Works That Work Issue X

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E X , 2017/2018

IN THE BEGINNING IS THE END

ANOTHER ROUND The standard bottle for carbonated mineral water and soft drinks (Brunnen­einheitsflasche) was introduced nationwide in Germany in 1969 as a reaction to the expansion of the Coca-Cola Company. Regardless of where a bottle has been filled, it can be returned at practically any shop and returned to the nearest bottler. Between 1971 and 2006, approximately five billion standard German bottles were produced. A 0.7 l (23.7 oz) bottle of clear glass carried a deposit of DM 0.3 (€0.15/US$0.18). The innovative screw cap made it possible to fill bottles faster and with less risk of damage.

On average, each bottle is filled and used 50 times before being pulled from circulation for recycling. Two barely perceptible glass bulges, which protect the paper label, wear down and indicate the age.

The bottle—designed by industrial designer Günter Kupetz in 1968—is a beloved German icon of quotidian refreshment: more than 10 billion litres (2.64 billion gallons) of mineral water are sold in Germany annually, of which more than 80% are sparkling. But a new deposit bottle made of PET has begun to outrank the Brunnen­ einheitsflasche over the last decade. Although it can only be reused around 25 times before it needs to be recycled, instead of the glass bottles’ up to 50 cycles, it holds 1 l (33.8 oz) at approximately the same size and weight, and of course it does not shatter. Photo: GDB.

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When I told my friends that this was going to be the last issue of Works That Work, most of them had more or less the same reaction: ‘I am so sorry to hear that.’ People like stability, the security of being able to keep things as they are in defiance of the basic law of nature which says that everything that has a beginning also has an end. Once in a while, however, we have the luxury of choosing an end, planning a conclusion that is timely, satisfying, even joyful.

The start-up culture that we live in celebrates new things like launches, releases and births, choosing to ignore the less glorious endings of projects, products and lives. I believe we should be intentional about designing ends as well as beginnings. The plan for WTW has always been to publish 10 issues and to wrap up the project on a high, while we are still enjoying a thriving community of readers. In these 10 issues we have been defining a vision of design that I believe in, design that doesn’t just make things pretty, but design that brings lasting positive changes.

When we started five years ago we made a conscious decision to avoid the term ‘design’ as much as possible, acutely aware of the widespread view that design is a layer that is put on top of things to make them trendy and expensive, a view that forgets that every human act of creation is design. After 10 issues, I think the point has been made. Our understanding of good design is when design benefits all parties involved: users, makers, producers and the general public.

In this final issue we present further examples of design that goes beyond the surface of things, encompassing beginnings, middles and ends. The mainstream press often calls this ‘circular design’, but we see it just as good design. And we pay attention to endings too.

— Peter Biľak

Works That Work, Issue X, Winter 2017/2018 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Drukkerij Tielen, Boxtel Binding: Hexspoor, Boxtel Lithography: Mrs. Bright Typeset in fonts Lava (designed by the editor) and Neutral (designed by the designers of the magazine) Thank you guys, it has been a privilege to work with you! (P) Printed on certified, environ­ mentally friendly papers.

Cover: Xper. Inside: Cocoon Offset and Cocoon Gloss (100% recycled fibre).

Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Contributors this issue: Molly Bonnell, designer, London Maja Demska, designer, Warsaw Rico Gagliano, writer, Los Angeles Pete Guest, writer, Singapore Caitlin Hu, writer/editor, New York Richard Johnson, photographer, Toronto Parvinder Marwaha, writer/designer, London Rich McEachran, writer, London Anne Miltenburg, designer, Nairobi Leanne Prain, writer/designer, Vancouver Anne Quito, writer, New York Rahman Roslan, photographer, Kuala Lumpur Nadine Stijns, photographer, The Hague Kurt Vanbelleghem, curator, Antwerp Ben Weeks, illustrator, Toronto Justin Zhuang, writer, Singapore Thanks our trusted contributors who made the magazine into what it has become!

Special thanks to: Matthew Carter Henrik Birkvig Pepe Heykoop Laurien Meuter

Patrons The following people helped to make Issue X: Wayne Ajimine Jason Dilworth Simon Esterson Konrad Glogowski Geir Goosen Frith Kerr (Studio Frith) Benjamin Listwon Joshua May Jay Rutherford Brian Scott/Boon Martin Tiefenthaler (tga) Clodagh Twomey Typefounding typeheaven Dana Wooley You guys rock, thank you for your continuous support!

In this issue:

Artefacts

by Rico Gagliano 4

Designing Things to Last

10

by Rich McEachran

A Vase that Makes a Difference

20

by Parvinder Marwaha

Front cover: Brunneneinheitsflasche, the standard German bottle for carbonated mineral water, photographed by Nadine Stijns.

See the inside cover for more information, or read Return to Maker, on p. 42.

Back cover: Social Distribution, our readerbased method of distribution, has worked wonders. We’ve managed to get the magazine to places which would rarely receive publications such as ours, including South America (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela), Asia (India, China, Bhutan, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, Thailand) and the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Leba­ non, the UAE), besides the usual places in Europe and North America. Thanks to everyone involved—together we made more than a magazine!

The Chair that’s Everywhere

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by Justin Zhuang

Made and printed in the Netherlands Copyright ©2017 Typotheque, all rights reserved.

Don’t bother photographing or scanning the articles; use the short web address next to the title of the article to share it with your friends, or for easy online sharing of the full articles. If you’d like to reproduce or repub­ lish anything, please ask first.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to Johanna, my wife and partner, who has taken a lot of duties off my shoulders over the past five years, freeing me up to do this project. Thank you!

The Sky’s the Limit 30

by Pete Guest

When the Ice Gets Thick

36

by Ben Weeks

Reaching Beyond Borders

58

by Kurt Vanbelleghem

A Wardrobe for Wellness Return to Maker 42

66

by Leanne Prain

by Anne Quito with photos by Nadine Stijns

Do Not Park

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by Maja Demska

Helping Zoo Animals Find the Fun

50

by Anne Miltenburg

Designing for the End

by Caitlin Hu

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Artefacts A collection of ideas which consider logical, respectful, conclusive endings, and how endings are part of any beginning.

Collected by Rico Gagliano

Farewell for a Building When the city of Chicago began demolishing the CabriniGreen public housing project in 1995, locals were conflicted.

Cabrini—conceived in the 1940s as a block of affordable homes for low-income families—had become a symbol of American urban decay: dozens of crumbling, neglected build­ ings wracked by crime. Still, the place was home to 15,000 people. It had been part of Chicago’s social landscape for decades. Said a student whose relatives once lived there, ‘It’s history that’s going to be destroyed.’

Two days before the city razed the last Cabrini high-rise in 2011, local artist Jan Tichy installed Project Cabrini Green: a public artwork consisting of 134 LED modules, placed in win­ dows of the vacated building. Each night, the lights flickered, ghostly reminders of lives once lived there. Then came the wrecking ball. Today, where Cabrini-Green once stood, there’s an empty field and a Target store.

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The Last Waltz Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is doubly historic: it docu­ ments The Band’s legendary 1976 farewell gig, and was itself the first concert movie ever shot on 35mm film, a dicey propo­ sition in those days. Scorsese planned to run seven big Pana­ vision cameras for hours, pausing only to reload. No one knew even whether the machinery could handle it. According to The Band’s Robbie Robertson, the director ultimately decided, ‘If the cameras melt, the hell with it. At least we gave it our best.’

Scorsese tried not to leave much else to chance. For sev­ eral sleepless nights before the show, he and cinematographer Michael Chapman drew up hundreds of pages of storyboards, meticulously mapping out moves for all seven cameras, timed to every verse and chorus in every song. But meanwhile they missed some of the best performances of the week as The Band and their crew of guest musicians hung out and jammed elsewhere in the hotel. ‘Muddy Waters […] played “Nine Below Zero”,’ recalled Dr. John in a 2013 interview. ‘I saw every socalled badass guitar player with his jaw droopin’ and saggin’. I wish they’d filmed that.’

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WTW #10

The Guillotine

Life, Rewound

Before the French Revolution, getting executed in France was just no fun. If you were poor, you’d be tortured to death, or slowly hung. If you were a nobleman, you’d mercifully have your head chopped off with a sword, but even that didn’t always cause instant death. So after the Revolution, France’s progres­ sive new government decided the system needed a civilised overhaul. Enter physician Joseph Guillotin. His suggestion: a painless beheading machine that would be used on anyone, regardless of class. A French doctor designed one with the help of a harpsichord maker, and honoured Joseph by calling it a ‘guillotine’.

This was mildly ironic, because Guillotin was against the death penalty. He’d hoped the machine would be a step towards its abolition. Instead, France’s revolutionary govern­ ment soon launched the Reign of Terror, executing people by the thousands, using the symbol of humane egalitarianism which bore Guillotin’s name.

Czech filmmaker Oldřich Lipský’s 1967 black comedy Happy End is the story of a criminal’s life, shown in reverse. Liter­ ally: the film begins with his severed head leaping out of a guillotine basket and back onto his body. Then he walks from the execution platform, backwards, into prison. And so on.

Meanwhile, he cheerfully narrates the action as though it were all happening in standard, chronological order: his backwards beheading is his ‘birth’. He spends a happy ‘childhood’ in prison, until he’s sentenced by a judge to marry a woman. He first encounters her as a dismembered body, which he must ‘reassemble’ into a whole person, using a magical butcher’s knife—a murder reimagined as an act of creation. Happy End works as an absurd farce. Or a clever piece of experimental cinema. Or a creepy glimpse at the ultimate self-delusion: a villain rewinding his life, to cast himself as a hapless hero.

Artefacts

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After the End For some, a last will and testament is simply a legal document.

For others, it’s an opportunity to provide friends, family, or even total strangers with a final, heartfelt surprise. And for others still, it’s an instrument of revenge.

Comedian Jack Benny took the lighter path. Upon his death, his will instructed a local florist to bring a single rose to his widow, Mary Livingstone, every day for the rest of her life. Singer Janis Joplin left behind a chunk of change to fund a giant boozy party at which 200 friends could get ‘blasted’.

Choreographer Bob Fosse’s will similarly bequeathed $25,000 to 66 pals and co-workers, with instructions that they use it to buy themselves a nice dinner. And Luis Carlos De Noronha Cabral Da Camara, an aristocrat from Portugal, asked his executor to pick 70 random people out of the Lisbon telephone book and divide his enormous fortune among them.

On the other side of the coin, leave it to the author of Macbeth to execute one of the most vengeful wills ever: William Shakespeare bequeathed most of his estate to his daughter Susanna… leaving his wife, Anne Hathaway, only his ‘second-best bed’.

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Imperfect Sound Forever Each side of a vinyl record ends in a ‘locked groove’—a groove that doubles back on itself, creating a loop. On turntables without automatic return mechanisms, the needle sits in this groove, playing it forever, until it’s lifted.

Usually locked grooves contain no audio. But as a kid, musician Nick Zammuto noticed they aren’t exactly ‘silent’.

As the needle glides over scratches or other imperfections, it spits out combinations of hisses and pops—‘Each like a finger­ print for that record,’ he later wrote. Eventually, Zammuto started using locked grooves as a musical tool, intentionally carving scratches into the vinyl with razors, tacks and sand­ paper, to create stuttering, handmade looped rhythm tracks.

Zammuto deployed this technique with his now-defunct band The Books. And when he went solo, he gave fans the tools to try it themselves: The ‘scratch edition’ of his eponymous 2012 LP comes with five circular patterns, each corresponding to a different musical time signature. By affix­ ing these to the centre label of an LP and using the numbers around the edge as a guide, listeners can gouge their own beats into any locked groove, turning the end of a record into endless music.

WTW #10

Artefacts

Unsolved Mysteries Perhaps no finale in TV history has been as equally anticipated and reviled as the conclusion of ABC’s Lost. After 121 enigmatic episodes, viewers wanted to be told what exactly had hap­ pened to the show’s cadre of island castaways. Instead, they got more enigma. In 2014, Brian Moylan wrote in The Guardian: ‘I’m still mad at Lost for wasting five years of my life pondering mysteries that the writers had no intention of answering.’

But one of those writers was the show’s co-creator, Damon Lindelof, a guy from whom Moylan should not have expected answers. In an interview just before the conclusion of another of his enigmatic series, The Leftovers, Lindelof spoke about a formative experience.

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‘There were these books called the “Encyclopedia Brown” books, where there were these little one-page mysteries,’ he said. ‘Encyclopedia Brown was a boy detective, and at the end of the case it would be like, “How did Encyclopedia know that Bugs Meanie stole his bike?” And then you’d flip to the end, and it would tell you what the giveaway was. And my Dad caught me basically, like, flipping to the end before I’d even really thought it out. So he ripped out all of the answers in my Encyclopedia Brown books.’

