically with our own hands, and the material that we have now.” E N D

Philosophy

Words Lara Chapman

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Lessons in a Flash(light)-Flashlights come in many shapes and sizes: slick cylindrical metal tubes that can be stowed in backpacks or drawers for emergencies; moulded chunks of heavy-duty yellow plastic with built-in handles suited to camping; head-torches mounted on elasticated straps for nighttime adventurers; or smartphone torches that double as camera lighting. Flashlights, in all their guises, are a classic example of the oftrepeated design mantra “form follows function”. But what form might a torch take if its function extends beyond solely providing light?

The DIY Flashlight, produced by social enterprise Ambessa Play, acts as both an educational kit to teach children STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and a tool for displaced children living in refugee camps. Branching into these new uses, Ambessa’s founder, Sara Berkai, knew that her ambition needed to be embodied in a suitable form. As such, she approached Jon Marshall of Pentagram, asking him to help develop a design for a torch that could be built from scratch by anyone aged eight and upwards, to be distributed through a one-for-one business model in which, for each flashlight sold, another would go to a displaced child.

To find the final form of the DIY Flashlight, Ambessa and Pentagram undertook a process of co-designing with input from children in refugee camps in Calais, France, alongside weekly sessions with children seeking asylum in the UK. Sessions were facilitated by charities that advised on donations and recompense, and Ambessa followed the International Bureau for Children’s Rights principles for child participation. “In the initial stages we had so many cool, different shapes,” explains Berkai, recalling the presentation of the first prototypes to the children. “There were some shapes where I thought, ‘This is amazing,’” she says. “But then the kids hated it!”

Instead of choosing triangular, cylindrical or more playful shapes that

resembled lighthouses or dumbbells, the children leaned towards rectangular models and made pragmatic suggestions.

The flashlight must be wide enough to stand up by itself for ease of reading or doing homework without electricity; it needs to be compact enough to be transported in a childsized pocket and protected during the frequent police raids on refugee camps. A lanyard, they advised, would help users navigate nighttime bathroom trips hands-free. “And obviously,” says Berkai, “they’re the experts, so we go with what they say.” That children are experts in how to design for such a hostile environment is heartbreaking. “Their notion of how they use a flashlight was different from our preconceptions,” says Marshall.

Testing prototypes with children revealed other unexpected design challenges, too. Off-the-shelf connectors, for example, were too springy for little digits. “So we had to invent our own type of connecter that is easier for children to use,” explains Marshall. Other more tactile and graphic elements such as satisfying-to-clip clips, the bright orange winding mechanism, the layout of the internal cabling (which needed to be both intuitive and challenging), and the pictorial instructional manual designed to be legible to speakers of any language, similarly went through many rounds of testing and refining with the children before getting their thumbs-up.

Packed into this little flashlight’s playful yet instructive body are many lessons and many functions. Beyond in-built lessons about kinetic energy and electrical components, and the emotional lessons of self-efficacy and empowerment, there is a more subtle and broader lesson for the design community – form can (and often should) follow function, but function must first follow advice from future users.

106

Keep It Clean Words India Block Illustration Claudia Chanhoi

This is an unusual product launch for a design object.

Held in a five-star hotel suite overlooking the Thames, there are manicures on tap, free-flowing prosecco, and sexual health educator Sarah Mulindwa, host of Channel 4’s The Sex Clinic, is giving us a PowerPoint presentation on the finer points of masturbating in the shower. A hand-picked crowd of sex-positive influencers are filming content, taking turns in the bathroom to pose with the product in question: the Womanizer X Hansgrohe Wave Clitoral Stimulation Shower Head. Featuring “unique PleasureJet technology”, the ergonomic shower head includes three different jet settings, an intensity slider, and Hansgrohe’s signature EcoSmart setting that claims to use 60 per cent less water than your average shower. You can hog the bathroom without wasting the Earth’s precious resources, but the influencers are far more interested in sharing rave reviews with their fans.

“Imagine turning on the Weather Channel and it’s saying light showers with a 100 per cent chance of orgasm,” former The X Factor contestant Ash Holme tells her front-facing camera. There’s a discount code in her TikTok caption for 20 per cent off the retail price of £99.99.

Economies

108

All photographs courtesy of Hansgrohe and Lovehoney.

For a design journalist more used to bathroom launches involving a panel discussion about taps, it’s all a bit overwhelming. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance in seeing Hansgrohe, a German bathroom engineering company with a pedigree stretching back to 1901, team up with sexual wellbeing retailer Lovehoney to bring something so gung-ho about sex to market.

Much of the mainstream design industry generally adheres to a strict omertà around all things sexual, but now Hansgrohe has nailed its colours to the horny mast. This, however, could prove to be a canny financial decision. The sexual wellness device market is big business these days.

Management consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates that the global industry was worth $19bn in 2021, with the market “supported by positive long-term growth dynamics, which Covid-19 has structurally accelerated”. That’s management consultant speak for “everyone was stuck at home with nothing better to do”.1 According to the Financial Times, that market could be worth $62.32bn by 2030. Even the phrase “sex toy” is passé these days. Now, design that’s designed to get you off goes by the moniker of sexual wellness device (for the self-care devotees) or sex-tech (for the self-optimisers). The Womanizer Wave markets itself for both the routine shower masturbators and those looking for some me-time in the bath.

But household sanitation has always been thoroughly sanitised; scrubbing the body clean goes hand in well-washed hand with a pristine soul. Bodily cleanliness and moral purity are intertwined in most major religions via water-based purification rituals, while sexual gratification in general, and masturbation in particular (not to mention female masturbation), have widely been regarded as sinful across different cultures. Sanitation reformers in the 19th century began as moral crusaders, and even as scientific knowledge grew around health and disease, a connection between physical and spiritual cleanliness remained. Even cinematic depictions of bathroom business were verboten by Hollywood’s Hays Code until Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences with a flushing toilet in Psycho (1960). Today, bathroom manufacturers still trade on this squeaky-clean imagery. Looking at their glossy images of impossibly gleaming tiled rooms, the idea that anyone would take care of a bodily function in one of these spaces seems absurd. Outside of the showroom setup, bathrooms are a hive of sexual activity – the prepping for, the act itself, and the cleanup afterwards. But for bathroom design brands, the topic has remained taboo. A shower head engineered for masturbation blows that pact of un-acknowledgement out of the water.

