COVERSTORY
“Hello, am I speaking to the past?”
FEATURE
Indispensable
NOT YOU
What is left? January 2021 № 75
Happy New Year ever yone! The year 2020 has been an unprecedented unexpected year. A year in which COVID-19 dominated and has had an enormous impact on the lives of us all, whether we were ready for it or not. We all have a new handshake, became an exper t in online meetings and streaming and have a new word of the year, the ‘anderhalvemetersamenleving’. This year will go down in histor y as the year of social distancing. Even with so many possible methods of contacting each other, we experience such a lack of connection. Yet we have managed to hold on hope together. Last month vaccinating star ted, which star ted turning the page on a new year. 2021 will be our year! Enjoy this new year as much as you are going to enjoy reading this new edition of the Turn The Page! The star t of this year is also marked with the loss of one of our honorar y members. Jan Bernard Heeman was former managing director of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Working at our faculty, he oversaw a big increase in student numbers and lay the foundation for the current way of education at our faculty. He helped our study assocation, ID, to connect all students in the way we still do today. In memoriam.
Lonneke Orij Chairman of ID
CHECKLIST CONTENTS
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Connect the dots RECURRING B.A.B.E+
FEATURE Inspired by nature, Nature inspired by us
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ID PAGES T TP’s evolution
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FEATURE Circular mussel shells
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COVERSTORY “Hello, am I speaking to the past? ”
INTERVIEW The good not the bad
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ADVERTORIAL Rendering the future
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FEATURE Indispensable
IDE XPO Ordinar y things
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SPECIAL
ID PAGES Upcoming events
NOT YOU What is left?
COLUMN From Careless to Caring
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SUSTAINABILIT Y We <3 Ear th
RECURRING Hutspot EDGE Who has the power?
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January July 2020 2021|| turn the page
CHECKLIST EDITORIAL
We have all been asked what our most significant achievement is. Often my answer would be something related to reaching a specific goal. However, when reflecting on that question, for this 75th-anniversary edition of Turn The Page themed Milestone, I wondered what accomplishment or realization influenced my life the most. Could it be a period of time when I gradually changed perspectives, as told in our cover stor y? Or as the ar ticle on biodiversity discusses, the moment I decided to consume more environmentally responsible? This edition is filled with explorations of past developments, but also and arguably more impor tant for us as designers, possible outlooks on the road ahead. When it comes to my personal most influential event -and probably also yours- it might just be something less distinct. An achievement I cannot actively recall, and I had little to no influence over, yet influences my life on a daily basis. Take, for example, being the first of millions of sperm cells to successfully fer tilize an
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egg cell. Without that specific DNA combination, my character might as well be ver y different. Sometimes milestones are those exact moments where you did not have a choice and just had to go with the flow. Creating different perspectives, ideas and inspiration in the ever-changing field of design is the aim of this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Turn The Page committee. We have added the rubrics Not You (?), in which we discuss designing for minorities. Behind the Pages, where we sit down with design professionals. Edge, which re-evaluates the bounders of what is socially acceptable. And We <3 Ear th, in which we discover the road towards a sustainable world. I hope you are as excited as we are these explore new points of view. Lastly, we have been working on making Turn The Page more environmentally friendly. Printed with renewably sourced ink on FSC cer tified paper, this edition is the most sustainable yet.