‘I’ve always been drawn to a story that has an interpretive ending,’ said Lindelof. ‘The book that has the last 10 pages ripped out.’

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WTW #10

Rich McEachran is a London-based freelance writer exploring the intersection of technology, innovation and sustainability. With the cities of tomorrow facing many challenges, he’s particularly interested in highlighting smart solutions to our waste problem and unsustainable consumer habits.

DESIGNING THINGS TO LAST

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Today many people throw things away, not because they are unusable, but because we want to replace them with the latest style. It keeps the wheels of industry turning and designers in business, but it also bloats our landfills and destroys the environment. What are the alternatives, and can we learn to embrace them?

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Previous spread: The W123 was the most successful Mercedes ever, and 2.7 million of them were sold before the model was succeeded by a newer one in 1985. It was widely considered one of the most reliable and durable cars of its time, but its multiple technical inno­ vations also made it prone to technical failures. Photo: Mercedes-Benz

Above: The practical and affordable Ford Model T changed the way Ameri­ cans live and travel. Thanks to Henry Ford’s advancements in assembly-line manufacturing, it was the first car accessible to the masses, who bought more than 15 million of them between 1913 and 1927. The Model T’s low cost, durability, versatility, and ease

If you ask Jan Nielsen, his family’s MercedesBenz W123 saloon should have been built to last. Manufactured in the mid-1970s, it was very much a grand showpiece, and wherever they went in it, they would arrive in style. It was also a robust machine, like a block of granite… until it had a fault that proved difficult to repair.

‘We started having problems with the water pump and this led to a coolant leak. But when it came to fixing it, the local service centre didn’t have the part needed in stock and told us they didn’t expect to carry it ever again,’ Nielsen recalls. ‘It turns out that supplies of old parts start to dry up a few years after a manufacturer stops production of a model. We could have ordered the part needed from a secondhand dealer and got it shipped, but there was no guarantee that the part received was going to be in good working condition.

And the service centre couldn’t say for sure whether they’d have the right equipment to fit it anyway.’

of maintenance made it a symbol of America’s age of modernisation.

Ford rejected the planned obsoles­ cence practised by its competitors, but later lost market share to cars that were larger, more expensive and more designdriven. Photo courtesy of La Nación, Buenos Aires.

In the end, and to save money and hassle, Nielsen decided they should cut their losses and sell it on. It’s a dilemma many drivers have faced over the years because, quite simply, cars aren’t designed to last. From a manufacturing point of view, this approach makes business sense, because if there was a never-ending supply of parts and every vehicle could be fixed easily, then every car would be a lifelong investment, which wouldn’t be economically viable for carmakers, so planned obsolescence is a part of their design.

Planned obsolescence is defined as a business strategy in which old models and parts are discontinued and new models and parts are introduced, perhaps with incremental changes, making the older ones look outdated and ensuring constant demand. The term was first used in 1932 by a real estate broker, Bernard London, who wanted to encourage spending to bring the USA out of the Great Depression. He noted in his famed essay ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’ that prior to the collapse

Designing Things to Last

13

‘We cannot conceive how to serve the customer unless we make for him something that, so far as we can provide, will last forever. […] It does not please us to have a buyer’s car wear out or become obsolete. We want the man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy another. We never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete.’

— Henry Ford, 1922

“Our big job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years, now it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score.”

— Harley Earl, head of design GM, 1955

of the economy, people were giving up their vehicles ‘before they were worn out’, whereas times of scarcity saw them ‘disobeying the law of obsolescence, […] using their old cars and their old clothing much longer than statisticians had expected based on earlier experience’.

Planned obsolescence as we know it today, though not precisely as London imagined it, had already been introduced on a large scale in the automotive industry during the Roaring Twenties, a time when the Ford Model T was the car that had the world motoring. It was sturdy and reliable, and started rolling off the Detroit factory’s production line in 1908, with 15 million of them going on to be produced over the next 19 years. Though it originally came in a number of colours including green, maroon, bright red and dark blue, Henry Ford, upon realising the huge demand for the car, famously decided that it should come in ‘any colour, as long as it’s black’, because black paint dried quickly and production speed was of the essence. For more than

a decade, the Model T came in just one colour, and by the late 1920s, General Motors (GM) had started to capitalise on Ford’s inertia by releasing models on an annual basis, creating a perception that each new one was better than the previous one. Eventually, as the market became saturated, the Model T ran out of gas.

In his 1963 autobiography My Years with General Motors former CEO Alfred P. Sloan said that ‘The changes in the new model should be so novel and attractive as to create demand for the new value and, so to speak, create a certain amount of dissatisfaction with past models as compared with the new one.’

Although this strategy had been implemented in the twenties and named in the thirties, it wasn’t until 1954 that the term ‘planned obsolescence’ was actually popularised by an American industrial designer, Brooks Stevens. He defined it as ‘instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary’.

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WTW #10 The Centennial Light, the world’s longest-lasting light bulb, has been burning continuously since 1901, giving more than 1,000,000 hours of light. This seemingly ordinary lightbulb in the fire station of the small Californian village of Livermore is often cited as evidence for the planned obsolescence in mod­ ern lights, whose lifespans are routinely quoted at 25,000 to 50,000 hours. Round-the-clock webcam broadcasting of the bulb’s uneventful life began sixteen years ago, and has already burned out three cameras. Photo: Gazebo

Around the same time, credit cards in their earliest form were becoming a popular way for people to spend money that wasn’t at their disposal. Even poorer people were now able to buy products they previously considered unattainable: home appliances, cookers, radios and colour televisions, once a luxury purchase only the well-off could afford, but now becoming increasingly commonplace.

This newfound buying power meant that manufacturers could increase production and could even release new and updated models, encouraging customers to buy what they didn’t need, even if it meant borrowing more credit, artificially boosting the economy and maintaining employment.

Even the humble incandescent light bulb was the subject of a great planned obsolescence conspiracy during the 1920s and ’30s when a group of international businessmen known as the Phoebus Cartel colluded to engineer bulbs with dramatically shortened life spans. Bulbs that had once burned for 1,500 to 2,500 hours now lasted for only half that, which meant increased sales, and because of reliable demand, since lightbulbs were a necessity rather than a luxury purchase, companies could also artificially inflate prices.

Today, incandescent light bulbs remain virtually unchanged from their late-1800s form, though they have often been criticised. In 2009, the EU began phasing them out in favour of energy-efficient ones, and other regions have taken similar measures. From the end of 2018, halogen lamps, which, like incandescent bulbs, use a tungsten filament, will also cease to be sold, forcing consumers to make the switch to other technologies like LEDs. These more expensive bulbs are marketed as being up to ten times as efficient, but as a 2010 documentary, The Great Light Bulb Conspiracy, points out, whether

Designing Things to Last

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The history of the Phoebus Cartel has cast something of a shadow over the lighting industry.

they last a fantastically long time remains an unanswered question. Doubts also linger over whether they are the most sustainable solution, but at the moment they are the best massproduced alternative on the market.

Another option that is being explored is not a product but a model: selling light as a service.

Pay-per-lux, as it’s known, is being pioneered

by Frans Van Houten, CEO of Dutch company Royal Philips, and circular economy visionary and architect Thomas Rau. It’s based on the principle that people should only pay for what they consume, so rather than owning any lighting products, they simply pay a fee to a third party to handle the installation, maintenance and upgrades. While a number of businesses have signed up for the service, it’s hoped that in time it could be offered to households and eventually transform the whole market.

For households to turn their backs on such familiar products will require a shift in mindset.

‘Consumers are conditioned to buy them, and retailers and the like are conditioned to sell them,’ says Tom Lawton, inventor of the Million Mile Light, a safety light for joggers and dog walkers that harnesses energy from footfall to power small LEDs and is designed to last forever.

Lawton hasn’t had the easiest of times getting the niche product into the hands of people, partly because retailers are wary of stocking it, which means that sales have to be driven through their online profile. ‘We’ve had positive feedback from potential buyers about the design, the price point and our branding. But not a single retailer has taken the product on. Why? A few running store managers told us in confidence and admitted it’s more profitable to sell cheaper throwaway lights that customers don’t particularly care for. If they lose it or throw it away when the batteries run out, they’ll simply buy another one.’

In an ideal world, Lawton says, companies and manufacturers would do business on the principle of people buying fewer but superior products which would be required to have a certain level of durability and repairability.

Products would cost more, but because they would last far longer than existing ones, they would be seen as a worthwhile investment.

‘However, the narrative of planned obsolescence goes much deeper than engineering products like running lights that never give up,’ he adds.

‘This story is about the bigger picture of what underpins our throwaway culture and, for me at least, the problem is the pursuit of short-term profit rather than longer-term objectives.’

To reach the point where products are being manufactured to be more durable and reliable would require designers to think about life cycles and endings. Right now, designers excel at on-boarding consumers and persuading them to commit to a particular product or service through advertising and branding, yet bad at offboarding them, says Joe Macleod, author of Ends.

(Why We Overlook Endings for Humans, Products, Services and Digital. And Why We Shouldn’t) who has worked in mobile phone design since the late 1990s, including a stint at Nokia. This failure to off-board means that endings aren’t part of the consumer experience and so ‘we buy things on a whim, impulsively, to satisfy an emotional desire’, without thinking about the impact consumptions are having once a product reaches the end of its life. As a result of ‘wanting to experience new purchases, we fail to reflect on the long-term consequences and so products continue to be designed with shortened life spans’.

By failing to acknowledge the importance of endings, designers and manufacturers lose the ability to improve them. ‘Approaches like cradle-to-cradle and the circular economy

Architect Thomas Rau worked with Philips Lighting to develop a new busi­ ness model for Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Normally the airport would expect to buy fixtures and cables that would eventually have to be replaced and disposed of, but Rau proposed a pay-per-lux model in which the lights are owned and maintained by Philips,

and the airport pays by the exact amount of illumination in each space.

Not only is this solution sustainable and cost-effective, but it enables the manufacturer to deliver durable products for which there is currently no business model. Photo courtesy of Philips Lighting.

I told Philips, ‘Listen, I need so many hours of light in my premises every year.

If you think you need a lamp, or electricity, or whatever—that’s fine. But I want nothing to do with it. I’m not interested in the product, just the performance.

I want to buy light, and nothing else.’

— Thomas Rau

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If consumers became aware of the impact that their purchasing habits have, both on the environment and on companies’ design strategies, they could respond by turning around and demanding action. Sales of inferior products would drop, and manufacturers would have to re-evaluate their products, designing out factors that shorten life spans, and designing in more robust elements that last longer or are easier to repair.

have aimed to create products and services that are less damaging, but often miss a chance to hone in on the consumer experience,’ Macleod says. ‘They’re aimed instead at neutralising the damage of materials and the breakdown that the chemistry of these physical systems has on the environment.’

If consumers were aware of endings, it would change their relationship with products, helping them rethink what constitutes a good buy, particularly regarding electronic devices.

Smartphones, tablets, computers and the like are being continuously updated with faster processors and better software thanks to tireless innovation, and this isn’t necessarily done to exploit consumers, but is rather a part of companies’ ongoing battle for market share. On the other hand, keeping product cycles short and repair charges high contributes to the perception that it’s better to buy new models than fix old ones. If a faulty button, cracked screen or fading battery didn’t mean the entire product needed replacing,

consumers wouldn’t be discarding their devices as often. Nearly half of all smartphones suffer a premature death and the majority of these end up in landfills, where toxins such as mercury, lead and cadmium can leak into the soil and groundwater and eventually find their way into the food chain.

‘This is why we need products to have coherent and reflective endings,’ Macleod says. ‘A well-designed and well-managed off-boarding will create reflection and responsibility for the consumer in regard to their consumption.’

Enabling consumers to demand action on an industry-wide scale is easier said than done.

There are flickers of hope, however, such as emerging networks of repair workshops and cafés where people can go to learn how to fix electronic devices and household appliances and bring them back to life. They actively encourage participants to remove warranty stickers or seals, since warranty terms generally prevent consumers from trying to fix their own devices

The Million Mile Light is a wearable battery-free LED light powered by motion. The technology for the small kinetic engine that harvests the energy

from the wearer’s motion has been around for years, but it doesn’t seem to be a popular product for distributors given that the device is projected not to

and force them to either pay for authorised repairs or buy an updated model. By voiding these warranties, consumers terminate their relationships with the manufacturers, but begin new relationships with their devices, empowering themselves not only to repair them, but also to hack and customise them.

According to Janet Gunter, co-founder of the London-based Restart Project, while repairs can be difficult, they’re not impossible. Consumers see warranty stickers and warnings and fear what will happen once they’ve prised the back off their devices, but this is more out of ignorance of electronics, because with a bit of creativity and tinkering, ‘obsolete’ products can be restored.

