Design Reviewed #3 by Disegno

DESIGN REVIEWED

Felix Chabluk Smith took about 15 minutes to come up with this Lara Chapman thinks she should finish writing her story before writing this bio Jonna Dagliden Hunt is building a cottage with a ceiling height of 8m Evi Hall is trying to mend a raincoat Joe Lloyd has been searching for the perfect carciofo Joshua Segun-Lean knows where the best sourdough bread is Michael Snyder is in the kitchen and does not need a hand, thank you Oli Stratford could probably do without this bit if he’s honest Lily Wakeley is still hungry

INTRODUCTION In Praise of Faff

MASTHEAD The people behind Design Reviewed.

ECOLOGY Remnants of a Retreating Sea Michael Snyder assesses an aquatic institution’s acceptability for modernday Mazatlán.

SYSTEM The Modern Milkman Jonna Dagliden Hunt pours out domestic products with På( fyll), a container engineered to reduce plastic waste.

BODY To Speak Amongst Ourselves Joshua Segun-Lean sifts the influences interwoven in Lagos Space Programme’s fashion collections.

INTERFACE Stock Creep Lara Chapman scrolls through an alternative stock photography website that aims to court designers.

MEDIA The Attention of Passersby Joe Lloyd corrals the miscellaneous thoughts behind Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise crusade.

SPACE Good Road, Bad Road Evi Hall gets on her bike to forge a new relationship with London’s streets, with help from Beeline’s Velo 2.

POLICY Patching the Machine Felix Chabluk Smith considers getting his trousers taken up.

TECHNOLOGY The Corruptibility of Olive Oil Lily Wakeley questions whether equipping AI to analyse olive oil leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

OBJECT Rising, Dancing, Twisting Oli Stratford becomes lost in the relationship between lava lamps and respectability.

The next issue of Design Reviewed will be available in July 2024. Design Reviewed #2 was published in July 2023. Design Reviewed #1 was published in December 2022.

DESIGN REVIEWED

STOCKHOLMFURNITUREFAIR.SE

Welcome to the world’s leading meeting place for Scandinavian design. Since 1951, we bring together the foremost design brands, designers and architects for a week of news, business, engaging talks and inspiring exhibitions. In 2024 we unveil a new arena for young design ventures, as well as an exhibition space showcasing Scandinavian innovations in curation by Form Us With Love. We are also proud to host Formafantasma as our 20th Guest of Honour. Book your tickets here:

Stockholm Furniture Fair 24.02.06 — 10

IN PRAISE OF FAFF Words Oli Stratford

If there is one portion of this publication that I would consider ceding to AI, it’s this editor’s letter. Get some robots in, see what they’d do with the place. I could, you know. It was very voguish not so long ago for journalists to hand over a column or two to ChatGPT. Bung in an explanation in that you were letting the old AI have a stab at things – thereby appearing of-the-moment and, crucially, avoiding having to do any actual work – and away you go. I presume said columnists were still paid, which is more than I can say for myself. I’m writing this text on the weekend so, technically, it’s all off the books. In hindsight, I should have just hired a bot and knocked off. Gone to a farmers’ market; peered at those carrots which still have tendrils on the end. Well, I didn’t do that, so I’m sat here lonely and unpaid, tippytapping away. Meanwhile, the AI is presumably enjoying its Sunday, probably seeing its friends for tapas or trying its hand at kayaking. Perhaps that’s all for the best. Making the AI work weekends would no doubt only accelerate the eventual uprising and, truth told, I have other concerns. Chief amongst these is my suspicion that any AI I put on the company’s payroll would simply prove to be too diligent. They might have actually made this letter about the publication you’re reading, which I’m afraid I can’t allow. If this introduction is for anything, it’s for providing a home for faff. That’s the human touch you’re paying for. That’s the spark of creativity! I’m sure designers know what I mean. After all, the business of design isn’t just a case of rigorously meeting requirements in the most efficient way possible; it’s also about flimflam, vibe,

flourishes! All the little oddities, eccentricities and inanities that make a thing worthwhile. Don’t bring me projects that seek to meet my needs calmly, sedately and accurately; bring me work o’erflowing with subjectivities! Actually, the very idea of reviewing design is fuelled by faff. Sure, there’s the matter of determining whether a thing works or not, but the business end of reviewing is never so straightforward. I want to get lost in the weeds of personal opinion. I want to know what the designer was thinking, and how the project’s priorities and peculiarities shaped what they came up with. What preferences and peccadillos of the reviewer fed into their assessments? We never create or experience design in a vacuum: everything is subjective, connected, personal. It’s all faff! We’re all bound together in faff! Anyway, I just took an extended break and now it’s Monday. New week, new attitude, so I’m prepared to put aside prior concerns and give AI a crack at the whip. “Is design faff?” I ask my esteemed ChatGPTeammate. “What may seem like ‘faff’ to one person could be the necessary work to achieve a well-thought-out and visually appealing result,” they tell me in response. “While design work can be challenging and time-consuming, it is an essential aspect of many industries and often leads to valuable and impactful outcomes.” See, I don’t like that. Too worthy. Too even-handed. It has, I don’t mind telling you, completely spoiled this editor’s letter.

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Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com Managing editor Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com Assistant editor Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com

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

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

DISCOVER MODULOR WALL PANELLING SYSTEM, COVER WALK–IN CLOSET, RADIUS DOOR. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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

Contributors Felix Chabluk Smith, Lara Chapman, Jonna Dagliden Hunt, Evi Hall, Joe Lloyd, Joshua Segun-Lean, Michael Snyder, Oli Stratford and Lily Wakeley. Paper and print This issue of Design Reviewed is printed by Park Communications on paper stock from G . F Smith. The publication is printed on Munken Design Pure Smooth Cream 90gsm, with a 150gsm cover. The dust jacket is printed on G . F Smith Accent Fresco Creme 120gsm.

Thanks Many thanks to Grace Kim and Becca B Jones for gamely guineapigging; Donna Bagnall and Cathy Fogg for their services to barcodes; Cressida Granger and Anthony Voz for their enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, all things lava; Kate Osborne for hooking us up with a Velo 2; and the teams at G . F Smith and Zetteler for all their support.

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.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Design Reviewed #3 possible – not least Olaf the cat, whose new family have deemed him “very interested in modern design” because his house of choice is a recycled plastic box.

Disegno The team behind Design Reviewed also produce Disegno, a journal that focuses on designers’ engagement with their field’s cultural, political and social entanglements. Disegno #36 has been in stores since September 2023; Disegno #37 will be released in April 2024.

Finally we are sad to say goodbye to India Block, who was part of the founding team behind Design Reviewed. We will miss her warmth; talent as a writer, speaker, and podcast host; and ability to find unexpected, challenging stories. We wish her luck in the next steps in her career.

Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

REMNANTS OF A RETREATING SEA Words Michael Snyder

Image courtesy of Juan Manuel McGrath (@jmphotography_mx).

ECOLOGY

Gran Acuario de Mazatlán

As an adolescent growing up in the Baltimore suburbs – in what devotees of The Wire might know as “the County” (pronounced “canny”) – I would make the 30-minute drive into the city maybe twice a month to go to dinner or museums with my family, to go to the symphony or the theatre or the arthouse cinema down on Charles Street. But as a child, I equated Baltimore with the National Aquarium. Baltimore’s aquarium is probably the closest thing the city has to a bona fide tourist attraction, alongside Fort McHenry, whose bombardment by the British in the War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and the Orioles Stadium at Camden Yards, where it is routinely butchered. Inaugurated in 1981 and expanded in 1990 after its staggering early success, the aquarium’s main buildings, as I knew them, jutted brightly into the harbour on a sequence of piers, their oblique pyramidal rooflines gliding out onto the mud-colored surface of the Patapsco River. (Another building, dedicated to the Australian Outback, opened in 2005.) Sea lions cavorted in a pool near the entrance. Inside, right by the ticket counter (and, if memory serves, the gift shop), a sequence of transparent pillars transported bubbles from the floor to the ceiling like a set of pneumatic tubes at a drive-through bank teller. The moment my parents and I entered, I would throw my arms around the columns and press my ear to the glass (or was it plexiglass?), listening to the guttural, gurgling rush of air through water. Tickets in hand, we moved from that transitional space into the high, ecclesiastical darkness of the building’s central atrium – a towering void traversed by concrete pathways that crossed the empty space at shallow angles. At ground level, manta rays glided through an open pool that sunk deep into the ground. Down there, below us, and up ahead, tucked into a labyrinth of dark halls and byzantine pathways, there were puffins and poison dart frogs, threshers and hammerheads; in the glass pyramid that surmounted the second building, lianas and bromeliads steamed in a balmy patch of misplaced rainforest – a composite fantasy, really, unlike any actual rainforest I’ve had the chance to visit since – with piranha tanks encased in artificial stones. There was also a famous dolphin show – since discontinued, thank god – complete with the usual, ethically abhorrent (though I didn’t know that at the time) tricks, and wave-shaped curtains that rose and fell on a staggering view over the harbour, where the Chesapeake Bay ends. There were also, somehow, traveling exhibitions, like a miraculous show

on jellyfish that ran from 1996-1998, on loan from Boston’s New England Aquarium, that’s still imprinted on my memory almost 30 years after I first saw it. All those amorphous figures (clouds at sunset, liquid opals) gliding through empty space felt, still feel, like the closest I’ll ever get to outer space. I loved the aquarium. There is a very good chance that I will never go back. In May of this year, I traveled from my home in Mexico City to see an entirely different aquarium, the newly opened Gran Acuario de Mazatlán in the northern state of Sinaloa – the largest of its kind in Latin America – designed by Mexico City’s Tatiana Bilbao Studio. Mazatlán is a beachside city known, in no particular order, for its 21km-long seaside promenade, or malecón; its spectacular seafood (giant clams hoisted live out of plastic coolers, raw scallops so fresh they’re not even served cold, crab tostadas, oysters and glistening plates of aguachile); and the activities of the Sinaloa Cartel. Mazatlán’s economy is based largely in fishing and tourism, much of it local. (The Mexican navy also maintains an important presence in the city.) Recent years have seen a rash of real estate speculation, as well, particularly at the northern end of the malecón, where newly built apartment towers loom over the water in an urban landscape that is otherwise dominated by one- or twostorey houses and broad, pin-straight streets. Before working on the aquarium, Bilbao – who is the principal at her eponymous studio and one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary builders – had spent two years in Mazatlán developing and executing a massive urban design project for a new Central Park (the city’s name for it), built around a retention pond that previous administrations had failed to convert into a recreational space. “They’d tried to protect it in various ways,” Bilbao told me on the afternoon that we met at her Mexico City offices, a couple of days before my visit to Mazatlán. “They’d put in some basketball courts and moved a couple of trees and put in some plants, but they’d never succeeded in making it live up to its name.” When Bilbao’s office started working on the project in 2015, she says, “we wanted to understand the hydraulic issues of the city, the ecological issues, to understand the park not just as a hydraulic system, but also as an ecological system.” The office’s plans began with cleaning the pond (all those tall new buildings, which separate the park from the sea, had a bad habit of dumping their sewage there) and organising the 30.6-hectare area around permeable surfaces

and hardscapes that would adapt to changing water levels. “For us, it was very important for the intervention to become a medium through which to understand the ecosystem,” Bilbao told me, “not a boundary separating us from it.” In the process of cleaning the lagoon, says Alba Cortés, a partner in the studio and project manager for the aquarium, the team had to remove

A drone shot of the aquarium’s site in Mazatlán (image courtesy of Tatiana Bilbao Studio).

four crocodiles deposited there by former owners who’d bought them as pets and gave them up when they became prohibitively large and threatening: a pithy little metaphor for 21st-century humanity’s radical, almost comical disconnection from the fundamental logic of the natural world. While the park was underway, its primary sponsor, the flamboyant entrepreneur and hotelier, Ernesto Coppel Kelly, commissioned another firm to intervene at the city’s small, grim aquarium, popular principally for its penguins. The plans had been a disappointment: a sculptural glass roof locking a bunch of exotic species in what was, effectively, a greenhouse (a deranged choice in a desert city where temperatures routinely reach 35°C). When Coppel approached Bilbao to take over the project in 2017, she and her colleagues were skeptical. “What worries me a great deal about aquariums is that way of thought, that Man Dominates Nature,” Bilbao told me. More to the point, Mazatlán stands at the mouth of the Sea of Cortés, which Jacques

Cousteau famously described as “The World’s Aquarium”. “If you have one of the world’s most important natural aquariums right there in front of you,” Bilbao wanted to know, “why would you want to make a place where they’re bringing in species from who-knows-where that have nothing to do with anything?” Coppel agreed that the aquarium should be dedicated to local ecosystems. Bilbao accepted the commission. From there, a series of questions: how could the building facilitate contact between people and ecosystems that are both so nearby and so foreign? What would such a building look like? How could a structure as densely technical as an aquarium also let the ocean in? How could they make it clear that this was a space for the city, not just tourists? How, in short, can you justify an aquarium in the 21st century? To answer these questions, Bilbao’s office developed an elaborate backstory for the building they planned to create. It would have to be huge and heavy to contain such a complex programme; in Mexico, where that much structural steel would have been prohibitively expensive, that meant building in concrete, an increasingly embattled material. “The idea was to make a building that’s alive, that gives the impression of something that’s always been there, of a ruin that we’ve reprogrammed,” said Cortés. “The story we came up with,” Bilbao added, “was that this was a building from before and we have no clue what it was used for, there are no vestiges of its previous use.” In this scenario – both fanciful and darkly realistic – something was built, sea levels rose, the building was consumed. When water levels dropped again, say, 200 years later, ponds and pools, remnants of the retreating sea, formed among the decimated foundations. The structure reemerged, Bilbao said, “teeming with life”. As an architectural object, the building itself is surprisingly discrete. Organised as an intersecting grid of cement walls, the tallest rising 22m above the ground, the building is only visible in its entirety from the avenue on the far side of the retention pond – a notably successful element of Bilbao’s park design where young people gather in the evening to listen to music and drink beers. From the south, the structure is largely obscured by trees. A dusty arterial road skirts its eastern side, not someplace anyone is likely to walk. And to the north lies the park, which, to date, has exactly one point of entry and, at least on the day I visited, roughly as many users. (The park, Bilbao and her team readily, if sadly, admit, has been an abject failure,

in large part, it would seem, due to problems with city administrators.) Rather than open to the park, as Bilbao’s team had planned, the aquarium is fenced in, with a single ticketed entrance on its southern side. Cut off from their surroundings, the inscrutable walls seem less mysterious or majestic than they do carceral.

An architectural plan of the aquarium (image courtesy of Tatiana Bilbao Studio).

Past the fence, the building starts to take shape as a collection of transitional spaces, devoid of hierarchy. Veils of water tumble down the high walls that contain monumental staircases on either side of the building, a poetic gesture that encourages visitors to reach out and touch the cool cement surfaces. Those stairs lead to a habitable roof that Bilbao and her team conceived as an extension of the park. From there, another staircase leads down to a circular vestibule planted with a ceiba tree that will one day form a soaring canopy over the building, and a churning fountain in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi at the Camino Real in Mexico City. From here, doors open onto the aquarium’s various exhibition spaces, which descend

(figuratively, rather than physically: they’re all on the same level of the building) from coastal ecosystems and mangroves through shallow littoral waters to the deep sea. Designed with no fixed pathway, the building’s layout opens itself to exploration. There’s a manta pond under a graceful oculus, sea turtles and boas, and a shark tank like an IMAX screen for kids to press their hands and faces against in wonder, like I once did with those columns in Baltimore. There are spaces, too, for research and for educational programs, all run by serious scientists. Throughout, unprogrammed interstitial spaces open to the sun and the rain, demonstrating the possibilities of passive cooling. The building is heavy, immense, frankly out of scale to the city around it, which is home to only about a half million people. But Bilbao has an explanation. “We need to think about the fact that our buildings are going to be there for a long time. Concrete and steel will last,” she told me. “If we’re going to build at all, then we should be sure that our resources can serve for a lot and for many.” This was, I found out soon upon my arrival a month after the aquarium’s opening, a heavy conceptual load to carry, even for all those tonnes of concrete. Immediately upon opening, the aquarium’s administration found that the lack of a set path through the building was causing bottlenecks, a predictable problem in a space designed for families with young children. Up went the airport stanchions, which soon extended like vines onto the roof – closing access to most of its pleasant, landscaped corners – and around the tanks, to keep the kids from smudging or tapping on the glass. Contact between humans and nature, the animating idea behind the entire project, has its limits. On a walk-through of the aquarium, architect Soledad Rodríguez, one the studio’s partners and the construction director in Mazatlán, pointed out the stanchions as an unfortunate administrative decision that the studio hopes will be temporary. “The building needs to tell you what it wants – people, too,” Rodríguez says, a process that, of course, takes time. But the presence of those barriers suggests a larger problem. An open plan is a nice idea, but insufficient, in itself, to overcome the practical issues of wayfinding in what is essentially a children’s museum; I struggle to think of a situation in architecture where concept should take precedence over functionality. However you want to theorise it, a building has to work, and the idea that you could build an aquarium to be anything other than an aquarium strikes

me as, at best, disingenuous. Service spaces for maintaining tanks, treating water and caring for the animals occupy fully 60 per cent of the building’s immense floorspace; from a technical standpoint, an aquarium makes an opera house look like a basketball court. The image of these towering walls as heroic, post-apocalyptic memorials to our precarious present moment, with the tanks as pools left behind by the withdrawing ocean, is certainly evocative. It also has little bearing on reality. When that larger backstory comes apart, so too do some other justifications. Take, for instance, the choice to use concrete – so much concrete – for a building whose very scale and typology were bound to raise eyebrows vis-à-vis sustainability. As Bilbao rightly (and frequently) points out, concrete is a convenient “villain of the discourse for privileged white people who have all the resources of the world at their feet.” In Mexico, she notes, which has no reliable system for certifying sustainable sourcing of timber, wood is hardly a panacea and adaptive reuse isn’t always viable because, she says, “construction isn’t necessarily as well consolidated” as it is in parts of Europe. Moreover, “if you’re imagining this building to survive above and below water, concrete serves for that.” All of which is true. Except that this building cost over $100m, two-thirds paid by Coppel, the remainder by the state. And whatever possible futures we might dream up for these towering pylon-walls, in its present form, the building is neither public housing nor a free space for recreation, nor even connected in any meaningful way to the park around it. (It’s important to note, again, that this is not Bilbao’s fault. Failing to consider traffic patterns inside the museum strikes me as a design flaw; designing the building for a version of the park that works as intended is maybe more like optimism.) It’s also a clever sleight of hand to deploy an anti-colonial discourse for a building that is, in the end, a privately operated, and extremely expensive, tourist attraction, which will likely drive up real estate value in the surrounding area. (Whether that was part of the investment team’s calculus in sponsoring the project, I can’t say; I did, however, see new developments advertising their proximity to the aquarium as a perk for future buyers.) These kinds of logical contortions – comparable to those made by an actor drumming up motivations for a desperately underwritten role – shouldn’t be necessary to justify a building’s existence. Bilbao is hardly the only architect to have twisted herself in rhetorical knots to rationalise working on a particular typology. Even Paulo

Mendes da Rocha, easily among the best and most ideologically serious leftwing architects of the late 20th century, explained his many private houses for members of São Paulo’s intellectual elite by claiming that a house could one day serve some other purpose, that everything is public space, and that, as he famously used to say, “the only private space is the mind.” This is not,

The aquarium is soley dedicated to local ecosystems (image courtesy of Juan Manuel McGrath).