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CONNECT THE DOTS... .36 .37
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Connect the dots to reveal our mascot, which you might encounter somewhere further down the pages... This exercise reminds us that we are continually growing and learning, and that reaching milestones is done step by step, with effort and patience. 3 by Liza Oomens
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January 2021 | turn the page
BABE+
APPS
BOOKS TOA S T
BLOGS EVENTS by Julie Leclercq
TOAST arose from the need for a slower, more thoughtful way of life. The inventors create and design simple and original clothing, homeware and a magazine. The clothes are made using traditional textile techniques, such as block-printing or indigo-dyeing, and are intended to remain timeless, sustainable, and long-lasting. But TOAST is more than just a clothing brand. With an online magazine the creators want to to nur ture creative communities. This magazine is full of ar ticles about ar t, culture, travel and books. They also organize online events, workshops and create podcasts. www.toa.st
‘We barely talk about: Why do you do what you do? Why do you think your work should exist? This is interesting, because most designers have an unbelievably strong drive to create.’ Blank Space Magazine inter views designers, focusing on why they design and their position in society, not what they produce. Designers who are motivated to create, often have a strong vision of how they want to contribute to the world. The third issue has just been published; A magazine with a message. www.BlankSpaceMagazine.com
B L A N K S PA C E M AG A ZI N E turn the page | January 2021
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BABE+
‘PureRef is there so you can focus on creating.’ Speed up your creative process and organize your inspiration with a program that keeps track of your images. Drag and drop your images, make mood boards or collect reference images. Perhaps to make a collage? The program is ver y easy to use and free to download, so get inspired now. www.pureref.com
ALGORITHMIC PERFUMERY
PUREREF
With an intuitive inter face, a sensor y machine and the finest ingredients, algorithmic per fumer y creates a per fume that is reflective of your distinct interests and personality. They believe in empowering people with technology, by distinguishing themselves from others with their own scent. First, you will be asked to take a questionnaire on your smar tphone, in order to bind your personality to the algorithm. With Ar tificial Intelligence, your personal scent will be blended with the machine. Not just a unique scent, but also an experience. www.algorithmicper fumer y.com
De Kunstmeisjes take you along in the world of ar t and let you know which exhibitions you must see. Ever y week they post reviews of current exhibitions in museums and galleries in the Netherlands. Be inspired by the different highlights and projects they display on their blog, where you can also find an agenda with all the current events they got going on. ‘Ar t does not have to be difficult, and cer tainly not elitist.’ www.kunstmeisjes.com
K U N S T M E I SJ E S
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BABE+
24 CHAMBRES ‘24chambers: where the music is classic, the crowd is small, and the drinks are free!’ The 24chambres event takes place almost ever y month and is always organized at a different location. A few weeks before, you will receive a secret message in which the date and location will be announced. Unfor tunately, only a small group can get together offline due to the circumstances, so be quick! If that does not sound like music to your ears... www.24classics.com Are you curious how you can taste freedom in times like these, when we must keep ourselves indoors? Edith Eva Eger reveals her fascinating life in her autobiography ‘De Keuze’. At the age of sixteen, she was depor ted to Auschwitz, where she was forced to dance for Nazi doctor Mengele. Meanwhile, her parents were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Besides sharing her remarkable stories, she tells how she, as a psychologist, helps people to choose for freedom and liberate themselves from their own thoughts.
DE KEUZE FRE DE RIQU E DAU BA L The ar tist Frederique Daubal explores various creative fields. She currently works in Paris. Her work is somewhat conceptual, humanized with humour and irony. Daubal, educated as a Graphic Designer, always challenges its definition. With many different materials and medias, she refers to the fantasy that can be found in ever yday life. By hiding faces, an interaction is created in which people look for what is happening beyond or in order to let people interpret the images themselves. Ar t in which it is all about acting, reacting and imagining. www.daubal.com
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“Hello,
COVERSTORY
am I speaking to the past?”