‘We need to open up our devices and learn exactly what needs to change; only then will we have the knowledge to demand action from manufacturers,’ Gunter says. Gunter is part of a growing movement across Europe and the USA. The Restart Project has been going since 2012 and now runs Restart Parties up and down

need any replacements in its lifetime.

Photo courtesy of Million Mile Light.

the UK, inviting communities to gather and fix their relationships with their electronics. To date, the events have led to 4,445 kg (9,800 lbs) of electronic waste being kept from entering landfills and prevented 95,602 kg (210,766 lbs) of CO₂ emissions as a result, which is equivalent to the emissions that would be produced by the manufacture of sixteen cars. It’s a small drop in the ocean of global waste, but there is an increasing number of people across the world who are waking up to the tactics that companies use to get them to buy again and again and who are subsequently taking an interest in extending the lives of their products.

‘We know that there are consumers who have a deeper desire for durable, reliable and long-lasting products, but the challenge is how to raise awareness and get the message out there so others can learn,’ Lawton says. ‘Planned obsolescence is just lazy thinking. We should be designing with planned endurance in mind.’ ☐

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WTW #10

A VASE THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE Parvinder Marwaha is a British Indian writer & designer living between London and Amsterdam. Her dual background and Sikh religious roots continue to inspire (and confuse) her endless inquiry into belonging, equality and identity.

To escape the poverty of one of the world’s largest slums, children need a miracle. Laurien Meuter and Pepe Heykoop offer them one.

A casual shopper spots a beautiful vase in a designer shop window in The Hague. Myriad triangular folds cover its complex surface in an intriguing design. She walks into the shop for a closer look. To her surprise, the object is not a vase, but a paper vase cover, an aesthetic object rather than a functional one. A further surprise is that it’s a flat-pack object sold in an envelope, going from two dimensions to three with just a few clever folds. The third surprise is that it costs only €19 (US$22.40). Without hesitation she buys it on its visual merit.

Her purchase is helping to make a dream come true not only for Dutch duo Laurien Meuter, founder of Tiny Miracles Foundation, and Pepe Heykoop, designer of the vase cover, but also for the families of Foras Road, Mumbai’s red light district, where the covers are produced.

The vase cover’s story began when Meuter moved from Amsterdam to Mumbai to work in the banking sector. Her bank employed a coffee server, a cheerful man named Mohan, who would greet her every day with a big smile. She began to wonder how he lived, and so she invited

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The Pardeshis, a street community in Mumbai’s notorious Dharavi, one of the world’s largest slums, are traditionally basket weavers. The woman in the photo joined the Tiny Miracles project to obtain a job, education and healthcare for her and her four daughters. Photo: Pepe Heykoop

herself to his house for dinner. Honoured by her request, Mohan spent a week preparing to receive the Westerner at his home, a small rectangular space with two bags of belongings on a pavement deep in the slums of Mumbai.

Mohan and his daughter were what they call pavement dwellers in Dharavi, where over a million people are crowded into about 200 hectares (500 acres). With around one toilet per 1,440 residents, the slums are ravaged by disease. Rent starts at about ₹2,500 (€33.10/US$39.00) a month, depending on the level of shelter, but wages, for those who have work, average about ₹5,000 (€66.20/US$78.00) per month, and although Mohan earned slightly more, it was not enough to pay for a place to live, let alone tuition for his daughter, a cost of ₹15,000 (€200/ US$234) per year.

Without hesitation, Meuter offered to pay for his daughter’s education, a small gesture that would be the beginning of a crusade to improve the quality of life for hundreds of people. After consulting with Asha Rane, an 80-year-old professor of social sciences familiar with four slum areas across Mumbai, Meuter chose to begin with the children of the Pardeshis, a community in the heart of the red light district where everyone shares the same last name. The Pardeshis, like most people in the slums, were illiterate and worked in professions determined by their caste.

Although Dalit, the caste commonly known to the Western world as ‘untouchables’, heir to the foulest jobs available, the Pardeshis are basket

weavers, so they managed to avoid cleaning up toxins and toilets. Still, ‘most of the men in this community get drunk and rely on their children, prime targets for prostitution, to work, and on their wives to cook and clean,’ says Meuter.

Meuter’s first intention was to send about 20 Pardeshi children to English school, as she felt that learning Hindi would be less effective in getting them out of the slums. She enlisted the help of Grace Joseph, who would later become community manager of the project, to find a school. The first 15 schools approached, however, rejected the idea, unconvinced that the parents or the foundation would continue to pay tuition. The parents were also suspicious at first, thinking that Meuter was trying to convert them to Christianity. Why else would a tall, whiteskinned, blond-haired, Dutch woman want to help them?

One school eventually agreed to accept the children, and the parents eventually agreed to send them, but during the project’s first year it became evident that the way out of poverty was not as straightforward as might be hoped. The parents, themselves uneducated and with little understanding of the value of education, would often keep their children out of school to work, and those children that did go to school were often hungry and malnourished, unable to focus on learning.

Meuter came to the most crucial realisation in her quest: focusing only on the children was futile, and she would have to widen her scope to

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The Pardeshi women making vases depicting Vermeer’s Milkmaid for the

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Dutch National Rijksmuseum. Tiny Miracles operates two workshops in

include whole families, and her charitable efforts would have to evolve into a multifaceted project.

‘If there was really to be a difference here, the parents would need work, at least the women, and they as well as their children would need to be educated about self-sufficiency, self-worth and self-confidence.’

Meuter turned to Heykoop, her cousin, a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven: ‘Pepe, I need to create work for the parents— that’s the only way the children can go to school.

Can you design something that they can make?’

Heykoop was eager to get involved, and together they began to think about a product that would provide a sustainable business model. They felt that the only way to generate enough revenue to support the project was to target first-world designer boutiques, and the Pardeshi baskets were not a viable option. Practically speaking, they needed a product that was less expensive to produce in large quantities and easier to ship. Furthermore, they wanted something that

Mumbai, producing up to 20,000 items per month. Photo: Pepe Heykoop

would sell primarily because of its quality as a design object, not just because of its fair-trade or charitable aspect, although that angle would inevitably play its role in the marketing.

The idea of the paper vase cover was the result of two years of sketching, exploring and experimenting with numerous materials. Production requires only two skills, folding and stitching, and the final result folds flat for shipping.

Working with paper makes it easy to produce a variety of designs to suit nearly any décor, transforming any empty bottle into an object as beautiful as it is useful.

His design finished, Heykoop started to teach the women how to fold and sew. Sitting on the floor with 40 women gathered around him (the Pardeshis don’t like sitting on chairs), he gave each of them a piece of paper and asked them to fold it exactly in half. Not one returned with a straight fold. There was a moment of disbelief, quickly followed by a brave smile. He hadn’t come this far just to give up over a few

A Vase that Makes a Difference

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People would first notice the paper vase cover as a designer product and not because of the story behind its making. Selling around 100 covers a day worldwide, there’s no doubt that the product is successful in its own right. Meuter says, ‘We’ve created a design that doesn’t have that poverty poor feel to it —people buy it because they like it and not out of sympathy and that’s the key to its success.’ — Laurien Meuter

crooked folds. He decided to make it into a game to encourage them to learn: ‘For every fold you get right, you can fold it in half again; for every fold you get wrong, I’m going to sit on the paper, and you are out of the game.’ With just a couple of Hindi phrases, dhiyan se, ‘be careful’, for the folding and seedhe, ‘straight’, for the cutting and sewing, he began to teach the women invaluable life skills. In the end, they were all able to make the paper vase cover, and it seemed like they were safely on their way to success.

Over time, however, Heykoop noticed that the quality of workmanship was beginning to decline. The project was turning into a mass-production operation where the women favoured quantity over quality. Although a final checker had been appointed, she would often let imperfect objects pass due to the pressure and responsibility she felt towards the women.

Undeterred, Heykoop thought of a way to harness that sense of responsibility to promote quality control. He divided the women into

Group A and Group B. Group A would send their finished pieces to Group B to check and if Group B approved the quality, then the pieces were sent to the final checker. If any were returned, Group B would have to fix them, but Group A would get paid. Of course, the same process applied to Group B’s work as well. This system was a success, and production actually increased as the women became faster and more precise at their work.

As the project gained momentum, the women began to earn wages unheard of in their community. One of the advantages of working with paper is that the cost of the raw materials is relatively low, and the vase covers can be sold at a profit that enables the foundation to pay the women fairly according to UN standards while also supporting its continued growth. Meuter breaks down the numbers: ‘We sell the vase cover to shops at €8 (US$9.40) and they sell at €19 (US$22.40) including VAT. The women get €1 (US$1.20) for every cover they make. The

Community manager Grace Joseph (standing) conducting a social aware­ ness session, part of a two-day-a-week

programme that encompasses a wide range of services, including health checkups, cooking classes, a visit to

remaining €7 (US$8.20) goes towards materials, shipping etc. One euro is actually too high, since the women can make one cover in about 20 minutes. They used to earn one euro a day, but we increased their salary.’

Unexpectedly, that salary increase was also a source of problems during Tiny Miracles’ trial-and-error learning process. For one thing, women suddenly started working faster to earn more, compromising product quality again. For another, the demand for jobs jumped beyond the foundation’s capacity to provide work. Another problem concerns future expansion: ‘When introducing a new product, the women will need to learn how to make it, which takes time before they get fast, and they’re not going to be that willing to take a drop in their income.’

Dealing with money and managing personal finances were entirely new skills for the women.

One of the initial steps Meuter took was to help each woman open a bank account into which their wages would be paid. ‘On the very first

a local bank and an explanation of how government works. Photo: Pepe Heykoop

occasion they were paid, a mass of women stood outside the bank in disorder, throwing rocks at it, asking the building to give them their money.

Even the concept of a bank was foreign to their thinking,’ says Meuter. The following day, she organised a tour of the bank with the general manager, as well as a class in how to use the bank and what it meant.

Today Tiny Miracles is structured around five ‘pillars’, of which ‘employment’ is only one, and not even the first on the list. That position belongs to ‘social awareness’, which includes learning how to use a bank, but also topics like hygiene, domestic abuse and family planning. ‘Healthcare’ includes regular doctor and dentist visits as well as addiction rehabilitation, healthy cooking and exercise. ‘Employment’ is the third pillar, followed by ‘education’, the dream that started the whole project, and which now provides after-school homework classes, English lessons and computer instruction.

Finally, the foundation promotes ‘celebration’,

A Vase that Makes a Difference

Finding a school to work with was a challenge, and the first 15 schools approached rejected the idea of taking on slum children whose parents are

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illiterate and lack funds to pay tuition.

The foundation not only covers the fees, but also makes sure that the children are neat and clean when they go to school,

the recognition that material well-being is useless unless it is enjoyed, and that cultural traditions are an important part of a healthy identity. Tiny Miracles pays 100% of the education and healthcare costs in the first years of the programme, but its contribution decreases with time, expecting the women to gradually assume more financial responsibility until eventually they are covering their own costs. ‘The idea is that over the ten-year project, the women would learn how to manage their finances and the importance of visits to the doctor themselves,’ Meuter says.

Six years in, it is certain that this project has already had a significant impact on the community. Tiny Miracles currently employs 150 people who earn about €25 (US$30) per day, but the total number of people reached by the programme is 1,300, with plans to expand faster in the coming year. With 250,000 vase covers sold worldwide, the foundation is opening a way out of the slums, but whether the Pardeshis will

emphasising education as one of the foundation’s pillars for bringing about lasting change. Photo: Bart Coenders

grasp that opportunity is yet to be seen. ‘That the Pardeshi community was given a choice, an opportunity to get out, that’s the biggest change for them. Before this they were chasing a miracle,’ says Meuter.

To be sure, the project raises many issues.

Would it be better and more culturally sensitive to sell the baskets that are part of the Pardeshi history and tradition? Will the project have lasting impact? Can it be replicated in other communities in other conditions? And purely practically, how long will the vase cover be marketable, and will the next product be another hit?

There are still many questions to ask, but only time will reveal Tiny Miracles’ overall success or failure. Although the project has been running for six years, the slum where it operates has existed for more than 130, and neither cultures nor economies change overnight. In the meantime, every vase cover sold helps to hold a door open for the Pardeshis. Now it is up to them to decide where it leads. ☐

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With its 50 injection moulding units, Mah Sing Plastics in Malaysia is one of the largest high-tech plastic manufac­ turers in Southeast Asia, producing a wide range of plastic products includ­ ing industrial containers, furniture,

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motorcycle helmets, pallets and the ubiquitous lightweight stackable resin chair.

Right: Polypropylene, the world’s second most widely produced synthetic plastic, is used to make resin chairs as well

as hundreds of other products—bags, fabrics, packaging and utensils. The chairs are manufactured by heating the granules to about 200°C (392°F), and injecting the liquid plastic into a mould.