It’s not just design for the bathroom that gets shy when it comes to sex. While established engineering brands have turned their knowledge and resources to the design of sex toys before, they have often become prudish when their runaway success sees the company name associated with – gasp – female pleasure. Such is the case of Hitachi and its no-longer eponymous Hitachi Magic Wand Household Electric Massager, which first 1

Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the PwC clean shirt who managed to sneak the line “online penetration has accelerated due to Covid-19 and is forecast to remain high” into their very professional report on sex toy economics.

Economies

The three different jet settings of the Womanizer Wave.

vibrated its way into bedside drawers in 1968. “It was a massive hit: a very obvious sexual one,” writes Kate Devlin in her illuminating book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. “Even though it had gained a reputation as a sex toy, in 1999 Hitachi was still maintaining its popular product wasn’t for masturbatory purposes. Then, in 2013, they decided to stop manufacturing it owing to concerns about the company name being linked to sex,” Devlin explains. “Quite why it had taken them so long to notice this is unclear, especially given it had featured in pornographic videos for quite some time.”

Like Hansgrohe, Hitachi has been around for over a century. Founded in 1910, the Japanese company made its name engineering induction engines for copper mining. It rapidly expanded into everything electrical: industrial equipment, telecoms technology, stereo parts, TVs, systems for high-speed trains, and even bits of nuclear reactor. But it was the brand’s Magic Wand massage tool that saw it become a household name; when the product featured on an episode of Sex and the City in 2002, it sold out.

Stopping production of a cult product because its wildly popular off-label usage could be bringing your brand name into disrepute would surely be a hit to a company’s bottom line, but it was a risk Hitachi was willing to take to appear sexless. The company’s California-based distributor, Vibratex, managed to talk Hitachi into producing the device again in 2014, but under the name Original Magic Wand. Only a sex toy could lead to such corporate consternation. It was a Hitachi-designed boiling water reactor, that had been one of the six impacted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, but a vibrating clitoral massager is apparently more toxic to a brand than a level 7 accident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.

So how and why did a squeaky clean bathroom brand such as Hansgrohe risk getting into the business of water-powered sex toys?

Hansgrohe has always prided itself on coming first in the race for the new.

On its website, the company proudly counts among its innovations: “the first hand shower with different spray modes”, “the first pull-out kitchen faucet”, and “even the first shower rod”. Innovation is baked into company lore; founder Hans Grohe’s metal business in Germany’s Black Forest catered to those who wished to adopt the indoor bathrooms that had become fashionable at the start of the 20th century, with showers offering a more affordable and space-saving alternative to bathtubs. A century later, with regular home-bathing a standard cultural expectation, the company has had to go in search of new regions of the bathroom to innovate around.

Founded in 2017, Hansgrohe’s InnoLab – short for Innovation Laboratory – houses a 15-strong team of interdisciplinary designers, engineers and product managers “who are looking for new adventures outside of the obvious”, explains Steffan Erath, Hansgrohe’s head of innovation and sustainability. Sequestered in the Black Forest, away from the company’s modern-day HQ in Schiltach, the InnoLab is where the wackier ideas about bathrooms can be bounced around. It’s not just a pursuit of the new that drives the InnoLab – addressing social and environmental issues is also a core part of the lab’s stated goals. “Wherever the biggest issues with the planet and society are, we try to solve them,” says Erath. Can you 110

The shower head was designed to be unobtrusive and not immediately communicate its purpose.

save the world through showering? It’s the kind of lofty mission statement that seems better suited to a startup than a 122-year-old heritage brand.

But the need for constant movement forward, for endless new products brought to market, for relevance, are challenges every company faces under consumer capitalism. The market for bathroom hardware is currently strong – worth $125bn worldwide in 2023 – and renewing one’s product lines is key to keeping pace. “We’re always starting new projects,” explains Erath. This rapid pace is necessary because the InnoLab expects a success rate of just one in ten projects actually reaching market. “Failure is part of the game,” he adds.

Hansgrohe’s successes so far have been interesting and varied. There’s the Jocolino showerhead for children, available in crocodile, zebra and lion designs with big googly eyes, a handle ergonomically shaped for small hands, and gentle spray settings to avoid any soap-in-eye traumas. The Croma E shower system was created with safety for the elderly in mind, pumping cold water through the thermostatic mixer case to prevent the metal surface from becoming scalding to the touch. Even companion animals are catered to thanks to the DogShower, a hand shower with soft, brush-like fronds on the nozzle that allow the user to gently stroke their pet as they wash them, to keep the bathing experience as calming and stress-free as possible for all parties. It was the DogShower that was one of innovation designer Michelle Uhl’s first projects while interning at the InnoLab, and the process got her thinking. After tackling the pet care market, sex-tech may not have been the most logical step, but her interest had been piqued by conversations with women in the InnoLab about another project that had happened before she arrived: the RainTune.

Like something out of a spa-centric sci-fi movie, the RainTune is a multisensory shower “experience” that frankly sounds like the height of luxury. Users select from seven different pre-programmed “scenarios” on a linked smartphone app to induce a carefully choreographed set of light, water, sound and scent via a built-in system of video screens, LED lights and aromatic shower tabs. Scenarios include an invigorating wakeup, a recuperating post-exercise setting, and a lavender-forward nighttime programme. The InnoLab tested out a wide variety of scenarios during the R&D stage before landing on the final seven, and one in particular ended up on the cutting-room floor. “During testing, my colleagues told me that there was a scenario called the sexy time, and I found that really interesting,” says Uhl. “All the testers were voting for the scenario. But no one really wanted to admit voting for it. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s so cool. Why don’t we look into it?’” Uhl was aware that people with clitorises were appropriating shower heads for pleasure, and with Hansgrohe priding itself on its water-saving jet technology, applying it to orgasmseeking seemed like a no-brainer.

Pitching this project to the innovation board, which is made up of senior Hansgrohe staff and independent specialists, was understandably nerve-racking for Uhl. “I was extremely nervous,” she remembers. “Before the call with the panel my knees were shaking. I was like, ‘Oh my god, what if I lose my job? What if everyone thinks I’m crazy?’” This was in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, so the presentation was done Economies

“All the testers were voting for the sexy time scenario. But no one really wanted to admit voting for it.”

—Michelle Uhl

online. Uhl leaned in to the shift in consumer behaviour motivated by the lockdowns, pulling up facts about how Pornhub was getting more clicks than Netflix. The angle worked, and the board loved it. “Everyone was excited,” says Uhl. “They said: ‘Why not try something new? This is a super-valid use case, everyone is doing it already in the shower.’”