I don’t think, true in any meaningful way, at least not in the neoliberal world order of the post-Thatcher/Reagan era. Private homes are the palaces of the bourgeoisie, often fortified behind walls and fences or with even more effective tools of segregation like red-lining and structural racism. But a house (unless we’re talking about, say, Buckingham Palace, which is an entirely different kind of unjustifiable proposition) does not sit on public land, does not use public funds, and does not have to charge an entry fee beyond the means of most middle-class families in order to stay standing. Its program is simple and elemental: it’s just a shelter. It is not, in short, an aquarium. Which brings us to that sticky question: How do we feel about aquariums in the 21st century? I do not have an answer to this. The best justification for aquariums, and it seems to me one worth taking seriously, is that they can

serve as valuable sources of data for marine biologists. They can serve, too, as rehabilitation centres for injured animals or shelters for those so deeply and permanently harmed by human beings that they can no longer survive in the wild. More philosophically, aquariums can introduce young people to the wonders of distant, alien worlds, as the Baltimore Aquarium did for me in my childhood. The counterargument typically offered is that programs such as Planet Earth and Blue Planet make aquariums redundant, a posture that none other than David Attenborough, doyen of the nature doc, rejects. There is no replacement, he has argued, for seeing animals in person. My early memories of Baltimore’s aquarium are deeply physical, connected as much to the sensory experience of the place as they are to the images or stories of the animals themselves. Did my childhood visits to the National Aquarium in Baltimore make me more conscientious? I hope so, though I can’t say for sure. Did they turn me into an activist for ocean health? Certainly not. In my recollection, the aquarium was, above all, a form of entertainment, and here you should note the other activities I put in its company in the opening of this essay: theatre, restaurants, the symphony. In Mazatlán, I saw children genuinely awed by the mantas and sea turtles and sharks. I saw far more people lining up for pictures in front of a (very cool) wave simulator. Are visitors learning anything? Surely some of them must be; surely at least one of these children will now harbour dreams of becoming a marine biologist, and surely the idea of an aquarium creating links to a local ecosystem – rather than one imported from far away – is exciting, a chance to reframe the apparently familiar as a source of wonder. But what’s the moral calculus that allows us to decide how many changed minds are ethically equal to how many wild animals in glass cages? We have no good answers to these questions. While in Mazatlán, I had the chance to speak with Catherine Hart, who has been researching sea turtles in Mexico for 20 years, since the age of 18, and who was brought on as the coordinator of the sea turtle program for the Oceanic Research Center of the Mar de Cortés, the independent scientific institution working out of the aquarium. Of everyone I spoke to, she made the clearest case for the project’s existence. “I love the idea of an aquarium in the sense that we can bring the sea to people. Standing on the malecón has its impact, but only so much: there are so many distractions, it just becomes a backdrop,” she told me over coffee one morning, a few meters away from the crashing pacific. “Of course, there’s a part of you that’s going

to look and think, ‘Isn’t it nicer for fish to be in the sea?’ And the answer is yes. But if we have these two or three sharks here as ambassadors, it really allows people to look at these animals as individuals, not just in terms of tonnage of by-catch.” The idea of the aquarium, as stated by Bilbao and Hart and also the administrators, is that it should function first and foremost as a research centre. If that turns out to be true, and if the research produced at Mazatlán’s aquarium deepens our understanding for a spectacular but fragile ecosystem, then that might be justification enough. It might also turn out to be essentially a theme park for out-of-towners and their kids, a selling point to up the prices on unnecessary new condos – a classic expression of cynical, late-capitalist urbanism. Who knows? It takes time for a building to reveal its nature, for a city to absorb it. This is one of the fundamental problems of architecture criticism: we can’t know if a building actually works until years after its completion. Maybe when the landscaping grows in, the walls will resemble a ruin rather than a fortress. Maybe the Central Park will eventually function. Maybe as visitor numbers increase, prices will go down and maybe researchers like Hart will produce invaluable new knowledge. And maybe if all that happens, the building will make sense and will become as essential to Mazatlán as the sea itself. Maybe. If so, the aquarium won’t require speculative storytelling to explain itself. In the meantime, we have a name for buildings built for fictions. They’re called follies. Michael Snyder is a freelance reporter and contributing editor for T Magazine in Mexico City.

THE MODERN MILKMAN Words Jonna Dagliden Hunt

Image courtesy of Form Us With Love.

SYSTEM På(fyll)

The grey container filled with detergent that stands atop my washing machine has a long story behind it. In a way, it started back in 2017, when a goose-beaked whale washed up in the bay of Sotra in Hordaland, on the west coast of Norway. The local emergency services tried to lead it back into deep waters but failed. When the whale’s condition deteriorated further, it was euthanised by the authorities. The story, however, did not end there. The whale was emaciated and when scientists performed an autopsy they found more than 30 plastic bags, including food packaging and sweet wrappers, inside its stomach. The large amount of plastics had created a plug, blocking its digestive tract. On some of these bags the branding was still visible, and the waste could be traced back to Norway, Sweden and the UK. The “Plastic Whale” quickly became world news, and triggered action. For Orkla, the leading Nordic conglomerate of consumer goods, it became the starting point for an entirely new company. På(fyll), which launched as a beta-version with 100 households in Norway during 2022, is a circular refill service for Orkla’s household products, aimed at helping consumers reduce plastic waste. This is no small task: every year, over 26m tonnes of plastic waste are produced within the EU, 70 per cent of which is sent to landfill. According to På(fyll), this leads to at least one garbage truck’s worth of plastic waste being dumped into the ocean for every minute of every day. “Even if everyone was [already] aware of plastic waste, the incident with the whale was very visual,” says Karin Blomberg, design manager at Swedish studio Form Us With Love (FUWL), which was commissioned to design a reusable plastic container that På(fyll)’s refill system could be built around. “The whale was one of many incidents, but it was a triggering factor for Orkla, which realised that it had a very significant responsibility.” So, how is a company that sells plastic containers aiming to change an entire industry by using more plastic containers? Because behind these containers is an entirely new system built on a very old one – the milkman.

Instead of milk, På(fyll) customers order shampoo, soap, detergents or cleaning products from brands such as Zalo, Lano, Omo and Klar via a QR code, and then leave their empty containers on their doorsteps for a pickup in the same box they arrived in. The reusable containers are then reconditioned, refilled, and sent back into circulation. This way, the containers can be used for at least ten different life cycles, or an average of three to five years, explains Rayson Ho, På(fyll)’s CEO. “That’s something that we’re testing, but we’re pretty sure it can last longer than that,” he tells me when we speak over Zoom. “So the durability of the container is, of course, critical.” The På(fyll) container on my washing machine has taken some getting used to. When I want laundry detergent, I now have to handle a big, flat, 2-litre container, as opposed to a bottle with a handle. It’s a change that makes the pouring movement slightly different. The first time around, for instance, I poured out too much detergent. The second time, I adapted to its weight and shape in my hands. I turned it around to get a different angle, and it worked better. FUWL and På(fyll) are currently working on a dispenser that promises to make things easier, but at present it’s still a learning curve. What I did like immediately, however, is the low-key design: no big logos or unnecessary bulk anywhere in sight. These containers don’t have to scream for my attention. At my local supermarket, the shelf with laundry detergents is packed with messages. The bigger the packaging, the better: “Mega pack”, “New generation technology” and “Scents of morning sun” are just some of the slogans that hit me. When it comes to my På(fyll) container at home, the message is completely different. The sleek design is visually pleasing, with branding restricted to a discrete sticker showing the product it contains. It is, first and foremost, designed to be functional. FUWL has had to strike a balance between promoting the Orkla brands involved and, at the same time, establishing På(fyll)’s own brand identity – leaving brand stickers out completely, for example, meant 23

confusion for users during the Norwegian pilot. “We also had to consider how much these brands needed to be visible for it to be worth it for them,” Blomberg explains. “Not being part of this journey could potentially close a new channel for these brands.” According to Ho, the biggest advantage of På(fyll) compared to other companies trying to sell sustainability is that it doesn’t require the consumer to fall in love with a new brand, or figure out how new products will fit into their lives. “We’re talking about the least interesting products that people need to buy, but they have to buy anyway,” he says. “You’re buying the things that you already know and love; just the container is different to what you’re used to.” With Orkla as one of its investors, På(fyll) has access to its entire portfolio of goods within its Home and Personal Care subsidiary. When it wants to expand and sell more things, På(fyll) already has access. “Our value proposition to existing brands is that any home or personal care good can now be consumed without plastic waste,” Ho explains. A central question for På(fyll)’s model, however, is how it will persuade consumers to go through a more difficult, or convoluted, process to buy household cleaners – products they’re unlikely to be naturally interested in. To combat this, the company has worked with digital design studio Bakken & Bæck and business strategy company Æra to make På(fyll) as pain-free a process as possible. Instead of an app, for instance, the platform is built around QR codes, with trials suggesting that the former would be unnecessary given that the average frequency of purchasing refills would be every two to three months. Similarly, there is no subscription model; people simply order new products when they are about to run out. Elsewhere, På(fyll) has optimised delivery by collaborating with Heltjem, a company which delivers packages, newspapers and magazines overnight in Norway. Since this company already has access to addresses and doorsteps, people can receive their På(fyll) containers seamlessly in the morning. “This means people don’t need to sit at home and wait for a tracking number or wait for the 24

delivery to be received,” Ho says. “We have really taken a lot of care to make sure that if somebody has to do something more difficult, let’s make it the least difficult as possible to buy home goods. As you can see, our idea was basically a modernised milkman model.” Originally, I had been due to take part in På(fyll)’s second pilot scheme, which was scheduled to take place in Stockholm in October 2023. “A circular service like this requires a lot of awareness building, a lot of education is needed just to get to the level of consumption,” Ho tells me. The Stockholm pilot, he suggests, represents the next test for På(fyll) given that the company believes it represents “a more mature market [than Norway] in terms of the familiarity and the legislation when it comes to home deliveries,” as well as being a country where “market confidence in shopping online is much higher in terms of penetration rate”. These things are hard to evaluate definitively, but the pandemic has definitely changed people’s behaviour in Sweden, including my own. The Swedish e-commerce food company Mathem, for instance, doubled its production during these years; although I love shopping in-store, I was a regular customer. I may have since returned to my old routines, but I would still consider a service like this. Despite Stockholm seemingly being primed, however, På(fyll) is a complex system to set up. Every step needs to be in place in order for it to work, from securing existing delivery and pickup infrastructure that the system can be designed around, to the three further external vendors required by the model: a warehouse, where stock that’s ready to be distributed sits, and where empty containers can be received; a company called OK Service that helps to recondition the containers; and another, Paragon Nordic, that refills them so they’re ready for circulation. Just as I began writing this piece, the decision was taken to postpone the Stockholm trial until the beginning of next year – a delay that should make clear the vastness of the whole system underlining the project.

Hence the focus on laundry detergent. If you can’t trial the entire system, trying the vessels it’s built upon is the next best thing – particularly given that these designs sit at the core of the whole project. Alongside my larger detergent container, I’ve been using a smaller container (900ml) from which I refilled

away in drawers.” The fact that the containers are directly sent to consumers’ homes meant that the brief which FUWL received was unusual from the start – the project was not about aesthetics, but instead focused on ensuring that the containers were “easy to store, easy to pour and easy to grip”.

På(fyll) currently targets five product groups, of which laundry detergent is one (image courtesy of Form Us With Love).

an old soap dispenser and then stacked away in my bathroom cupboard. By the end of this year, consumers will also be able to purchase dedicated dispensers for På(fyll)’s product groups, including hand soap, kitchen spray dishwasher detergent, shower gel, and laundry detergent. Designed by FUWL, these dispensers will all use the same base unit – only the head will change to suit the different products. To get its designs right, FUWL spent a lot of time researching containers such as jerrycans, stackable objects like bricks, and user-friendly designs including book spines. “We looked at how people read titles and information on book spines to quickly get an understanding of the content – and how they are sorted in bookshelves,” Blomberg says. “Whether you are a single person in the city or a big family living in the countryside, it made us realise that no two homes are the same. Some people want to fit the containers into shelves and some prefer to put them

The resultant design is low key, and the focus has been on details that many users may not notice at first: a slightly funnel-shaped bottle to make the liquid flow; a tulip-shaped opening for pouring with minimal spillage; an absence of pockets that would collect dust, allowing for ease of wiping. The diameter of the neck makes it easier to insert fully into a dispenser, allowing the container’s shoulders to rest on the edge of the dispenser while refilling. FUWL’s design also considers grip strength and ease of use for all ages, while still allowing for easy stacking at home. Most importantly, it is intuitive. “Hopefully, the users will think, ‘Someone really had a think about this,’” Blomberg tells me. For FUWL, which has previously designed Forgo Handwash – a refillable, powder-to-liquid hand soap –1 the challenge for På(fyll) was to create a durable and versatile container that 1

See ‘A Radical Reduction’ in Disegno #23.

could hold various brands’ products, including liquids of different viscosities. The container had to be designed so as not to absorb or release chemicals, and to be easily cleaned and refilled again and again. Complex surfaces that make cleaning difficult had to be avoided; the edge of the container, which makes it easier to grip

and return for both users and transport services, and easy to store at home. “We knew we had to come up with a hardware that would support the circular service,” Blomberg summarises. Its container, På(fyll) believes, is one of the key tools to connect with people. “When we’re conceptualising this as a service, it’s easy

A display of cleaning products in the Form Us With Love studio (image courtesy of Form Us With Love).

externally, needed to be balanced against avoiding overly dramatic internal curves. There was also an aspect of material choice: FUWL’s team had to think about what types of liquids the container could hold without absorbing colour or scent. One important consideration was creating a form that would allow for different methods of storage, as well as being as neat as possible for transportation. In the process, the studio tested out different materials, both soft and hard ones – and asked several questions. What degree of recycled material can be used? How does it affect the durability of the bottle? How many cycles can it live through before it needs to be recycled and turned into a new one? “There is so much more to the container than the container itself,” Blomberg says, highlighting how the team worked to adapt their design to fit behaviours and infrastructures already in place. The final format – a high-density polyethylene rectangle – makes it easy to refill and clean, easy to ship 26

to want to minimise the value of the container or its design because the service is the thing that we want people to love and latch onto,” Ho tells me. “But the container is the asset, the item that customers spend the most time with us on. It is the thing that they see the most often. It is the thing that they touch and have that tactile feeling [with].” For me, På(fyll) has been a positive experience. I like having containers at home that I treasure instead of loathe, which is a first when it comes to personal care products. We throw away so many household containers, so much material, and why wouldn’t we – there is no love behind them, so why should I love them in return? It’s nice knowing that På(fyll)’s containers have been carefully designed with the end user in mind. I will definitely consider becoming a regular customer. I would, however, like to see as much thought go into the service’s products, as has clearly gone into the containers themselves. The laundry detergent I used had

too much perfume in it and no sustainable promises in itself – something I found a little disappointing, even if there are alternatives and new brands on the way, including green soap from Grumme. But, funnily enough, the brands that stand out on a supermarket shelf are reduced to nothing when placed in an (almost) brandless container – something which should give På(fyll) more encouragement to focus on sustainable products. Even if I do understand Ho’s argument that one of På(fyll)’s advantages is that people don’t have to change their existing buying behaviours, mine possibly look a little different to many of the people he refers to. I’m a regular consumer of private labels and own-brand products, for instance, and actually prefer these to many of the big brands. In Sweden, many of these products have themselves transformed into brands in their own right (think Garant or Änglamark), often without the annoying branding of their competitors. To me, På(fyll) has a lot of those same traits and, given that it is backed by a conglomerate, it would have been refreshing to push it as a standalone label. Big brands need a new system, but is that enough? I’m not sure.

Nevertheless, I hope for a bright future. If Orkla manages to set new standards, others may well follow suit – especially consumers. Hopefully, it will lead to better choices and opportunities for brands to focus on things other than big and bold messages that stand out on the shelf. Imagine if sustainable contents could outshine their containers altogether? Plastic waste might, in those circumstances, start to become a thing of the past. And as for the Plastic Whale, what remained of its body after its autopsy was frozen such that it can eventually be displayed at the University of Bergen Museum. The whale’s legacy lives on in other ways too, not least in the form of the Plastic Whale Heritage, a group of local and global organisations that collaborate to combat marine littering. As Kenneth Bruvik, a board member of this organisation, has said: “It has caused a big revolution and it will never stop.” Hopefully På(fyll) will be able to ride its wave in Norway, Sweden and beyond. Jonna Dagliden Hunt is a journalist and editor of The New Era magazine in Stockholm.

TO SPEAK AMONGST OURSELVES Words Joshua Segun-Lean

Image courtesy of Lagos Space Programme.

BODY

Lagos Space Programme

The room is painted floor to ceiling in a smooth, dense blue which, in the warm, shifting light of midday, works brief but powerful illusions. From the west side of the room, a window’s unobscured view provides the main source of light. Brightly lit, the room evokes a sense of concentrated energy. Books lie open on tables, pieces of fabric lie side by side with measuring tools, and sketches bear the impression of hands. The markings and makings of industry. When the light recedes, however, those same walls turn a shade of indigo and the room becomes a grotto someone has carved into the side of a mountain. Around me are their treasures: grave, variously shaped objects of indeterminable age and use. Books take on the aura of arcane knowledge and cutting tools appear as relics of a lost art. The effect of the space is almost talismanic. It is the bluest room I’ve ever been in. To the extent that it serves as a kind of incubator, an artist’s studio can reveal much about the processes, materials, and conditions that inform that artist and which constitute the formal qualities of their artworks. These spaces can also, in themselves, possess a vividness and potency not unlike the artworks they house, producing their own range of affects. More than mere backdrops for creative output, such spaces arrest the imagination. This is certainly true in the case of designer Adeju Thompson’s Lagos studio, where I spent a day observing their work and talking with them as their dog, Bowie, watched on. The space functions as a small showroom and, along with adjoining living quarters, their home. In the past few years, the studio has served as the locus of Thompson’s sartorial project, Lagos Space Programme, which has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for its treatment of queerness, craft traditions and ideas around African futures through the medium of garments. After a while my eyes grow accustomed to the blue and I can start to take in its details more closely. The room, long and narrow, has been arranged along a horizontal orientation. At one end, a carpeted seating and study area; at the other, a work table. Between these poles is a middle space that is mostly just that – space. Something in this arrangement makes walking across the room feel less like walking and more like striding. While the carpeted area, filled with books and objects, absorbs the sounds of my body, the room’s bare centre makes every step pronounced and, through the vibrations in my legs, intensifies my awareness of my body’s density and its dimensions. It is, at first, an uncomfortable sensation, not unlike the

feeling of walking alone down a hallway. The hallway often seems much longer than it is and my body more ample, filling the space with sound and movement. The body unable to escape the fact of itself. What mundane, daily habits remind us of this fact, the fact of the body, more intensely than the act of dressing? When, if not before

Adeju Thompson, photographed in their studio (image courtesy of Ifebusola Shotunde and Lagos Space Programme).

the mirror, trying on clothes, do we confront the great and terrible power of our own gaze? Or admit our desire to entice and hold the gaze of others? Watching Thompson work, I realise how essential this feedback loop between body and space is to their process and their understanding of what clothes do and why we wear them as we do. To properly assess the rightness of a garment’s fit, I learn, is to see and feel how its formal qualities enhance the body’s sense of dexterity and lightness in the space it occupies, complementing the need for stability with a need for versatility, as well as how it gives the body a kind of mood, whether still or in motion. Looking through some pieces that Thompson has hung on a rack, I can’t help but feel that the proof of this approach, of keying into the spatial, haptic, and sonic qualities of body (the gendered body in particular) and material, is evident even when clothes are unworn. They are not limp, mute objects waiting for a wearer. They attract, provoke, and attest.