All photos by Rahman Roslan.

THE CHAIR THAT’S EVERYWHERE

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Squat, boxy and unglamorous, but decidedly practical, the one-piece stacking plastic chair is a design that has become part of everyday life all over the world.

Singapore-based Justin Zhuang is a writer and researcher with an interest in design, cities, culture, history and media.

The industry calls it the monobloc chair.

To everyone else it’s that cheap plastic chair, the squarish, one-piece, stackable thing that populates the lawns and gardens of the world, so ubiquitous as to go unnoticed.

It seems to be everywhere: inside a storeroom in Florida, outside the Uruguay Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and on a boat on the Zambezi River in Zambia, to mention just a few of the places the chair has been spotted, according to the Plastic Chair World Map. No one knows how many exist in their different versions or even who the original designer is, but they clearly number in the millions.

The version produced by Malaysia’s Mah Sing Plastic is indistinguishable from others except for a few details: a ‘Magnum’ trademark stamped on its back, rows of dash-like drainage slots (six on the spine and fifteen on the seat), and an ‘Asian-friendly’ size of 80×54×45 cm (31.5×21.3×17.7 in). It is also manufactured just like the others: tiny beads of polypropylene and colour concentrate are melted at a temperature

of 200°C (392°F) and then injected into a mould.

Sixty seconds later, or even less, a 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) plastic chair is unveiled. This process hasn’t changed since the first MS 938A rolled off the assembly line in 1987.

Executive director Hong Hock Seng still vividly recalls that day. ‘When the first piece of the chair came out at midnight, I had to carry it to the airport and catch a flight to Canada for an exhibition,’ he said. ‘It was my first time travelling overseas, and I didn’t even know how to change planes!’ He eventually made it to the trade show with two white chairs and clinched the MS 938A’s first sales. Ironically, Mah Sing had sold the plastic chair back to the West where it was originally invented.

With the end of the Second World War, furniture designers began experimenting with the newly invented plastics to make chairs.

Pioneering examples include the iconic singleshell chair by Americans Charles and Ray Eames, and the Hille Polypropylene chair by British designer Robin Day. The first all-plastic

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The Unica plastic stool, a variation on the monobloc chair, is an icon of Singapore’s food culture designed by Singaporean industrial designer Chew Moh-Jin in 1990 and produced by local

chair, however, wouldn’t arrive until 1965, when Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo created the Universale. It would take another two decades before such a chair caught on with manufacturers, but after Mah Sing’s founder saw one at a trade fair in Germany in the mid-1980s, he developed his own to expand his business beyond the manufacture of plastic containers.

The MS 938A was just one of several allplastic chairs that entered the market beginning in the 1980s. Though the details of their designs differed, they shared similar features that proved to be big advantages: they were light, cheap and, most importantly, stackable. By offering the flexibility to seat just as many people as needed,

plastics manufacturer Singa Plastics.

The Unica’s sturdier, more robust design uses more polypropylene (1.4 kg/3.1 lb) than flimsier monobloc seats.

this space-saving design eventually replaced Thonet’s Chair No. 14 as the furniture of choice amongst kopitiams, the local coffeeshops of Malaysia and neighbouring Singapore, although traces of the No. 14 live on in plastic chairs from Malaysia. Their designs display a similar silhouette, and a version from one of Mah Sing’s competitors even has a seat with a pattern that mimics the cane seating of the No. 14.

Today plastics are used so widely that it may be difficult to understand how strange the idea seemed in an age when furniture was still typically made from natural materials like wood, cane or metal. ‘Thirty years ago, when you said “plastic”, they would say, “Huh?” To them, it was

A worker in the Malaysian company Mah Sing Plastics stacks up the monobloc chairs. The first all-plastic chair is often said to have been produced by Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo in

1965. The chair became popular in the early 1970s when innovations in injection moulding made it possible to create them in one mould from one material. Today, variations of the chairs

very fragile, very brittle. So you had to demonstrate to them,’ explains Mr Hong as he bends the backrest of the MS 938A towards its seat and lets it spring back to shape. It’s a stunt he often used to prove the durability of the material and how plastic chairs can withstand the elements.

Such flexibility is also found in the transparency of polypropylene, which allows manufacturers to produce the chairs in a wide assortment of colours. While customers in Europe and America may picture the plastic chair in pristine white, the multi-ethnic communities in Malaysia and Singapore see theirs in an array of colours instead, says Mr Hong. Based on the sales of MS 938A, which has been sold largely in Southeast

are manufactured in dozens of countries around the world, which helps to explain their global ubiquity.

Asia, red is a favourite amongst the Chinese, green is well-liked by the Malays and blue is preferred by Indians. The market for Mah Sing’s white chairs seems to be limited to funeral parlours.

Unlike most chairs that become iconic for a specific aesthetic or function, the plastic chair has become popular for the pliability of both its material and its design. Like a blank canvas, it can be easily customised for economical mass production. The result is not only a highly functional and affordable piece of furniture used by people all around the world, but also a sign of our globalised times. ☐

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Peter Guest is a journalist and editor writing about the environment, human rights and economic development. He wrote about the diamond trade in WTW No. 7, and Mars exploration in No. 4.

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THE SKY’S THE LIMIT –

VERTICAL FARMING IN SINGAPORE

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Urban growth is increasing the world’s population even as it consumes areas once used to produce food. With more mouths to feed and less space to do it with, we may need to rethink our concept of ‘arable land’.

Jack Ng has a small strawberry plant on his windowsill. Even shaded from the Singapore sun and cooled by air conditioning, it doesn’t look in good shape. One day soon, though, Ng hopes that he will be able to grow commercial-scale crops of the fruit among the skyscrapers of this tropical city where the air is thick with humidity all year round and the daytime temperatures rarely drop below the high twenties.

Ng’s company, Sky Greens, is a pioneer of high-tech vertical agriculture. From the outside, its prototypes on a plot in Singapore’s Kranji district look like standard aluminium-framed greenhouses. Inside they hold long revolving platforms like oddly extruded Ferris wheels laden with green shoots. The plants are fed, watered and moved through the sunlight depending on their exact needs, arriving at the bottom of their circuit in time to be harvested.

This computer-driven, high-volume farming can produce ten times the amount of vegetables as a traditional farm occupying the same land, using only a fraction of the water.

Kranji lies far past the northern boundaries of the city, where the high-rises give way first to industrial parks, then to a few scattered warehouses, and finally to dense greenery marked with signs warning that the army’s live fire zones lie inside. Throughout the day, fighter jets shriek low and loud overhead. Rural idyll it is not, but it remains the last sliver of farmland in one of the world’s most densely populated countries.

The older generation still talk wistfully of the chickens-in-the-yard ‘kampong days’, but their children—baby boomers in the Western parlance—built a shining city of high-rise housing, sweeping expressways and malls stuffed with global brands. They drained swamps to put down foundations and fenced off the remaining tracts of rainforest for reservoirs, in one of the most ambitious urban development projects of the 20th century.

Today, this is a city-state that is widely heralded as an exemplar of urban governance and economic planning, but Singapore is also an archetype of urban fragility. With no hinterland, the country relies almost entirely on imported food and water to survive. As much as 90% of Singapore’s food comes in from overseas, as does 60% of its water. In the case of the former, that means vast volumes of packaging and preservatives and huge energy expenditures to keep things fresh and edible in the tropical climate.

The city-state’s future rests on the belief that the world will remain open to free trade, and that an abundance of food in its bigger neighbours will ensure a plentiful supply.

With an anti-globalisation movement in full swing, and climate change already disrupting food production across Southeast Asia, neither of those assumptions looks as ironclad as they did a few decades ago, which is pushing the country to reassess the decisions that have allowed its agriculture sector to wither, and to

Previous spread: Jack Ng, founder and inventor of Sky Greens, at his high-tech urban vertical farm, which produces one ton of leafy greens every other day.

Using a water-pulley system, growing troughs rotate to ensure even distribu­ tion of natural sunlight for each plant.

The same water used to turn the troughs

also nourishes the plants, obviating the need for a sprinkler system while reducing the consumption of water and electricity.

Above: Farms are rare in Singapore, which imports more than 90% of its food. Jurong Frog Farm in the Kranji countryside was founded by Wan Bock

invest in high-tech farming methods like Sky Greens’.

‘I think the realisation that food is going to be an issue for the world has hit home,’ says Manda Foo, executive secretary of the Kranji Countryside Association, which represents farmers in the area. ‘We might be in a position to buy food from other people because we have a lot of money, but we cannot assume that we will matter when there’s not enough food.’

Singapore, with 5.5 million people crammed into an island of a little over 700 km² (270 mi²), seems like an extreme example. However, the rate at which humanity is becoming an urban animal is such that many of the world’s cities are on a path to outstripping the capacity of the farmlands that feed them.

The world’s urban population has been increasing steadily for the last half-century. In 1960, 34% of the global population of 3 billion lived in cities, according to the United Nations.

By 2014, it was 54% of 7 billion people. By 2050,

Thiaw in 1981 as Singapore’s first and only of its kind, and it uses antibioticand hormone-free farming methods to produce frogs with meaty hind legs, a Singaporean delicacy.

All photos by Pete Guest.

according to current forecasts, it will be 66% of nearly 10 billion individuals, or another 2.8 billion urban inhabitants that need to be supplied by a rural population that will have changed only marginally in size.

Cold chains and supply chains into cities are already overstretched. Even in the developed world there are many ‘nutrition deserts’, areas empty of affordable fresh food and dependent on packaged, preserved products. Judging by current trends, that is only likely to get worse, unless cities can be redesigned to become not just consumers of food and fuel, but producers, integrating new agricultural technologies into their planning and construction.

That is already happening in many cities, albeit in an unstructured way. In South London, Growing Underground has turned deep tunnels into a farm for specialist salads; in Bangkok, EnerGaia is using carbon dioxide exhausts from urban industry to grow spirulina, an edible seaweed. In Singapore, several rooftop

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In a world where cities are growing, farmlands are shrinking and populations are increasingly subject to unpredictable geopolitical and climatic shifts, Singapore may provide a glimpse into the future of food production and distribution.

allotments provide fresh herbs and salad leaves to local restaurants. For the most part, however, they are small scale, feeding into a niche market that wants local produce for reasons of ethics or fashion.

Sven Yeo, co-founder of Singaporean vertical farming technology company Archisen, thinks that might change. The nascent ag-tech industry is heading to an inflexion point within the next decade, where falling costs of technology and proven business models intersect with rising concerns about food security and the impacts of climate change, he says.

Archisen wants to use cloud computing and Internet of Things technology to develop urban farming methods that maximise food production and minimise use of space and water.

These technologies could be applied to manage an intricate web of small-scale production and distribution, abrogating the need for any kind of central aggregation or middlemen, or they could be used for huge ‘skyscraper farms’, he says.

The company is in the process of raising funds for an industrial-scale project in Jurong in the southwest of Singapore with a partner that has expertise in ‘last mile’ logistics, which they hope can solve the distribution challenges that small farms face. The project has started to pick up interest from private investors and venture capital funds.

‘Right now, I think everyone in the industry is trying to drive this past a certain point where one of us has demonstrated that we are able to con-

struct a farm that is very productive, and we are able to offload our produce in an effective manner, maintaining a profitable venture. I think that will unlock the whole industry,’ Yeo says.

At Sky Greens, Ng also believes that urban farming can be distributed or centralised, or a combination of the two, but his industrial-level visions are the most dramatic.

Although Singapore has little space to spare at ground level, it has always built upwards. The flanks of its skyscrapers and housing blocks represent huge tracts of unused vertical real estate, he says, that could become fertile ground.

‘We don’t have much land, but we have plenty of vertical area,’ he says. ‘Urban agriculture can be part of the design of the city. It can be part of the architecture of buildings… Every housing tower could rent out its [walls] to become a farm.’

He has worked with urban developers in China to integrate factory farms into the planning of new cities, with mixed success.

Retrofitting existing cities is a bigger challenge.

His technology can be scaled up to create huge, moving green conveyor belts that roll up the sides of tall buildings. As Ng says, the selfdescribed ‘garden city’ is already draped with greenery, but it is all for show; nothing is edible.

Developers have not exactly welcomed his proposals. Their main objection has been aesthetic: no one wants to have their green wall harvested and bare.

Other projects, such as putting farms on car parks and public housing estates, have

The Sky’s the Limi

Manda Foo, executive secretary of the Kranji Countryside Association, which represents around 40 farms in

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Singapore. She is a fierce advocate for Singapore’s tiny agricultural sector, looking for ways to boost food supply

foundered because of mundane challenges.

Start-ups struggle to get bank loans; others find that their permits get stuck in limbo between different government agencies.

