Design Line: 1 – 7 April
April kicks off with period-proof shorts for England’s Lionesses and a day of jolly japes as design brands play the April Fools. Bocci’s makeover from Studio Frith is dead serious, though. All this and more on this week’s Design Line.
There’s less risk of getting caught short in these shorts (image: England Football).
Bleeding good design
The Women’s World Cup is due to kick off in July, and this week Nike unveiled a nifty new kit for England’s Lionesses that features an important twist: blue shorts are replacing those featured in the previously all-white strip. It’s not a sartorial statement, but an acknowledgement that white shorts (or dresses, trousers, skirts and any other garment that falls below the hips) are the natural enemy of people who menstruate. The last thing you want to be stressing about on a penalty shootout is period blood leaking in front of the world and its cameras. “It’s very nice to have an all-white kit but sometimes it’s not practical when it’s the time of the month,” Lioness player Beth Mead said in 2022. “We deal with it as best we can.” Well, Nike listened to the athletes’ feedback and developed the punny “Nike Leak Protection: Period” technology, which features an absorbent liner for shorts that adds an extra layer of security. It’s not just for the professionals – the technology will be available in the brand’s civilian range, too. Nike may have spent years developing its new needle-punched fleece alternative fabric made from plastic bottles (see Disegno #34), but this material innovation is arguably even more important for ensuring that everyone can feel more secure whilst being active. Period.
Studio Frith gives Bocci a makeover (image: Design Week).
Bocci rebooted
Amongst contemporary design brands, the Canadian lighting company Bocci is unusual. While most manufacturers speak of the importance of play and experimentation during their product development process, the freeform and occasionally chaotic results of these explorations are rarely visible in the final outcomes, which are invariably highly polished and resolved. In the case of Bocci, however, this dimension of its work is pushed front and centre. Led by its creative director Omer Arbel, the company has come to specialise in contemporary lights whose forms are guided by the behaviour of molten glass and metal when subjected to unpredictable external forces. The lights are beautiful pieces of product design, but never to the detriment of conveying Arbel’s evident glee in seeing what happens when you start messing around with materials. It is this exuberance and delight in process that seems to have been pushed to the fore in the Bocci’s new brand identity, designed by Studio Frith and revealed this week. The new design draws upon the abstract, globular glass forms that Bocci creates in its kilns, converting these into a new typeface and graphic elements into which have been sown collage-esque photography that reveals elements of the brand’s making process. It is a striking new identity, and one in which Studio Frith seem to have ably captured Bocci’s identity as a brand.
Money can buy you LoveFrom
Jony Ive has certainly been a busy bee since parting ways with Apple, designing everything from King Charles’ coronation emblem (see Design Line 11 – 17 February) to a Comic Relief Red Nose (see Design Line 28 January – 3 February). This week, his creative studio LoveFrom announced it will be funding a scholarship at London’s Royal College of Art to support students from minorities that are underrepresented in design (so, like, all of them), along with scholarships at the California College of the Arts and Rhode Island School of Design. The scholarships have been funded by a $1.5m donation, and Ive himself along with members of the LoveFrom team will offer personal mentorship to the students. Offering time, knowledge and connections along with a chunk of change is a commendable donation, and one that acknowledges that financial barriers are just part of the endless hurdles that entry-level designers from underrepresented backgrounds face while trying to survive in an industry that is notoriously impenetrable and elitist. Of course, this support shouldn’t just be available to students who have already proved themselves to be outstanding despite the racism, classism, sexism and homophobia they will have undoubtably already faced just to get to the RCA in the first place – but it’s a start.
Studio Swine entering its blue era (image: Hyundai).