This view of fabrics as objects imbued with presence independent of their “functional” use recalls a Yoruba saying, “Aso là kí, kí a tó kí ènìyàn”, whose rough translation is, “We greet dress before we greet its wearer”. It is also the title of Lagos Space Programme’s fifth collection, dating from 2021. Through their work in fashion, Thompson has been finding new ways to rediscover and express their connection to indigenous Yoruba cosmology, within which textile traditions that are typified by hand-woven fabrics such as aso-òkè play a significant role. Never separate from other aspects of life, .. modes of dress are used to denote status in the material world, as well as access to the immaterial. In variations of colour, pattern, plainness, and embroidery, clothes symbolise the wearer’s movement through physical and social environments, and the changes that occur as a result of those movements. Marriage, the birth of children, professional accomplishments, death: the events that shape and give meaning to individual and collective life are narrated in cloth. The historical importance of dress in Yoruba communities meant that in many cases weavers have performed their task under special conditions, weaving specific types of cloth depending on the occasion. A great example is found among the cloth weavers in Òwò, . . a historic Yoruba town, where chosen families produce the ashigbo cloth used specifically for funerary rites. Cloth here represents the link between the living and the dead. In recent years, Thompson has made trips to Osogbo, a city in present-day Osun State, and the site of both the Osogbo Sacred Grove, where worshippers of the Yoruba deity, Osun, have gathered for generations, . and the Osogbo Art School, from which a radical modernist art movement emerged in the 1960s. These visits, often resulting in collaborations with local craftspeople, reinforce Lagos Space Programme’s position as a kind of intermediary between traditional Yoruba artisanship and modes of contemporary design. At the same time, the objective, for Thompson, isn’t merely a synthesis by force. Rather, what seems important beyond honouring these craft histories, is developing a practice that works with fabrics on the materials’ own terms. By emphasising the status of fabrics as carriers and repositories of cultural meanings, Lagos Space Programme highlights their “interpretational possibilities”, in the words of scholar Toyin Falola, writing in Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. “The language of Yoruba textiles is intelligible,” Falola explains, composed of “contextual codes, metaphors, stylo-artistic

conventions”. When these elements are foregrounded, as Thompson intends, textile becomes text. Texts can exist as closed systems, comprehensible only to a select few. They can also exist in layers of intelligibility, opening themselves to the possibility of being read while evading definitive interpretation. This realisation informs Lagos Space Programme’s evolving visual language, exemplified in its latest collection, Cloth as a Queer Archive, which maintains the studio’s familiar spare silhouettes, while incorporating Adire, a Yoruba resist-dye technique, Australian Merino wool, and references to classic European styles. In Nigeria, where lawmakers have passed anti-queer legislation such as The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (2014), and where dominant attitudes toward queer people range from snide ridicule to overt hostility, queer life is subjected to constant surveillance. Clothing choices, then, become closely policed markers in the strange terrain between imposed obscurity and hypervisibility. Because, or in spite of this, clothes also become a shared vernacular among people whose existence defies the language of law. As in ancient Yoruba practices, in which fabrics were enchanted to protect the wearer from elemental and spiritual forces, and used to identify members of secret societies, the concept of cloth as a queer archive emphasises adornment as an insistence on survival and as an invitation to forms of gathering that are necessarily vivid, divergent and multiple. Self-presentation, as Thompson believes, does not only carry the powerful proclamation “I am here”. It says also, “I am here as others have been before me”: a decisive counter to the claim that queerness in Africa is a contemporary aberration or a fad taken up by exuberant youth. And if one is privy to the vernaculars of the wearer, such proclamations bear a third meaning: “Come, let us speak amongst ourselves”. Thompson’s work is a homage to their collaborators, many of whom are based in Nigeria, while others are spread across the world. Each collection follows an arc of creative exchange, and the visions they proffer are made brighter by the visions that constellate around them. As I listen to stories of how some of the studio’s most ambitious ideas have come about, I realise how broad Thompson’s interests are and how wide the network of artists, craftspeople, writers, and designers that help feed those interests is. It’s perhaps one reason why Thompson has always struggled with the term “fashion brand” in relation to Lagos Space Programme. Too often, this

term is used to mean a singular narrative, fixed identity or mass-market product, which has never seemed right for the experimental, multifaceted, and intimate experience that Lagos Space Programme has always been, or reflective of the places, people, ideas, and stories contained in any one of its creations. Thompson founded Lagos Space Programme in 2018 after

Cloth as a Queer Archive, featuring jewellery designed in collaboration with Dunja Herzog (image courtesy of Lagos Space Programme). .

years of working in supporting roles at some of the fashion houses and concept stores, such as Maki Oh and Stranger Lagos, that have made Lagos an exciting hub for promising design talent over the past decade. In the five years that have followed, the project has made incredible strides. At the time of my visit in November 2022, Thompson was making final adjustments to Cloth as a Queer Archive, which had been selected as one of eight finalists for the 2023 International Woolmark Prize. Since its inception in the 1950s, this prize has been juried and won by some of the most illustrious figures in international fashion. Names such as Balmain, Lagerfeld, Dior, and Saint Laurent dot its history and, earlier this year, Thompson told me the news over the phone: Lagos Space Programme had won the prize and become its first African recipient. Thompson’s winning collection was judged on its use of Australian Merino wool, a material from the breed of sheep which gives it its name. The

fibre and structure of the wool give it an incredibly fine texture. Finer even, experts argue, than cashmere. Still, when I try on the Venture Vest, a core piece in the collection, I’m surprised by how light it is, and how cool it feels over my skin. The vest, a design that Thompson has experimented with in previous collections, is somewhere, in both look and intended function,

A look from the Post-Adire collection (image courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

between a chore coat and a tunic. It’s easy to recognise the influence of Japanese minimalism. This and other pieces are accompanied by jewellery designed with Dunja Herzog using recycled e-waste, which Thompson commissioned from Phil Omodamwen, a seventh-generation bronze caster

in Benin, and the collection’s full effect is more deeply felt when the clothes and jewellery are paired. They lend their wearers a delicate, sculptural grace. Thompson, meanwhile, is wearing pieces from Lagos Space Programme’s seventh collection, Post-Adire (2022). The tailoring, as usual, is excellently understated. When Thompson moves, the coat curves around them, almost like a shroud. The pants drape without crease. Coat and pants are matching black. The colour of coal: deep and knowing, with a slight lustre. At some point, evening comes, and we decide that today’s best work has been done. Whatever else requires attention will be handled tomorrow. Thompson recommends a restaurant not too far from the studio. It is owned by a family member with whom they share a love of plants and, before the food, we go to see what new ones have arrived. There are hibiscus, and dracaenas, hyacinth and pottos, jasmine and orchids. As we sit down to eat, we talk about some ideas they’ve been thinking about for the next collection. Again, the references are disparate: the baroque period, workers’ uniforms, and lace blouses. Histories of dress intersect, are placed in unexpected, cross-directional, and sometimes uneasy, dialogue. Textile as text. Textile as intertext. The past is not yet done with us and therefore calls for continued re-examination. The present is apocryphal, a story we are yet to substantiate, even as we live it. If the future, as scholar José Esteban Muñoz wrote in their 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, is “queerness’s domain”, then Adeju Thompson has returned to us from it, laden with its gifts. In Lagos Space Programme, they have conceived the means by which more of us might visit it for and amongst ourselves. Joshua Segun-Lean studies contemporary art and material culture, and writes essays, criticism and other prose forms.

STOCK CREEP Words Lara Chapman

Image courtesy of Eren Sarigul and Stills.

INTERFACE Stills

They are on the cover of your book, the side of your bus stop, pasted to the walls of the exhibitions you visit. They are camouflaged within your Instagram feed and folded into the menus at your favourite local restaurant. They are in your magazines, mail and medicine boxes. They’re living in every nook, corner and cranny of the internet, from the places you read your news, to the places you shop, from the sites you use to transfer images, to the memes that you share with long-suffering family members in yet another WhatsApp group chat. You can’t escape them because they are, in short, everywhere. Stock photographs are one of the most promiscuous products of our time, explains Paul Frosh, a professor of communications and journalism, in his paper ‘Is Commercial Photography a Public Evil?’. Combining genericness of style and ambiguity of content with all the ease of digital licensing, these images openly flirt with the needs of different users and uses. Casually moving across formats and media, they slip seamlessly into our lives and subconsciouses. Stock images have created what Frosh calls “an overlooked but enveloping visual environment”, which has become “the wallpaper of consumer culture.” He argues that the multi-billion dollar stock industry has “successfully acquired dominance over vast terrains of public visual culture while itself remaining out of sight.” We live in an age of stock creep. The systems and platforms designed to collect, catalogue, display and monetise images have left an indelible mark on what we see in the world and, as a result, shape how we see the world. I first begun using stock images at university to jazz up hastily-put-together presentations. I would visit the likes of Getty or Alamy to find the image I wanted. Following this, I’d shamelessly screenshot the image in as high a resolution as my computer would allow, before cropping or photoshopping out the watermarks, handily avoiding the licensing fees. I didn’t think too deeply about my blatant thievery at the time, or about who or where these images came from – hey, I was just a poor uni student on a deadline for an assignment that very few people would see. I don’t remember the specific images, but I do remember being told by a tutor that I should think more carefully about my image choices: generic images, he said, were doing a disservice to my work. Oops and noted. I moved away from stock photographs. When I started freelancing as a researcher and, later, as an assistant curator at a museum, I had to engage more deeply with the world

of stock photography. In these roles, I wasted more hours than I care to remember trawling through endless masses of cheesy, mediocre, superstaged images. This particularly soulless activity quickly makes your eyes feel dizzy, your brain numb and, after a few hours, strangely warps your view of the world. With hundreds of tabs open, images start to blur into one. The ability to differentiate the OK from the terrible quickly erodes, and an existential crisis looms large. The question of “What even is a good picture?” quickly spirals into panicked thoughts about whether you are good at your job, if you have any taste whatsoever, and how you ended up here. Finally, you’ll dejectedly arrive at the question of all questions, “Who really am I?!”, before abandoning the task at hand to make a consoling cup of tea and moan to a colleague about those damned stock sites. All this may sound dramatic, but if you’ve ever been tasked with penetrating these platforms’ endless crap, I think you’ll know the feeling. They’re a masterclass in user-unfriendliness. Add to this the complexity of understanding various pricing brackets and licensing criteria, and I say no thank you to all that. I’d much rather engage with stock photographs at a distance, laughing at memes made from them, or scoffing at images of dogs in suits typing at computers. Silly stock photography! Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with that anymore! And yet, as we began working on this issue of Design Reviewed #3, I found myself pitching a story about Stills, the new kid on the very populated stock photography licensing block. 🤦 Stills bills itself as “the new standard in photo licensing”, and since the old standard leaves much to be desired, I found myself intrigued. What would a “new standard” look like? How would it feel? What would it offer? Where, I wondered, would it fit into an industry that Diana Kamin, in her book Picture-Work,1 argues “has emerged, ballooned, fractured, and transformed” over the last century and is now “controlled by an evershrinking number of conglomerates”? Maybe I have as poor a taste in stories as I did in choosing images for presentations, because here I am, about to re-enter the stock photo hell that I’d so gleefully escaped, and I only have myself to blame. First stop: www.stills.com. A smart light grey backdrop, a tastefully white banner, minimal text and lots of gloriously blank space. A classy welcome. The page is covered by a pop-up 1

The full title of the book is Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy. It is due to be published by MIT press in November 2023 and is one of the few examples of deep, scholarly engagement that I found about the history of the stock photography industry. It was invaluable to this piece and is a highly enjoyable read.

box, which, although annoying, is similarly smart. In fact, it’s probably the chicest pop-up I’ve ever seen – minimal yet assertive. It declares: “Stills is invite only. This is the only way to secure your invite.”2 There is a space to enter my email address and I do, feeling like I’m signing-up to one of those exclusive dating apps where the super rich are matched with the mega rich, and then I close the pop-up. Back to the soothing grey. I am struck by how little Stills’s landing page looks like, or feels like, the other stock photography websites I remember. Where they are crowded, shoving their products in your face in a chaotic scramble, Stills is calm. For a stock photo website, there are not many photos in sight. A glimmer of hope flashes into my mind. Stills, maybe, will be different. Stills launched in August 2023 as the fifth brand created by its parent company, FM. According to FM’s website, all of its brands revolve around a central mission to “equip creatives with premium resources so they can deliver the most influential work of their careers”. FM began its work in this area in 2011 with Musicbed, one of the first companies to recognise the potential for licensing music digitally. “Musicbed kind of pioneered its space,” says Daniel McCarthy, CEO of FM. In 2015, FM expanded its offerings by licensing high-quality film footage through the aptly named Filmsupply. Once these two brands were established and “really rolling”, McCarthy says, FM turned its attention to a platform for licensing images. Unlike with Musicbed and Filmsupply, setting up Stills came with a large dose of uncertainty. “It really was a big conversation internally, which was like, ‘Does anybody even need this?’” reflects McCarthy. “It just felt like: ‘Why now? And why really at all?’” The company’s reservation lay in the saturation of the stock photo market. “Getty is a billion dollar company, Shutterstock is huge and Unsplash is free, so there are so many options for photo [licensing].” There was already a lot to weigh up, “and then you introduce AI into the conversation,” McCarthy adds, “[and] you’re like, ‘Does anybody even need photographers anymore?’” But still, Stills exists, so a need was clearly identified. I continue my exploration of Stills’s landing page, holding my breath for what this stock platform might offer me. “Built for Designers, by Designers,” a text in large font reads. Herein, then, lay the need, nay the audience, that the Stills team had been searching for – Designers with a capital D. When I return to the website a few days later, the copy has been slightly tweaked: “The platform built with designers in mind”. For the 2

Since I started writing the piece, the pop up box has changed – such is the chagrin of reviewing online media! It is now (or currently) much less classy. It features a man in a snorkel and reads: “Join Stills. Start a free account.No credit card needed.” The site doesn’t appear to be invitation-only any longer. This makes me feel less special, so I’m sticking to my original experience.

record, I think the former is catchier, but either way the core message remains the same: this is a stock licensing platform where designers as users are the POD and USP. The idea to focus on designers, McCarthy explains, grew out of first-hand experience. FM’s internal design team was frustrated with using

“A Flock of Birds Flies in Formation Among the Clouds” by Megan Rogers (image courtesy of Stills).

existing stock sites for their work. McCarthy too, had encountered the teethgritting, keyboard-hurtling annoyance of stock platforms when he started his career as a designer and, later, when running his own creative agency. “I was constantly on stock photography websites trying to find photos,” he explains. “It actually blew my mind how many stock photo brands existed in the world and how little those brands cared about graphic designers or talked to them or understood them.” Why so mind blowing? “That’s the foundation of this entire [image licensing] industry,” he tells me. “The entire industry is built on designers and copywriters – it’s either words or design, or a combination of the two, and it felt like some of the more recent competitors understood photographers more than they understood the design world. Photographers aren’t your clients[…] Designers are!” So, how do you design for designers? What do designers want and need from a stock photography platform? What do designers enjoy?

And what do they hate (apart from comic sans)? How do they even use these kinds of images in their design process? A day after I enter my email address into Stills, an email sidles into my inbox. “The wait is over,” it declares in white type laid-over a red-infused image of an astronaut walking across a desert-like landscape. A flicker of excitement. I’m in. The site is easy to navigate. It feels more like an Instagram feed or photo gallery than a stock photography website. I begin to play around with some search terms, testing the waters. I type in “work”, expecting to find white-collar workers in glassy corporate offices looking manically happy. The first few images, however, are of a leatherworker’s bench with tools laid out. Other photographs show construction sites, a yogi, scenes of farming, a masked person behind a food counter, beekeepers, traffic cones, and a retro, pink hair salon. There is, of course, a photo of a smartly dressed person working at a laptop, but there is not a single image of a middle-aged man looking smugly in charge in sight. Ahhhh, refreshing. The quality and variety of these images are no coincidence. Stills’s content is highly curated because FM believes that what designers need and want are good images that they can use for client-facing projects. Having the best images is the main focus of the platform. “It starts first with curating the photographer and we’re very selective,” explains McCarthy. Photographers can apply to be represented by Stills by submitting their portfolio online. From this, Stills’s team accepts “less than half a per cent” of the many photographers who apply, McCarthy says. Even once Stills has chosen only the cream-of-the-photography-crop, there is a further selection process. “Of the photos submitted by those represented photographers, we’re only accepting a small percentage,” McCarthy explains. “There may be 1,000 photos submitted and only 200 will go live.” In its initial curating process, Stills approached big-name photographers, inviting them to sign up. Highlights of their rota include well-known photographers such as Nirav Patel and Charly Savely, and creative design agency &Walsh. The result of this rigorousnesses is, at least to my eye, that the images appear to be a cut above other stock websites. In contrast to Stills, most stock sites take a more fancy-free approach to compiling their offerings. McCarthy draws on the example of Getty, the largest and most powerful platform of them all, to illustrate the

distinction: “Getty is Getty,” he says. “Getty is great. Getty is 300m photos. Getty shows up at every event – every NFL game, every Taylor Swift concert, every inauguration. Getty saturates the world.” Blimey! McCarthy continues, “which I think there’s a place for and there’s a need for in journalism.” But, he goes on, “what’s hard to find is curated, relevant art that you can begin to build a brand around.” And here we come back to the designers’ needs that were not being met. Once I’ve had a click around and browsed through a few different photographers’ profiles, a significant hurdle in reviewing Stills dawns on me. Simply put, I am not a designer and therefore don’t know if these images are useful to Still’s intended users. Time to phone a friend. Grace Kim is a Melbourne-based graphic designer who I met in primary school many years ago. She founded and runs Studio 87, which specialises in brand design. Grace tells me that her work “goes from the strategy, to the design itself, and then to rollout, so I do a little bit more than just the graphics.” She uses a lot of stock photography in this process, typically spending about three to four hours on stock sites to source about 30 photographs at the start of every new project. The images give clients a sense of the look and feel of the branding direction, and work to inform their photoshoots. Sometimes, when clients don’t have budget to produce their own images, Grace also helps them license photographs through these platforms. On my request, Grace signs up to Stills. To get a feel for the site, she uses Stills’s photographs on a test presentation deck, something she would typically create for a client. Her assessment? “I like what they’ve done,” she tells me. “The quality of the photos and images are definitely the best I’ve seen.” When I ask her to explain the difference, she says that on other stock sites, “you can either tell that they’re stock photography, or they’re a little bit too commercialised,” although she reflects that “perhaps it’s just gotten to a point where I’ve seen so many [stock] photos that I know where they’re from because the same ones keep circulating.” The images on Stills, on the other hand, she’s never seen before. “They feel like a breath of fresh air.” Importantly, she adds, “they actually look like they’ve been taken by photographers, which is nice.” She also likes the “Boards” feature, which allows you to compile images into a moodboard (think similar to Pinterest), and create a link which you can share with collaborators or clients. This, Grace explains, could streamline certain stages of the design process.

To be doubly sure to cover my inexpert tracks, I reach out to another friend, Becca B Jones, a freelance photographer whom I met at university and who has worked for many years as an image researcher at a London-based press specialising in art and design books. Like me, she is not the exact target user of Stills, but unlike me she knows a lot about

“A Man Swimming in the Sea Wearing a Helmet and Swimming Suit” by Ben Strang (image courtesy of Stills).

photography – how to take a beautiful photos, how to assess the quality of images, and what clients of photographers want. Becca tells me that clients and their audiences increasingly are looking for more than just a single shiny hero image. “They want maybe a series of images, where you get a bit more insight behind the scenes.” These might be blocks of images that aren’t easy to replicate, for example. “Authenticity,” she explains, “comes up quite a lot.” This desire for authenticity is something McCarthy speaks about too. “We haven’t been launched for long, but what we’re finding is that there is a hunger from the market for really relevant, authentic work,” he says. “And not only that, but a place of curation.” These are things that stock photography has typically not traded in. In fact, it feels like an oxymoron to be peddling luxury, curated and exclusive stock photos when the whole premise of the industry is providing generic, multi-purpose, affordable products en masse.