Quite often, bureaucratic inertia is what derails moves towards utopian visions of cities that are sustainable in food, water and energy, according to Alan Marshall, an environmental scientist at Bangkok’s Mahidol University and the convener of Ecotopia 2121, a project that tries to extrapolate what global cities will look like in a century’s time.

As a student, Marshall researched how to build ‘ecological closed loops’ for use in space, technology that would allow astronauts to recycle water and organic matter to grow their own food. That kind of space-age agriculture is still the foundation of many fictional visions of urban self-reliance, composed of sealed towers of stacked vertical farms, typically drawn as sweeping futurist buttresses.

self sufficiency in the land-scarce city-state.

That kind of city, where the whole system is integrated for total self-reliance, is probably a mirage. ‘For philosophical and scientific reasons, I just don’t think you can do it,’ Marshall says, although he adds that ‘you might as well try’.

A more likely scenario is a number of distributed projects producing a small proportion, maybe 20 or 25%, of a city’s food, integrated into the overall food supply in the same way that small-scale solar can be built to feed into national grids.

The technology to do so exists now; what is missing, according to Marshall, is political will.

‘Real change is not going to come until we have democratic institutions that show that people care about these things,’ he says. ‘Twenty years ago, we didn’t care about dirty air so much. Now, in the centre of Beijing, people don’t care about access to water… In the future I’m sure, as these important resources get taken away, they will want to voice these concerns.’ ☐

WHEN THE ICE GETS THICK The unexpected beauty and variety of ice fishing huts.

by Ben Weeks

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On frozen lakes across Canada, ice-fishing huts appear every winter, the havens of self-reliant, contemplative, patient folk who find meaning in fishing. Many build their own huts in their back yards out of scrap materials like printing plates, beer tins, tarps, and road signs. One hut used an old washing machine housing to shelter a woodburning stove. Standing like icy man caves on a

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forbidding plain, they are a space where physical labour yields free-range food as a jackpot.

In any given area there are often many similar huts because people copy each other’s styles.

In Nova Scotia, rain comes in from the ocean, which can freeze the hut to the ice, so huts are small and easy to move. Saskatchewan has the country’s highest per-capita ownership of

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pickup trucks, so huts there fit like Tetris blocks into truck beds. On Prince Edward Island, the popularity of spearfishing makes lightproofing a design criterion.

Huts carry various local names: ice shack, bobhouse, ice shanty, fish house, dark house or ice hut. Photographer Richard Johnson shot this study of types over ten years in Canada, although

recreational ice fishing is also popular in Japan, Korea, Scandinavia and the northern USA. Nobody knows when the ice huts first appeared, but on the walls of the hotel in SainteAnne-de-la-PerĂĄde, QuĂŠbec there are photographs from the 1940s showing horses dragging out ice shelters on sleds. The town has a village of rental huts that draw electricity from the

mainland, lighting up the frozen lake at night.

A good ice hut balances weight and portability. Huts must be heavy enough to withstand strong winds, yet light enough to transport.

The size of a person’s pickup truck or sled base constrains scale. Ventilation is a must for releasing heater fumes. Reflectors improve visibility at night for snowmobiles driving by. Early in the

season, light structures claim favourite spots.

Towards the end, everyone waits to see who moves first before joining the scramble to strike camp.

On the lake, ice is a science, and an ice auger and tape are invaluable instruments for assessing safety. At 4 in (10.2 cm) thick, ice is safe enough to walk on. A snowmobile is safe

at 6 in (15.2 cm), cars at 12 in (30.5 cm). Clear ice is optimal. Low density ice can be a threat.

Some fishermen carry small ice picks to drag themselves out of the water if they fall through.

Bonfires don’t melt through the ice.

The season is changing. It used to last from January to March with ten weeks of solid ice.

Now there are only three weeks. In Thunder Bay

in February 2017 it was 10°C (50°F), and water was visible on the ice. That was unheard of just a decade ago.

The photographer learned early to carry his gear on a sled rather than in a backpack. He sees how designs adapt to the geography. A typolo­ gical study investigates related forms in a series.

He shoots in a consistent manner: clean back-

ground, same horizon line, tripod. His biggest fear is drowning, and he faces it every time he steps out on the ice, but facing the risk of falling into chaos can have its rewards. ☐

Anne Quito is a design critic and writer on design, architecture and visual culture. She has written several articles for WTW, most recently on the design of sport trophies in issue No. 9.

Photographer Nadine Stijns initiates multidisciplinary collaborative projects in the realm of design, fashion and autonomous art, playing with the medium’s documentary nature.

RETURN

TO

MAKER

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Concerns over the environmental effect of plastic waste are mounting nearly as quickly as the tons of plastic bottles discarded every year. Bottle-deposit schemes are proof that a little financial incentive can encourage people to return beverage containers for recycling.

Printed on the back of most beverage containers is a fragment of the circular economy.

The bottle deposit return scheme gives customers money back for bringing empty beverage containers back to stores. Its traces can be seen in the fine print on beverage cans and store receipts, where a bottle ‘rental’ fee is applied. Its roots go back 100 years, and though it virtually disappeared with the arrival of ‘throwaway culture’, it is making a comeback in the face of the deluge of plastic bottles clogging streets, landfills and waterways.

‘A few states in Australia have just announced that new programmes will start soon, […] Scotland just announced that they will have a new container deposit law, and then just last week, Malta did the same. Several months ago, Lithu­ ania made a similar announcement,’ explains Susan Collins, director of the California-based not-for-profit Container Recycling Institute (CRI). ‘2017 has been a very big year for container deposit programmes worldwide,’ she reports.

Previous spread: On average, a German mineral water bottle is filled and used 50 times before being pulled from circulation for recycling. Two barely percep­ tible glass bulges, which protect the paper label, wear down and indicate the age: from left to right, the bottles in the photo range from a freshly recast one to a battered one that is ready to be pulled from circulation and melted down yet again. (Also see inside front cover.)

A & R Thwaites & Co, an Irish soda water producer, is credited with the invention of the bottle deposit scheme. In 1799, to encourage customers to return their heavy-duty glass bottles, the Dublin-based company offered two shillings for every dozen returned. Manufacturing glass containers was very costly then, with most bottles still produced by hand-blowing until the 1900s.

In Norway, where returning bottles or ‘panting’ is still very much part of everyday life, competing beverage companies agreed on two standard sizes for the bottles they shared. In the 1960s and 1970s, ‘35-centilitre (12 oz) bottles were reused 23 times and 70-centilitre (24 oz) bottles 18 times, on average,’ as historian Finn Arne Jørgensen writes in Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling.

Coca-Cola started bottling their syrupy beverage in 1899, enchanting housewives with the luxury of serving colas at home. Until then, Coke was consumed by the glass, on the spot in pharmacies and restaurants. In 1916, Coca-Cola

Right: The first glass milk bottle was patented in 1874 in the USA, but the invention crossed the Atlantic to become an archetypical part of British lives. In the 1960 and 1970s, over 90% of milk in the UK was put into glass bottles to be delivered by milkmen directly to families’ doors. The empty bottles were picked up daily at a time when the con­ cept of recycling was hardly discussed.

The proliferation of refrigerators and the

advent of chain supermarkets changed everything, and environmentally friendly glass bottles were replaced by throwa­ way plastic containers or cartons, which are cheaper to manufacture and lighter to transport.

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A reverse vending machine at Rotter­ dam’s central train station that accepts empty glass and plastic bottles as well as aluminium cans. The machine

dispenses ecoeuros, green coupons that can be redeemed for goods and services in local stores or donated to a linked charity or social partner, encouraging

introduced the iconic contour bottle, a curvy, green-coloured model that was sold, collected, washed and refilled. Many vintage Coke bottles were even inscribed with a reminder: ‘Money back bottle. Return for deposit’. Bottles then were considered ‘borrowed’ and were technically owned by the beverage company, not the consumer.

But with millions of glass bottles in circulation by the 1940s, shopkeepers began complaining about the inconvenience of storing used containers, and beverage companies were saddled with the expensive and laborious process of sanitising them, as Jørgensen describes: ‘Cleaning bottles was a labour-intensive job.

The bottles had to be thoroughly washed in the bottling plant before they could be refilled. In 1899, the women—because this was a woman’s job—who washed, filled, and capped bottles were paid thirty øre per one hundred bottles. […]

Some bottles needed extra cleaning, since it was common to store kerosene in them; stores sold

residents to help keep the city clean.

Photo: Peter Biľak

kerosene wholesale and empty bottles were a convenient way for customers to bring it home.

Some of the women had as their job to smell all the incoming bottles, and if they caught so much as a little whiff of kerosene, the bottle had to be sent to special cleaning. Machines later took over much of the cleaning work, but the inspection process still required people to ensure that the bottles were clean.’

After the Second World War, everything changed. Propelled by advances in glass manufacturing, American beverage companies started selling lighter, more portable throwaway bottles.

Soda bottles then were inscribed with the words ‘No Deposit, No Return’. The August 1955 issue of Life magazine, called ‘Throwaway Living’, celebrated disposable items, underscoring the freedom from having to clean and repurpose household items.

Americans became so enamoured of the idea of convenient, single-use containers that a litter­ ing problem emerged in the 1950s. Discarded

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To demonstrate how grave plastic bottle pollution has become, the Plastic Ocean Foundation and the UK entertainment channel Lad Bible petitioned the UN to declare a patch of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean as a country. ‘Trash Isles’, as it’s called, has an area the size of France.

Former US vice president Al Gore has agreed to be its first honorary citizen.

bottles and aluminium cans cluttered streets, parks, highways and forests, making oncepristine areas look like rubbish tips. In 1953, beverage and packaging manufacturers such as Coca-Cola, the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, who invented ‘one-way’ disposable bottles, established the ‘Keep America Beautiful’ campaign. Its intent was to emphasise that careless individuals, not the mountains of throwaway containers, were responsible for the epidemic of litter. Their massive, well-funded media campaign and lobbying ensured that disposable bottles continued to be unregulated.

Despite evidence that paying people money for empty containers significantly helps reduce waste, only ten US states— California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont—plus the territory of Guam have container deposit legislation in place today.

Michigan, which gives the highest rewards for

returned bottles, has a bottle recycling rate of 95%, compared to the 30% national average.

The UK has a similar problem with litter.

British lawmakers have recently been touting the old money-back scheme as a potential solution to arrest the proliferation of tossed bottles—currently an average of four million bottles a week throughout the UK. ‘A deposit scheme will generate higher quantities of material of higher quality for recycling, with attendant benefits for the global climate,’ said Dominic Hogg, chairman of the environmental consultants Eunomia Environmental, who produced an environmental audit report for the Parliament in June.

Zero-waste advocates are now studying successful deposit return schemes in Scandinavia as a possible way to reduce the mountains of plastic accumulating every year.

Among the technologies they’re studying is the reverse vending machine (RVM), which is standard equipment in most supermarkets in Norway, Finland and Sweden. The majority of

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these bottle-collecting machines are supplied by a Norwegian company called TOMRA. Equipped with automatic container recognition systems, TOMRA’s machines can rapidly scan and sort collected bottles, calculate the total deposits to be returned, and print a receipt redeemable at the cash register. In places where these highcapacity machines are present, more than 70% of containers of all beverages sold are returned for recycling. TOMRA reports that their machines capture about 35 billion containers every year, avoiding greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to two million cars driving 10,000 km (6,214 mi).

Not everyone supports the return of bottle recycling, however. CRI outlines how beverage companies propagate myths to combat bottle deposit campaigns because producing new containers is much easier than grappling with the logistics of recycling. ‘The arguments bottle recycling proponents encounter most frequently Mass-scale bottle return has existed in Denmark since 1922, when breweries entered into a voluntary agreement to use a common bottle for beer and soft drinks instead of unique branded bottles. The Danish bottle return system was widely called the world’s best, with a return rate of nearly 100%. Until 2002,

include the following: deposits duplicate kerb­ side recycling, are a public health threat, are inefficient, are outdated, are a regressive “tax”, and will damage local businesses and lead to closures or layoffs,’ it says. ‘Most of their arguments are simply not well-grounded in truth.’

Norwegians also warn, however, that legislation or technology alone isn’t enough to get the world to go back to returning used bottles. In most countries, there is a stigma associated with returning bottles for money, and the task is often relegated to ‘canners’, poor and underemployed people who rummage through rubbish bins to make cash from discarded bottles and cans. For the public to embrace the bottle deposit scheme will require a cultural shift. According to Simen Knudsen of Nordic Ocean Watch, ‘People [in Norway] understand they are borrowing the bottle but buying the content.’ ☐

the sale of beer and soft drinks in cans was not allowed in Denmark, but this was challenged by the EU Commission, bringing disposable beverage packaging to Denmark, and introducing a bottle deposit system. In this photo, a 33 cl (11 oz) soft drink bottle manufactured in Carlsberg in the 1930s.