Quick, we are playing Charades! Act out that you are making a phone call. What gesture did you make with your hand? Did you hold your pink to your mouth and your thumb to your ear, as an old time phone horn? Or did you hold your hand flat against your ear, as a smartphone? Most twenty to thirty year olds will remember the horn, but have we actually used it? Younger children, that grew up with tablets and smartphones, do not know any better and will never pretend to pick up the horn. Another example; say you are opening the window of a car. Did you push the window button, nice and easy? Or did you still roll the window down, turning the lever as fast as you could, as you probably remembered doing as a kid? by Liza Oomens and Megan Seker
It is remarkable how these hand signals changed over time. Something that went without saying for one generation, leaves giant question marks for the next. This indicates a major gap in the way design is perceived. Some designs last, but others fade into oblivion. Some stay more or less the same and make a comeback, while others only cast a shadow of what they used to represent. Let’s explore the past by looking at designs of today. 1
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C OVERSTORY RETRO IS ALWAYS IN FASHION
Mid-century modern cabinets, big light bulbs that look like incandescent bulbs, vintagelooking water cookers, bikes and record players. What all these products have in common, is that they appear to belong in a past decade. However, they are popular today. There is something about designs of the past that speaks to us. Loving the aesthetic of a past decade is not just something of the last few years. In the seventies, the aesthetic of the fifties was popular, and in the past decade, the nineties have had a revival. It seems that the style that was popular when we were small children, is the style we want to re-explore now. Could this have something to do with associations with fond childhood memories, or do we romanticise a time we did not experience ourselves? Yet not all designs are
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this romanticised and some are tossed out as the way of thinking and living changed, only to make their reappearance later on.
BACK WHERE WE BEGAN Design is a funny thing; in a way it strives for comfort and making
lives easier, yet also pushes boundaries and likes to explore the unknown. Take for instance a corset; this undergarment was initially designed to make women well-shaped and look desirable in the most beautiful, extravagant dresses. But as the independence of women grew over the years, the corset was viewed more and more as a cage, rather than an upgrade to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appearances. The corset was tossed away, and women were proud to be unrestrained. As years passed by, the need
to feel beautiful, curvy and feminine arose for some women and advertisement for corsets emerged again, only now to be called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;shape-wearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The same funny reoccurrence happened with our phones. The first Nokia had the size of a brick and as technology improved these not-so-smart phones shrunk significantly. This was very convenient, since you could now be available anytime and anywhere. But technical development did not stand still, and phones became smarter
January 2021 | turn the page
COVERSTORY and better equipped. To see the better pictures, apps or sites that were developed, a better and especially larger screen was deemed necessary. So basically, phones were huge, then shrunk, only to be enlarged again later on. When you think of it, it is quite amusing how our need to pursue and surpass trends as designers, also leads us back to where we came from. 1
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C OVERSTORY ALTERNATING ATTITUDES
Not only products have evolved, but also the way we perceive and value them. If you would have asked people 40 years ago what they thought of a portable phone, they would answer that they did not see any need for it. We have a phone at home, who would want to be reachable every second of the day? Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine our ever online lives without our personal assistant in the pocket of our pants. Speaking of pants, jeans have quite a history as well. They started as an essential for workmen and were later worn by rebellious members of counterculture. Jeans where introduced to the masses as casual wear, as seen on stars like James Dean in big Hollywood movies of the fifties. The first jeans only served practical use, they evolved into symbols of disobedience only to become fashion items in the end. Today,
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they have become mainstream and can be found in anyone’s closet. Another interesting story is how cigarettes got adopted by women. Smoking thick cigars used to be the epitome of masculinity while it was socially unacceptable for women. Due to the changes in the social and economic status of women caused by The Great War and a PR campaign promoting cigarettes to women as fashionable ‘torches of freedom’, cigarettes became a new symbol of female emancipation. Now, knowing they cause damage to our lungs, they have become a little less appealing, although they are still integrated in society.
EVERLASTING ICONS
What about products that have disappeared? Some of them are in fact still here. We use them as symbols in everyday design. These icons aim to explain the use, or the goal of products and most people understand them
immediately. They explain as much as possible, with as little as possible. But did you ever realise what these tiny images actually represent? For instance, back in 1876, the first microphone was introduced. This was a wired device that conducted an electrical current as a means of transporting soundwaves. A technology which seems slightly ancient this day yet is still used to indicate the microphone on your earphones. Another example is the savebutton on your Word documents. This tiny square cornered in your screen represents a so-called floppy. These floppies used to be the first flash drives ranging in a storing capacity from 800 kB to 2.5 MB, which is roughly the size of only forty images. We
January 2021 | turn the page
COVERSTORY could not even imagine the use of a flash drive with that little capacity anymore. Yet nowadays, this image represents your nearly unlimited number of documents, essays, biographies and love poems.