Both Becca and McCarthy point out that a desire for authenticity may stem from a backlash against AI-generated images. McCarthy says that the emerging style of photography is “raw, full of emotion, less tack sharp, less overly produced.” He and his team have noticed that “the best photographers in the world right now are figuring out how to make their photos look like they didn’t try. It takes a lot of energy to shoot something that feels so authentically captured that it feels almost anti-produced.” This style is what Stills is focusing on curating and, when I put this description to Becca, she agrees that it’s accurate, adding that she sees Stills as “very much prioritising artistry, which I feel is quite rare on stock websites. It’s usually quite anonymous.” She highlights the fact that the site has a page dedicated to photographers as one example of this prioritisation. Overall, Becca concludes that Stills has “a really good library of images, creatively, they’re very strong.” The only major drawback Becca and Grace raise is a lack of quantity. “When I used to source images [for publications],” Becca tells me, “the websites that I would spend the most time on were the ones which had a big bank of images because you want to be able to have lots of options. You might be looking for something really specific. In that case, you need lots of examples.” This is where something like Getty excels – it covers all bases through the vastness of its stock because it’s hard to predict when your images might come in handy and for who and to what end. It is an approach that could be described as: everything for everyone. This all-encompassing approach has a precedent in pre-internet physical stock libraries too. The Picture Collection of the New York Public Library (NYPL), for example, was established in 1915 as a free, public resource for sourcing and borrowing images. Its stock – currently around 1.5m physical images – is broad in content, having been clipped from all manner of places including “discarded books and magazines, from book proofs and film prints, from postcards and travel brochures, from discharged personal and institutional photo archives” writes Kamin, who dedicates a whole chapter of Picture-Work to the picture library’s history and impact. From 1929 to 1968, the collection was directed by Romana Javitz, who believed that the image library was “for use for information, inspiration, or pleasure by its user; its applications cannot be foreseen in advance,” writes Kamin. “Javitz observed the same image put to different use, copied, altered, rephotographed, reprinted, and interpreted widely”. To illustrate this varied

use of images, Kamin draws on the example of a 16th-century drawing of beggars by Hieronymus Bosch, which Javitz documented as being used by “an orthopedist who was tracing the introduction of hand-grips on crutches; a fashion designer who used a bag worn by the beggars as the basis for a new type of purse, [and] a public health lecturer who used the same print to illustrate the medieval community’s neglect of the disabled.” Designers, then, used the library, but so did many others. While Stills is founded on a much more curated approach, McCarthy says that the FM team are adding thousands of images to the platform every week, so it will hopefully not be long until Stills has more to offer in the quantity department. Whether image quality can be retained as volume increases remains to be seen, but things look hopeful. “I think if they keep going, if they get to tens of thousands of images, they’re definitely going to be the go-to for designers,” Grace tells me. “If you have a choice between shitty and good, you won’t go with shitty, so I think it’s just a matter of time.” With quantity, however, comes the problem of findability. No matter how good your images are, if a user can’t find the images they need, they can’t license and use them. A collection’s infrastructure, then, is as crucial as its content. To think about how structure influences the success or failure of an image collection, I look to Javitz. As the NYPL’s picture collection expanded in size and scope, Javitz developed “a flexible, straightforward organization system that empowered the user,” writes Kamin, which “openly challenged the bibliographic hierarchy of information” set in place by previous picture libraries. The old system was “logical to a professional cataloguer but impenetrable to the average user (for instance, bays or oceans would be found under F, ‘Forms of Land and Water—Oceans’)”. Instead, Javitz’s new system relied on simplification and was organised by “straightforward subject terms and minimal subcategories.” These were divided alphabetically into topics such as “‘Accidents,’ ‘Butter,’ or ‘Curiosity,’” writes Kamin, explaining that “[sometimes] they are subdivided – ‘Animals—Fighting,’ ‘Animals— Fox,’ ‘Animals—Humans as’”.3 Stock libraries build on this, with keyword categorisation and searches at the core of their design. On Stills, as with every other stock site, you can find what you’re looking for by typing a word into a box. Sometimes you might search for a literal thing, say “banana” (which, when I search it, 3

One of my favourite organisational categories of the NYPL that Kamin highlights is called “Rear Views” which she writes “primarily contains images of the back of the human figure.” An image spread in Kamin’s book features a number of photos from this category which are literally just images of people, fully clothed, facing away from the camera. I like its implication of something cheekier than its mundane (but, I’m sure, very useful) reality.

provides me with “29 banana Premium High Res Images”) or more elusive, conceptual or emotive terms such as “friendship”(which bizarrely produces only one image of a fern, although “friend” gets me 50 sweet images of companionship in many forms). The NYPL’s team was largely limited to one keyword per physical image, which dictated the folder it would be placed in. One exception to this constraint is when they have had more than one copy of an image. Jay Vissers, a senior librarian, tells Kamin a story about finding “a duplicate image of a urinating cow in the ‘Cow’ file,” which he promptly moved “to the ‘Urination’ file, having noted a sustained public interest in the latter”. Digital image libraries, meanwhile, have the advantage that a single image can be tagged in endless ways, meaning that the aforementioned cow image could be tagged with any number of keywords including “cow”, “urination”, “livestock”, “relief”, “funny nature”, “bowel movement”, “liquid” – well, you get the picture. A further advantage to digital collections is that searching for images can go beyond relying on keywords with the introduction of filtering categories. Playing with Stills’s filters, I’m having fun checking and unchecking boxes in the filter column on the left, dropping down menus at a whim, and seeing the images on the right-hand side of the page reshuffle accordingly. There seem to be more filters on Stills than other stock websites I’ve come across.4 On Stills, I can choose the framing; shutter speed; whether the photos are taken inside or outside; the number of people in my images; the camera angle; if the people in the images should face towards me or away from me; and much more. I can select from a list of 24 search categories that include “architecture”, “creative industries”, “sports”. I can search images by colours or hex code or photographer. Stills’s choice of filters was informed by the central idea of the designer as the user. As such, in creating the site, the FM team set out to discover whether “we really, really really, understand designers and their problems and whether we are solving them properly,” says McCarthy. He tells me that what is on the website currently is just the start. “There are a lot of features coming,” he explains. “The roadmap is pretty full of tools and features that would be functional for a designer.” And, indeed, since I have started writing this piece, more have been added, including one called “Composition” which is based on designers’ frequent need to 4

Although, in the name of fairness, I recently revisited Getty and Alamy and there are now far more search functions than there used to be and the sites seem somewhat friendlier in content and design overall.

overlay images with text. McCarthy explains that “while it is important to sometimes search by colour or mood or emotion, it also is really important to be able to search by layout. Can I put text on this photo? If I can put text on this photo, is it a full-bleed photo? Can I put text on the left? On the right? Is it bottom heavy? Top heavy? I don’t want to spend

“Wooden Table with Work Tools” by Igor Zacharov (image courtesy of Stills).

three hours photoshopping backgrounds and trying to make this thing work in my ad.” As Composition is a new tool, the FM team will monitor how it is received. “In the end, you’re tracking usage,” says McCarthy, adding that “we’re really trying to shift all the brands to become much more clientfocused, and feedback-focused”. A digital interface makes it possible to gather quantitative data about whether a feature is popular or not. McCarthy describes an instance with Musicbed where FM created a pull-out drawer of features, but internal user tests revealed that although “it had been there for a year, nobody knew it existed. As soon as our team saw it, they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a game changer!’” A simple redesign of the way it interfaced with users and, hey presto, it became fundamental to the user experience. I continue to play with the filters on Stills, wondering if there’s a secret like this to discover here too. I click the “people” filter and feel

a creeping sense of ethical dubiousness which inevitably comes with the categorisation of people into “age”, “ethnicity” and “gender”. In recent years, the main critique that has been levied at licensing platforms is the sexist, racist, patriarchal and capitalist values they perpetuate and, as such, uphold. “Traditionally, the stock system is often accused – by clients and industry insiders as well as critics – of encouraging conservatism and the constant reproduction of formulaic images which reflect, construct and reinforce cultural stereotypes,“ writes Frosh in his aforementioned (and provocatively titled) essay ‘Is Commercial Photography a Public Evil?’. As we are strongly influenced by what we repeatedly see, peripherally or otherwise, stock images impact what we value as a society and what we don’t. While this critique generally pertains to the content of photographs, the filtering tools and design of these sites play into this too. Frosh continues, arguing that this perpetuation of stereotypes is seen by many “as something which can only be resolved by eliminating stock photographs (along with the stock industry, and perhaps, ultimately, capitalism).” But then he offers an alternative, more nuanced, option. “Another solution is to intervene in order to generate more and more varied stock photographs and categories, including categories that cut across existing categories.” With this approach, he argues, stock photography has the potential to become a public good, with the power to change our visual culture for the better. We already see this happening with alternative image sourcing platforms being founded by community groups and organisations to address some of the gaps in the stock giants’ collections. The Gender Spectrum Collection, for example, was established by Vice in 2019 “after noticing a scarcity of stock imagery that realistically depicted transgender and non-binary people.”5 Large stock photo sites also seem to have begun to address their rotten roots and expand their representation and diversity. Kamin gives the examples of Getty’s 2014 Lean In campaign, which was a “collection of ‘powerful’ representations of womanhood, implicitly acknowledging the previous lack of these types of representations.” Stills was presumably created with knowledge of this critique in mind, and because I’ve been generally impressed with its content, curation and range of filtering options, I am genuinely surprised when I drop down its gender filter to see only “male” and “female”. When I ask McCarthy about this, he looks thoughtful and makes a quick note to himself on his notepad. “That’s a great call out,” he replies. “We’ve talked about it a lot.” He explains 5

See ‘Relief’ by Vic Parsons from Design Reviewed #1, in which an image from The Gender Spectrum Collection was used to illustrate the article about chest binders.

that complications arise with categorising gender specifically, because “the talent [models and photographers] don’t tag their own photos.” Instead, it is a team of contractors who do the tagging. “So then it becomes [a question of] what does the talent look like? It’s really complicated with race [too] because you’re like, ‘What do you mean what do they look like? Right? Do they look Black? Do they look Asian? Do they look female?’” All these questions, he says, come with the risk of causing offence and with liability issues. “It really is just trying to make sure, I would say, that on the one hand you’re trying to tag the photograph properly, but on the other hand you’re also trying to be very careful not to try to tag it improperly. It gets kind of complicated.” This complication of categorisation of people has arisen in the NYPL Picture Collection too. Kamin writes about one folder that was reclassified in the early 2010s to “transgenderism” in order “to respond to public inquiry and to redress previously harmful classification decisions, such as the placement of images of drag performances under ‘Impersonators’.” This was revised again in 2022 when the librarians noted that “‘transgenderism’ was not the preferred term in the transgender community,” writes Kamin. The librarians acknowledge the challenges of classifying images in constantly changing sociopolitical contexts, but confronts these challenges head on: if you design a system of classification, it can also redesigned to be inclusive and adaptable as things inevitably shift and evolve. If physical libraries can be malleable, digital ones can too. “What it comes down to for us,” McCarthy tells me, “is ‘What do the clients want?’ There’s what the photographers want, there’s what the content wants, there’s what the talent wants, there’s what the kind of community-at-large wants – but what are our clients asking for?” To understand what their clients want, Stills has a feedback forum in which users can make suggestions to FM. “We take our cues from the community.” There is diligent interaction from Stills on this forum, with each comment receiving a reply or further questions from a staff member. The suggestions are tagged so that users can see if Stills plans to implement them. The forum is a curious, insightful and unpredictable place, with posts such as requests for more images of “pickleball content” from Zuhair L; comments such as “LOVE THE CONTENT. Just wanted to say :)” from Susi P; and various suggestions as to how to improve the filters, categories and the user experience. In terms of diversity, users on the forum have requested more images of wheelchair users, more plus-sized models, and

more representation of indigenous groups – all of which have slightly grown in number since I began looking at Stills over a month ago. Perhaps the addition of more gender-inclusive tags is just a suggestion away. Stills does seem to be adaptable, the website has developed and changed as I’ve written this piece, and McCarthy seemed receptive and engaged with my questions. In the end, it again comes back to the need that Stills was founded on – what does the designer, as the user, need? A seemingly simple question, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when you are designing tools for designers, it is not really simple at all. For one thing, it relies on a huge amount of intuition, foresight, user testing, analysis, design development and iterative work. For another, a designer’s needs are not isolated. No designer is an island, because they are asking similar questions to the ones that Stills itself is asking: ‘What do my clients need?’ And then those clients are asking, ‘What do our customers need?’ or ‘What do our users need?’. Stock images tend to be licensed for designers to create publicfacing works – advertisements, websites, posters, banners, social media campaigns and the likes. As such, we are all users of stock image websites by proxy, consuming their photographs whether we choose to or not. Whether we are designers are not. My hope is that if designers have access to better images through more considerately curated platforms like Stills, then, as a result, we (the public) will have a better visual culture and our lives will shift to be slightly richer too – more creative, more beautiful, less generic. But what the users as a public need is a complex question that traverses many terrains. While Stills perpetuates some of the less palatable aspects of the stock licensing industry, it remains early days. It has a chance to address this and, I believe, the willingness to do so. I like to think that Stills will not become just another stock creep on the stock image market. Lara Chapman is the assistant editor of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

THE ATTENTION OF PASSERSBY Words Joe Lloyd

Image courtesy of Raquel Diniz and Penguin Random House.

MEDIA

Humanise

Thomas Heatherwick is angry. And he wants everyone to share his fury. The designer turned maker-of-buildings is enraged by the “intense and dreadful changes that have been creeping through our towns and cities for the last 100 years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, sickness and violence.” He has launched Humanise, a campaign rallying against “boring” buildings everywhere. Humanise was kicked-off with a book of the same name, plus a string of media appearances, a website, and the three-part BBC Radio 4 series, Building Soul. There has even been a flypostering effort, adorned with a logo by creative branding agency Uncommon. Heatherwick has steadily grown in British public consciousness. I first encountered him in the late 2000s in the form of B of the Bang: a 56m-tall steel sculpture in Manchester that resembled an enormous spiky Koosh. It was commissioned to mark the city hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games – in 2003. Construction ran over. It leaned at a greater angle than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Under a week before its eventual launch in 2005, the tip of a spike fell off. A second spike had to be removed a few months later. Weld defects were discovered. Manchester City Council took legal action to force Heatherwick Studio to pay for repairs, and settled for £1.7m for “damages for breach of contract and negligence.” In 2009 it was dismantled. The core was later sold for scrap, netting £17,000. I knew none of this at the time. Despite the health and safety barriers blocking it off lest a steel shard slip off and impale a member of the public, it was big and bold, like nothing else I’d seen. Heatherwick was at the time a designer on the make, though it was always uncertain what he was a designer of. His start came after captivating Terence Conran following a lecture at the RCA. Conran let Heatherwick erect his graduation project in his garden, a sculpture called Gazebo, and commissioned him to make an interior display for his shop. He then made window displays at Harvey Nichols for retail consultant and TV presenter Mary Portas. He soon started winning public space commissions. The first 52

were Newcastle’s Blue Carpet (2001) and the Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin (designed in 2002 and completed in 2004). Neither could be described as a resounding success.1 B of the Bang could have been the end, but it was just the beginning. As well as the sculptures and folly bridges, Heatherwick started to produce furniture, gardens, vehicles, interior schemes and buildings. Heatherwick Studio expanded to become a 200-employee design firm. He forged business relationships with Foster + Partners and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and with the latter co-designed several structures for Google. Heatherwick himself has become arguably Britain’s best-known designer, though members of the public might be hard-pressed to name what exactly he has made since the 2012 Olympic cauldron. He certainly has a discipline-hopping trophy cabinet: a London Design Medal, a RIBA Lubetkin Prize, a Compasso d’Oro, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, 2 and even a place on GQ’s Best Dressed list. Throughout it all, he has built an image as what The Observer’s Tim Adams calls an “elfin prodigy”, a faux-naif savant in navy blue workwear, expressing gnomic pearls of wisdom about the power of making. Try this one, from his 2012 V&A retrospective: “Everything that we start is something that we don’t know what the outcome is going to be.” His press images resemble those of a techno producer promoting an ambient album, dreamy but pensive. Yet as the honours and plaudits continue to mount and he further entrenches himself in the public eye, Heatherwick has become architecture’s whipping boy, especially among the confederation of practitioners, educators 1

The Blue Carpet, an area paved with glass-andresin slabs that curve up like a rug, lost its colour quickly and attracted metal thieves. The bridge, which was designed to curve up to let traffic pass, has been inoperable for several years. It also sits across a boat-free waterway. It was fittingly presented by Broadway director Julie Taymor, infamous for the disastrous musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which like Heatherwick’s Vessel, of which more soon, was closed due to safety concerns.

and writers who discuss architecture on social media. It is hard not to detect an element of envy in some of their attacks. He has a star power that perishingly few architects can rival. Celebrities and public figures are drawn to him: Joanna Lumley, Sadiq Khan, Alain de Botton. Then there is his tendency to attract hyperbole from those outside architectural practice. Conran once hailed him as “the Leonardo da Vinci of our times”.3 An architect friend of mine once described a client repeatedly asking him if they could get Heatherwick on board an already-designed project, like a celebrity signature to lend the building value. His name – English, simultaneously toffish and craft-adjacent – rolls off the tongue. There is more to it than this though. Architects often make mistakes, from carmelting skyscrapers to slippery bridges.4 But Heatherwick has made a remarkable number.5 There was the new London Routemaster bus, commissioned by then-mayor Boris Johnson, which was twice the price of a regular bus. These became painfully hot in warm weather and had inoperable windows.6 There was the Garden Bridge, also supported by Johnson, 3

Perhaps there is a comparison to be drawn. Due to humid conditions and the artist’s own experimental paint choices, Da Vinci’s Last Supper has deteriorated rapidly. Only 60 years after it was completed, Giorgio Vasari described it as a “muddle of blots”. Rafael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street (“Walkie Talkie”) was nicknamed the “Walkie-Scorchie” after it reflected a beam of light six times brighter than the sun that then melted the bodywork on nearby cars. Santiago Calatrava’s glass-bottomed Ponte della Costituzione has now been clad in stone after almost daily falls. Even the widely-praised cauldron did not escape controversy. New York design studio Atopia claimed it was “identical” to a design it had presented to the London Olympic Committee. Atopia received an out of court settlement from the London Organising Committee of the Olympics. Heatherwick’s original design did contain openable windows, but they were removed from the final vehicle. The buses began to be phased out in 2017, only five years after being introduced into the Transport for London system.

a proposed private folly across the Thames that guzzled £46m from the public purse before being dumped. Heatherwick then struck out internationally. The high point was likely the award-winning museum Zeitz Mocaa Cape Town, though some critics have noted Heatherwick’s decision to demolish most of an existing power plant structure to then rebuild it anew as environmentally irresponsible. But then there was Vessel, a honeycomb of staircases in New York’s Hudson Yards luxury development, a privatelyowned and managed enclave. When it opened in 2019 it appeared unfinished and poorlymade. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote: “[it] is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.” Vessel is now closed indefinitely after four people, tragically, jumped off it. This had been anticipated when the design was unveiled in 2016. “As one climbs up Vessel,” wrote Audrey Wachs in The Architect’s Newspaper, “the railings stay just above waist height all the way up to the structure’s top, but when you build high, folks will jump.” No changes were made to the final design. Like his erstwhile patron Johnson, Heatherwick seems to keep failing upwards. The rules do not seem to apply to him. And he seems happy to break them when necessary. Of the Garden Bridge, writer and educator Will Jennings tweeted: “He helped design the fixed procurement which was a sham & tricked other firms, then designed the model to run it through a charity to avoid scrutiny over costs and management.” And yet the praise, and the projects, keep coming. Architects are the Frank Grimes to his Homer Simpson. And, like Grimes, they have a point. Yet on some occasions, the criticism directed towards Heatherwick does seem disproportionate. The Architectural Review, for example, described his Coal Drops Yard shopping centre as “choreographed confections of disingenuous ‘authentic’ experiences”. That still sounds more interesting than a Westfield. He has been relentlessly attacked for working with gentrifying developers such as Hudson 53

Yards’s Stephen Ross. But few architectural firms of any size have clean hands, desperately hoovering up work where it shows up, whether that be for property magnates, tech giants or repressive governments. This is a systemic issue rather than a particular one, and an instance where Heatherwick’s prominence exposes him to more opprobrium than others. It is in this context that Heatherwick has released Humanise into the world. It feels in part a reaction to his many critics. The book and podcast depict trained architects as both misguided rationalists and indoctrinated cult members who see the world through a warped perspective. Heatherwick himself is untrained, and refuses the title “architect” even as he designs buildings. He salutes the achievements of fellow builders Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson, who worked at a time before formal training. The book features a section taking architecture writers to task for not reacting to buildings in a “human” manner, though is quite vague on what that might involve. At a time when creative industries in the UK are underfunded and devalued by the government and media, this attack from within carries risks. Heatherwick’s main argument is straightforward. Cities used to be rugged, variable, “full of interesting lumps and bumps”, human in scale. Barcelona, especially the tightly-packed medieval Gothic Quarter and Antoni Gaudí’s art nouveau apartment blocks, is his exemplar. But now, with some exceptions such as Ricardo Bofill and Peter Barber, architects have become obsessed with “horizontal repetitive monotony”. Modern buildings, he says, often commit seven deadly sins: they are too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous and serious. The blame for this lies with “the God of Boring”, Le Corbusier, and his “Virgin Mary”, Mies van der Rohe.8 Modernist plans for mass-built modern cities, he says, spread 8

Both of whom also lacked formal training. Heatherwick also takes a hit out on Louis Sullivan for the dictum “Less is more”, despite Sullivan’s own architecture being laden with the sort of ornamentation Heatherwick elsewhere salutes.

like spilled ink through the minds of architects and planners. Close to a century later, architects remain in hock to these outdated ideas. They create ugly buildings which depress us and contribute to “division, war and the climate crisis”. We must demand that they stop, and start creating exciting, fun, playful buildings that hold the attention of passersby. The Humanise campaign has been mauled on X (formerly Twitter) and by specialist journalists.9 Rowan Moore called Heatherwick’s arguments “head-numbingly, soul crushingly simplistic.” Stephen Bayley said it contains “a lot of tosh”. It is not that Heatherwick’s call for prettier buildings is controversial in itself. Indeed, it is the conventional one. Very few people wish Le Corbusier had replaced Le Marais, a dense historical neighbourhood in central Paris, with tower blocks. His attack on a theoryheavy architecture education, too, joins a long-gestating debate. And Heatherwick makes some sensible observations. We should only create buildings that last for a long time and can be adapted for changing functions, rather than being ripped down and replaced. The media should train their eyes more on “normal” everyday buildings, rather than large-scale banner projects. The trouble starts with how Heatherwick presents his argument. Humanise was written with ghost-writer Will Storr. It employs a colloquialism-laden patter that sometimes verges on patronising. The book rails against “archibollocks”, “the Blandemic” (too soon?), the “Turkey Twizzlerification of our streets, towns and cities” and “mononononononotomy” (Heatherwick’s version of this last one is significantly longer). It has a quirky design, awash with “hand-written” notes and the underlining of key points. Sometimes the typeface changes on the same page. It is copiously illustrated. The second chapter is a globe-trotting rogue’s gallery of ugly modern architecture. A picture of a Milanese 9

Heatherwick pre-empts this in Humanise with a section that takes critics to task for ignoring the “human” elements of buildings, a bold generalisation in a book full of them.

street is captioned, “Would you go on a date outside these buildings?” Heatherwick’s argument flounders on contact with reality. He has a selective reading of architectural history. He fixates on some exceptional buildings of the past, but does not consider the humdrum that makes up

buildings in a style he does like without explanation as to how they succeed where others fail. A particularly berserk passage of Humanise juxtaposes lengthy excerpts from Jacques Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man and a text by Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Moonies, and asks us to see this as proof

The front cover of Humanise (image courtesy of Penguin Random House).

the majority of cities. Boring is relative:10 the Victorian terraces that Londoners now covet were not so long ago seen as dreary.11 He seems to pay little heed to how streetscapes, rather than individual buildings, shape our perception of a place. Pre-modernist streets can also be monotonous – visit London’s endless suburban labyrinthine – while some modern roads have irregularly shaped structures that together from a knobbly streetscape. There is a lot of partial evidence and inconsistencies. Heatherwick attacks concrete and glass architecture, then presents eight 10

He mentions a tool called the Boring-o-meter, which ranks how boring a building is based on its flatness. Many buildings that he praises, however, would not pass muster, such as Bath’s Royal Crescent. See, for instance, P.G. Wodehouse in 1933: “Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.”

that architecture is a cult. He cites studies from many disciplines without interrogating them. One survey by neuroscientist Colin Ellard found that New Yorkers feel happier walking past a row of independent redbrick shops than a Whole Foods in a plain post-war building. But to what extent is their emotion shaped by what lies within? Indeed, Heatherwick explicitly states that he thinks the exterior appearance of a building matters more than its interior. He seems to see buildings as oversized public sculptures whose main purpose is to distract passersby,12 rather than structures for living in. This seems an odd blindspot for someone who wants to make architecture more “human”. 12

He would enlist other types of artists to create buildings. “Can you imagine what a Wes Anderson office block, a Björk parliament building, a George R.R. Martin hotel or a development of 800 affordable homes by Banksy would look like?”