She was thrilled, especially given that she was not exactly expecting a receptive audience. “I hadn’t thought that it would be such positive feedback, especially from men. At that time, we didn’t even have one woman sitting on the panel.”2 All-male boards are a well-known bottleneck when it comes to innovations that intersect with sex. “The ‘sex tech’ sector may in fact hold enormous untapped potential, but investors – mostly white, straight, male investors – appear to be keeping their distance,” Alice Bonasio wrote in 2016 for a piece published by Fast Company, catchily titled, ‘When Prude Investors Cockblock Sex Tech, No One Gets Off’.

A combination of clauses against promoting anything considered adult content, discriminatory banking systems,3 and general squeamishness around female sexual pleasure means that investment money, which is overwhelmingly controlled by men,4 rarely gets thrown at women’s masturbation aids. But money is a powerful persuader, and getting into the sexual wellness device market could make companies oodles of it.

With the board’s blessing, Uhl made the project part of her university thesis for her degree in product design at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, handing out Hansgrohe shower heads to friends with instructions to report back on which jet settings they enjoyed the most. “It was quite a journey,” says Uhl. “The result was super cool, because afterwards we knew that we had the technology and spray types in our portfolio already. We just needed to optimise and modify to get to the result where it really feels pleasurable.”

Looking for a more ergonomic shape that would suit the contours of the human body, the InnoLab also had an existing product in their recent archive. “Fun fact, it was DogShower,” laughs Uhl. “We modified the spray type so we could test out pulsation and a spray slider.” When it came to the tech part of sex tech, the InnoLab team was all set – but working out how to test, market and distribute a sex toy was a whole different game.

“The easiest part for us was the technology,” explains Uhl. “You could say it’s a regular shower head at the end of the day, just with this very specific use case. For us, the hurdle was getting into the sexual wellness market, because we have no experience at all there.”

It was a problem the InnoLab team knew they had to solve. When giving its approval, the innovation board had given Uhl a single condition: “Find a strong partner”. As luck would have it, Erath had previously met the head of innovation at Wow Tech Group, a Berlin-based sex toy manufacturer that merged with Lovehoney in 2021. The idea for 2

3

4

Hansgrohe has also made changes to its innovation board following the success of a project focused outside of the cis male experience. “It opened up this topic,” says Erath. “You see that society is different. Now we have a more diverse board with more diverse backgrounds.”

For a full account of how banks often refuse to serve sex workers and adult entertainers, along with censorship from social media platforms, see ‘The Online Ass Wars’ by Carolina Are in Disegno #31.

Only 8.6 per cent of all venture capitalists in the US are women, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

112

“The easiest part was the technology. The hurdle was getting into the sexual wellness market.”

—Michelle Uhl

a masturbatory shower head got pitched to Lovehoney CEO Johannes Plettenberg, who met with Hansgrohe’s innovation board to give the collaboration the green light. “It was a match made in heaven, because Lovehoney had also been thinking of solutions like this,” says Uhl. In particular, the sex toy brand had been looking for ways to adapt its Womanizer, a sex toy that Plettenberg had acquired the rights to distribute in 2017. Created by German inventor Michael Lenke with input from his wife Brigitte in 2014, the Womanizer has gone from a madcap basement invention to one of Lovehoney’s bestselling toys, thanks to Lenke’s pioneering idea to use clitoral suction instead of mere vibrations. The first prototype involved an aquarium pump and a piece of plastic hosing – an inauspicious design for the intrepid Brigitte to test out. “Technically, the modified aquarium pump worked,” Lenke told Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. “But it didn’t work for my wife. She still holds it against me.”

Despite the early fish-tank accessory disaster, the Womanizer and its trademarked Pleasure Air Technology was a hit. Now Lovehoney was on the hunt for ways to commandeer water to expand its orgasmic potential, but lacked the technical expertise. “We’d been aware that water, and especially the shower head, is quite a common masturbation method,” says Elisabeth Neumann, head of user research and in-house sexologist at Lovehoney. “We do a lot of research on sexual behaviour, and we knew that it’s a very early memory for people: how they discovered self love and masturbation. But we hadn’t been building our own product.” Both parties agreed it was an ideal business collaboration. Hansgrohe could offer its engineering services and extensive knowledge of bathroom products, and Lovehoney could bring its expansive testing and research department into play, along with its established platform for selling and shipping sex toys.

Hansgrohe sent over its shower heads, then Lovehoney handed them out to testers and interviewed them about their experiences. Key feedback, such as the importance of an ergonomic design suited to placing between the user’s leg, was delivered back to the InnoLab. Uhl and her counterpart at Lovehoney would trade sketches and 3D models of potential forms, which the InnoLab printed and sent to Lovehoney to pass on to their testing pool for more reviews. “One of the most important things was the testing,” says Erath. “For us, it was weird to be asking these kinds of questions, so it was a big benefit to have Lovehoney’s sexologist and testing pool.”

The biggest debate was how obviously sex toy-ish the shower head should present as. Should it blend into the bathroom decor, or be loud and proud about its pleasure purpose? Although most respondents agreed that they were happy to leave their sex toys lying around when friends came to visit, the general preference was for the shower head to appear unassuming, lest family members pay a visit. Alongside a more gadget-like matte white or black, the teams opted for the bathroom perennial of a chrome finish. Lovehoney also lent its knowledge of sex toy packaging norms, as the experience needed to be more sensual than that of a standard shower device. “I’ve been working in product management for a long time,” explains Erath. “But I really learned a lot about the unboxing experience. It feels like an Apple product; you can feel the love in the packaging.”

Economies

Development sketches of the proudct from Hansgrohe’s InnoLab.

The mind-expanding benefits of the partnership were mutual. Although Neumann has dedicated her life to qualitative research on sexual behaviour, even she found the user testing process illuminating, particularly when it came to discerning whether there was a market for such a novel product.

“We were especially nervous about this, because they could easily say, ‘I have a shower head already. Why should I buy this?’ Or, ‘I’ve masturbated with the shower head in the past, but now I have toys it’s not my thing anymore,’” says Neumann. “To be honest, we were surprised by the huge amount of euphoria and positive feedback we got. So many people said, ‘It’s so obvious – why has no one ever thought about it doing this before?’”

