Design Line: 14 – 20 October
It’s been a busy week for conferences and openings in design. Finland hosted its Spirit of Paimio conference at Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium to explore ideas around architecture and care; the UK’s Design Council launched the third edition of its Design for Planet programme to examine the climate crisis; and London’s Design Museum opened its new show, Skateboard. Meanwhile, Google rolled out design tweaks to its emoji keyboard, and RIBA announced the winner of the 2023 Stirling Prize.
Skateboards as far as the eye can see (image: Felix Speller).
Design on wheels
The opening wall text to Skateboard, the Design Museum’s new exhibition, promises “a story of design, performance and communities progressing together”. Fortunately, it delivers. Curated by Jonathan Olivares and Tory Turk, the show aims to provide a history of skate culture, but delivered in a way that avoids the trap of academicism – “It needs to really be coming from the skate world and the people of skateboarding,” Olivares notes. This is no small task, but the show succeeds through a clear focus on understanding its subject through the design development of the boards themselves. Olivares and Turk have collected skateboards from across the 1950s to the 2010s, leading visitors from furniture casters nailed onto wooden board, through to contemporary ply boards. These objects are used to tell a complex story of how material developments, design shifts, changing urban environments, and skating techniques all fuelled one another: alterations in board shape, dimensions and materials changed the way in which people skated (Olivares suggests that the shift from clay and steel wheels to polyurethane ones in 1972 is “probably the biggest” of these), which in turn fed back into further changes in the boards’ design. It is an elegant and restrained framing, and one that illuminates a subculture that specialises in hacking products, appropriating urban spaces, and pushing materials in new directions – it is, in short, a classic design story, and one that presents the field as a medium through which to understand the wider world.
Base Milano is seeking new exhibitors for 2024 (image: via Base Milano).
A call for entries
Base Milano, a cultural centre in the north of Milan, has put out a call for entries to exhibit in the space during Milan Design Week 2024. The space aims to provide a space for experimental, political and research led-designers, and has developed a reputation for housing younger, more experimental projects compared to many of the installations and presentations that occur elsewhere during the week. The space’s programming for the 2024 festival will be curated by Erica Petrillo under the theme “In-difference”, with its call for entries seeking works and proposals that offer “new forms of coexistence and interdependence based on Convivialism principles such as cooperation, democracy, dialogue between cultures, equal dignity, and ecological responsibility.” It is a large and complex set of criteria – no doubt deliberately so – and one that reflects the organisation’s interest in the experimental and artistic. More information about the call for entries can be found here, and those interested in applying can do so here.
How do you solve a problem like Paimio (image: courtesy of Paimio Sanatorium)?
After the Aaltos
When Aino and Alvar Aalto were just 35- and 31-years-old, they designed one of the most significant buildings of Finnish architecture: The Paimio Sanatorium. It was a masterclass in the attention that architecture, interior and furniture design should pay to the needs of their users, in this case tuberculosis patients and healthcare workers. Just a few years after it opened, however, the sanatorium’s original purpose became largely defunct thanks to the discovery of penicillin and rollout of antibiotics. What, then, should be done with the purpose-built space? Over the years, the site has been used as a general hospital, army hospital, housing for refugees, kindergarten and more, yet 90 years on from its creation, questions of how best to activate the sanatorium in a manner that both honours its designers’ intentions of public care while respecting its architectural heritage persist. On Monday, the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, (established in 2020 to address exactly these questions), held its inaugural Spirit of Paimio conference, gathering leading architects, curators and conservationists to puzzle through what to do. The speakers approached the conference’s theme, “The Architecture of Taking Care”, from many angles – charming stories were told, reflections were given, and projects based on practices of care shared. While there were no conclusive answers as to questions about the sanatorium's future, there was sense of momentum building and conversations starting. In Paimio’s yellow and teal hallways, surrounded by a collective revelling in the potential for architecture to be restorative, it was hard to not feel hopeful.
The John Morden Centre is your Stirling Prize winner for 2023 (image: Jim Stephenson, via RIBA).