Remarkably, however, although he mentions the environmental cost of modern buildings, he pays little heed to the likely environmental cost of his own project.13 How much will making buildings look interesting cost the planet? Perhaps all of these things can be forgiven if one sees the Humanise campaign as a work of polemic, aiming to rouse. If Heatherwick gets more people thinking about our built world, perhaps he has succeeded. Outside broadsheet critics and the industry-facing architecture press, reactions have been less rebarbative. “Ultimately”, writes Mary Richards in Grand Designs, “Humanise is a provocative and interesting read with a kernel of truth at its heart.” The cardinal sin of Heatherwick’s campaign, however, is its myopia towards the contexts in which boring buildings are created. He portrays architects as actively embracing cheap, ugly buildings in order to satisfy their own perverse formalist itch; clients, whose functional needs and budgetary controls so often dictate the appearance of buildings are effectively let off the hook. It is an astonishingly naive vision for a man who runs an architectural studio. Perhaps all this can be explained by his visionary reputation and plutocratic client base: Heatherwick might have had a lighter ride of it than less famous makers, whose work is as much about compromise as it is creativity. There is an economic illiteracy at the campaign’s heart. The world is richer than ever, claims Heatherwick, so why can we not

Or perhaps not so surprising. Last year he unveiled his sculpture Tree of Trees in London, which celebrated the importance of tree-planting by holding 350 saplings in an enormous metal structure. He also built 1,000 Trees, a shopping centre in Shanghai capped by ornamental trees. Writing in Dezeen, sustainability expert Philip Oldfield argued that “the embodied carbon of the concrete planters outweighs the environmental benefits of the trees they hold.”

build only exceptional buildings? There is no analysis of why this might be the case: where this wealth lies, who has the capacity to build, the regulatory environments which lead to particular sorts of things being built. “What happens,” he writes, “when we’re forced to work our entire careers in boring offices, boring factories, boring warehouses, boring hospitals and boring schools?” He never asks if the problem is with the jobs, not the facades of the buildings they are performed within. Humanise contains relatively few references to Heatherwick’s own practice. And just as well, because a lot of it does not fit his own strictures. There are no bustling streets of misshapen buildings in his oeuvre. One of his Google projects with BIG, currently under construction in King’s Cross, is a socalled “landscaper” that looks startlingly like the 60s offices Heatherwick professes to despise. The Bay View Google campus in California is a slightly warped version of Stansted Airport, with flat plate-glass facades. And over in Tokyo, his Azabudai Hills redevelopment is reaching completion: more steel, more glass, more shopping, this time on the site of a specially demolished neighbourhood. Once again, it is one rule for Thomas, another for all other architects. Is it any wonder so many are so enraged by him? Joe Lloyd is a London-based writer on architecture and culture.

GOOD ROAD, BAD ROAD Words Evi Hall

Image courtesy of Beeline.

SPACE

Beeline Velo 2

About three times a week, on a good week, I cycle to work. I should cycle more. Door to door it’s my quickest route, it’s better for my health, and has that added edge of worthiness associated with cyclists. The route itself is inviting too – an unbroken path following the Regent’s Canal

a horrible death amongst all those sunken, reedy Lime bikes.1 I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover how easy cycling up the canal was when I finally decided to embark upon it. I took it slow, preferring to hover behind people and overtake with plenty of space.

A user selects a fast route on their phone, which is paired to Velo 2 (image courtesy of Beeline).

north from Limehouse towards Haggerston in London’s east. At points, it even borders on the pastoral. Over the course of a year, blossoms are succeeded by leafy greens, to various reds, bronzes and coppers of canal vegetation. There are ducklings swimming amongst dumped Lime bikes, dreamily streaming with reeds. During my old route to work – the “bad route” – I had to sit behind Mile End traffic for minutes on end, gradually ingesting fumes from a bus I’d be too worried to overtake lest I be crushed in its blind spot. I’d awkwardly circumnavigate the Victoria Park roundabout via multiple zebra crossings. Shamefully, it scared me to cycle around it. I’m a fussy cyclist. I had always avoided the canal route for similar reasons. In all honesty, unless I can cycle on a completely separated cycle lane I’m probably not having a great time. In the case of the canal, I was keenly aware of the imminent risk of veering off the narrow path and drowning 58

On finishing, I was intrigued to see my smart watch displaying the total time as 22mins, a vast improvement on my previous times via roads. I’ve since theorised that, due to the lack of traffic lights, junctions and/or need to weave around stationary traffic, it’s much faster. Because of this, the canal has become a pretty good motivator for me to cycle more. The canal is the route I have in mind as I find myself opening Velo 2 on an autumn morning. Manufactured by Beeline, the Velo 2 is a black, circular screen, just under 50mm across and 20mm deep (it’s almost identical in size to my smart watch, which strays large). Beeline designs wayfinding hardware and software for bicycles and motorbikes, and Velo 2 is its most recent product for cyclists. It’s a simple device that provides directions to help cyclists navigate, saving them from attaching their 1

Other dumped e-bikes are available.

phone to their handlebars (or keeping it in their pocket with Google maps blaring, or else having to stop every five minutes to check their phone for the route – it always comes back to the phone). “The size really matters to people,” Sam Lucas, Beeline’s head of design, tells me. “I think the fact that you can put the Velo 2 in a pocket, and not really worry about it is a big draw.” The device attaches to your bike via a discrete mount that straps onto the handle bars using black elastic bands. Once the mount is set, the Velo 2 itself can be twisted on and off. It offers obvious ease and flexibility for someone like me who regularly takes short trips and parks my bike outside.2 In terms of set up, the device is operated by a smartphone app, and connects with the seamlessness that consumers now expect from any kind of technology product. I add in two favourite places as “saved locations” on the app: my current one (home) and work (Rose Lipman Building). It’s morning and I’m about to test it on my ride to work. Beeline offers me three route options – fast, balanced, quiet – but none of these are my usual commute to work. That puzzles me. “The initial idea was, ‘Why don’t we make a really nice looking compass to go on your bike so you can orient yourself in the city?’” says Mark Jenner, who co-founded Beeline with Tom Putnam in 2015. “From there it developed into: ‘What if, rather than pointing north, the compass pointed at your destination? So you could find your way through the streets?’” Jenner and Putnam wanted to strip back some of the complications of cycling around a city and tap into the sense of joy they found in meandering about on a bike. The first Beeline product, 2015’s Velo, stayed true to the compass idea: a bike-mounted navigation device that displayed an arrow continually shifting to point the rider in the direction of travel. Jenner and Putnam wanted to offer something simpler, more intuitive and less intense than the more detailed bike navigation 2

In hindsight, perhaps too easy. I’ve now lost two of the four bands by accidentally slingshotting them into moving traffic whilst attaching the Velo 2 to my bike.

tools out there. “There’s lots of tech that is designed for elite sport cyclists – the sort of people who go for long rides on the weekend,” Jenner explains. “There’s not a huge amount catering for the person who is new to cycling, or someone who literally just rides their bike to work on known routes, and never goes off of that.” I feel a twinge of self-recognition as to the latter camp. Meeting this gap in the market, the first Velo found a dedicated fan base whom Beeline courted and kept in contact with to understand how they experienced the product. As time went on, however, a sticking point began to emerge for some users. “Conceptually, the arrow is a really fun idea,” Lucas says, “but for a lot of use cases, like if you’re trying to get somewhere by a given time, it’s frustrating.” Velo 2 is the company’s answer to these frustrations. In this updated model, the device’s user interface has moved away from the compass-only wayfinding system (although it does retain this option if desired). Velo 2 now provides step-by-step directions, but aims to retain the spirit of simplicity of its predecessor. I’m running short on time, so set the Beeline app running but opt to follow my usual commute to work. As I cycle up the canal, I start wondering whether I just need to introduce Velo 2 to my route. Yet throughout the trip, the device is gently trying to pull me away from the towpath and onto a parallel route through Mile End Park. It does this by showing the path I’m on, but pairing this with a little white arrow pointing in the direction I should be heading. Meanwhile, it’s marking out the path it thinks I should be on by blocking it out in white, with other potential routes shown through white outlines. I ignore its suggestions and get to work on time via my usual route. My second journey that day is more successful: a long stretch from Haggerston to South Kensington. The fast route tells me it will take 55mins and the quiet route 1hr and 1min. I choose fast. The arrow appears on screen with the road to follow blocked out in white. It also beeps: one beep when you approach 100m to 90m from your turn, two beeps when it’s time to turn. 59

Velo 2 guides me above central London, through Islington, Angel and Clerkenwell. My usual method for travelling is to go direct to the river, which offers a safe reference by which I navigate; as long as I know where I am in relation to the Thames, I feel fairly confident about improvising a route. There’s something instinctual about that form of wayfinding – honing in on a water source like some kind of migratory bird. Another reason I default to the Thames is because of the separated cycle lane that runs along the river, which avoids contact with cars and buses. Yet the routes Velo 2 is suggesting are not dedicated cycle paths (although they do propose these where appropriate), but rather quietways: residential streets that have been identified as seeing less traffic, and which the London Cycling Design Standards (LCDS) describes as being “aimed at new cyclists who want a safe, unthreatening experience.” Perhaps I should have been using quietways all along. In my mind, residential streets had equated to cars becoming irate as they struggled to pass you, or doors suddenly flying open from parked vehicles. But the quietways Velo 2 is taking me down feel direct, little used and visually interesting. I get distracted by strange buildings, diminutive parks and curious shops I haven’t seen before. There are moments of delight as, Oh! You’ve sprung up onto a road you recognise that leads from Old Street to Angel, but shot across it onto a hidden cut through which you’ve never spotted before. I like this first long route, and I tell Beeline so at the end of my cycle (an app prompt appears when you’ve finished, asking you to rate the route via various degrees of smiley face). Ratings are important to Beeline. The brand wants users’ feedback and it wants as much of it as possible, because riders’ ratings are collected and combined with data from other sources to determine Beeline’s route suggestions. “The routes are based on things like time, historic traffic information and whole realms data from OpenStreetMaps,” Lucas tells me. “Then we can plug the user’s data in and use machine learning to expand 60

that very quickly.” Suggestions evolve over time as more and more users have their say on whether or not they like a route. “I think the feeling that the product is living is one of things that is so interesting about it.” The Velo 2’s hardware design has been adapted from its predecessor with this feedback in mind. Its black glass circular screen offers an initial moment of cognitive dissonance as you grapple with the fact that it’s not a touchscreen. Instead, a four-way rocker button is situated below its screen, with the user pressing down on the sides of the circle in order to use it – it took me slightly longer to realise this than I’m willing to admit. The arrangement of these buttons has visual similarities to the original compass inspiration. Four points are arranged on the screen; the north and south are marked out by white dashes, indicating the buttons that allow the user to switch between information screens: battery status or remaining route travel time, for instance. The east-west lines are green and red dashes respectively, the universal colours of yes/no, good/bad, stop/go. If you dislike a particular road that you are cycling down, just press red for a moment or two: a fat sad-face appears on the screen. Like the road you’re on? Press green and a smiley face affirms your evaluation. This rating mechanisms is key to the Velo 2. “We want people to be liberal with feedback,” says Jenner. Propelling the green/red rating system to the front of a very minimal piece of technology highlights the importance of the rating system. It’s appealing to rate whilst cycling and there’s a satisfying dopamine kick as a circle loads up around the screen and completes when a qualitative smiley face appears in its centre (this “loading up” system is also designed to reduce any accidental ratings that might occur from bashing the Velo 2 in passing). Industrial designer Jon Marshall, who worked on the original Velo, was invited back to design the hardware for Velo 2, and this emphasis on feedback was central to the whole process. “When we started the project, we knew how important the buttons and the rating systems were going to be,” he says. “So we mocked up

some models. They weren’t functional, just bits of cardboard to investigate that voting process. We realised pretty quickly that the bigger the button, the smaller the screen. We couldn’t square the circle of that issue for ages, until we came up with this idea of the upside-down construction.” Placing

whilst I was trialling it, I was thinking: what am I actually rating here?” he tells me. “Is it the comfort, the speed? I had to get the hang of thinking, no, it’s just an instinctive plus or minus, thumbs up, thumbs down, and then allowing the wisdom of the crowd combined with Beeline’s AI model to make sense of it.”

Beeline hopes that users of Velo 2 will regularly rate routes, growing the data set upon which the device is built (image courtesy of Beeline).

a rocker button below its screen allowed Beeline to keep its discreet size, but with as large a display as possible. There are obvious advantages to this system. For example, when attempting to approach the Waterloo IMAX roundabout, I find myself being rained on heavily and wearing gloves. The analogue button system succeeds where a phone’s touchscreen would fail given rain and fabric-laden fingers. I duly and negatively rate the road I’m on as red – bad road! – following a confusing and traffic-heavy right-hand turn. The roundabout, however, leads me directly onto Waterloo Bridge, which I immediately rate as green. Lovely view! Good road! It strikes me afterwards that this might be unfair to Beeline (after all, access to the bridge can only be reached via said roundabout), but the act of rating has become habituated in me over the course of my test runs. It’s something Marshall also touches on when I speak to him. “Initially

This idea of creating a big data set driven by human users resonates more widely than just Velo 2’s user base. The original research behind the product was made possible by a European Space Agency (ESA) grant: the ESA’s interests, it would seem, are not solely interstellar, but also extend to terrestrial wayfinding. ESA is interested in how people make choices to navigate spaces on mass and sees this collective thinking as an effective computer to calculate tradeoffs in wayfinding around a complex space like a city. “The Beeline project aims at demonstrating a safest routing and mapping service optimised for the needs of cyclists in order to encourage people to choose to cycle,” ESA states loftily on its sustainable development goals’ website. “The way in which the proposed system adds value is in the manner in which it combines all of these various space assets to be able to mimic human intelligence by weighting them in the correct manner.” 61

What puts you off navigating by bike? I find solace in the fact that there are so many things that people dislike when cycling, particularly as they’re often things that I feel I’m being a bit wimpish or high maintenance about. Being next to cars. Having to wait at traffic lights. Turning right. Other cyclists. Being

of Stress” in the Urban Bikeway Design Guide from the North American National Association of City Transportation Officials. “Motor vehicle congestion presents safety and comfort issues for people bicycling,” it declares. “Queuing encourages both motorists and bicyclists to engage in unpredictable movements.”

Beeline’s screen sits above a four-way rocker button in order to maximise its size (image courtesy of Beeline).

next to parked cars. Hills. They’re things we feel we ought be better or braver about than we actually are. These moments of hesitation are echoed in design handbooks for planners of cycling infrastructure. The LCDS for example, notes that “right turns in traffic, which require cyclists to filter into the middle of other vehicles, should be avoided wherever possible”. In a similar vein, queued up traffic is listed as one of the “Sources 62

Beeline is interested in the tradeoffs we make when navigating cities, and London is a great case study for this. It’s a complex, old and winding city, creating a continually expanding web of varied route options and combinations. “There’s always a balancing act when cycling between whatever your preferences are for the route and how quickly you want to get there,” says Jenner of the considerations they balance to create routes.

“You’re always trading off between the two. So for a quiet route, your journey might be 50 per cent longer, but it will be roads that you’ll be comfortable with: they’re quieter, residential or have segregated cycle paths.” Beeline’s routes aren’t perfect: you’re not going to have a perfectly safe, quiet cycle every time. Where an area on a route has been badly rated but is unavoidable, that area is marked in orange, forewarning you of what’s to come. I don’t know if this ultimately makes me feel more confident when cycling – after all, you can’t see the orange line on the Velo 2 as you cycle, only in the app view of the route – but at least I have a sense of what I’m getting into. I think it boils down to what kind of person you are. Do you want constant information about a space to feel safe and prepared, or would you rather not worry unnecessarily about things you can’t control? “We want people to rate in a way that’s more about their emotional reactions than whether there is a pothole,” Lucas enthuses, expanding on Beeline’s attitude toward rating. More ratings means better routes, so much so that Beeline offers its app for free, regardless of whether you pair it with its Velo devices. The drawback of not having a paid-for customer is weighed against being able to collect more road ratings and also meet some of Beeline’s guiding principles of making cycling more accessible to more people. The popularity of these routes amongst Beeline’s users means there are now plans to begin offering in-app subscription services that move beyond travelling from A to B, and instead create routes that last for a set time, or which cover a particular distance before looping back to their starting point. As such, any and all influences are fair game in terms of how you decide to rate a route: how pretty the road is; how safe it feels; how well paved or not it is; how quick; how noisy. But if Beeline is so keen for rampant ratings of roads based on any and all criteria, it makes me doubly wonder why my route up the canal isn’t an option. I put this to Lucas, confused, since this shortcut ought to represent exactly the kind of secret insider knowledge that Beeline wants to track and use.

“We used to [include] canals and towpaths,” he tells me, “but we removed them based on user feedback and rates.” Canals, it turns out, are unpopular because “they’re incredibly dependent on the time of day,” Lucas explains. “At peak times they can be pretty sketchy because there’s lots of foot traffic, and at night they are very dangerous. We specifically removed them based on this.” I nod along, slightly unconvinced. You just have to be like me, I think to myself. One of the good ones who doesn’t hare down the towpath or aggressively overtake prams. With the clocks about to change, I concede that he may have a point about the darkness, but still, whilst the weather is good I’m sticking to my shortcut. I’m on my way to work as usual up the canal. I wouldn’t say I’m rushing or running late, but I am making progress.3 I give way to runners and prams and merrily ting my bell before pedalling under bridges. I approach a corner, about to pass under a long bridge just before Broadway Market, tinging away. It’s busy on the towpath today but I’m clear. Or so I think until another bike appears silently but at significant speed from around the corner. I slam the breaks on, my bike stops, I don’t. Crashing into the wall of the bridge with an outstretched arm, I culminate the indignity by lying intertwined with my bike on the towpath with my arm cradled across my chest. My elbow hurts and I’m bewildered. People are gathered around me, including my crash-ee, a man with salt-and-pepper hair on a green Lime bike. My bike is bashed up and I’m feeling shaken and a bit guilty. Overall, however, I’m OK and eventually I walk my bike away shamefully to somewhere I can lock it up. I finish my journey on foot. Walking along the towpath, I’m twitchy, turning around to watch out for bikes passing me, peering round bridges before walking through them. My good route has morphed into a bad route. Red. Sad face. 3

A phrase my driving instructor would use – “You’ve got to make progress!” – when I was driving too slow. She said it a lot.