THINK ABOUT IT
In a way, it is quite peculiar that these remnants of a digital past represent a part of our digital future. Icons of products that only our parents or even grandparents have used, mark the everchanging field of design, yet our need to stick to the recognisable. Will our own grandchildren still use these icons? Or will they become abandoned, replaced by
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symbols of a new era? Change would not necessarily be a bad thing, but rather something to consider. We must stay critical on the roads we choose to walk on, yet also remember to look back every now and again, to see where it all began. Design is like the archaeological layers in the earth, where one significant development paves the road for its successor. The next time you look at a product, think about how its design is inextricably linked to its predecessors and the context it was made in. 3
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FEATURE
SS
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U L C AR R I
EL S HE
What can mussel shells teach us about the circular economy? In a circular economy, design is about more than just creating a sustainable product. In this system based on eliminating waste and minimising the use of resources, the design process is aimed at preserving the value of products and materials and keeping them in the economic system for as long as possible. So how do you do that? PhD candidate Marita Sauerwein came up with a novel material based on ground mussel shells and showed through 3D printing technology that the end of life of a product is really just the beginning. by Marc de Kool | layout by Annabel Schipper
INSPIRED BY WASTE In the early stages of her PhD, Sauerwein inter viewed designers who 3D printed with sustainability in mind. She found that the materials being used did not suppor t the aim of maintaining product or material integrity or
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January 2021 | turn the page
FEATURE
the value of post-product from materials. That prompted her to explore materials that would be renewable, from bio-based sources, but that would also fit in the circular economy. And though mussel shells are not the only material that meet the goals of a circular system, they are a huge waste stream in the Netherlands due to large-scale mussel processing plants. So, this plentiful and local source was a logical and appropriate place to begin. ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ALL ABOUT THE BINDING AGENT To create a material suitable for 3D printing, Sauerwein says the most impor tant factor next to the mussel shells is the binding agent. To make a composite material, the ground up shells have to be bound by something. And it is this binding substance that influences how to reuse the material and whether it fits within the circular economy philosophy. â&#x20AC;&#x153;What I wanted
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to achieve is that it is not only compostable, but reusable on a higher level,â&#x20AC;? she said. In addition to being reusable, she also wanted to create a material that is reprintable. Initially the research involved using sugar water to bond the mussel shells. After dr ying, it becomes a ceramic-like hard material. Sauerwein was able to produce a 3D printed lampshade using this material. In this example, when the object becomes obsolete you can add water, causing the material to dissolve back into a paste, which can be used to 3D print again. But the fact that it is not water resistant also limits its use. With some help from a biopolymer lab at the Applied Sciences faculty of TU Delft, Sauerwein learned that alginate could be used to create a water-resistant material through ion cross-linking. This reaction can then
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FEATURE
be reversed, producing a printable paste once again. With this material, she 3D printed a flat hair accessor y that when made wet again could be bent or shaped to fit the cur ve of the head. “It is a ver y good example of what is possible with this material,” she said. 1 A NEW SPIN ON METHODOLOGY Sauerwein chose to use a Research through Design (RtD) methodology because she wanted to make the findings more concrete. But she took a slightly different approach than is commonly used. She explained that often a product is designed and then tests are done with that product or prototype to continue generating knowledge and insights. “In my case the
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prototype is kind of the proof of concept, the end product,” she said. “The lampshade shows that there is this new material that can be reprinted and that you can actually make another product with it.” In the future, Sauerwein hopes to see more focus on the use of biobased materials but says that is not enough to make a sustainable or circular economy. “ You should also think about the end of life, how it can be recovered and reused at the highest level possible. In the initial design process, you have to think about reuse. You donnot have to entirely know how something will be reused, but you have to make sure that you enable this.” 3
January 2021 | turn the page
EDGE
WHO HAS THE POWER? You sit behind your desk, trying to get some work done. You notice that things do not get along very well. Last night you were watching a series on Netflix until late because you were enjoying it so much! So today is not really a productive day and you are easily distracted from your work. Where your attention does go, is your phone. Every time a message comes in you take a look. Or you pick it up for no reason and end up scrolling through your feed for half an hour. Do you recognise yourself in this scenario? If not, try to look at your phone usage consciously. What actually causes us to reach for our phones so often? And is there any way we can reduce our use a little? Because be honest, how much pleasure do you really get out of it? by Annabel Schipper
What probably pulls you to your phone are the social media apps that are on it. What we must realize is that companies of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have a cer tain profit goal. These apps are free for us to use, which means they must earn their money differently. They make money through adver tisements. In reality, we are not the users of these social media apps, the adver tisers are.