The reason no one had married sex toy technology with bathroom engineering is twofold: the aforementioned sanitising of the sanitation industry, combined with a seemingly insurmountable level of regulation around bathroom products that forms a barrier to entry for sex toy manufacturers. “Their industry isn’t one to focus on sexuality or intimate topics,” says Neumann. “On the other side, our industry doesn’t really have the knowledge to build products like this.” It seems almost topsyturvy, given that showers go on the human body and sex toys often go, well, inside them, but aside from regulations around electricity there’s little oversight on sexual wellness device products. This lack of regulation has, unfortunately, allowed all sorts of sexual wellness hucksters to flourish without oversight – looking at you, Gwyneth Paltrow.5 Bathrooms, on the other hand, are seriously highly regulated environments. For shower heads, products need to be signed off by the Food and Drink Association if you’re planning to market a product in the United States, and every material used needs to be drinking-water approved. “Drinking water standards are the highest I can imagine,” says Erath. “Every country has different rules, it’s a nightmare for global companies.” It would take your average sex toy manufacturer a decade to navigate this labyrinthine system, he estimates, whereas for Hansgrohe it was “business as usual”.

The kind of inter-industry collaboration pioneered by the Womanizer Wave could, then, be the way forward for a new typology of well-designed sexual wellness devices. Knowledge-sharing between experts from different sectors and the sex toy industry could allow for safe and well-tested products to be brought to a market that has been opened up by the normalisation of products designed for self pleasure – and the discretion afforded by e-commerce and home delivery.

Back at the hotel room launch party, the sex-positive influencers certainly have no qualms about grilling Mulindwa on the finer points of the Womanizer Wave’s usage. Is it safe to use? Yes, but only externally.

Can you use it with lube? Just go with the flow of water from the shower and you’ll be fine. What about a version in gold? Maybe in the future, if there’s a consumer demand for it. E N D 5

In 2018, Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop reached a settlement of a $145,000 fine for making misleading claims about, among other things, the “benefits” of its vaginal jade eggs, which it claimed could cure incontinence and increase sexual pleasure. Gynaecologists warn that putting these rocks in your vagina come with all kinds of health risks, from putting strain on your pelvic floor muscles, to introducing bacteria hitching a ride on the microscopic cracks in the porous surface of jade. Please, do not do this at home.

114

The Womanizer Wave is available in black, white and chrome.

The Portable Orchestra Words Nathan Ma Photographs Jonas Holthaus

Development

It’s 17 October, 2012, and Gerhard Behles emerges from the shadows and arrives stage right at the Jazz Institute Berlin. Tall and svelte, the German entrepreneur stops near centre stage with his arms outstretched, taking in the crowd’s applause in a simple black suit with a nude headset microphone curving round his jaw. He’s here to take a victory lap: it’s been 13 years since he launched music software company Ableton with Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf. As he stands before the crowd, Ableton Live – the company’s primary product – is one of the most popular electronic music programmes in the world. Behles is poised to announce the latest edition of the software, but he takes a short detour instead.

The Ableton Push 3.

116

“I’m going to talk to you real quick about something much bigger than us: the Ableton community,” Behles says earnestly as he finds his footing in front of a projection of the New York skyline. As he speaks, the words “1,697,421 Ableton Live users” stretch across the night sky. “That’s almost exactly the population of Manhattan,” Behles notes. “Isn’t that mind-boggling?

Imagine a city the size of Manhattan where everybody is making music with Live, and what kind of place that would be.”

“I was drawn to [electronic music] for one reason, really,” Behles continues. “The promise that you can make the whole sound, the whole song, from scratch.”

Rhythm, melody, harmony, sound, and form: these are the five components of music, he explains. An electronic musician’s job is to choreograph these elements as carefully as a ballet. But existing instruments are clumsy and hard to handle, he notes. Ableton Live helped streamline this process, but Behles wants more. He wants an instrument with which artists like him could easily layer a synthesiser chord over a drum beat, and line up the resulting clip as a sequence to be played at will. He’s after an electronic orchestra the size of a drum machine, or a full studio kit that’s as easy-to-use as a synth – an instrument powerful enough to play electronic music live at a club, but compact enough that you can carry it off backstage by yourself too.

As he explains his vision for the future, Behles walks back to stage right, then kneels by a nerdy black backpack that’s propped up against the podium. He draws from it a slim black console, not much larger than a PlayStation, and apparently not much heavier: Behles easily turns the console around in his hands until a multi-coloured grid of silicone buttons faces the crowd.

In a recording of the event uploaded to YouTube later in the month, Behles proudly holds the device up to the camera like a trophy as a hammy grin steals across his face. He says, “I want to introduce you to the Ableton Push.”

“We wanted to make a hardware product, but nobody knew how,” explains Jesse Terry over a recent Zoom call. Terry is Ableton’s head of hardware and the cocreator of the Push, but he’s logging onto Zoom from his home studio in Pennsylvania, far from the company’s headquarters in Berlin. He’s been with Ableton for nearly 20 years, and moved back to the States a few years ago to be closer to family. Behind him, there are four electric guitars mounted on the wall. To his left,

there’s an impressive collection of vintage synthesisers that he’s fiddling with between work tasks. “I’m not a hardware engineer or anything like that,” Terry confesses, “but I like to tinker with things, and to fix them, hopefully.”

Still, Terry is perfectly positioned to tell the story of the Push, just as he was perfectly positioned to bring it to life over a decade ago. When Terry joined Ableton in 2005, it was still a software company best known for Live, a popular digital audio workstation that remains an industry standard to this day. But as Behles prepared for Ableton’s first foray into hardware, Terry was a natural choice to lead the way: he worked in artist relations and business development, and had collaborated with consumer electronics brand Akai in 2009 to develop the APC40, a dedicated controller made-to-measure for musicians working in Ableton Live. The Akai controller had represented a new horizon for Ableton. Using it, musicians could easily navigate Ableton’s software both in their studios and on stage.

And while the Push was designed in collaboration with Akai, it was the first hardware product released as a part of Ableton’s portfolio, transforming the Berlinbased software company into a leader in music tech.

When it came to designing the Push, form followed function: Behles and Terry were after an instrument that could arrange singular units of music (“samples”) to be played either in a predetermined order (“sequenced”) or activated by a single keystroke (“triggered”). It seemed straightforward enough. At the time, you could find drum machines and step sequencers on the market that did approximately this. Behles proposed, however, that their instrument should be equally adept at composing and arranging melodies and harmonies, and maybe even editing sounds. Armed with sawn-apart MIDI controllers, a soldering iron, and a box of plastic toys, Terry got to work. As the scope of the project expanded, so did the design, with Terry and Behles experimenting with a few different layouts and key patterns. At the time, Lego offered corporate accounts to order custom sizes and shapes, of which Terry took full advantage.