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Animals in captivity are sheltered from many of the dangers they would face in the wild, but are also deprived of the stimulation they would get by fighting to survive. Designers at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo are working to provide them with challenges that keep them happy and healthy.

In the wild, giraffes forage on leaves for over 13 hours a day. Zoos cannot provide unlimited supplies of trees and therefore come up with alternative ways

to encourage the natural behaviour. This ‘giraffe tongue obstacle course’, in the shape of a log, helps giraffes practise the natural dexterity of their tongues

and keeps them engaged with the food longer, as they would be in the wild. All photos courtesy Chicago Zoological Society.

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HELPING ZOO ANIMALS FIND THE FUN

Anne Miltenburg is a designer based in Nairobi.

An inveterate traveller, she has lived and worked across Europe, and in Mali, South Korea, Australia and the USA.

Matthew Owens and Sarah Feliciano stand on a walkway at Chicago Zoological Society’s Brookfield Zoo, watching Sophia, an orangutan, cradling her two babies. ‘I call the animals our clients,’ says Owens, ‘and the orangutans are our toughest clients.’ His colleague agrees. ‘They will tear something apart just to show you that they can,’ she says, with a laugh and the smile of a designer who appreciates a challenge, the challenge of designing for animals, to be exact.

Behind the scenes at zoos like Brookfield (the first zoo in the world to receive the American Humane Society’s Humane Certified certification mark) are people like Owens and Feliciano, the zoo’s senior craftsmen, who design behavioural challenges for the animals to keep them happy and healthy. Nor is this just a hobby or visitor attraction, but a budding science called environmental enrichment, the design of objects to improve the quality of life of animals living in captivity. Tim Sullivan, Brookfield’s curator of behavioural husbandry, recalls watching Sophia

carefully peel a two-inch strip of cardboard from a box one day. ‘I was wondering what she was doing, so I kept looking. She was at it for almost 20 minutes. She then flattened the ends to provide rigidity and used it to reach a favourite item a metre outside of her enclosure.’ She had an idea and created a tool to act upon it. It’s just one example of the animals’ intelligence and why the design of their happiness can’t be left to regular carpenters or toy manufacturers.

Enrichments are created for Brookfield’s more than 2,000 individual animals in the team’s workshop, whose walls are lined with tools, samples of PVC bark and paw models of different animal species. A giant rubber warthog head adorns the wall. Fake kelp hangs from a shelf. An industrial table is covered in examples from the ‘design portfolio’: tree stands, tunnels, leaf-shaped hammocks, logs for nesting and feeding. There is a ball, designed to look like a rock, whose weighted base makes it roll in unexpected directions, encouraging tigers to be quick

It’s a rock that floats? Enrichment is camouflaged as natural objects to keep the environment looking as much like a natural habitat as possible. There

are some zoos left who use brightly coloured children’s toys for the animals’ entertainment, but that practice is becoming a remnant of a bygone era.

and agile as they bat it around. The ‘kelp’ is made from carwash sponge, with pockets that can be loaded with little fish, giving otters something to forage for. Owens explains, ‘The variety and unpredictability of the natural environment is what we are trying to recreate. We don’t want our animals to be couch potatoes.’

This attention to the natural requirements and behaviours of animals is relatively new.

‘Animal caretakers for years mostly provided animals with occupying things to do,’ Sullivan says. ‘“Toys” is what they would call them. Staff would use plastic preschool toys, activity boards, cones, buckets or beer kegs.’ Sullivan’s first objection to that approach concerns the institutions’ educational function: ‘Zoos combine entertainment with a conservation mission.

We get people in to learn about animals and their habitats, to become aware of their own role in conservation. When you design an entire environment to represent a natural habitat, you want the toys to match the environment.’

More important, however, was the failure of those foreign objects to promote healthy natural behaviour.

According to Sullivan, Hal Markowitz was a key figure in making environmental enrichment a science. He created changes in zoo environments in the seventies and eighties that allowed animals to behave as they would in the wild. Like most people with radical ideas, Markowitz encountered a lot of headwind. ‘Zoos were concerned he was taking the nature out of animals,’ says Sullivan. ‘It took a few decades for people to change their minds. Enrichment as we now define it is designed to encourage foraging, hunting and cognitive ability and allow animals to work their minds as well as their bodies. Some items are designed for play, others for food and all are intended to increase welfare.’

‘Take the giraffes for example,’ he continues.

‘They get three cups of pellet grains per day, super rich in nutrients. With their 18-inch tongues, it’s three licks and they are done.

Helping Zoo Animals Find the Fun

The design of the enrichment tools comes with many challenges: objects have to be designed in such a way that the animals cannot hurt themselves or

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use the objects as projectiles (orangu­ tans have a great throwing arm).

The tools are designed to create chal­ lenging tasks for the animals that mimic

Giraffes in the wild forage leaves for 13 hours a day. We want them to have all the nutrients, so how do we occupy them?’ Without the stimulation provided by their natural environment, the giraffes instinctively began to lick the walls of their enclosure, ingesting bits of paint, standing with their backs to visitors, and increasing maintenance costs. ‘We had to repaint the walls of the giraffe house every year,’ Owens recalls.

He shows the solution that they designed: a tree-trunk with a ‘tongue obstacle course’ designed to slow down the eating process and increase the effort required, providing a challenge for the animals by mimicking a situation they would face in the wild. ‘In acacia trees there are thorns, and giraffes’ tongues have to be very agile in getting to the leaves. We created this for the tongue to gain a dexterity that is otherwise not attained.’ It quickly paid off. ‘The benefits are numerous: the animals are engaged, stimulated physically and emotionally, and the licking of the walls stopped, so we don’t have to repaint the

those in the wild. Orangutans are tool users who look for clever ways to get to the prize: ants, honey or other snacks.

murals. For visitors it is more fun too.’

The giraffe feeder serves as an example of Owens and Feliciano’s design process, which always begins with the behaviour they want to encourage. Feliciano explains: ‘We use a briefing form and discuss with the animal care specialists what the animal’s needs are.’ ‘Several of our animal care specialists have master’s degrees, and they are basing their decisions on science,’ adds Owens. ‘Annually, the teams look at each species and set behavioural norms for the animal. Once we know the potential triggers for a behaviour, we design the enrichment.’

There are multiple factors to consider. The climate in Chicago is such that most objects need to be weatherproof. Of course, they also need to be safe. ‘We send new materials we use to the veterinary staff to make sure the materials are non-toxic,’ says Feliciano. ‘And the managers and animal care staff check the enrichments for safety and will supervise when they are used for the first time.’ No detail is too small to consider,

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Feliciano and Owens sculpt branch-like objects from PVC pipe, moulding, carving and painting it to be almost indistin­ guishable from a real tree, yet easy to

WTW #10

clean, hygienic and strong. Owens: ‘Con­ tractors leave large amounts of leftover PVC pipes at building sites and we are on it like dung beetles.’ The materials

as Owens explains: ‘When a design can be broken into pieces, are animals able to swallow the smallest pieces? Can they put their hand in but not their head? There might be animals of different ages playing with it. Can a young animal get stuck? We have to babyproof the materials too.’

Many of the animals have a keen sense of smell that also needs to be stimulated, and so cinnamon, camel hair and old snake skins find their way into the workshop, and the zoo also collects unwanted bottles of perfume. The lions in particular love Calvin Klein’s Obsession.

Sullivan says, ‘They just love rolling around with it. We’ve let the company know.’

Not all design requirements are dictated by the animals. The care specialists also have their needs, since they are the ones who maintain the enrichment items in the animals’ quarters.

‘Some of them are short, some are tall and strong. How do they hang the device up in a tree, how do they clean it?’ Once all concerns are addressed, the user (read: the animal) gets to test

are cheap, the biggest cost in the design is the labour. The giraffe feeding log takes about four hours to create.

a prototype. ‘It is quite typical that the animals outsmart us,’ Owens says. ‘They figure it out quickly, and then we have to go back in and make it more interesting again.’

The staff monitor each enrichment to make sure it is doing what the team intended it to do, iterating until it works. ‘For instance we might have 20 squirrel monkeys that we design for,’ says Sullivan. ‘There is a bell curve: most animals in the group respond in a positive way but not all of them will. So we then design a solution for the outliers.’

Like humans, animals have individual tastes, so the design process is customised for each animal. One giraffe might like leaves while another doesn’t. Or a particular animal has a very specific behavioural challenge. Feliciano gives an example: ‘We have a geriatric gorilla. This is becoming normal because animals in professional care live longer than in the wild. This gorilla has arthritis and needs a device that helps him increase the range of motion of his arms. So we created

Helping Zoo Animals Find the Fun

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Though the farm industry affects billions of animals compared to the relatively small number of animals at zoos, zoos are easy targets for criticism because while farm industry animals are largely hidden away, the animals in zoos are on display for the public to see.

several puzzle feeders and installed them at a particular height that encourages him to lift his arms and stretch, which keeps his shoulder joints supple.’

It’s no surprise that food is often involved in an effective intervention. According to Feliciano, food is a great motivator for behaviour, and therefore many enrichments are designed around it. They jokingly divide the animals into those who like peanut butter and those who don’t. Feliciano says, ‘Those who don’t are harder to please.’

Because each item is customised to meet a particular animal’s needs there are no businesses that sell animal enrichment products, no online stores or mail-order companies. ‘A lot of zoos rely on volunteers to make these things,’ says Sullivan. ‘We are unique in having dedicated staff that does this. In other zoos, there is a carpenter that repairs fences and builds enrichment items as well.’ Feliciano and Owens are widely regarded as at the forefront of their field,

and their work attracts attention. For instance, bear keepers across the country are showing interest in the rolling ball disguised as a rock.

The team doesn’t have much time to market their work outside, however, since they are already handling around 260 work orders a year. Instead they prefer to share their knowledge.

There is a budding scene around exchanging ideas for enrichment, such as ‘The Shape of Enrichment’, a website, newsletter and biennial event for animal care professionals. ‘We see that Disney parks are copying some of our materials,’ says Owens, ‘but we don’t see it as a problem.

What is good for animals is good for us all.’

In spite of everything that the enrichment team does to care for its ‘clients’, the question remains: is it all a sticking plaster to cover the pain of animals living in captivity, something to assuage the consciences of institutions and the public?

Sullivan puts the question into perspective: ‘Wild animals are rarely brought into American

Helping Zoo Animals Find the Fun

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The staff started asking us to make the enrichment items a little more natural and we thought, rather than just redecorate it, let’s redesign it.’

A big challenge for an artist is to make a living with your talent.

zoos due to species conservation regulations and the zoos’ desire to have self-sustaining populations. Almost all of Brookfield Zoo’s inhabitants are third-, fourth- or fifth-generation, born and raised in professional care. If we could go back in time one hundred years and ask, “Should we create zoos?” maybe we wouldn’t have. But the animals are here now and play a vital role in connecting our guests with nature. Most of these animals can’t be reintroduced to the wild, and we do the best job we can at keeping the animals happy and healthy and promoting science and environmental protection.’

Dr Joseph Barber, research fellow at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in the USA, would approach the question from an even wider perspective: ‘Enrichment is a way to maximise welfare in captive environments, whether that is a zoo environment, a farm or a lab.’ Thus animal welfare is a subject relevant to anyone who eats meat, dairy products or eggs, wears leather, fur or wool, uses animal-tested pharmaceuticals, owns a pet or visits a zoo.

In terms of promoting the welfare of animals, he believes there are good zoos and bad zoos.

‘And at a good zoo, there are good exhibits and bad exhibits. And not all education is good

education. In an immersive exhibition with a lion standing against a glass pane, and a child on the other side, and the lion trying to get through the glass to get to the child, I’m not sure what kind of education that provides. I would rather have people be amazed by lions hunting and killing and doing what lions do. Instead the child sees how we can control animals. So not all zoo experiences are necessarily teaching people the right lessons.’

For Sullivan, Brookfield’s more than two million visitors a year are an opportunity to teach the right lessons. ‘We have kids who come here from underprivileged communities who have never seen or touched a dirt patch before. Who will most likely never see these animals in the wild…’ Owens agrees that enrichment increases the chances that those visitors will connect with the animals. ‘You will fall in love with a gorilla that is goofing around, not one that is sleeping all day. The zoo needs people to fall in love with animals. We need people to care about the animals so they change their behaviour regarding conservation and the environment, make them little conservation leaders in their own way.

Unfortunately, humans are the toughest species to change.’ ☐

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REACHING BEYOND BORDERS

‘Watchtowers and Watertanks Game’.

An alternative chess set commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with watchtowers and water tanks as pawns

occupying every square on the board, resulting in a permanent deadlock with no winners. Designed and produced by Majed Abu Farha, Nader Rishmawi, Beith

Fahour and Mark Jan van Tellingen.