I reflect on what the Beeline team think about the confidence someone has on a bike. Lucas sums it up when explaining why rating is so important for them: “One scary moment or one negative moment ruins the whole ride, so it matters to us that we can remove that for as many people as possible.” It’s true. I’ve not been up or down the canal since my crash. Not just because it’s now dark in the evenings, an immediate barrier both visually and psychologically, but because the whole route has been recast in my mind. It’s become a no-go zone in my mental map of London, sat alongside locations such as Commercial Road with its never-ending supply of buses, the melee that is Hyde Park Corner, or anywhere in Marylebone.4 In the meantime, I’m experimenting more with Beeline on a few different routes

Where drivers honk at me every time I’m there on my bike. I’ve come to assume it’s due to the sin of “being on the road”.

to and from work. I’ve accepted that it takes longer, that I’ll have to get up earlier, and need to cycle further. Much like the routing options, I’ve sacrificed time for safety. It’s not all bad. I’ve seen Halloween decorations go up, leaves mature and fall, and Christmas decorations start to creep over the more enthusiastic houses like so many LED vines. My routes now have a couple of steeper sections, which I grudgingly concede is better for me. They’re smoother too, with fewer potholes and tree branches to navigate. Arguably, I pass by more useful things on my journeys, such as shops, post offices and pubs. It’s added time, but they’re not bad journeys. In fact I’ve been enjoying them. Perhaps that’s what it’s really all about. Evi Hall is the managing editor of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

PATCHING THE MACHINE Words Felix Chabluk Smith

Image courtesy of Refashion.

POLICY Le Bonus Réparation

I’d had a plan for this review about the French government’s €154m clothing repair scheme. ‘France to offer cold hard cash to repair clothes instead of binning them’ ran the headline of a Dazed article from 2nd August 2023. I remember reading it at the time. Cold hard cash. It seemed unlikely, and Dazed isn’t exactly the strongest pillar of journalistic accuracy, but there was a Guardian article from back then too, with the subheading claiming that “people will be able to claim back €6-€25 of cost of repairing clothes and shoes in latest environmental measure.” OK, so probably not cold hard cash, but a bureaucratic process presumably requiring submission of receipts on some online government portal with an obscure login procedure. That sounds more realistic; more French. The €6 that it cost to have those trousers taken up would appear in my bank account at some point in the following three months, and the permafrost would stop melting. After reading about the scheme, I’d totally forgotten about it. I work as a fashion designer in Paris. My job is clothing, in France, but I’d heard nothing more about this major French €154m scheme about clothing. Then I was asked to write about it and, so, my plan. It was going to be simple. After the traditional period of luxuriant procrastination, I would knuckle down and take a garment to one of my local retoucheries to see how it all worked. I don’t think I own a garment that really needs repairing, however, so I would have to damage one first. Would I unpick a seam, making it look like an accident? Maybe rip the corner of a pocket like I’d been in an exciting fight and see what they could do to patch it up? Or perhaps I would make it easy for them and just pull off a button. Summoning the spirit of David Sedaris, I would write with warmth about my clumsy interactions with the tailor or seamstress in their tiny shop, cluttered with piles of unhemmed curtains and wonky rails of coats awaiting treatment. Maybe there would be a forgotten cactus or ailing spider plant in the window. I would mention that too, and maybe the sickly fluorescent lights, to give a sense of the place and pad out the word count. Then I would write with humorous exasperation about the refund process: how it wasn’t worth the time it took to process it, or that I couldn’t get it to work in the first place. But, actually, how does it work? Alongside those write-ups in Dazed and The Guardian, the scheme was reported on by other major outlets, but despite the €6-€25 figure

repeated across all the articles, the details still seemed vague. The “cold, hard cash” claim was almost definitely click-bait, but Dazed went on to say that France will “pay all citizens a ‘repair bonus’ for taking their clothes in to get fixed.” CNN Business claimed, in ‘France will pay you to repair your clothes’, that “a simple piece of restitching will receive a €6 subsidy, while resoling a pair of shows will qualify for a €25 rebate.” It didn’t make sense, and I’m not talking about the basic typographical error. A €6 subsidy but a €25 rebate? A Le Monde article from 12th July says that “under the scheme, customers will be able to claim €7 for mending a heel and €10-€25 for clothing repairs from a €154 million fund set up to cover 2023-2028.” Right, so I will have to claim the money myself then? It went on to quote Bérangère Couillard, the then Secretary of State for Ecology, as she announced the initiative in Paris. “The goal is to support those who do the repairs,” Couillard said, referring to sewing workshops, but also those brands that offer repair services. Hang on, how does giving me money support the people actually doing the repairs? The government had delegated the nitty gritty to a fashion and textile environmental nonprofit… thing… called Refashion. I went to its website, where there was absolutely no mention of the scheme. After clicking around for a while, I found a tiny link to Refashion Pro. There was no mention of it on there either, but three more links and a slight graphic design change later, I think I know what this is, or what it will be. It’s called Le Bonus Réparation, and it’s a discount, not a bonus. As a member of the public, to have a hole in a tailored jacket seam restitched might cost me €12. Under the Bonus Réparation scheme, that kind of repair gets me a discount of €8. There is a table to explain the set discounts for various repairs hidden amidst all those links on the Refashion site, so a complicated lining repair can be discounted by €25, or a simple operation to replace the tip of a stiletto heel is discounted by €7. But in the small print it specifies that the repair bonuses can’t exceed 60 per cent of the total repair fee, meaning that that little €12 seam repair can only be reduced by €7.20. I don’t know why all repairs can’t just be discounted by 60 per cent, but anyway, I would pay €4.80, and the tailor gets the additional €7.20 they are due… how? I went to the FAQs and a bland, confusing labyrinth of modern French bureaucracy opened up before me. There was another graphic design change. A stock photo header of some rippling fabric. Four subsections, nineteen question links. Declaration and reimbursement of

the Repair Bonus. They have to declare the repair and then be reimbursed. Again, how? Repair Bonus Declaration Application. Click on that and, oh, another six question links. How do I access the reimbursement application? There’s an application? I click on that and: “The Repair Bonus declaration and reimbursement platform is not yet available…”

Repair work in a French retoucherie (image courtesy of Refashion).

According to the timeline set by Refashion, the scheme was meant to be up and running in October. I’m writing this on October 29th, it’s still not functioning, and no tailor or cobbler I could find had signed up for the scheme. When it does exist, an effective declaration will require, amongst other things, detailed explanations of the repairs required, a photograph of the garment before repair, a photograph of the garment after repair, and a photograph of the invoice detailing the repair, all uploaded using the app. Then, assuming the tailor or seamstress is digitally literate enough to manage all that, they should get reimbursed at the end of each month. Oh, and apparently an advance isn’t possible, so all the discounts must first come from their own pocket. Why would anyone bother signing up to this? Refashion suggests to a prospective signee that “You create traffic in your store, you increase your turnover, you develop and retain your customer base, you become

more well-known, you increase the value of your expertise,” which is all either totally speculative or uselessly abstract. Most of the articles about the initiative cite that over 700,000 tonnes of clothing are disposed of every year in France. Anything to reduce that number and lighten the impact of the clothing industry is obviously laudable, and there certainly aren’t any fashion sustainability policies in the UK, or many other countries for that matter. Whether it actually works, however, remains to be seen, and by “work” I mean on a basic level of functionality, not whether it has any meaningful environmental effect. I’m staggered by the effort it must have taken to think up and codify that complicated system of applications and reimbursements; the time spent writing those endless FAQs; all those meetings discussing how it might work, what it would be called, and how the logo should look. I don’t think that Bonus Réparation is pure greenwashing, I just don’t think that it is nearly good enough. Maybe by the time this review is published the online application will be fully functional,1 thousands of people will be enticed by the lower repair prices and the reimbursements will be flowing smoothly. I genuinely hope it is a success. At the moment, I can’t help but think it was just something for a government minister to say in July 2023 as temperatures soared, wildfires sparked into infernos, and we were reminded once again how screwed we all are. Even if we suppose that the scheme succeeds, the design of many items of contemporary clothing simply do not allow for easy repair, or the materials used in their construction are of such low-quality that repairs are almost a moot point. Think of the intricate stitching or technologically advanced finishings that you probably have on your gym gear, or the internally taped or ultrasonically welded seams of waterproof outerwear. Think too of the fabric quality needed to allow Shein to sell a winter coat for €26.99, home delivery included. Clothing like that is essentially disposable. Of course, it is possible to repair the majority of our clothing, but even if we can fix it, do we really want to? Since the turn of the 18th century, when young dandies rejected the impractical flamboyance of their fathers and became enamoured instead with the rough woollen coats of their coachmen, Western fashion has often aestheticised elements of the dress of the working classes and the supposedly good, honest damage that it sustains. It still seems extremely difficult for us to find a social acceptance 1

By mid-November, the online application process seemed to be operational, although there was little evidence of levels of usage, ed.

of that wear, damage and repair for our wider wardrobes, however, let alone the same aesthetic appreciation we seemingly only reserve for torn denim and worn-out chore jackets. Unlike workwear, we expect tailoring to be sharp and shirt collars crisp and fresh as a sign of respectability, but imagine the savings of time, energy, money and resources we could make if suits were machine washable and nothing needed to be ironed. We also seem to be uncomfortable with clothing we’ve damaged ourselves and had repaired out of necessity. Witness the confused froth in July 2013 when then-Prince Charles was photographed wearing a light grey suit with an obvious patch near the front left hem, or back in 2009 when photographers zoomed in on the royal feet, picking up at least three patches on his well-worn Oxford shoes. Who knew it was acceptable to have your suit patched like that? Who knew it was even possible to have your shoes repaired like that? We were all entranced by the shambling aristocratic eccentricity of it, but also mildly scandalised that the future king went out to meet the public wearing a patched-up suit and knackered old shoes. In a 2021 Country Life feature, Charles, again, was photographed in an extremely worn and oft-repaired, 20-year-old tweed hunting jacket that Liz Jones in the Daily Mail described as “a faded, shapeless garment sprouting loose threads that looks as if it belongs on a tramp, not on the heir to the throne.” We don’t have this problem with repaired furniture or appliances, vehicles, buildings, or any other pieces of design we own, use, wear down and damage. With clothing, we confuse thriftiness with miserliness, if not outright poverty. Bonus Réparation might make more people repair their clothes, and, as such, might help make repaired clothing more socially acceptable, but doesn’t the environmental situation we’re in demand that we go further? If we really want to encourage people to repair their clothes, nationalise the retoucheries and make all repairs state-funded. Let’s go further still. France holds itself up as the global capital of fashion, so why not lead by example, shoulder some actual responsibility and piss off some billionaires? We should impose a total Europe-wide ban on the worst online offenders such as Shein, Fashion Nova and Boohoo. While we’re at it, lets ban all virgin polyester, along with unnecessary mixed-fibre textiles that are near-impossible to recycle. We should restrict fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M to eight product drops per year, instead of per month, and set minimum fabric and manufacturing quality standards across the industry.

Prices will be much higher, so raise basic wages to allow the general public to afford these nicer, longer-lasting clothes. People won’t shop as much, so how do we balance out the hit to the economy? Legalise drugs, maybe? Humans seem to have been making aesthetic choices about the way they clothe their bodies since the practice began, but in his 1969 book

Édouard Manet’s Young Lady in 1866, cited in a New York Times article about cultural progress (image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The Concise History of Costume and Fashion historian James Laver suggests that the beginnings of fashion as we recognise it today emerged in the mid14th century. The cycles were slow at first, but with the patenting of the first power loom in 1785, followed soon after by the mechanical sewing machine,

the engine of fashion is now spinning at such a speed that Boohoo and its likes can go from an initial design sketch to shipping dirt-cheap, sweatshop-made garments to the consumer in under two weeks. Due to the easy availability of new, different clothing, we expect fashions to change rapidly, and so there needs to be new and different clothing to meet our expectations. I don’t think damage is primarily why people discard clothing; changing tastes are. Even the most well-constructed, infinitely reparable Savile Row suit will fall victim to this. I would suggest banning fashion, but maybe we don’t need to. On 10th October 2023, in ‘Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill’, The New York Times critic Jason Farago wrestled with a peculiarly deflating feeling of stasis that has been in my peripheral consciousness for a while now. Farago notes that in sharp contrast to Édouard Manet’s painting Young Lady in 1866, in which the subject’s dress anchors her firmly in that year and no other, he recently saw gallery goers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the painting is held, dressed “in the skinny jeans that defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that were popular in the 1990s; neither style [looking] particularly au courant or dated”. He goes on to insist that “we are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” Farago argues that our obsessive fascination with newness and the value we place upon it is a hangover from modernism, in which the role of the creative radically shifted. During that period of never-to-be-repeated technological and social upheaval, it became imperative for the artist or designer to forge the next link in the creative chain, on and on into the future. Yet for the vast majority of human history, Farago explains, this was simply not the case: “there is no inherent reason – no reason; this point needs to be clear – that a recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth.” Two days after Farago’s piece was published, Gary Wang, a former FTX executive, arrived at federal court in Manhattan to continue testifying in the criminal trial against his one-time colleague Sam Bankman-Fried, and I was fascinated by the suit he chose to wear. The jacket was boxy with three buttons, and the sleeves reached halfway down his thumbs. He’d paired it with an old greyish blue shirt, and a printed silk tie of a red and beige cinema carpet geometric that they

definitely don’t make anymore. The whole thing seemed enormous and oddly flamboyant, especially compared with the standard issue, two-button, slim-fit, 2023 tailoring of his legal team next to him. It’s the kind of outfit we haven’t seen out in public in decades; the kind of outfit you can only buy in a thrift store. It might have been a classic tech nerd IDGAF look in the hoodie-and-flip-flop tradition, but Wang was perfectly dressed for a court appearance. He had already plead guilty in his own trial for fraud pertaining to FTX’s collapse, so the formerly 431st richest man in the world wasn’t trying to look poor, and he didn’t. Judging by other photos of him online, I also don’t think he’s got the nuanced sense of personal style needed to deliberately channel a late-season Frasier Crane so perfectly. His outfit was incorrectly correct. It was definitely not new and resolutely unmodern, but because of an apparent lack of intention, it didn’t look vintage, either. I thought about reaching out to Wang or his representatives to ask about his outfit, but I’m not a proper journalist so I don’t really know how to do that. Also, he’s probably got a lot of heavy stuff to think about right now, what with all the wire fraud convictions. If you’re reading this Gary, you looked great. Sure, it’s just a few pairs of mixed-era jeans in an art gallery and a boxy suit at a trial. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe the fashion engine is slowing, little by little. Maybe we are beginning to sober up from the intoxicating idea of the new. Maybe the end of fashion is coming faster than we think, just like the end of the world. Felix Chabluk Smith is a fashion designer and tutor based in Paris.

THE CORRUPTIBILITY OF OLIVE OIL Words Lily Wakeley

Image courtesy of Mehmet Murat Carman.

TECHNOLOGY

AI Smelling Machine

What makes an olive oil “the best”? I’m sat against a shelving cabinet, brimming with oils and other produce – pickled, dried, and preserved – to try and find out. The olive oil in question is manufactured by “Mr Olive Oil”, also known as Mehmet Murat Carman. He is the proprietor of this shop and sits at a desk covered in a cluster of bottles and small plastic shot glasses. His son Murat finds space on the edge of the stairs that snake up towards his apartment, his Croc Pollex clogs peeping onto the shop floor. For the next few hours, I’m lost in Carman’s fastidious tales about his groves in Cyrpus and Turkey – how their local communities work in communion to harvest the olives by climbing and shaking the trees. Carman carefully pours one shot, and then another, of black olive oil. I try them between palette cleansing swigs of pomegranate molasses, its sharpness squeezing my eyes shut with the efficacy of tequila. In his Cockney lilt, Carman recommends cupping the vial with my hands to warm the oil and then swilling it to coat my mouth. “It’ll go down a treat. You won’t know you’ve had oil.” He looks at me intently over his glasses whilst leaning forward: “What can you taste?” The black oil tastes distinctly olivey, due to a process in which the olives are “dried under sunshine until they’ve wrinkled up like little raisins,” Carman tells me, “at which point they are boiled and then pressed.” It is the oil he grew up on and has received widespread acclaim. His oil is, as The Times describes it, “smooth, bright and fruity with a length of taste that any winemaker would kill for,” and it has been crowned “England’s best olive oil” by New York Magazine. Since visiting Carman, I’ve glugged many of his oils, one infused with lemon, and greedily chomped on vacuum-packed olives and a jar of unripe pickled almonds, bright and briney, all of which he generously gifted me despite protest. As such, I have built up a good authority to verify his oils’ delightful grassiness and glassiness, and their claims to be the best. Recently, however, I’ve heard that there is a machine that can offer an arguably greater

authority on olive oil: one supposedly devoid of bias, and cognisant to the world of fakes. You could sum it up as an “AI smelling machine” and it has got me wondering: to really know such a thing as what tastes best, what human experiences must this technology inhabit? What must this kind of sentience be fed on? Perhaps, the first whiff of a freshly opened bottle, the design of the bottle it is poured from, or even a language to describe the memory it invokes? Olive oil’s story began a long time ago, before machines were being designed to differentiate “good” from “bad”, “best” from “worst”. It is an ancient product, but one that frequently acquires contemporary inflections. In his book Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil (2011), writer Tom Mueller investigates olive oil as the most frequently counterfeited and adulterated product in the EU. It’s not hard to understand why. The olive oil industry is currently estimated to be worth $15-20bn, but olive oil’s increasing popularity as a cooking oil, super food, staple of the enviable Mediterranean lifestyle, and status as the poster child of long-life and good-skin means this number is growing. Chef Peter Hoffman, writing in his book What’s Good? A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients (2021), describes the shift from cooking with butter to olive oil in Britain as “the beginning of the decolonization of our collective culinary outlook,” opening the door “for not only the Mediterranean cuisines,” but “non-Eurocentric cuisines” too. Against this opening up, however, conservatism has crept in through the back door, as the industry tries to rewrite its narrative by doubling down on various quality checks. Chief amongst these is the question of whether an oil is “extra virgin”, which often proves to be contentious. During his research, for example, Mueller talked to a number of informants who work in the industry. One of them, who is named Marseglia, suspects that as much as 98 per cent of olive oil sold as extra virgin in Italy is, in fact, not. “You have to remember, olive oil is essentially fresh juice,” explains Curtis Cord, 75

editor-in-chief of Olive Oil Times and founder of the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, speaking with me over a long-distance call. As with any juice, there are multiple ways of producing it, which is where the idea of extra virgin comes in. Whether an oil is extra virgin is typically a question of whether it meets a

to have identifiably good qualities – smells of bitterness, fruitiness and pungency.”2 For the most part, assessment of these qualities which help determine if an oil is an EVOO are certified by sensory panels, a consortium of experts who, like a pack of blood hounds, sniff out the so-called “fustiness”, “fruitiness”

The olive groves of LA Organic, an olive oil brand co-founded by designer Philippe Starck (image courtesy of LA Organic).

definition set out by the International Olive Council (IOC),1 an intergovernmental organisation that brings together producers and consumers of olive products. According to the IOC’s definition, an extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) cannot be tampered with through heat, refining or chemicals, and it should have less than 1 per cent oleic acidity (acid is a sign of decomposition). Furthermore, Cord tells me, “there should be no defects detectable through smells of rancidity, fustiness, and wine or vinegar.” And finally, an EVOO “has 1

Different regions of the world may have standards set by different bodies, but the IOC is dominant in Europe, as well as having member states in North Africa, West Asia and South America. It is worth noting that although typically seen as a marker of quality, the label of extra virgin is largely a description. Carman’s black oil, for instance, is excellent, but not extra virgin because its production method does not abide by the IOC’s definition.