Care revisited
If the Paimio Sanatorium prompted reflection on the relationship between architecture and care earlier in the week, then a contemporary example of these ideas emerged at its close with the announcement of the 2023 Stirling Prize winner. The award went to The John Morden Centre by Mæ Architects, a day care centre for residents of the Morden College retirement community in south-east London. Featuring a brick exterior that references the college’s original 17th-century almshouse to which it sits adjacent, the new centre unfolds around a wooden colonnade from which treatment and social spaces branch off. It is a highly considered building, designed to offer an open, warm and social space that may help to combat the risks of loneliness and isolation faced by many older people. Ellen van Loon, chair of the Stirling Prize jury, praised the project’s “[dedication] to creating an environment that lifts the spirits and fosters community,” and the centre has received widespread praise for its thoughtful use of materials and design details that are considerate towards the needs of its residents and the challenges they face. It is a worthy winner, and one that makes a compelling case for care’s centrality to architecture: as Alex Ely, Mæ’s founder, noted to Architects’ Journal upon the building’s victory, “This project should be the norm not the exception.”
Google is introducing design tweaks to make emojis like these a little swifter to navigate (image: via Google).
Efficient emojis
The option to change the skin tone and gender of emojis is important – it shifts the power of self expression into the hands of the user, and helps to foster a sense of connection and representation in the way in which we communicate. But it’s also inefficient. Switching between different versions of an emoji introduces a moment of delay, which mounts up when applied across the entire keyboard. Credit to Google, then, which has introduced a modest design tweak in its digital keyboard for Android that makes the process more intuitive. Moving forward, changing one emoji changes all of them – if you pick a particular skin tone for one emoji, this tone will be replicated across the keyboard. The change was made following research conducted by Google that found users “often switch between different variations”, deploying different skin tones, for example, based upon the nature of their message and the audience it is intended for. “For example,” writes emoji researcher Alexander Robertson, “we’re far more likely to use a skin-toned emoji in a private group chat with our close friends than when posting to a public message board full of strangers.” The ability to quickly shift the entire keyboard between different expressions of identity is a small change, but one that is sensitive to users’ needs – having the entire keyboard modulate into the particular mode of expression that suits your current conversation is undeniably handy. Sometimes a tweak is all that’s needed.
Follow the arrow towards more sustainable practice (image: courtesy of the Design Council).
Design for planetary participation
Most of the design community seems to have got the message that we need to design for our planet. Just how we go about doing that, however, is less clear. Enter the third edition of the Design for Planet Festival, which shares practical knowledge of climate action through design. Hosted in Norwich by the Design Council, the event saw more than 5,000 delegates from 43 countries attend its packed programme of seminars, workshops and panel discussions. “But wait…” you, wily reader, may be thinking, “flying thousands of people across the world doesn't seem very sustainable!!!” And you’re not wrong. What was, perhaps, even more impressive than the festival’s thoughtful programme, however, was the hybrid physical/digital mode in which it was disseminated, allowing international audiences to join from the low-carbon comfort of their couches. Whilst many hybrid events feel awkward, isolating or clunky, the festival’s online platform genuinely considered the needs of its digital attendees. There was, for example, a specifically curated digital programme that ran alongside the streamed physical talks. There were Q&A forums and chat boxes pinging with messages, downloadable toolkits, spaces for online attendees to network and more. All of these UX details fostered a sense of online engagement and (in keeping with the festival’s theme) collaboration. Bravo, then, to the Design Council’s in-house designers Niall O’Connor and Maryam Atta who developed the guidelines for the digital space, and Open Audience who built the platform on the digital service Hubilo.
A murky exchange
The interrelation between tech giants and governments is under constant negotiation, typically defined by vague threats from law makers as to greater regulation, met with even vaguer promises from the tech companies to improve their operating practices in order to avoid this. This week, for instance, saw TikTok respond to demands from the European Union that it do more to remove fake news and violent content from its platform in the context of the Isreal-Hamas war. In an open letter written by Thierry Breton, an EU commissioner, the body argued that TikTok has an added responsibility to moderate content given its user base is largely made up of children and teenagers. In response, TikTok issued a statement explaining that it had hired more Arabic and Hebrew-speaking moderators, as well as providing “well-being resources” for these people (perhaps concious of criticisms from its staff earlier this year). The EU has issued similar warnings to X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Meta, demanding that these platforms’ moderation standards be upheld as defined by its Digital Services Act (DSA), which was introduced earlier this year. It is the first step in a longer process to demand more stringency from social media platforms, with the DSA allowing the EU to conduct investigations, issue fines or even temporarily ban platforms if its requirements are not met. This week’s call for improved moderation should prove an early test case for the new act, although it remains to be seen whether it is enough to bring about meaningful change.