Photo: Celine Callens

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A Dutch foundation is bringing Palestinian art and design —and the stories behind them—to the world outside.

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Kurt Vanbelleghem is a Belgian curator and author interested in the culture and crossover of art and design.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is easily one of the most intractable and divisive issues of our time, one that has attracted the attention and participation of nearly the entire world. With so many stridently voiced opinions and so much bloodshed, not only in and around the disputed territories, but indeed across the globe, it can be easy to forget the human faces behind the headlines, those whose everyday life is overshadowed by the hatred and violence.

Disarming Design from Palestine is a contemporary design label producing artefacts that bear witness to what it means to live in Palestine in these days, and while it may be impossible not to be political there, the label strives to narrate the human experience through its products. In the words of visual artist and graphic designer Mohamed Abusal, who coordinates the group’s activities in Gaza, ‘I incorporate my political views within the objects I make, and through the Disarming Design platform they are being promoted and sold in the rest of the world so people

can hear us from the other side of the wall.’

The platform’s online catalogue, which after five years of activities contains more than 50 products, resonates with explicit or metaphorical references to the realities of daily life in Palestine. Items include a glass measuring cup which demonstrates the unequal distribution of water between the inhabitants of the West Bank and Israel, a leather wallet that reveals and conceals different identities, a chess set with watchtowers and water tanks as pawns, a T-shirt with ‘I am an Arab’ calligraphed in the shape of a fingerprint, or a pillow case with screenprinted Arab poetry to protect dreams.

Although several of the designs deal directly with the wall, the checkpoints, the violence and so on, each object also expresses the designer’s cultural pride. As architect Ibrahim Alhindi puts it, ‘through Disarming Design, we are encouraged to do more to show to the world not only the current atrocious situation but also to radiate our identity in a positive way.’

‘Hide & See Travel Pouch’. A leather travel pouch that can reveal or conceal different identities, designed to hold two passports and additional documents that Palestinians need to cross check­ points and borders. Jordan is the only

Dutch designer Annelys de Vet developed the context for this platform some six years ago after working on the Subjective Atlas of Palestine, a project developed in direct collaboration with several local artistic organisations. She was impressed by the richness of local craft traditions and the quality of the artistic scene, but was surprised that there was hardly any collaboration between the local artisans and designers. In response to a call from , a global NGO committed to a world with less poverty, she began to organise what would become Disarming Design, organising workshops in several areas of Palestine.

Many of the participants perceived this suggested collaboration as entirely innovative.

Interior designer Ghadeer Dajani, now the platform’s production manager, can testify to this: ‘Before I attended my first create shop in 2015, I didn’t think too highly of our local crafts production. It felt as if it was restricted to traditional embroidery and to the usual products

country in the world to which Palestin­ ians can travel without a visa. Designed and produced by: Moniek Driesse, Saad Ghanem, and David Juan Ortiz. Photo: Celine Callens

in ceramics and glass and so on. We always saw the same things over and over again at the market. There was never someone who would do something different or revolutionary. Disarming Design made us aware that we have this heritage and that we could do something new with it.

That it is Palestinian, a part of our identity and that we can be proud of it.’

The artisans, for their part, were equally sceptical. Saad Ghanem, a leather craftsman who has produced several objects for the Disarming Design collection, was initially quite resistant to the idea of working with designers. ‘It took me some time to overcome these sentiments. But after a while it turned out to be very beneficial for all of us. I definitely have developed my ideas thanks to the way these designers are working, and I have taught them, through my techniques, different ways of doing things.’

Though de Vet has managed to bring these two communities closer together and let them discover how beneficial they can be for each

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The antagonism between Israelis and Palestinians has complex historical, religious and political roots, and is one of the world’s most complex and controversial conflicts. Can design and crafts make a hint of progress where politicians and negotiations have failed?

other, the platform still faces many other obstacles. Just as any other country, Palestine is subject to a global economic reality. Largescale, low-cost foreign production has led to the closure of many local craft studios and artisanal factories. Even their traditional scarfs are mostly produced in China. Abusal says that the Israeli siege also makes it impossible to import necessary raw materials into Gaza, and many smallscale studios have gone out of business. Ghanem adds that because of the occupation it is difficult to develop one’s skills, due to the lack of training facilities and educational opportunities.

Disarming Design addresses this challenge with a two-part structure. First, there is a notfor-profit company in Palestine which is responsible for organising the yearly workshops and following up with the production of the resulting artefacts. To date, more than 70 Palestinian and international designers have participated in five workshops, with a sixth taking place in autumn 2017 in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.

Fifty of the 80 designs from those workshops are currently in production and are manufactured in collaboration with more than 30 local crafts factories and individual artisans including woodcutters, ceramicists, embroiderers, printmakers, glass blowers and soap makers. Second, there is a Dutch foundation which handles international promotion, distribution and sales. They reach out to potential customers through online sales as well as a variety of events, exhibitions and pop-up shops. Overall turnover for 2016 was over €10,000 (US$11,920), a figure that is expected to be exceeded in 2017.

Ghanem explains that this rather complex organisational structure is vital because of the complicated reality of this particular region of the Middle East. ‘Because of the occupation, it is a real problem for us to export our products.

Everything is stopped at the border. But even if I managed to send my products abroad, I wouldn’t be able to get paid. Israeli laws make it impossible to pay me with Visa or through foreign money

Reaching Beyond Borders

One of Disarming Design from Pal­ estine’s yearly workshops where new products are proposed and developed

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(Gaza city, 2014). The designers and artisans in Gaza investigate existing production techniques to determine the

transfers. The Disarming Design platform has helped me to overcome these problems, as they don’t experience the same export restrictions.

They can also collect the money and make payments to us.’

Notwithstanding these specific economic contributions, the platform is still too small to act as a significant revenue source for all Palestinian designers and artisans involved.

Dajani says that currently they cannot significantly contribute to the financial sustainability of any of the artisans or designers, but that their ultimate objective has to be to support low- and middle-income businesses. ‘We are quite unique, and we are needed. The lack of real economic growth has reduced opportunities for an increasingly educated Palestinian population, so people are starting to look at us as an important step towards a less vulnerable financial position.

To my knowledge there are few organisations that support them in selling their products outside Palestine.’

feasibility of larger-scale production.

Photo: Mohamed Abusal

It would be too optimistic to say that Disarming Design manages to overcome these barriers, but Abusal and others are convinced that this collaborative approach can provide a way to reopen closed crafts shops in the future.

For the present, the platform is succeeding in creating a symbolic economy, enabling customers all over the world to support the Palestinian cause, giving them a real boost of confidence.

According to the former executive director of Disarming Design, ecological space designer Mohammad Saleh, the most important achievement of the platform lies in the fact that it shows the Palestinian people as human beings with a rich culture, putting them in a respectful light while giving them broad exposure. ‘Since the very first moment that we started working together, we have been looking at our country in a totally different, confident and hopeful way.’

He maintains, despite the problems they face, Palestinian artists are using the reality of their daily life as a source of inspiration. ‘Now we can

‘More than Love’ performance with calligraphed stencil for bread by João Roxo and Juliette Lizotte. Calligraphy

Mohammad Omar. Ramallah, September 2016. Photo: Andrea Karch

spread our stories using creative, productive and positive thinking.’

The first five years have been inspirational to many. A unique design platform has been created from scratch in what easily could be called one of the most problematic regions in the world.

Disarming Design from Palestine is providing insight, empathy, opportunities, learning possibilities, and so much more. Above all it is a

tool for all those, within and outside Palestine, who want to express that no individual and no community, wherever in the world, should be kept under oppression and occupation. It will be the next five years, however, that shall determine if this design initiative is capable of effectively altering the situation of those oppressed or if it is just another spin at the wheel. ☐

Reaching Beyond Borders

65 ‘Measuring Inequality’. This measuring cup demonstrates the unequal division of water for Palestinians and Israelis.

Palestinian consumption on the West Bank is about 70 l (18.5 gal) a day per person, whereas Israeli daily per capita consumption is at about 300 l (79.25 gal). In some rural communities Palestinians survive on barely 20 l (5.3 gal) per day. The cup lacks tradi­ tional measurement values, indicating the constant calcu­lations Palestinians face concerning water consumption: ‘If I do the dishes, can I wash my clothes as well?’ Photo: Celine Callens

The raglan sleeve of this sweatshirt has a zipper in each shoulder seam to create points of entry. The jersey is embellished with ‘sick kit’ embroi­ dery. All photos: Brandon Petulla

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Leanne Prain is a writer and designer who lives and works in Vancouver. She has previously written about diversion wall safes in WTW No. 7 and astronauts’ games in No. 9.

A WARDROBE FOR WELLNESS

Typical hospital clothing is designed more for the convenience of the hospital staff than for the comfort and dignity of the patient. Hospital Hacks proves that the two are not mutually exclusive.

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Hospital Hacks clothes don’t look or feel like common hospital garments, but the real difference with these is that you can bring the clothes home and wash them, and they become your own.

‘I’m lying in bed and my pants keep rolling up to my knees. I don’t have a shirt. This is terrible,’ said Emily Bonnell, recounting an unexpected hospital stay. ‘I called my sister and said, “Let’s fix it.”’

‘I was texting her 24/7,’ says Molly Bonnell.

‘We have been in and out of hospitals our whole lives, so Emily was my test user for everything.’

Through their correspondence, Molly developed Hospital Hacks, a graduate project for Parsons School of Fashion inspired by their shared experience of having cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease that causes chronic and fatal lung infections.

Molly explained that they both used to cut holes in their clothes to receive IV treatments.

‘We would be told to cut a long tube sock to hold the tube on our arms, but it would get caught on everything. There was nothing to fit this need, not just for us but for thousands of people.’

Frustrated with the lack of solutions, Molly began to research how to create garments that would serve patients with cystic fibrosis and other diseases. ‘If regular clothes offered the same type of access to the body, then you wouldn’t need to wear a hospital gown.’

Her project Hospital Hacks was realised in the form of a ‘sick kit’ of everyday garments such as T-shirts and sweaters which suit the requirements of hospital use but can be customised to meet each individual patient’s needs.

‘I researched which parts of the body they need access to in the hospital. With cystic

fibrosis, diabetes, cancer and breast cancer, the access points are usually from the waist up, so I worked on creating ports where those points would be.’

During the year-long development phase Molly’s design process was influenced by testing the products with a wide range of participants, both short-term patients and those who were in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. She also learned a great deal from doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

For example, Velcro’s flexibility and ease of use might make it seem like the ideal garment closure for patients with limited mobility, but Molly discovered from nurses that hook-andloop material harbours bacteria. Metal zippers and clips were also eliminated because, ‘you can’t use metal, as it can’t go in an MRI or X-ray machine.’

In the end she settled on a string-tie closure, but determining the proper length took some time, ‘If the strings are too long they become a choking hazard, and if they are too short you can’t actually tie them.’

Fibre content was also a tricky issue to navigate, since some patients are allergic to certain fibres. ‘You can’t make clothes that make people sick. I used a lot of knit blends, some wool and some natural fibres.’

Her research made her consider how clothing should be constructed to stand up to hospital’s industrial washing machines. All of the garments had to have reinforced seams so they would not

Each sleeve of this sweater contains a plastic two-way zipper. It can be opened in different sections to provide a variety of access points or it can be completely unzipped from wrist to armpit to allow an IV tube to be removed. This pink sweater is Emily’s favourite because it is ‘warm, cosy and happy’, and works for her needs in the hospital.

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Inspired by patients who wear a second hospital gown to cover their backsides, this stretch jersey hospital

come apart with repeated cleanings, but the seams could not be so thick as to cause bedsores and bacterial infections. Using a jersey stretch stitch proved to be helpful in accommodating a wider range of body types.

Not that Molly wanted her collection to reflect the institutional system of ‘one size fits all’ care.

She also packed each Hospital Hacks kit with craft projects that allow patients to personalise their clothes. Her design aesthetic appropriates traditional medical imagery such as pill bottles and stethoscopes. ‘There was a lot of pink,’ she says, ‘and the tops of pill bottles that said “Do not crush”, “Swallow whole” or “Take with food”.

gown has no closures in it. It is put on like a jacket and wrapped around the body.

These things are not necessarily seen as positive but I’m going to say “no”. I am going to wear these on my body to show this is who I am.’

These expressions subvert typical hospital objects into a celebratory craft, contrasting with the usually sterile nature of their environment and giving patients a chance to humanise their experiences while also giving them something to do with their hands during their stay or afterwards at home. Molly would like to see the kit used in art therapy circles, in and outside of the hospital.

From repurposing everyday garments and redesigning a sized hospital gown, to giving

A Wardrobe for Wellness

patients the tools to express themselves, Molly’s project sits at the crossroads of fashion, health and human dignity. ‘Being a sick person doesn’t just look one way—it takes different forms,’ says Molly. ‘Everyone is a sick person at some point in their lives. You could be the healthiest person, but one day find yourself in the ICU. There are not normal people and sick people.’