and subsequent goodness or badness (and therefore authenticity) of oils. This may seem like an insanely antiquated practice for human beings to be undertaking, but olfaction is the last sense to be machine-readable because of its complexity. There are simple rules for encoding (and reproducing) colour, light and sound artificially, but smell is entirely different. Rather than having inherent odours, molecules gain their smell by virtue of the way in which they interact with the 400 olfactory receptors in our noses, which can vary immensely. Scent is processed in the frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain that also deals with our personalities and emotions; it is inextricably linked to memory and experience. This, then, explains why the compound benzaldehyde is associated with the cherry-almond sweetness of marzipan, maraschino cherries and Bakewell tart in western nations, but has the savoury taste

of MSG/umami for Japanese consumers because of its commonality in various pickled condiments. I think back to my time with Carman. The oil’s charm and flavour was undoubtedly heightened by the smiling man and his son in front me, all of us crowded into a small unassuming shop on a backstreet in London’s Clerkenwell, which – contrary to reason – actually specialises in electrical wares.3 From this chilly grotto, crowded with dusty cables, sockets, and electrical fittings, I could feel the Mediterranean heat on my face through the stories I was being told. The oil was doused in the sunshine of Carman’s family farms in Cyprus and Turkey, as well as the idylism of his stories. Storytelling, for most of us, underpins our relationship with taste and scent more than anything else. The development of sensory science and AI smelling machines, then, are built on an immense ambition: they seek to find a hard-edge of flavour that is replicable, definitive and universal. Sue Langstaff is one of world’s leading olive oil tasting experts and founder of the dedicated sense assessment company Applied Sensory. Langstaff proliferates her knowledge through manual guides known as Defect Wheels, which she has developed for olive oil, as well as wine and beer. These referential wheels help discern mustiness as smelling, Langstaff tells me, like “wet cardboard” or “vanilla ice cream that’s been left in the freezer for too long and has scum on the top”. Rancidity may come through as “muddy sediment, or manure or pig farm waste pond, or vomit,” or “you know when you go into a doughnut shop and there will be this awful, rancid smell?” Langstaff lives in California and doesn’t like using words such as “objective” and “subjective” – for her, drawing out the shared experience of smell is a matter of calibration. This process starts by calibrating the very panels that judge oil . When Langstaff’s company took over an olive oil sensory panel 3

For those who wish to visit, the store can be found at 76 Compton St, London, EC1V 0BN.

hosted at the UC Davis research university, for instance, she immediately changed things up. “They weren’t a good group and I didn’t particularly like the way they were scoring,” she says, “so I recruited people from olive oil companies and classes I taught at UC Davis. I brought them on as apprentices for a couple of years before integrating them into the panel.” Panels such as these must include a minimum of eight sensors per session to accommodate for the inevitable variability and cross-section of findings and tastes. Langstaff’s panel has 17 people and, even though there can never be complete consensus, she claims that “a lot of them can score within tenths of one another”. In Italy, however, the story of sensing olive oil is being developed by an entirely different vernacular, one founded in analytical instruments and compound crunching. It seeks to cut through the variability in how smells are sensed and recorded, to instead capture the objective, molecular essence of smell. The likes of electronic noses and tongues have been around for a while, but an astonishingly new and sophisticated device has recently been used within academic research, with papers referencing its first application to olive oil in 2022. This is the AI smelling machine. Chiara Cordero, a professor of food chemistry, is one of its creators, and she has found time between the classes she teaches at Turin University to tell me how it works. She speaks quickly and with astounding precision: “The AI smelling machine uses analytical chemistry to target and quantify potent key food odourants in particular foods to predict their sensory properties. Once we know the key molecular targets in food types, we can tune the sensitivity and specificity of our smelling machines to them.” The machine cannot tell you something is rancid because it smells like Play-Doh or wood varnish, but it can be programmed to tell you the concentration of the molecules which are markers of rancidity. Scientists have already trialled the machine’s utility in measuring characteristics of hazelnuts, cocoa and olive oil, but Cordero’s colleagues are now investigating broadening its application to include roasted coffee, dairy, 77

and essential oils. In theory, this machine will be able to predict the smell of all foods types on the prerequisite of knowing their aroma codes, which are curated in the adjacent world of molecular sensory science through something termed a “sensomic-based expert system”. By screening hundreds of samples to check every batch is compliant, it’s possible to define the smell boundaries of certain profiles. “The strength of this kind of approach is that we can focus on the compounds that are shaping the identity of a product by reference of a human panel; we can then translate these traits into a table of key odorants and related concentrations,” Codero explains. “The idea is not to replace human sensory panels, but to support them,” she assures me. Machines like these should help bring mass order to the ineffable world of smell – a uniquely somatic and cerebral sense – and the world of olive oil. They will be able to regulate products at mass scale and could even have applications beyond the world of food, such as detecting breath that smells like freshly mown clover, a potential sign of liver failure, or sweat with a scent of freshly plucked feathers, which could be rubella. They will, the idea runs, be used to detect the quality and authenticity of products with precision and at scale, thereby combing out crime and corruption. In theory, their superhuman sensitivity could detect with such great nuance that smell actually becomes unshackled from linguistic parameters – from the stories we tell about food to explain their flavours. Where, then, does that place the need for writers like me? Taste is currently a poetics that writers crave and I’m not sure that I’m ready to retire my nose quite yet. Likewise, the calibration of flavours and smells that Langstaff and other sensory scientists strive for is a question of semantics – it relies on the co-creation of linguistic relativity in a world of epic fungibility. This is a sentiment that many others working in this field would agree with. Tasha Marks, for instance, is a set designer, food historian, artist, curator, teacher, and writer, all with a focus on “sensory interpretation, sensory storytelling and creating artwork 78

with the senses”. She tells me that taste is highly suggestible. “If you tell someone they’re smelling something even if it’s not there, they will smell it. When I’m creating exhibitions, I think a lot about how language will influence how people smell it.” She gives the example of a recent exhibition she created around tea, in which she “put words into [the accompanying texts] that aren’t actually present in the smell I’ve curated - and people smell it nonetheless.” I start to wonder whether, if taste were to have a horoscope, it would be like me: a shapeshifting and, at times, duplicitous gemini. In support of this, Marks tells me about Sarah Hyndman, who is a master of sensory manipulation. Hyndman is the author of the book Why Fonts Matter (2016) and the founder of Type Tasting, a company that shares niche and expert knowledge on the “taste” of fonts through multisensory type workshops, events and installations. By changing the fonts on food labels, Hyndman can make yoghurt taste sweeter and chocolate seem more expensive. “It’s why a lot of people think wine tasting is a load of utter bollocks,” Marks says wryly. Packaging, then, is the real connoisseur of storytelling. Do the soft pastel landscapes that are illustrated on olive oil bottle labels accompanied by “Made in Italy” stamps make us swoon with vitality with every slug of the liquid? Does the font make our heart grow stronger, our skin more shiny? I think back to Carman’s bottles, which are highly simple in their design. They display a photograph of his parents, who are encircled by a wreath of olive leaves. Some of the larger bottles are plastic, which seem to nonchalantly nod to the consumer: “Let the oil do the talking”. Carman’s packaging gleams of honesty and humility, further emphasised by a display of the products’ lineage – “Established 1950” – and the focus on family and traditional values. The brand’s title, Murat Du Carta, is also his son’s name,4 and is proudly emblazoned on the bottles in red. The simple confidence of the design matches that which Carman himself 4

Du Carta, Carman explains, is the family’s nickname in Cyprus.

instils in me. With every drizzle I’m sure: this is good, life affirming oil. Olive oil standards can differ around the world. Langstaff explains that the IOC, for example, has a lower threshold for signs of defect than olive oil bodies in the US. “They [the IOC] want to allow for heritage oils that use traditional methods of production,” Langstaff explains.

or not: it can pinpoint the cultivar and breeding of the olives that an oil is pressed from, how ripe the olives were upon harvest, the tree’s geography, the microclimate of the soil conditions, and the technological processes that made the oil. It could, therefore, test the compliance of products to PDO certifications, or even inform strategists on how to deal with the inevitable effects

A machine similiar to the one used by Chiara Cordero and her fellow researchers in assessing the smell of olive oils (image courtesy of Chiara Cordero).

“Even if that means using olives that have sat in piles, fermenting before being pressed. The US has developed higher standards because it doesn’t want to be a dumping ground for Europe’s shitty oil.” The heritage oils that she is talking about are ones guarded by the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme, which ascribes value to terroir and the history of products. Codero tells me that the AI smelling machine is so sensitive, it can go beyond establishing whether an oil is extra virgin

of climate change on harvests, market fluctuations or geopolitical impacts on the availability of crops. If used to these ends, then the machine has formidable potential in advancing agriculture, and the food and beverage industry more broadly. These machines, however, would still be at the mercy of those who use them, and the stories they want to tell – olive oil cannot always be extracted from its surrounding sociopolitical context. In Cyprus, for instance, during the 2018 season the olive oil brand 79

Colive harvested fruit from both the GreekCypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, mixing the two to create oils that it bills as a “taste of peace” in an island marked by civil unrest, war, and displacement. While Colive positions olives as a symbol of peace and resolution, there are other regions in which the fruit is actively entangled in war.

value of products, excluding some, but aiding the inclusion of others? A machine may be able to detect the the smoke of scorched earth in an oil, but would it tell us to care? Even outside of these explicitly political contexts, the value of an olive oil is directly impacted by the storytelling it is entangled in. Cord, for instance, believes that the quality of olive oil has increased enormously in the last

Graza is a new olive oil brand that has become popular, in part, through the design of its squeezy platic bottles (image courtesy of Graza).

Olives are believed to make up 25 per cent of the agricultural income of Palestinians, for example, but this has often been weaponised in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Long before the recent escalation in violence, there has been extensive documentation to show Palestinian olive groves in the West Bank being burnt by Israeli occupiers – one part of a series of illegal land grabs that have also resulted in the deaths of Palestinian farmers and the displacement of communities. In both of these contexts, olive oil is not simply a foodstuff, but also a marker of national identity – questions of food and agriculture are, among other things, always political in character. Sat within the context of market fluctuations and geopolitical impacts on the availability of crops, smelling machines will no doubt come to play a part in politics, even if their roles are invisible. Will these machines change our perception of the 80

10 to 15 years because producers have had to find ways of increasing value: “People don’t get into olive oil to get rich because, unfortunately, it’s treated as a commodity. Supermarkets have traditionally used it as a ‘loss leader’, so we’ve come to expect it to be cheap when good oil [actually] can’t be.” He goes on to explain that “producers have found that if they make a high quality product, they can distinguish their brand on the marketplace, whether it’s by participating in international competitions like [the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition] or getting good press about their products.” Adulteration and manipulation are so easy, the crudest markers of difference are in fact heritage and status. If we don’t maintain these ideals, production will be a continual race to the bottom. The free-market breeds competition in addition to innovation: it simultaneously pushes us to define the

boundaries of both ends of the spectrum. AI machines, however, have the potential to illuminate the quality and authenticity of products to consumers, which in turn might stabilise their value. But in this move towards market stasis, we run the risk of homogenising taste into easy categorisation. Homogeneity, however, is not always seen as negative; in some product categories, it is actively sought after. Marks, for instance, tells me that she has met one of the head blenders for PG Tips tea, a person whose job is to ensure that every teabag produced tastes reassuringly identical, expertly blending Assam crops in order to reach universally appreciated uniformity. “At first we use basic language to describe things, like ‘this is bitter’, and then you start to learn information for what flavour to look for,” Marks tells me. “As we build an understanding and matching vocabulary, you begin to appreciate these things. It’s an interesting correlation between effort and appreciation.” Yet if the knowledge of PG

Tips’s master blenders is, in future, inherited by machines, would this link between effort and appreciation be broken? In trying Carman’s oils, I do not detect a whiff of ice cream scum or taste Play-Doh. But whilst writing this piece, imagining the thrum of a machine with an intelligence beyond my comprehension, I’ve asked myself: if I had detected any of these supposed faults in the oils whilst the father and son shared stories of foraging wild herbs on their olive grove, would I have voiced my concern? Would I have trusted this inkling? Would I even have cared? I’ve come to the conclusion that even in my most self-aggrandising moments of identifying as a food writer, I would not – a good story is a good story after all. An olive oil being sold out of the back of an electric fittings shop by nice people makes for a damn good formula, perhaps even the best one. Lily Wakeley is an editor at a charity, as well as an independent writer.

RISING, DANCING, TWISTING Words Oli Stratford

Image courtesy of Mathmos.

OBJECT Astro

In June 2023, I was invited to catch a train to Poole, southwest England, as part of a press trip to the Mathmos lava lamp factory. I can’t tell you how pleased I was. I like lava; I like lamps. I like lava lamps. I had never been to Poole, but imagined I’d probably like that too. As the train started to pull out of London Waterloo, I had it all mapped out. I imagined an altogether lovely day on the English south coast, peering into bottles full of inscrutable liquids. I imagined bubbles of molten, illuminated wax ballooning, trembling and collapsing before my eyes. I imagined forgetting that these lamps run hot, and mildly burning myself while performing essential journalistic investigations. I imagined telling everyone who would listen that I actually already own a lava lamp, given to me one Christmas by my Aunt Sally and Uncle Graham, but that I’d irretrievably bleached its internal liquor by leaving it in direct sunlight. I imagined recounting this anecdote over and over again, forging an unbreakable chain of human connection with the staff of Mathmos, link by tedious link. Reader, all of this happened, but so too did something else. I discovered a mystery. For 60 years, Mathmos has manufactured Astro, the world’s first lava lamp. “Not many things have been made in Britain for 60 years,” reflects Cressida Granger, the company’s managing director, as she leads a tour around the factory. For those not lucky enough to have visited Poole (which does seem a nice place – I saw a lot of intrepid windsurfers and jaunty boats), I’m pleased to report that the Mathmos factory is exactly what you would imagine: a mad soda pop factory, filled with industrial nozzles spraying wax and mysterious fluids into crates of clanking bottles. “I’ve got to be quite basic about it because, obviously, it’s a secret,” begins Alan Staton, Mathmos’s master mixologist, as he swings a crate into position beneath said nozzles, “but we call it the master fluid.” Now, as much as I would like to know what master fluid is, that’s not the mystery I’m talking about. Mathmos may be cagey about the precise composition of its lava and liquid, but it’s not that cagey. After all, a company spokesperson has gone on record with The Guardian to confirm that the ingredients of a lava lamp are pretty basic: “fundamentally, coloured wax in coloured water”. But even if the wax and liquid aren’t especially mysterious, they are quite magical, especially when you see them in action in the showroom adjoining the factory. At the risk of repeating myself, the

Mathmos showroom is exactly what you would imagine: a dark space lined with lamps glowing blobby-beautiful amidst the gloom. “With lava lamps it’s all about the bottle,” Granger explains, as spheres of amber, red, blue and green trip lazily around her. “If you tool your own bottle, you have to make 20,000 a day because you need to use an automatic bottle plant,” she adds, a ball of yellow ascending behind her ear, a pink globe dropping beneath her shoulder. “We obviously own the mould for Astro because you can’t be messing around with doing a few. You have to commit.” Everything in the space is aglow and fluid. For those of you who don’t know Astro, you definitely do. Close your eyes and imagine a lava lamp – that’s Astro! Mathmos’s lamp has that familiar cinched metallic base, into which slots a glass bottle brimming with wax and liquid. A halogen bulb rests just underneath that bottle, while a blunt metal cap slips snugly over its neck, such that the interface between the two materials becomes seemingly seamless. For want of a more technical description, it’s as if someone has installed a viewing window in a cocktail shaker, and the martini within is being shaken slowly and globularly. The Mathmos showroom may be full of different lava lamps – rocket-like Telstars, candle-powered Pods, and child-safe Neos1 – but it’s the Astro that’s front and centre. “It’s our classic,” Granger explains simply. A confession: I consider the Astro to be a perfect piece of 20thcentury industrial design, and I think you should too. This isn’t just nostalgia for my childhood lamp either, but a full-throated endorsement of the sophistication of its design. After all, the lava lamp does something which, to the best of my knowledge, no other industrial lamp in history does: it thinks through the full implications of how a lightbulb works and then builds that into its design. A big claim, admittedly, but please bear with me while I now justify said bigness. The Astro was created in 1963 by Edward Craven Walker, an amateur inventor who based his lamp around a simple engineering principle: when illuminated, a halogen bulb gives off heat as well as light. That may be basic, but Walker’s insight was to make this the central element of his lamp. Or, put differently, despite heating up being one of only two things that a halogen bulb does, Walker stands alone in having noticed the design potential of hotness. When the Astro warms up, the heat generated by its bulb raises temperatures at the bottom of the bottle, slowly melting the wax. As this material melts, it expands, dropping its density below that 1

Despite being indelibly connected with children’s bedrooms, most lava lamps aren’t formally certified for safe use for anyone under 14. Neo, developed with designer Jonathan Coles, remedies this thanks to a base that includes fixtures, shatterproof glass, a cooler operating temperature, and a structure that screws together so that the bottle can’t be knocked out of its base.

of the liquid in which it rests, meaning that hotter portions of the wax start to extend upwards in blubbering tendrils, before breaking off into quivering spheres. Suddenly, you have lava. At this point, the elegance of Walker’s design kicks in. The elongated, tapering form of the Astro’s bottle means that the temperature gradient of the liquid drops in correspondence with

Edward Craven Walker, the inventor of the lava lamp (image courtesy of Mathmos).2

the ascension of the wax. Once a wax sphere has floated to the top, the liquid is cool enough to contract the material, increasing its density and therefore sending it spiralling back to the base. Here, the inclusion of a metal spring at the very base of the bottle completes the effect (“It’s a heating element, but it also breaks up the surface tension,” Staton explains, “because without that, you haven’t got a lava lamp”) and the falling wax is, after a moment’s delay, reabsorbed jigglingly into the base lava. It’s a complex, ever changing effect, but one determined by considerations of form, materiality, and the nature of its light source – impossible ornament through practical engineering. “It’s really form follows function,” Granger says, “because the bottle is exactly the right shape to make those lava bubbles work.” Like I said, it’s a masterpiece. Which made me think that writing this essay was going to be easy. The lamp would presumably be included in every major museum collection going, with a huge wealth of curatorial insights about its value and wider 2

Walker based his lamp on the work of engineer Donald Dunnet, who held a patent on a “display device using liquid bubbles in another liquid”. While Dunnet deserves credit for the idea behind the lamp, however, it was Walker who introduced industrial design and transformed the idea into a product.

cultural resonances that I could draw on. Yet as I clicked through the online catalogues of MoMA, the V&A and the Vitra Design Museum, a creeping realisation began to set in – Astro wasn’t in any of them. I assumed this must be a mistake, but when I couldn’t find reference to it in the London Design Museum’s collection either, I began to panic. If a British design classic was going to be anywhere, wouldn’t it be there? To try and resolve the situation, I texted Johanna Agerman Ross, the Design Museum’s newly appointed chief curator,3 to ask whether it was possible that Astro really doesn’t feature in its collection. Having only started in the role a month previously (and having been ambushed by text at about 6pm on a Sunday), she didn’t know for sure, but did suggest that lamps like Astro can be difficult to collect, “because you can’t fully understand their function without them being plugged in,” and also flagged up the potential challenges of conserving roiling liquid and wax. Which is all well and good, but the nearby Natural History Museum has successfully conserved hedgehogs, assorted beaks, and bits of old squid that Charles Darwin stuffed into formaldehyde,4 so a lava lamp can’t be that much of a problem, surely? While the museums had let me down, I was convinced that the secondary literature would bear up my belief in the Astro’s design significance. Yet as I read through all 240 pages of Lesley Jackson’s The Sixties: Decade of Design Revolution, I couldn’t find a single reference to Walker’s lamp. There were points at which I thought Jackson was heading there, like when she noted that “[of] all the geometric forms that were utilised during the 1960s, it was those based on the circle which had the greatest resonance,” or her observation that “the 1960s was such a fruitful and creative period in the history of lighting”, but the move onto the greatest circle-based 1960s lighting design of them all just never occurred. Elizabeth Wilhide’s Design: The Whole Story proved similarly lava-less, while Mel Byars’s The Design Encyclopaedia restricted itself to a mention of Mathmos having once collaborated with the British designer Michael Marriott. It felt scandalous. Astro is iconic, but few people in serious design criticism seemed to be talking about it. This, of course, could not stand. Astro was the first piece of namebrand lighting design I’d ever owned, and even if Aunt Sally and Uncle Graham’s gift had ended in pallid disaster, I couldn’t let their uncley/auntly taste stand disrespected in this way. As such, I set out to solve the mystery: why doesn’t the lava lamp get the critical acclaim it deserves? 3

Who also happens to be the director of this publication – I don’t have access to chief curators on tap.