The kids’ toy made it easy to arrange and rearrange the buttons he salvaged from older controllers. He attached each button to a Lego brick, then snapped them into place on a grey Lego baseboard alongside Lego miniatures he made of the Ableton executive board. “The first Push was really a Frankenstein product made of Legos,” he says. Before he knew it, he was at Akai’s offices in Rhode Island to review the official

Development

Philipp von Lintel (left) consults with Moritz Paul, a UX designer at Ableton.

118

Work in Ableton’s hardware workshop.

Push prototypes and, by March 2013, the Push 1 was ready for commercial release.

Ableton’s history as a software company proved to be both the Push’s most exciting proof-point and one of the most formidable challenges that it faced. Ableton Live’s Manhattan-sized community came from around the world, spanning Grammy winners and dilettante teenagers alike. The Push needed to anticipate and meet their many needs, and to do it with the style and ease-of-use to which Ableton fans had grown accustomed. Part of Ableton Live’s appeal is that it makes making music simple: previous digital audio workstations helped producers manage recorded samples, but Ableton Live allowed them to record and produce new and novel sequences either in the studio, or live on stage. The software was designed with users in mind. It stripped electronic music of coded jargon so that musicians could focus on their craft, not computer science textbooks. With the Push, Behles wanted an instrument that effectively did the same.

Terry was also perfectly positioned to carry this out: his work managing artist relations meant he’d seen firsthand how artists from around the world used Ableton Live, so he knew which features to pursue and how they might be used. He took early iterations of the Push directly to artists for their feedback, with DJ Jazzy Jeff and Flying Lotus among the first to play around with a prototype. Today, Terry estimates that he’s sat in on thousands of user research sessions like these – they’re still a central pillar of the Ableton design process, and one that shaped both the Push 2, which was released in November 2015, and the newly released Push 3.

Conducting these user research sessions is both an art and a science, Victor Mark says. As the principal designer behind the Push, Mark is in charge of user experience, and these research sessions help him explore unforeseen challenges and new opportunities.

Teasing out these surprises is key. “You can’t just ask people what they want,” he says, before reciting an apocryphal quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

At Ableton, design is an ongoing process, and the Push is no exception. Patches and software updates bridge the gaps between individual product releases, but new products are spare and sparse. When the Push 2 was released just two years after the Push 1, the newer device met a few major milestones: its pads were touch sensitive, its layout was more intuitive, and Behles had

finally found the perfect on-device display screen.1 After that, the company waited nearly eight years to introduce the Push 3 in May 2023. There was no rush to flood the market with a new toy, anyway: Ableton’s instruments are built to last (a second-hand Push 1 will still set you back at least £100 on eBay). Instead, Terry’s team wanted to break new ground.

While the Push 1 was designed in collaboration with Akai and the Push 2 was engineered in-house at Ableton, the Push 3 was the company’s first attempt at both designing and engineering an instrument on its own. Driving much of this process was Philipp von Lintel, who joined Ableton in 2017 as the company’s first in-house industrial designer. He had spent years building his product portfolio for Muji, Herman Miller, and Mattiazzi while a designer at London’s Industrial Facility, and the novelty of his new role came as no surprise to him. After having heard from a friend that Ableton relied on external consultants to produce the Push, he approached Terry’s team himself with a pitch: if they wanted to improve the design, they should have someone in-house to handle it. To von Lintel’s surprise, the team agreed with him, and he quickly got to work.

When von Lintel joined Ableton, the Push team was going back to basics. To Terry and Behles, the Push was meant to be its own musical instrument, and one that could be played both with and without a computer. They dreamed of an instrument that you could get lost in, far from an LCD screen, and with which you could sketch out ideas on its pads without worrying about incoming emails or notifications. “If you watch early videos of the Push 1 and Push 2, the team hid the laptop, which acts as the brain of the Push, because they wanted to focus on the instrument,” von Lintel points out. “I always wanted the Push to be a standalone instrument,” Terry says, “but if we had said we would make it a standalone instrument from the beginning, we’d have never released a product.”

To start the design process, von Lintel joined Mark and Terry on a trip to Japan and China. The trip’s purpose was twofold. While overseas, von Lintel could 1

120

Behles and Terry wanted to include a full-colour display in the Push 1 to allow users to edit, sample, and splice audio with greater precision. Ordering a made-to-measure display would have cost a small fortune, but Behles found a mass produced display screen that matched the exact width of the Push pads in a rental car.

meet with potential suppliers and manufacturers, and the team as a whole could meet with end users to learn about how, when, and where they played with the Push.

They were used to artists using the device on festival stages, in DJ booths, and in studios. But watching artists

“It’s about the size, the touch, and the feel of the buttons.”

—Philipp von Lintel

work in compact Tokyo flats drove home how crucial it was to keep the Push both powerful and portable.

Back in Berlin, von Lintel began building a proper hardware workshop in Ableton’s headquarters with a CNC machine, painting booths, and exhaust hoods to boot. The team was going back to the drawing board for the Push 3, salvaging what they could from previous editions while implementing new design standards that allowed the Push to function as a standalone instrument without the support of a computer. Von Lintel needed somewhere to rapidly iterate prototypes for testing, while still keeping new designs confidential. “If you have to ask another company to design a prototype, you need to get a quote, and you need to get it signed off and you begin to wonder if it’s really a good design, so you spend a bit more time on it,” he explains. “When you have the space to build it with your own hands, you can just make it.”

The hardware workshop was even more helpful to orient the rapidly expanding team. While Terry and Behles had sketched out the Push 1 themselves, the Push 3 involved members of the software team, the UX design team, the now-growing product and industrial design teams, logistics and operations, and the sales team too. The workshop allowed for these crossfunctional teams to align on key aspects of the project, especially when introducing new features. “It’s about the size, the touch, and the feel of the buttons,” von Lintel stresses. The team frequently reviewed visual mockups and renderings, but for bigger changes, they needed to feel the difference between buttons and keys, and to understand how these feelings could fit into the flow of music making.