Visual flair
It is no secret within the design world that Studio Swine, the practice of Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves, are a dab hand at visually impactful installations. Swine has previously worked with the Eden Project on ∞ Blue (2018), a 9m-tall, smoke-ring puffing tribute to the oxygen-producing qualities cyanobacteria, and Cos on New Spring (2017), a white pipe tree that blooms with smoke-filled bubbles – both works that offer visual chutzpah in spades. For brands and institutions seeking an immersive, thought provoking installation, therefore, Swine seem a sure bet. This week it was the turn of Hyundai to cotton onto the practice’s talents, with the launch of Swine’s Under a Flowing Field at the the Hyundai Motorstudio in Busan, South Korea. Hosted as part of a wider Hyundai presentation about how “mobility will transform into a space for living in the future” (nope, we have no clue either), the installation features a canopy of neon tubes in a blue room, through which energy crackles. It is a beautiful display, and one that seems to visually extend the exploration of plasma that the studio evinced in its Wave. Particle. Duplex. (2019) project. Fingers crossed it travels outside of South Korea in future.
The Young Climate Prize winners provide hope for the future (image: The World Around).
The future belongs to the young
This week, The World Around announced the four winners of its Young Climate Prize, following the shortlisting of the final 25 under-25 entrants (see Design Line 18 – 24 February). Foday David Kamara, who is just 22-years-old, won the design category with his project Ecovironment, which turns plastic waste into paving tiles, flowerpots and eco bricks. Kamara’s motivation is personal, having grown up “surrounded by plastic waste” in the Buhmeh Slum in Freetown, Sierra Leone. When he was 14, his mother’s illness was diagnosed as having been caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals from toxic plastic waste. Ecovironment offers a cheaper building material than cement while removing plastic waste from the environment, and uses its profits to run a scheme feeding schoolchildren. In just three years, the company has turned 786 tonnes of plastic waste into construction materials, with the goal of processing 500,000 tonnes by 2030. The visionary prize went to urban researcher Namra Khalid, whose organisation Karachi Cartography has been creating an open access map addressing the flood risk in Pakistan. Karachi could be under water by 2060 if sea level rise continues at predicted rates, but much of the city’s infrastructure mapping remains incomplete, contested post-colonial property, or held in private collections. Young designers and urbanists have inherited a heavy burden and a desperately constrained time limit, but as the prize highlights they have already achieved some very lofty goals.
A further consolidation
For years, Italian design was proudly built around a series of family-owned companies, with these brands presented by the industry as a cornerstone of the nation’s postwar il miracolo economico. In the 21st-century, however, family has steadily been stripped out of the field, with many of the industry’s leading names steadily having being acquired by private-equity funds and investment groups. Investindustrial presently holds B&B Italia, Arclinea and Flos, while the Haworth Lifestyle Design group controls Poltrona Frau, Cassina, Alias and Cappellini. This week saw the latter grow, with Cassina announcing that it had acquired Italian furniture brand Zanotta from its previous owners Tecno. Founded in 1954 by Aurelio Zanotta, the company hit its stride in the 1970s through collaborations with designers such as Achille Castiglioni, Bruno Munari Superstudio, Enzo Mari and Ettorre Sottsass. It is a roll call of 20th-century greats, and one that speaks of a specific period in Italian design; in its acquisition by Haworth, Zanotta salso speaks of the present realities of the field.
Just joking….unless? (image: Instagram).
Jokes on us
The prankster tradition of April Fools Day had become a little unloved recently, probably thanks to an online climate of rampant misinformation that means you have to look at everything on the internet with your critical thinking hat on. But this year saw design brands and institutions embraced a pleasing level of silliness. Technology studio Nothing, the brains behind the transparent Nothing Phone (1) (See Disegno #34), mocked up an entire ad campaign for Nothing Beer (5.1%), a “technically refreshing” beverage brewed in Wales with a cool, minimalist can. Tiffany & Co clearly took all the ribbing for their Nike collaboration in good humour, pretending to drop a hideous diamond-encrusted sneaker called Facet. The Guggenheim trolled architecture nerds with an Instagram post claiming it had begun painting the museum’s spiral structure red to honour the original wishes of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The public reception was widely positive, with added requests from commenters to turn it pink or to add lighting around the rings. As we enter a destabilising period where AI can make an image of anything at the touch of a button, it’s refreshing to know that the best visual puns are still ones made by human hands and minds.