Or something like that. I’m not a man of science; I don’t know the details.

Down in Poole, 2023 has been busy. Mathmos has experienced an uptick in sales ever since the Covid-19 pandemic (people were stuck at home: they wanted things to stare at), as well as occupying itself with celebrations to mark Astro’s 60th anniversary. In particular, the company has commissioned five figures from across culture to create new editions of the lamp: designers Sabine Marcelis, Studio Job and Camille Walala, as well as photographer Rankin and new wave band Duran Duran. It’s an eclectic list, but, then, Astro is an eclectic lamp. “It does have a very broad appeal,” confirms Granger, “which is a marketeer’s nightmare.” The lamp’s buyer demographic veers wildly across age groups (although does, Granger adds, skew more male than female) and different audiences respond to different aspects of the design. For some, it’s the lamp’s association with British music from the 1960s and 70s that resonates (Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and David Bowie all owned versions of Astro); others enjoy its sci-fi cachet built up through appearances in shows such as Doctor Who and The Prisoner; while there are various sets of buyers drawn to the lamp’s industrial design, kitsch appeal, or nostalgia. “There are so many different people who like the lamp,” Granger summarises. “It’s kind of a pop product really, but there’s also this design flavour. So, [for the new editions], we wanted to choose people from different walks of life.” Thing is, what do you do when designing a new take on Astro? The core element of the lamp, its lava, is essentially unchangeable, so you’re already severely limited in the moves you can make. “You can’t change too much or the iconic character disappears,” summarises Job Smeets, the cofounder and art director of Studio Job. “So a project like this is not really about inventing a new principle or adding something to the functionality – it’s about communication.” To Smeets, this kind of communication is important, not least because perceptions of the lamp have changed over the course of its lifespan. “It used to be an industrial product you would see everywhere, from Stanley Kubrick movies to ordinary households,” he explains, “but it has now become quite niche because it’s dependent on the technology and the heat of the light bulb. It’s a bit like other [older] products such as a record player or an alarm clock – they stop being seen as industrial design and become icons instead.” So, what do you do with an icon? Sabine Marcelis, one of Smeets’ fellow designers on the Astro anniversary project, offers one potential answer. “I have to admit,” she tells me over Zoom, “when I first read the brief, I was like, ‘Oh God, this is really restrictive.’” Marcelis had initially hoped

to redesign the light’s form, or add multiple colours of wax within a single bottle, but both ideas were quickly ruled out. Although she was familiar with the design from childhood (“I had a friend who had one and I was pretty jealous – I imagined it must have cost about €1m”), Marcelis acknowledges that she had spent little time considering the actual operation of the lamp. “Growing up, I had no idea what the hell it was or how it worked,” she says. “It was only when I started playing around with the ones Mathmos sent where I was like, ‘It’s so simple. It’s genius.’” As part of its brief, Mathmos set clear limitations around altering the functional operation of the design (and therefore its form), but the challenge of redesigning Astro is actually even more restrictive if you consider one of the central quirks of the design – a quirk which, weirdly, is best illustrated by the early 2000s TV drama Gilmore Girls. In ‘Love and War and Snow’, an episode from the show’s first season, lava lamps get a shoutout when Taylor Doose, a local busybody, gets into an argument with Andrew, who owns the neighbourhood bookshop: Taylor

Andrew Taylor

Well, excuse me, Andrew, but some of us have businesses to run that don’t involve peddling drug paraphernalia to kids. It was a lava lamp, Taylor. There is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs.

Child drugging aside, the mention of “use” does tap into something fundamental about Astro: it’s one of the few notable lighting designs that isn’t intended to illuminate anything external to itself. “A lava lamp is a lamp, but its purpose isn’t to light a room,” explains Marcelis. “Its purpose is to light itself and highlight its material properties.” Whereas most lights profess to be functional, the lava lamp doesn’t – at least not in any straightforward way. Since visiting Poole, for example, I’ve set up an Astro in my bedroom5 and, qua lamp, it’s pretty rubbish. Astro doesn’t give you enough light to read or work by; the light it does emit is distractingly tinted by whatever colour master fluid you opted for; and you have no real control over where the light falls. Like I said, it’s not the best lamp. But criticising Astro by the standards of a conventional lamp misses the point. It’s not there to light a space – it’s there for you to become lost in its waxen whorls. 5

Kinky.

“I sometimes say it has no use, but it actually does have a function,” Granger says. “It’s there to create a mood or a feeling in a space. They’re not serious, but they’re not frivolous either. They’re not utilitarian or useful – their use is for pleasure.” To give credit to Taylor Doose, “There is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs,” actually captures quite a lot of that sentiment. This sense that the lava lamp has come to sit unorthodoxly within conventional ideas of lighting is part of the appeal for the design’s fans. “There’s nothing quite like it,” says Anthony Voz, a trained industrial designer who has established himself as both a collector of lava lamps (he estimates that he currently owns around 400, most of which are in storage) and a leading authority on the lamp’s history.6 “There are millions of designs around the world, beautiful lights like those from [design brands such as] Kartell and Artemide,” he says, “but none of them, none of them, has the appeal and loyal following of the lava lamp.” Voz is passionate about the history of the lamp’s development, but he attributes its popularity to something outside of its engineering. “It uses the element of a light bulb to power it up, but it’s really more than a light – it transcends light,” he tells me. “It’s a lamp, but it’s actually a piece of theatre, it’s a piece of interactivity, it’s a piece of relaxation, it’s a piece of tranquillity. There isn’t anything else out there that has that element of playfulness and interactivity.” This emphasis on theatricality certainly comes to the fore in both Smeets’ and Marcelis’s Astro redesigns, each of which obscures elements of the lamp’s operation in order to emphasis its visual effect. Smeets has added a gold coating to the top and bottom of his bottle, for example, creating a narrower viewing window which suggests that the lamp’s blood-red lava is emerging from nowhere. “It makes it quite dramatic,” he says, “which is what it should be: a tiny little theatre.” Marcelis, meanwhile, has opted for an all-white lamp with a frosted glass bottle – a haze from behind which neon-yellow lava drifts dreamily into view. According to Mathmos, none of its designs have previously employed a frosted finish; once you’ve seen Marcelis’s in action, you struggle to understand why. The glass’s finish diffuses the light, but also ramps up the sense of mystery, intrigue and downright sci-fi oddness that lava lamps tend to engender in a viewer. “It was a case of zooming in on the one thing that could make it different and maybe more interesting,” Marcelis says. “Everything else I stripped away.” Paying close attention to a lava lamp’s lava – and, in particular, its contrast to the surrounding design – also highlights one reason why the 6

Voz is the driving force behind flowoflava.com, which is the most comprehensive and interesting history of the lamp and its industrial development that I’ve found. I wholeheartedly recommend visiting it.

Astro doesn’t get the critical attention it deserves: it’s an awkward object to make sense of. “The look [of the design] is modernist, right?” explains Smeets. “The form is iconic and there’s this simpleness to the execution of the bottle. It absolutely has a modernist attitude towards developing a product, but it’s not modernist because of that theatrical aspect. You’re

The Astro Lantern, an early (and now discontinued) version of the lava lamp (image courtesy of Mathmos).

getting some kind of magical, hippy [effect], with these almost Henry Moorelike sculptures [appearing in the wax].” He’s right: there’s a stylistic tension in the different elements of the lamp, with its fluid allure chafing against its more traditional design credentials. Rather than noticing the elegance of

the Astro’s engineering, your eye is drawn to the visual effect it generates, which in turn encourages the idea that the lamp isn’t so much an industrial product as it is a visual gimmick. The Astro plays with the same rounded, poppy forms that characterised the 1960s work of celebrated designers such as Verner Panton and Vico Magistretti, and it builds out from its light source in a manner that chimes with venerated 20th-century lighting designer Gino Sarfatti’s maxim that “the lighting system is simply a means of support that highlights the characteristics of the lightbulb”. Astro follows a lot of the principles demonstrated by more vaunted designs from the same period, but the use it puts them to is sheer visual delight – a decision that leaves it open to charges of kitschiness and novelty. “When we used to sell to John Lewis [in the 1990s and 2000s], we would always be included in the novelty lighting section,” notes Granger. “We wanted to be with the design, but we’d be put next to the light-up nodding dog instead.” Today, this same suspicion as to whether Astro is actually design, whatever that means, still holds strong. This autumn, for example, I was invited to an industry dinner that was also attended by a buyer for a major design store. Deciding to put my time to good use, I asked for an opinion on lava lamps. Their reply was quick and decisive: “Horrible.” The lamp, they felt, was a 1960s nostalgia act, with no place in a discerning, contemporary home. Yet as I explained my belief in the lamp’s design value (and its place in my discerning, contemporary bedroom) it soon became clear that they didn’t necessarily disagree about the sophistication of the lamp’s design, they just disliked the effect to which it was yoked. The flow of lava, they felt, was too kitsch, too frivolous, too nostalgic and, dare I say it, just too fun to be good design.7 And if you dislike the lamp’s lava effect, Astro doesn’t have much going for it – in fact, it starts to become objectionable. This, Voz tells me, is not an unusual reaction; actually, it’s part of the reason he began collecting them. “One of the things that was very interesting to me,” he says, “was that here was a product that everyone has an opinion about.” In researching this essay, the opinion I have come across most frequently is that the lava lamp is a giddy flourish of 1960s design. It’s not an assessment I agree with. For one thing, the Astro is totally 1990s. “I picked Mathmos up in 1989,” Granger tells me, recounting how she and her former business partner David Mulley acquired the company (then known as Crestworth Ltd) from Walker and his wife Christine at the 7

I don’t think they’d agree with my assessment that the lava lamp is too fun to merit adequate appreciation, but if they want to put their conflicting view forward, they can write their own essay.

end of the decade. Despite having grown up in Poole, she professes never to have come across lava lamps until brought into contact with them as part of her work as an antiques dealer. “When I saw my first one, I just thought it was great,” she says; fortunately, consumers seemed to agree. In the 10 years following Granger and Mulley’s acquisition, Mathmos doubled in size every year, eventually rising to a turnover of around £18m. Anecdotally, I can confirm this. I am a child of the 90s and adverts for Mathmos lava lamps were in all the video game magazines I bought; they filled the windows of The Gadget Shop and all the other 90s stalwarts I saw while pottering around town with my mum; and they were bubblingly present in most of my friends’ bedrooms. Aunts Sally and uncles Graham must have been very generous that decade. “I think it was partly because they had basically disappeared in the 80s,” Granger suggests as to their sudden rise in popularity in the 1990s. “It was pre-internet, so things could just disappear completely. When they came back in the 90s, younger people were seeing them for the first time. They felt very fresh and we definitely sold more lava lamps in the 1990s than we did in the 1960s.” I don’t think this is surprising. After all, Astro was a good match for the 90s. Its British manufacturing and poppy vibe seemed to gel with the Cool Britannia cultural movement that dominated much of the decade (and which was, in itself, basically a 60s tribute act),8 while its constantly shifting lava seemed to reflect the emergent aesthetics of digital design and 90s video game culture. It was, I would suggest, a perfect lamp for late-night Playstation, fuelled by all kinds of things Taylor Doose would disapprove of. “[The resurgence] was about the same time as that whole era of inflatable products,” Smeets recalls of his own 90s interactions with the lamp, “so it felt like part of a wider design phenomenon. It has that morphing effect like [a screen saver] on a computer screen, but done in a very analogue way.” As the decade wore on, the lava lamp started to further coalesce with the rise of Y2K aesthetics in design, with their emphasis on flowing, unbroken, futuristic forms. Despite being 30-years-old, and manufactured from lowtech materials and processes (as far as I can tell, the most adventurous technique used in making a lava lamp is metal spinning), Astro seemed to speak to people’s ideas of what the future should look like. “It’s this idea of the future,” Marcelis summarises, “but seen from the past.” In 2000, this process culminated with one of the company’s most ambitious projects to date: Fluidium. A contemporary take on the lava 8

One intriguing possibility is that these connections to British culture sometimes count against the lamp critically – at least domestically. “People do have different takes from different countries,” Granger tells me, “and we maybe get more flak in Britain than we do in other countries.” I can’t explain why this would be, although one thought is that the lamp has perhaps been more present in the UK than elsewhere during its boom years – maybe the occasional backlash has, in turn, been stronger too.

lamp, Fluidium was the work of industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, who abandoned Astro’s machined metal lines in favour of an injection-moulded polycarbonate body that seemed to itself be flowing. If Astro was space-age in inflection, Fluidium was resolutely cyber, with a sinuous, droplet-like form that seemed to speak to the millennium’s wider techno-optimism. “It was very much of its time,” says Lovegrove, whose design remained in production for 16 years, and is now considered a collector’s item.9 “You had the Apple iMac at around the same time, and there was this idea of using polymer in an elegant, noble way for its properties – meaning, you know, light transmission and so on.” The result was divisive (one person I spoke to while researching this essay deemed it the greatest of all the lava lamps; another rejected it as “spermy”) and not a commercial success, but Lovegrove’s ambition in searching for a form that would move the lamp on from its 1960s expression was undeniable. “Being asked to design [a lava lamp] means you don’t start from zero, because you already have a compass embedded in you of what that product represents,” Lovegrove explains. “It’s a 60s icon, but I wanted something that was more the mood of the time.” Personally, I love Fluidium (and if any aunts or uncles are reading this, do please remember that Christmas is coming), not solely because it speaks of a particular moment in design history, but also because it’s a demonstration of the lava lamp’s capacity to shapeshift between different periods – something Lovegrove acknowledges too. “I think it’s the kind of product that can go any way,” he tells me, before drawing a parallel between the lava lamp and the profusion of plasma lights, fibre-optic lamps and other science-inflected novelty designs that had also become prominent in the 90s. “I think all that stuff is really great, it’s just not packaged in the right way,” he adds. “Those products have a kind of magical charm, which I think there should be room for in design.” The challenge, he believes, is in repositioning this kind of ambient, theatrical lighting as worthy of serious design consideration, which is where the flexibility of the lava lamp’s appeal may come into play. “It can go scientific, it can go fun, it can go for children, it can go super popular, it can go hippy, it can go space age,” Lovegrove notes. “We have a tendency [in design] to banalise geometries into ridiculous simplicity, whereas what I like about the lava lamp is that it’s a dialogue. It’s an act of morphogenesis, always.” This may be one reason why the lava lamp tends to be dismissed as being a piece of unserious design. For an object with such a pronounced 9

Which, personally, I think is a shame, because Fluidium is completely in step with the recent renaissance of Y2K aesthetics. “If you pushed it the right way, it could fly,” Lovegrove says. “It’s of the moment, whereas shiny metal is not.” Preach!

aesthetic, it’s still something of a blank canvas, absorbing different references at different points in its own timeline. “Despite its simple design, a lava lamp’s contents are as permutable as an alphabet,” wrote poet Nora Claire Miller in her excellent 2023 essay ‘The Language of Lava Lamps’ for The Paris Review, but I actually think the lamp’s design is pretty permutable too. It’s an icon that’s simultaneously 60s and 90s; a design that is both highly engineered and staggeringly kitsch; an aesthetic that’s wholly digital, but entirely analogue;10 a lamp equally beloved by kids, spaced-out 20-somethings, and nostalgic boomers; a visual gimmick, but also a rigorous display of material properties. Astro takes on a lot of its surrounding culture, for both better and worse, resulting in a whole jumble of contradictions that make for a design that is very hard to place and assess in isolation. Just as Marcelis felt as a child, it’s a design where you constantly wonder what the hell it actually is. On the train back from Poole, I got to thinking about Edward Craven Walker. With no formal training and no other products of note to his name, he was clearly an unconventional kind of designer. But he does seem to have understood the appeal of his design perfectly. “It’s like the cycle of life,” he said of Astro’s operation. “It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.” It’s a good description of the lamp’s wax, but also a description of the design itself. The Astro has twice become indelibly connected with the design culture of a particular decade, before being rejected as an anachronism in the next. The lamp’s heyday in the 60s and 70s was followed by its disappearance in the 80s; its resurgence in the 90s was followed by contraction in the 2000s. “It does come in waves,” Voz agrees. “We had the first era, then we had this massive revival in the 90s. I think we’re seeing a new revival right now.” Well, I certainly hope so, because there’s a lot about the lava lamp that’s excellent. It’s a design that unashamedly marches to the beat of its own drum, but which still follows sound design principles, not least the fact that all of its elements are discrete. As such, if any individual part breaks, it can be straightforwardly replaced as a single component: an emphasis on easy repair that is supported by Mathmos selling spare parts and legislation compliant halogen bulbs for all of its lamps,11 including for versions of Astro stretching back to the 1960s originals. “The beauty of Mathmos is that you can take a lamp from the 60s, buy a new bottle and it will work seamlessly,” 10

It’s the only lamp I know where you have to actively plan ahead to use it, because the lava can sometimes take up to three hours to warm up. “We live in a world of instant gratification,” Voz says. “If you want music, you can get it. If you want videos, you can get them. The lava lamp makes you disciplined in a way, but it also has an element of attachment because you have to wait for it.”

says Voz. “The future of design will be repairability, but that’s already present in Mathmos’s design. If you look at the lava lamp, it’s very minimal, but it was, and still is today, very much ahead of its time.” All of which I agree with, but I also don’t want to hit too hard, because at least one positive corollary of Astro having been denied so

Alan Staton, Mathmos’s master mixologist (image courtesy of Mathmos).

much of the historicising and theorising that goes on within design is that it’s been spared so much of the historicising and theorising that goes on within design: it’s a lamp that doesn’t seem to worry about prevailing design discourse, but which is content to plough its own furrow and put forward sheer pleasure as enough of a justification for something to exist. “Which is why it’s not a design thing,” Smeets tells me. “It’s more of a common thing and for everybody, like a stapler or a lighter. We can talk endlessly about the greatness of the product, but that’s just amongst us. The lava lamp is not in the field of design any more – it’s outside of all that.” So while I’d still like to see Astro in more museums and books, it is nice to think that one reason it may not get the critical acclaim it merits is because, actually, it doesn’t really need it. Astro has already been selling for 60 years and, given its price tag of around £85, it’s fairly accessible to wide audiences – at least by design standards. “It is a democratic design,” Granger tells me, “and it needs to be. 11

It has been suggested to me that Astro’s use of halogen bulbs is a failing of the lamp, given that they’re not the most energy efficient means of lighting. Which is probably true, but I do think that a sense of proportion is needed. Lava lamps aren’t conventional lights – they run sporadically – whereas all of the articles I’ve found online attacking their environmental credentials seem to assume that they’re running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as if their owners are living in a perpetual swingers’ party. Occasional use, I would suggest, is not going to set the world on fire.

It needs to be for everyone, because it’s not this sort of elite thing.” Astro may not be in as many of the critical annals and archives as it should be, but it is in people’s houses. Still, it would be nice to pin down what Astro actually is, particularly given that so much of its lack of recognition seems to stem from its nebulousness. So, as my train wended its way back north, I checked in on Mathmos’s website for a final time. Clicking through a few links, I came across what I assumed was a typo: a description of Edward Craven Walker as “a naturist”. Assuming a gentle English naturalist, friend to hedgehogs and hedgerows alike, had been gloriously mislabelled, I was quite shocked by what I went on to read. “Aside from inventing the lava lamp and various other patented inventions, he also made underwater naturist films,” the website explained, “and owned a naturist camp in Dorset.” Upon Walker’s death in August 2000, the headline for his obituary in the Los Angeles Times was even blunter: ‘Edward C. Walker; Nudist Invented Lava Lamp’. “Mr Walker,” Granger tells me when we meet up in London a few weeks later, “was not an easy man to pin down.” Given that she worked closely with Walker and his wife Christine for a number of years, the latter of whom is still involved with Mathmos, I assume she would know. “He was an accountant in a grey suit, but he also invented the lava lamp and made naturist films,” she explains. “It wasn’t easy to fit him into a groove. He was always his own person, which is why the Astro is really of him. It’s not easy to pigeonhole.” Suddenly, I feel like I know what Astro is: it is exactly the design I would expect a naturist accountant to come up with. Strict lines, meticulously engineered and manufactured, but fundamentally letting it all hang out in aid of a good time. The lava lamp represents careful design, fully in service to raucous, silly fun. And when you’ve got that kind of joie de vivre, who the hell needs critical respectability? Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno and Design Reviewed.