The touch and feel of the design work was especially important in shifting the pad design between the Push 2

and Push 3. The pads on the earliest Push devices were hard and less responsive than the team had wanted: in early demos, you can see Terry’s phalanges flex as he presses down hard to trigger a sample or compose a new beat. With the Push 3, the team upgraded the pads to include sensors for both the finger positioning and the force applied, allowing the act of pushing them to replicate the experience of playing an analogue instrument. There are 12 musical notes that make up the chromatic scale, but experienced musicians can dip and glide between these notes for dramatic effect: the slide of a trombone, the twang of a guitar, and even the broad vibrato of an opera singer help add colour and feeling to a composition. With the Push 3, users can do the same. As your fingers slide between the grid of pads, individual notes bend and tighten, breaking out of the 12-note scale and into the range of blues, jazz, and full expressive freedom.2 The biggest changes to the Push came from the company’s shifting priorities, however. Ableton was interested in instruments built to last, and ones that were designed to reduce their environmental impact.

As such, a number of changes were incorporated.

The Push 3’s cardboard packaging doubles as a sturdy travel case, for example, while the body’s design uses as many single-material components for durability and waste reduction as possible. But these changes seem superficial compared to the conceptual leap between the second generation Push, which relies on an external computer, and the third generation Push, which can function on its own. “The idea was that the Push should draw you away from the computer,” von Lintel explains.

He says that this shift brought with it a new set of design challenges: “If there were a computer inside the device itself, what would that mean in terms of its thickness and construction? How would we cool it?” And what about the artists who prefer using their Push in tandem with a laptop?

It took eight years, but the team reached a working solution. They released two different set-ups for the Push 3. The first configuration includes an internal CPU and a heatsink that let it function as a standalone instrument, while the second set-up is tethered to an external computer. Ableton also designed and released a do-it-yourself upgrade kit with all the parts needed 2

A similar effort to introduce this kind of expressive quality into new instruments was explored in designer Roland Lamb’s Seaboard, which writer John L. Waters described as a “fretless piano” in his exploration of the device in Disegno #4.

Development

The Push 3’s cardboard packaging doubles as a carry case. Also pictured are custom power and accessory cables.

Philipp von Lintel.

122

The Push 3 has been designed such that it can be converted from a model with an inbuilt CPU to one without.

to move between the two different set-ups, in hopes of extending the product’s lifespan. Von Lintel points out that it would have been easier to design two separate devices, but a customisable model made more sense for Ableton’s goals. “If you use a device for four or five years instead of two or three years,” he says, “its carbon footprint grows smaller and smaller.”

Designing the Push as a standalone instrument was a technical challenge as well as an ideological one. With limited time and resources, the team was tasked with bigger-picture questions about how they envisioned their device being used. For example, as the Push transitioned from an electronic instrument to a tool also capable of computing, how should they handle data and privacy? They could devote their time to developing a more intuitive interface, or they could spend the same time encrypting the device, protecting it from being accessed externally. They imagined Beyoncé and her producer as an end user. As Beyoncé takes the stage at a festival and her producer connects the Push to the local wi-fi network, what would happen to her unreleased tracks? Could the Push be hacked?

Mark says the team quickly decided that upgrading the security protocol was worth the investment, adding that, “At some point, it was just called the Beyoncé Feature.”

This is how design can work. Together, discussions precipitate decisions, and these decisions become changes. But if you zoom out, you can see how these changes paint a complicated picture of what a modern musical instrument should be. The Push 3 is expressive in its function, but exacting in its form. It’s at once a powerful playground; a tool with which you can programme intense sequences of melodies and harmonies; and a device with which you can noodle around on a drum kit while bored in your bedroom.

It’s made for use on the stage and the studio, and to be carried through an airport as well. If Behles wanted an electronic orchestra that could fit in a backpack, he’s finally found it in the Push 3. E N D

Development

Words India Block

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Lemon Aid-When inspiration strikes, it doesn’t care what time it is. “Alex called me very late at night and told me she had the best idea,” recounts Emilie Skaff, founder of Beirut-based Beit Collective. “She said: ‘Let’s do a lemon! It’ll be amazing.’”

The seed of Citrus Charm came to jewellery designer and maker Alexandra Hakim in a bar in Madrid, the city where she lives and works. “I was working late at the studio and met up with friends for a cocktail afterwards,” Hakim recalls. “The idea of making jewellery to adorn drinks glasses came to mind.

It was something that I felt the need to share with Emilie immediately.”

Skaff had asked Hakim to use her skills to create homeware pieces for Beit Collective, an initiative devised in response to the multiple emergencies that are besetting their home country of Lebanon, not least its ongoing financial crisis. After the 17 October Revolution in 2019, Skaff, who had just quit her job in a London gallery, returned to Beirut determined to set up a project that would benefit the Lebanese craft community.

Beit Collective was in its infancy when disaster hit the city, already crippled economically and by Covid.

On 4 August 2020 an explosion at a warehouse in Beirut’s port caused by improperly stored ammonium nitrate killed more than 200 people and caused enormous damage to people’s homes and businesses. As she joined in the rebuilding effort, Skaff saw a chance to continue the mutual aid movement she witnessed. “Even though it was horrible, it was incredible,” she says.

“Everybody that wasn’t affected by the explosion went down to help,” she adds. “You had all the artisans coming into the city, ready to fix your doors and windows.”

Through Beit Collective, Skaff connects Lebanese artisans – who tend to be located in industrial zones outside the capital – with designers. Together they create homeware products (“Beit” means “home” in Hebrew) that reflect Lebanese culture and craft, selling them to an overseas audience to bring in dollars, euros and pounds – essential when the Lebanese lira has lost 98 per cent of its value since the economic crisis began in 2019. “We’re creating jobs, we’re paying artisans in foreign currency,” explains Skaff.

“We’re creating a new parallel economy with these products.

An artisan called me the other day, saying ‘I want to thank you, because I just bought a house.’”

When a friend of a friend mentioned that they knew a metalsmith, Sako Der Artinian, who specialises in sand casting, Skaff knew she had to connect them with Hakim. “In Lebanon, everything is word of mouth,” Skaff says. Hakim had worked with sand casting in her student days, and was delighted to have a meeting of minds with a fellow metalworker. “Sako is great! He’s kind and professional,” says Hakim. “Collaborations are much smoother when you fully understand the process and the materials behind the work.”

