Design Line: 11 – 17 February
Some solid design decisions on Design Line this week – and some questionable ones. Jony Ive nails an emblem for King Charles III, and Ikea sends its award-winning temporary shelters to aid victims of the Turkey-Syria earthquake. Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton picks celeb chanteuse Pharrell Williams for the top job, and Chick-fil-A designs a delivery driver rest stop.
Why be the face of the label when you can be its creative director (image: Louis Vuitton via Twitter).
Square peg / Louis Vuitton hole
Sigh. Pharrell Williams has been appointed Louis Vuitton’s new creative director for men’s wear. You can, perhaps, understand our frustration. Williams, a musician and producer, has been appointed to one of the leading design jobs in the fashion industry. It is a role that numerous highly trained, eminently qualified designers would have presumably leapt at, but Vuitton has instead opted for a man who is not, erm, a designer (presumably meaning that they’ll now need an actual designer to do that portion of the work – albeit at a lower fee and without any of the glory). None of this is to knock Williams, who has a clear interest in fashion and design, an excellent sense of style, and who will undoubtedly deliver the pop culture cachet that Vuitton clearly craves continuation of following the tenure of Williams’s predecessor, Virgil Abloh. Yet there’s something dull about the decision to sacrifice a design role on the altar of celebrity brand value. Abloh’s work was frequently divisive, and his route through design disciplines unorthodox, but his appointment did evince a way in which different perspectives on the field could be commercially and culturally successful, and which highlighted the value of more diverse pathways into the industry. By contrast, Williams’s appointment seems disappointingly orthodox – famous man gets famous job. Let’s hope he proves us wrong.
An emblem fit for a King (image: Jony Ive via Dezeen).
Contemporary heraldry
What a week for heraldists! While you may have been forgiven for thinking that the coat of arms was a dead format within the world of contemporary design, this week has shattered all such illusions. First off the bat was Jony Ive, continuing his post-Apple career with a coronation emblem for Charles III. Ive’s design is traditional (you sense that Charles must have loved it), but that’s just the nature of the beast. It’s less innovative and playful than Ive’s other recent work on Comic Relief’s new Red Nose, but it’s nevertheless a pleasure to see him working to briefs that step outside of the well-defined Apple aesthetic. And if you prefer your coats of arms with a touch more of a contemporary twist about them, why not look towards the 62 pictograms developed by creative agency W and the Paris 2024 design teams to mark the city's upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games. Each pictogram serve as a graphic representation of a different sport and, while they’re busier than the pictograms used in previous editions of the games, they’re rather good fun: each building a detailed coat of arms out of a graphic nod to the sport itself, an axis of symmetry, and a depiction of the environment in which it is played. Personally, Disegno enjoys the simplicity of the crossed barbells to represent weightlifting (a fitting tribute to the art of hefting stuff), but there’s plenty in there to cater to all tastes. As they say, vive la difference!
Fifteen minutes of infamy
Who is afraid of the 15-minute city? This week, the strange furore around the radical concept that people like, erm, to be able to walk to the shops, reached a fever pitch. A British Conservative member of parliament demanded the House of Commons debate the “international socialist concept” of designing neighbourhoods so that people don’t have to rely on cars to reach services and retail opportunities. Right-wing pundits took up the conspiracy theory, horrified by the dangerous communist idea of walking on pavements instead of the lovely patriotic activity of sitting about in your car in a traffic jam. Coined by Parisian professor Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city is a fairly anodyne urban model for neighbourhoods in which houses, schools, workplaces, cultural venues, leisure and health facilities would be only a 15-minute walk or bike ride away. But wall-eyed right-wingers are whipping themselves into a frenzy, suggesting that cities are about to be walled off into militarised districts patrolled by the dystopian 15-minute cops if you can purchase a (socialist) croissant on your (republican) school run. While the idea of distrusting an idea because it comes from, le horror, the French, is somewhat amusing (particularly considering the Associated Press had to apologise for calling the phrase dehumanising), the deep links between far-right ideology, petrocapitalism and masculinity are all linked in a toxic stew of loving cars and setting the planet on fire. To that we say, get on yer bike.
Better Shelter by Ikea, as seen previously in Syria (image: Better Shelter).
Flatpack aid
This week, Ikea has sent 5,000 emergency shelters to the regions of Turkey and Syria that have been struck by two devastating earthquake and aftershocks. Almost 42,000 people have died and millions have been displaced after strong earthquakes in the early hours of the morning of 6 February 2023. Ikea designed the Better Shelter, which won the London Design Museum's Beazley design of the year 2016, as a flatpack temporary structure that can serve as housing, clinics and classrooms. Each one comes in two boxes and takes four people four hours to erect into a 17.5sqm shelter without the need for tools. The earthquake, which struck when people were sleeping at home, was particularly catastrophic because many multi-storey buildings collapsed before people had a chance to escape. In Turkey, scrutiny is falling on a construction sector that has played fast and loose with building regulations during decades of government corruption. Additional floors added to buildings without planning permission, falsified building permits, lack of inspections – all contributed to dangerous conditions. The country straddles major fault lines and earthquake regulations for new buildings were updated in 2018, but many new apartment blocks constructed since then still collapsed, suggesting they were not strictly enforced. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has issued arrest warrants for developers and architects, despite his own government having granted regular construction amnesties to waive the need for a building safety certificate – for a price. Now the devastating cost of bad design has come to bear.
Relax from the trails of capitalism, sponsored by capitalism (image: Chick-fil-A).
Who will deliver for the food deliverers?
The rise of app-based food delivery services in major cities has created an itinerant class of drivers and cyclists who, despite spending hours coming in and out of restaurants and takeaways, have little time to rest, eat and use the bathroom. This week, American fast food chain Chick-fil-A opened a designated break room for delivery drivers in New York. To access the Brake Room, which features many different seating options and art featuring delivery drivers on the walls, users simply show proof of a delivery completed within the past week. “When designing the space,” a spokesperson told the Architects’ Newspaper, “the team at Chick-fil-A wanted to ensure the space felt comfortable and welcoming to the delivery community so they could truly use it to recharge in between deliveries.” It’s a nice sentiment, but low-paid gig economy workers would benefit more from labour protections or, even better, direct employment from the businesses that use their services rather than the plausible deniability offered by third-party apps that are designed to exploit. The fact that a branded space for people to rest and use the facilities can only be accessed via proof of productivity also demonstrates the pressing lack of public services available in urban areas. That Chick-fil-A’s billionaire owner makes donations to anti-LGBTQ organisations only adds insult to injury.
One book club you’ll want to attend (image: Head Hi).
Shelter in words
It should be no surprise to readers that Disegno has a long-running interest in design writing. What a treat, then, when we learned of this week’s inaugural New York Architecture + Design Book Club, created by the city’s Head Hi space and new design journal Untapped. The club is exactly what it sounds like – a quarterly gathering for the design curious to meet up and discuss a new publication – and it's picked a belter for its first edition: Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place. Created by Burks to coincide with his exhibition of the same name at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the book is an exploration of Burks’s interpretation of design, which has recast the discipline as an opportunity for workshop-based collaborative practice that foregrounds societies and people whose making traditions and design nous have been excluded from Euro-centric histories of the field. The book club is due to take place at Head Hi on 18 February, and will welcome as guests Burks, his studio partner Malika Leiper, and artist Christian Nyampeta. For anyone interested in attending, you can sign up here.