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The attention we give to their ads is what is sold. The more ads you see, the more likely you are to click on one of those ads, the more the companies earn. The goal is to keep you on those apps for as long as possible, in order to show as many adver tisements as they possibly can. Showing ads is okay, as long as you get a wide range shown. Such as on billboards
in bus shelters, on T V or in the newspaper. But that is not the case on social media, where they determine what you can and cannot see using algorithms. All data about your use is stored and analysed. For example, they look at what makes you stop scrolling, how long you look at something and when you click on an ad. All this data is also sold to other companies. The more they have this kind of information 1
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CHECKLIST HUTSPOT
The development of humanity has been enormously influenced by a powerful element that nature has given us; stone. Thanks to its toughness and strength it is suitable for almost all our needs. In the Hutspot, we show some interesting and peculiar designs and their background story. This time everything is made from stone. by Eva Le Navenec
Keeping plants without using any filthy dir t? The Terraplanterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s material is solid, yet porous. This plant pot has a beautiful and pleasing design. Water is slowly diffused through the cells of the material. This allows roots to have constant access to water and air.
The dense and heavy proper ties of stone make it a per fect material for music speakers. The low resonance of the cabinet allows for a clear sound. These speakers are the per fect product to enjoy some rock music on. Credits to designer Jonny Anderson. ) www.andersonspeakers.co.uk
) www.terraplanter.com
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Less a fan of rock and more a fan of rolling? Or just a fan of standing on the ground? Good, because Lucas Munoz designed a way to make all these preferences possible, resulting in a skateboard from stone a caveman could have made. Feel like rocking a new look?
COLOFON
Of ficial body of ID Volume 22 / Issue 75 Januar y 2021
) www.lucasmunoz.com
Turn The page is issued four times a year. Contact ID study association Landbergstraat 15 2628 CE Delf t +31 (0)15 2783012 www.studieverenigingid.nl Comments, questions, compliments and remarks can be sent to: turnthepage-svid@tudelf t.nl Issues 7000 Copies Press Opmeer papier pixels projec ten T TP Thanks Marc de Kool, Henk Jan Oudenampsen, Amber van Gastel, Margarita Kovalchuk, William Chizhovsk y, Michiel Mar tens, Jetske Visser, Orlando Sardaro, Floris Jansen, Nico Vink, Isis Verhaag Subscription/adver tisement Members of ID receive Turn The Page free of charge. A yearly subscription costs â&#x201A;Ź9,50 (4 issues). Want a subscription or publish an advert? Please contact turnthepage-svid@tudelft.nl Copyright The committee has strived to own the copyrights of the included texts and images. However, if you believe you own the rights to a piece that has been used, we request you to contact us. Nothing from this issue can be reproduced. The committee claims the right to shorten, alter or refuse submitted pieces.
Hessa Al Ajmani uses stone in a more meticulous way. She hand-picks beautiful flowers and transforms them into ceramic plates. Matching your tableware to the flowers of the season.
The Communication department of the IDE faculty and the Alumni Association have contributed to this Turn The Page.
) www.hessaalajmani.com
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Everything of value is vulnerable.