Hakim had already used citrus fruit in a previous jewellery collection, turning lemon seeds into spiky ear cuffs and lime rinds into golden bangles. Now, the Citrus Charms provide the charming illusion of lemon slices perched on the rim of a drink. In creating jewellery for the home, Hakim has also honoured one of Lebanon’s precious resources. “There’s nothing ready-made here. Artisans are the foundation of our country,” says Skaff. “They are the jewels of Lebanon.”

124

Index FEEDBACK: CONTROL pp. 34-47

Writer’s note: I brought two old iPhones into the facility that Daisy is stored in when I visited, hoping to get them recycled in her maw. They were, sadly, turned down.

Not fucked enough, apparently. —Oli Stratford Apple – apple.com

Writer’s note: Curiousa called me one day and were like “Glowbules is going to be in a film. We can’t tell you what it is because we’ve signed an NDA, but it’s really appropriate.

It’s a film you’ll love, Adam.” —Adam Nathaniel Furman

Adam Nathaniel Furman – adamnathanielfurman.com Curiousa – curiousa.co.uk

DISTRIBUTION: THE NECESSITY OF UNCERTAINTY pp. 25-32

Writer’s note: When I spoke to Petro Vladimirov, he told me there are two kinds of Polish people: “Those who

Philippe Malouin – philippemalouin.com Flos – flos.com

Writers note: “I’m Francophone, so I thought it was fun to use a French word to name the light,” Malouin tells me. It’s true: although cup-and-ball games are ubiquitous throughout history, there is a French connection to the toy. One of its most famous players, Henry III of France, would parade the streets of Paris with the knick-knack.

“This exhibition of himself Henry was not ashamed to repeat on several occasions,” explains historian Martha Walker Freer. “For some weeks his majesty wore a bilboquet at his girdle[...].” —Evi Hall

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: NEVER STATIC p. 33

Fundacja BRDA – fundacjabrda.org London Design Biennale – londondesignbiennale.com TŁO – tlo.archi

think Poland is in Central Europe and those who think it is in Eastern Europe.” An acute observation, exemplifying the distancing many attempt in order to associate themselves more closely with Western Europe and separate themselves from our Eastern neighbours and recent history. Ben Stanley, an academic specialising in Central and Eastern Europe, once put this geographical ambiguity rather well in a tweet: “Central Europe is all those places where people get angry when you tell them they’re in Eastern Europe.” —Marianna Janowicz

OPINION: LEARNING FROM FAILURE p. 24

Sizegiver archive – instagram.com/sizegiver

Writer and photographer’s note: In writing this piece about sizegivers, I’d often find myself looking for more examples to add to my archive. The thrill of collecting images is hard to resist, and new photos appear every day.

I invite you, reader, to visually describe an object or scene using a sizegiver, and send me the image. —Corinne Quin

MATERIAL: AS BIG AS A... pp. 14-23

Dharohar – dharohar.org Studio Saar – studiosaar.design

Photographer’s note: It’s uncommon to see architectural elements that are designed to fail safely. I was particularly fascinated by the bamboo sails for the roof canopy.

It was a learning experience to see how temporary vernacular elements are being embraced to tackle the climate crisis, while also creating an economy for local artisans. —Eshwarya Grover

CONSTRUCTION: HOME, WORK AND WHERE ELSE? pp. 49-58

Ligne Roset – ligne-roset.com

Writer’s note: I like that sitting in a Togo makes you transform into a Togo too. Your belly will adopt a similar layering of slightly bulging rolls as your back curves to meet the sofa’s body. One backstory for the Togo’s shape suggests that it was dreamed up by Michael Ducaroy as he contemplated the way a sealed aluminium tube of toothpaste bulges when bent. Other sources suggest it was a crumpled cushion on the floor that provided the spark. Who knows which story, if either, is really true.

—Lara Chapman

OPINION: SEEN ON SCREEN p. 48

126

Ayzit Bostan – ayzitbostan.com Die Neue Sammlung – dnstdm.de RESEARCH: FOLLOWING WHOM? pp. 85-95

Polaroid – polaroid.com

OPINION: THE PARTHENON RHYMES WITH CINDERELLA CASTLE p. 60

CONTEXT: NAVIGATING FRICTION pp. 61-70

Formafantasma – formafantasma.com Nasjonalmuseet – nasjonalmuseet.no/en/

Writer’s note: I enjoyed this anecdote from Cambio about another human and other-than-human co-evolution, as told to me by Gregorio Gonella: “The biologist and writer Stefano Mancuso gives the example of chilli peppers.

They’re not eaten widely in nature, but humans started to enjoy the spiciness since the burning sensation makes your body release endorphins. Humans became addicted.

You could view this as chillis using their spiciness as an evolutionary strategy to become globally dispersed. If you shift the perspective that humans are not actually controlling everything, it changes things.” —Evi Hall

Writer’s note: I want one of these bags, and I want the giant ball it came from too. —Oli Stratford

Writer’s note: Trying the new Polaroid was the first time I’ve ever used an instant camera and it alarmed me. The film shield shoots out like a tongue. —George Isleden

Writer’s note: My favourite Disney anecdote is about font designer Justin Callaghan. He created Waltograph, a free font based on the Walt Disney logo, which the company neither endorsed nor shut down. One day Callaghan was visiting a Disney resort and, to his surprise, found the font being used there. Although I remember reading about this incident somewhere, I couldn’t verify its authenticity when I looked online. It may be better to think of it as a fairytale. —Tetsuo Mukai

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: MOTLEY p. 84

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: LESS VOLUME, MORE MEANING p. 59

Writer’s note: It’s not just drinks charms that Alexandra Hakim has created for Beit Collective. Her collection of

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: LEMON AID p. 124

Ableton – ableton.com

Photographer’s note: I was positively surprised by how the design department at Ableton felt more like a genuine workshop, rather than the typical cold atmosphere of a tech startup. —Jonas Holthaus

DEVELOPMENT: THE PORTABLE ORCHESTRA pp. 115-123

Hansgrohe – hansgrohe-group.com Lovehoney – lovehoney.net

Writer’s note: Nosiness and a penchant for gossip are vital traits for any journalist. I only found out about the Womanizer Wave – and got myself invited to the party – because I was asking a PR what they were up to while they were in town for Clerkenwell Design Week. They told me about a sex toy launch in hushed tones. I’m grateful this piece wasn’t for Design Reviewed, though. There is such a thing as too much information. —India Block

ECONOMIES: KEEP IT CLEAN pp. 107–114

Index

Narp – instagram.com/_n.a.r.p

Photographer’s note: I think working on this commission reminded me of the nuances that come with shooting buildings in Lagos, particularly Lagos Island. As much as I thought I was experienced, I got to re-learn a lot of things in a new way. —Ọlájídé Aye´̣ni

COLLABORATION: REGIONAL MODERNISMS, TROPICAL SKINS pp. 72-83

Completedworks – completedworks.com

Writer’s note: I was interested that the Thaw pieces are made in Kenya. It’s where Completedworks found the only glass manufacturer it approached who could work with 100 per cent recycled glass. —Lara Chapman

Ambessa Play – ambessaplay.com Pentagram – pentagram.com

Writer’s note: I was once interning for a designer and we were working under a very tight deadline to complete a lamp going on display in an exhibition the following day.