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‘Dignity is having a voice and feeling heard and actually being heard. When you are in the hospital, you don’t feel a lot of control. Usercentred design means focusing on the patient and making sure that their needs are met, not just the needs of a more efficient hospital. In a system that doesn’t always work best for patients, this project returns power to them.’ ☐

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DO NOT PARK Maja Demska is a designer based in Warsaw.

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The ‘parking goats’ of Bucharest are homemade markers used to stake out that most precious of urban com­ modities, the parking space.

Finding a place to park in Bucharest, the bustling capital of Romania, is not easy. The municipality offers only 8,000 parking spaces, a number woefully insufficient for the number of registered cars, and residents frequently resort to unusual measures to reserve a spot temporarily. Polish artist Maja Demska spent six months in Bucharest documenting the capra de parcare

or ‘parking goats’, improvised, handmade objects that send a clear message that they are guarding parking spaces for someone close by.

Demska was surprised by the diversity of forms and materials used to build the goats, as well as by the fact that they seem to work. Although the parking goats have no legal standing, drivers largely respect them. ☐

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DESIGNING FOR THE END

When life, or even the whole world, seems to spin out of control, designers who try to prepare us for the worst offer a measure of dignity and hope.

Caitlin Hu is a deputy news editor at Quartz.

w-t-w.co/s2b

81 Left page: A satellite image from March 18, 2011 showing damage after an earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima Power Plant, Japan. Photo: DigitalGlobe Right page: Hiroyuki Takeuchi, chief editor of the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun newspaper, poses next to their March 14, 2011 newspaper wall at the company’s headquarters in Miyagi prefecture, northern Japan. When the March 2011 tsunami struck a great swathe of the northeast coast, leaving 19,000 people dead or missing and triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it also flooded the paper’s offices. With its modern technology incapacitated, the town’s only newspaper wrote its articles by hand with black felt-tip pens on big sheets of white paper for six days.

Photo: AFP.

No one plans a disaster. Then a porcelain cup falls. The sea rises. Your heart breaks. Or stops.

Disasters may seem as unfair as they are inevitable. From the Italian roots dis (ill) and astro (star), a disaster can be unleashed by forces far beyond our control, impossible to escape, leaving no alternative but to hope for the best when it strikes.

Some disasters, however, can be designed—at least in part. Unable to actually prevent all operating system errors, Microsoft Windows offers the Blue Screen of Death, the unmistakeable colour signalling a problem otherwise inexplicable to the lay user. Helpless to forestall all possible crashes, aircraft designers at least supply the black boxes that withstand and witness them. Across different industries, a constellation of anticipatory structures can shape disastrous events, in the hope of producing minor improvements to the human experience such as a ‘good’ death or a clean break. On scales as widely varied as an individual death, a collective tragedy, and the destruction of the planet, designers, architects and engineers work to give form to disasters, offering a startlingly romantic view of humankind’s ability to face the future.

One future that every person faces is the inevitable and yet inconceivable disaster of death. While initiatives like the $1 million Palo

Alto Longevity Prize seek to one day end aging, an experimental design studio in London is focused on improving the interim: Helix Centre, embedded within St Mary’s Hospital, seeks to redesign the process of dying.

Statistically speaking, a large number of British people seem to be dying bad deaths, their last moments playing out in a sterile and uncomfortable environment they did not choose. A recent Helix survey reports that even though only 1% of people in the UK say that they want to die in a hospital, that is where nearly half of them are likely to breathe their last. The challenge, according to Ivor Williams, senior designer at Helix, is to create a system in which patients can express how they want to die before they’re actually dying.

Since the 1970s, patients in the UK have been able to register ‘do not attempt CPR’ decisions, so that doctors and first responders do not resuscitate them in a medical emergency, allowing them to die naturally. But except for the miraculous few who have already survived a near-death experience, patients often find it hard to articulate what the words ‘a good death’ mean to them. They may have an idea that they want to prioritise comfort instead of eking out a few more minutes, but actually planning for the possible scenarios can be a daunting task.

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DISCUSSING AN EMERGENCY CARE PLAN People have different views about types of treatments that they would want if they were suddenly ill and could not make choices Visual scales like this one can sometimes help discussions At the extreme left of the scale, a person would want all active and invasive care and treatments that might sustain their life, even if some of those interventions are accompanied by discomfort or risk

At the extreme right, a person would not want any treatments aimed at sustaining life and would want the focus to be on preventing, controlling or minimising any discomfort

Life preservation

Comfort

Some elements of care and treatments, such as pain relief, should be offered whatever the person’s priorities

Consider focusing on desired outcomes rather than specific treatments

Use these outcomes to guide discussion on realistic treatments and care options

Do-not-resuscitate decisions were first documented in the 1970s and were formalised over time to protect people from receiving CPR that they did not want or that would not provide an over­ all benefit. Medical publishing company The BMJ developed an emergency care plan allowing clinicians to discuss and record patient preferences in advance, not only regarding cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but all aspects of care and treatment in an emergency when people might not have the capacity to communicate their preferences. Image courtesy of The BMJ.

I don’t want to go into hospital again

A team of healthcare professionals will care for a patient, whatever their preference is on this scale.

Make sure that all patients receive good care

Do everything you can to keep me alive and well

Don’t try to keep me going if I’d lose my independence

Place of care Interventions such as antibiotics or ventilation Whether or not CPR is likely to achieve desired outcomes

Where possible, expressed preferences can be used to guide care and treatments.

While it is impossible to plan for all scenarios, patient preferences can help guide the healthcare team, and support discussions with their family when they are unable to make choices. If the patient’s health changes, consider reviewing their preferences

Read the full article online

© 2017 BMJ Publishing group Ltd.

http://bmj.co/resus

Disclaimer: This infographic is not a validated clinical decision aid. This information is provided without any representations, conditions or warranties that it is accurate or up to date. BMJ and its licensors assume no responsibility for any aspect of treatment administered with the aid of this information. Any reliance placed on this information is strictly at the user's own risk. For the full disclaimer wording see BMJ's terms and conditions: http://www.bmj.com/company/legal-information/

Doctors, trained (and in many countries, bound by law) to save patients’ lives rather than let them die, can also struggle to guide conversations about death. One article in The BMJ advises medical professionals to avoid awkward words like ‘futility’ and images like ‘hitting a ceiling of care’.

In February 2017, Helix launched a project to facilitate such discussions, ultimately creating a document called ReSPECT to be shared between doctor and patient. Since February 2017, ReSPECT has been in use in five UK hospitals and is intended to eventually replace the far more alarming ‘do not attempt CPR’

form. Designed to be regularly revised, the gentle violet form summarises a patient’s health condition and allows them to mark along a scale ranging from ‘prioritise sustaining life’ to ‘prioritise comfort’. Perhaps most importantly, the form offers freeform spaces in which patients can use their own words to describe what they mean by ‘comfort’ and what matters most at the end of their lives—already a stark contrast to the jargon-heavy bureaucracy that makes hospitals such alienating places in which to die in the first place.

While communicating about an individual death is a challenge because the situation is at

Designing for the End

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Desperate Search at Sea Desperate Search at Sea Desperate Search at Sea Desperate Search at Sea Type designer Matthew Carter created a family of typefaces called Vincent for Newsweek magazine with three size-related versions: Text, Subheads and Headlines. When John Kennedy Jr, his wife and sister-in-law were killed in a plane crash in the ocean in July 1999,

Newsweek design director Lynn Staley found that the Headlines font used at the huge sizes appropriate to such a tragic event looked too clumsy. She accordingly commissioned a special version, known internally at the maga­ zine as the disaster font, for especially

once complex and intimate, handling information about a collective disaster poses challenges of a different scale. Today when a hurricane strikes, terrorists attack or hackers steal data, news organisations are able to gather, analyse and report the information faster than ever. But what is the most effective way to organise and relay that flood of data in a way that worried readers can digest?

In 2012, US news outlet USA Today added a secret template to its website, one to be deployed only in case of a massive disaster. Part of an overall site redesign by Brooklyn studio Anton and Irene, the disaster template was designed to channel incremental breaking news and updates as an event unfolds. Like a folk hero, the page will appear instead of the usual homepage when ‘the next 9/11’ strikes, says the studio’s global creative director Anton Repponen. It has not yet been used.

In contrast, Russian investigative paper Novaya Gazeta once considered taking the

notable events. The font is used not only for disasters but also for victories, such as when the Red Sox won the World Series or the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Image courtesy of Matthew Carter.

design of disaster in a different direction for particularly earth-shaking events, for example if second-term president Vladimir Putin died in office, a major shift for a country ruled, directly or indirectly, by the same man since 1999.

Overhauled in 2015 by Moscow studio Charmer, Novaya Gazeta’s regular homepage was originally designed as a minimalist snapshot of the day’s news. ‘The main goal of the front page model was to form a total picture of the day for readers of the newspaper. We were thinking about different content configurations for this feature, so we came up with six or seven layouts, one with one menu, one with two menus, etc.,’ says UX designer Ross Sokolovski, who was contracted to work on it.

But for that day, unlike all others in Russia, Sokolovski proposed a concept radically opposite to the USA Today design of constant updates and fragmentary news: a special homepage would be left completely blank—no menu, no links—except for three momentous words, he

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On the morning of April 18, 1906, a mas­ sive earthquake shook San Francisco, California. Though the quake lasted less than a minute, its immediate impact was

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disastrous. The earthquake also ignited several fires around the city that burned for three days destroying half of the city, one of the worst natural disasters in US

recalls. ‘One special layout would have nothing on the screen except the sentence “Putin is dead”. No other information needed.’ (According to Charmer, that concept did not make it to the final site design.)

Still greater disasters unfold not in a day, but over years and decades. One of them grips the globe today, a gradual warming that even now is drying out the earth and expanding the seas.

And as climate change threatens to usher in even more furious storms and increased seismic activity, some architects are rethinking not just their designs, but their entire deontology. ‘[The environment] is going to define the way we practise design, architecture and politics to come,’ says Nadir Tehrani, Dean of Architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. ‘How do we re­imagine sustainability to bring these three forces into conversation such that the next generation can look back on us with kinder eyes?’

Responsibility for anticipating a natural

history. Photo: Records of the United States Senate, National Archives.

disaster has historically belonged to the state— architects in earthquake-prone countries like Japan, Greece and Indonesia are familiar with the cadence of updated building codes that follow each big quake—but Tehrani suggests that perhaps responsibility should lie with the designer instead, on the frontlines of negotiating an increasingly volatile environment.

During environmental crises, large structures often become impromptu shelters and refuges.

Without careful anticipatory design, they may not do the job particularly well; Louisiana’s Superdome stadium became famously hellish as tens of thousands of displaced people took shelter there during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Six people died while sheltering there.

‘The creative challenge is to determine how such infrastructure can fulfil a civic purpose that exceeds its quotidian purpose,’ says Tehrani. ‘In places like New Orleans, civic memory makes that need and vision explicit: resilient infrastructures that respond to contingent needs. But

Designing for the End

PREPHubs are a new kind of public structure designed to increase disaster resilience. Each component serves the community in everyday scenarios so that

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when emergencies occur people already know where the equipment is and how to use it. Photo courtesy of Urban Risk Lab.

most cities don’t bring this up, not only because they lack the money, but more critically because they lack the imagination to forecast and plan for possible futures.’

Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Urban Risk Lab offers one example of how an ethical architect can do it on the people’s behalf.

Directed by former Office for Metropolitan Architecture associate Miho Mazereeuw, the lab’s research into natural disasters has produced designs for numerous projects, including PREPhub, a universal physical shelter that looks like public art but also offers light, an emergency radio and a movement-powered phone charger—functions, Mazereeuw says, ‘that are designed to work every day, building a community’s familiarity with and usage of the technology. That way, if a disaster strikes, people already know where to go and what to do to get critical resources.’

That may seem like small comfort in an age when the world appears to hover between the

threat of global warming and the spectre of nuclear winter, when geopolitical balances shift unpredictably at the slightest provocation and the technological infrastructure that underlies so much of our comfort also opens the door to lurking dangers on a scale never before imagined.

From some angles, our safety and security have never been more fragile, and Silicon Valley’s wildest solutions—like migrating to Mars—can seem perfectly apt. The case studies above, however, offer a different way of thinking, drawing on the very human idea of resilience. It acknowledges the designer’s lack of control and nevertheless tries to offer a little grace and even, perhaps, a little hope.

Of course, for those who are impatient, there is one other available survival strategy for a danger-fraught future: pre-empt uncertainty by scheduling your own end, designing the last day of your life, determining the last stop on your journey, writing the last page of your story—

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