I was tasked with wiring the light. When I finally finished at the very end of the day, I nervously presented it to said designer and we flicked the switch. The bulb immediately blew. He was admirably calm about it, while I was (and, to be honest, still am) very embarrassed that I had wired it back to front. Safe to say, I could have done with something like the DIY Flashlight growing up.

—Lara Chapman

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: LESSONS IN A FLASH(LIGHT) p. 106

ADVERTISERS

Fuminori Nousaku Architects – fuminori-nousaku.site Studio mnm – studio-mnm.com

Bocci – bocci.ca p. 4 Carl Hansen – carlhansen.com pp. 2-3 Ellen MacArthur Foundation – ellenmacarthurfoundation.org p. 13 Maharam – maharam.com p. 7 Poliform – poliform.it p. 11 Rimadesio – rimadesio.it p. 9 Vitra – vitra.com p. 1, inside front cover Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de outside back cover Zanat – zanat.org inside back cover

Writer’s note: Best chocolate cake recipe (from my aunt Nicole): On the stove, melt 200g of dark chocolate with 200g of butter, add 100g of sugar. Remove from heat and add 4 eggs. Cook in oven for 10 minutes at 220ºC, then 20 minutes at 180ºC. —Oscar Lhermitte Oscar Lhermitte – oscarlhermitte.com

END NOTE: NO RANDOMNESS p. 128

Alexandra Hakim – alexandrahakim.co Beit Collective – beit-collective.com

metal ashtrays have been a huge hit for the organisation.

The Pyromania collection in bronze features the cast of a burnt-out match being stubbed into a minimalist circular ashtray, a riff on her Matches earrings. “I know it’s bad to condone smoking,” says Beit Collective founder Emilie Staff, “but the ashtrays are truly beautiful. They’ve definitely been one of our bestsellers in France.”

—India Block

Writer’s note: What initially drove me to visit Holes in the House was its similarity to the work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Initially trained as an architect, Matta-Clark became famous for the cuts he made into deserted American housing stock. He summed up his intentions in 1976 as being: “To convert a place into a state of mind”. I read Tsuneyama and Nousaku’s house in this same spirit, only that they’ve gone one step further by converting a place into a way of life. —Selma Alihodžić

PHILOSOPHY: RADICALLY UNFINISHED pp. 97-105

Casio – casio.co.uk

Photographer’s note: When Disegno asked me to shoot the keyboard, I assumed it was a computer keyboard.

When the courier showed up at the door with a huge box, I was a little nervous. —Fabian Frinzel

Yassine Ben Abdallah – yassinebenabdallah.com

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: GLASSWARE IS LIKE ONIONS p. 71

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: NOTES OF MUSTARD p. 96

Photographer’s note: Yassine welcomed me into his home, and I cherished the tranquillity. —Bachir Tayachi

No Randomness Collecting meaningful details in meaningless objects Words and photograph Oscar Lhermitte

The chocolate bar In 2015, industrial designer Oscar Lhermitte launched No Randomness, a project that highlights the design stories behind the everyday standards, systems and products that surround us. Having begun life as an exhibition at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne, the project will now become a regular column in the pages of Disegno.

“Stop yelling, kids! Form one line and you’ll each get your piece of chocolate!”

—A father taking care of a bunch of kids on a Saturday afternoon in a park.

I always struggle when it comes to explaining to people – and especially young design students – what design is actually about. Luckily I manage to get my point across most of the time, but only after a certain effort, and the use of many different examples.

Design is all about context and systems – where a product lives and to what systems it belongs. It’s a process of making observations and decisions.

End Note

Explaining this through the typology of the chair, while a design stalwart, is too difficult. It takes a trained pair of eyes to see the impact of one design for a chair over another: the subtleties of an armrest, the use of ash over oak, and so on.

To best understand (and appreciate) design, we should talk about the things we use every day. The mundane stuff that we see so often that we don’t even look at them properly any more. Dissecting and understanding the small details and decisions that make up our objects is the key. And there is no better place to start than with a chocolate bar.

Chocolate, in essence, hasn’t got a shape. It’s not square, it’s not round; it’s solid, it’s liquid. And because it’s highly appreciated all around the world, we’ve had to come up with lots of different ways to shape and package it.

Solid chocolate was already consumed in Mesoamerica in the form of small balls made from ground cocoa, but it was during the Industrial Revolution that something marvellous happened.

The combination of steam-powered engines and new grinding techniques gave chocolate an incredibly smooth texture that could be moulded at an industrial scale – and at a price accessible to the mass market.

But one 19th-century chocolatier, François-Louis Cailler (Swiss, of course), understood that chocolate was a delicacy to share with one another. Appreciated by children and grownups alike, chocolate needs to be divided fairly. So Cailler gave his chocolate a super-functional form by pouring the chocolate into a mould with segmented ridges, thus making it easily breakable into equal parts. This is the chocolate bar we know today.

It seems so obvious that we don’t question it. The bar has simply become the norm for the confectionary industry, and hasn’t changed in 200 years. Whether it’s for distributing pieces of chocolate to over-excited kids or for precisely measuring 185g of chocolate to bake a brownie, the bar makes your life a lot easier.

Did I get my point across?

Veo Room divider

by Sebastian Herkner

Pointe table

by Monica Förster

Sava chair

by Patrick Norguet

For information on our sales network, please visit: www.zanat.org

Iwan Baan

Moments in Architecture 21.10.2023 – 03.03.2024

The exhibition

»Iwan Baan: #VDMIwanBaan Moments in Architecture« is generously #VitraDesignMuseum supported by Rolex www.design-museum.de

With the kind support by

Media Partner

Thanks to