Design Line: 19 – 25 August
New forms of travel – be they to the moon, across oceans, or simply pottering around San Francisco – abound in this week’s edition of Design Line, which also turns its beady eye towards Apple’s volte-face in the right to repair debate; a legal ruling around AI-generated imagery; and Aviva’s insurance offer for timber architecture.
The landing may have looked a little something like this – albeit in higher resolution (image: ISRO).
A lunar first
India's Chandrayaan-3 made history this week, becoming the first spacecraft to land on the moon’s south pole. Designed by India’s ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), the craft is the successor to 2019’s failed Chandrayaan-2 mission, and its Vikram lander and Pragyan rover will now embark upon a two-week mission of taking thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements from around its landing site. It is a triumph for India (which joins the United States, Russia, and China as the only extant nations to have successfully landed on the moon) and an interesting design story to boot. ISRO’s chairman S. Somanath has described Chandrayaan as a “failure-based design”, informed by the issues that faced its immediate predecessor. “We looked at very many failures – sensor failure, engine failure, algorithm failure, calculation failure,” Somanath explained. “So, whatever the failure we want it to land at the required speed and rate. So, there are different failure scenarios calculated and programmed inside.” It has proven to be a winning approach, with Chandrayaan-3 succeeding where so many previous missions have wrecked upon the rocks – only earlier this month, Russia’s Luna-25 space craft crashed while preparing for pre-landing orbit.
Got one of these? Speak to Aviva (image: Aviva).
Assured insurance
Engineered timbers such as CLT (cross-laminated timber) and glulam offer exciting opportunities for low-carbon construction, but a major barrier has been fire safety regulations and the associated issues of insuring wooden-frame buildings. This has been a particular bugbear in the UK, where designers are chomping at the bit to build sustainable homes to address the housing and climate crises, but stuck with traditional brick, concrete and stone. So there was much excitement in the British architecture community this week following insurance company Aviva’s recent announcement that it has changed its policy and will now underwrite commercial engineered timber buildings. The news has been a long time coming, as Aviva has been engaged on a pilot scheme with selected developers to test out the risk management process associated with building with timber. Of course, while engineered timber is fast growing and locks in carbon, the reason wood fell out of favour as a building material in the first place is its inherently flammable qualities. While there have been great leaps forward in technology to create safer and flame-resistant engineered woods, it can still be risky when used inappropriately. The UK has a way to catch up, though. Since 2021, Denmark has authorised the construction of engineered timber buildings of up to 45m in height. The green light was given after testing proved that wooden walls and floors could maintain their structural integrity during two hours of fire exposure. Innovation and risk management must go hand in hand, but this is an exciting sign of progress.
Apple is now more in favour of this sort of thing (image: Apple).
A repairable Apple?
Apple has a contested history when it comes to the right to repair movement. Positively, the company introduced its Self Service Repair programme in 2021, allowing for a degree of relaxation around its previously tight control of repair of its devices; negatively, Apple’s actions in this area have been widely perceived as slow to arrive and limited, with the company having historically been resistant to the introduction of industry-wide legislation around repair. It was something of a sea change this week, then, when the company unexpectedly threw its weight behind California's right-to-repair bill, SB 244. The bill requires manufacturers of consumer electronics to make spare parts, tools and manuals available to customers and independent repair shops, with this support to be maintained for three years after the last date of manufacture if the product is $50 to $99.99, and seven years if the device costs over $99.99. Apple’s support has come with some provisos – it has said it supports the bill “so long as it continues to provide protections for customers and innovators,” including requirements that “repair providers disclose the use of non-genuine or used parts” – but it is nevertheless a positive and highly unexpected stance for the company to have taken. The significance of the moment was certainly not lost on Kyle Wiens, founder of the influential iFixit repair community: “It feels like the Berlin Wall of tech repair monopolies is starting to crumble, brick by brick.”
Headless chickens
Earlier this month, regulators from the California Public Utilities Commission gave permission for driverless car companies Cruise and Waymo to offer paid rides to customers throughout San Francisco (although Cruise presently offers paid rides only at night and in limited parts of the city; Waymo offers only free rides). Unsurprisingly, chaos ensued. Ten Cruise vehicles stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street; another Cruise car got stuck in freshly poured concrete; and, to top it all off, a Cruise vehicle crashed into a fire truck, injuring a passenger. To critics of the technology, it proved that autonomous vehicles are a hazard and potentially dangerous, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles seems to have agreed. The department has requested that Cruise halve the number of vehicles it operates in San Francisco, reducing from 400 driverless vehicles to no more than 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night. It’s a bloody nose for Cruise, which is owned by General Motors, although the company has remained confident in its technology, arguing that Cruise “positively impacts overall road safety” and will provide state officials with “any data they need to reinforce the safety and efficiency of our fleet.” The driverless future may yet come, but it would seem we’re not there yet.
A lovely, copyright-less scene (image: Creativity Machine/Stephen Thaler).
No human, no protection
“[Human] authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” Thus spoke DC District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who ruled this week that AI-generated artworks cannot be copyrighted. Judge Howell was presiding over a lawsuit brought against the US Copyright Office by Stephen Thaler, who had been repeatedly rejected in his efforts to copyright an AI-generated image made using his Creativity Machine algorithm. Thaler had sought to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” but his case was rejected by Judge Howell, who ruled that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand”. Nevertheless, the court did acknowledge the growing complexities surrounding creative practice and the use of AI, stating that humanity is “approaching new frontiers in copyright,” and that the rise of artists, designers and architects using the technology prompted “challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary” to copyright AI-created art. It is a fascinating question and one that admits of no easy answers – is the technology an artistic tool that practitioners steer like any other, or a qualitatively different mode of creation?
Big ship; big sails (image: Cargill).
With the wind in her sails
Cargo ships get a bad rap. Not only do they clutter up shipping lanes by getting stuck in canals and provide maverick designers with an endless supply of material for shipping container architecture (shudder), the maritime industry is responsible for an estimated 3 per cent of global emissions. So it was a breath of fresh air – literally – this week when the Pyxis Ocean set sail from Singapore under full sail. The five-year-old cargo ship has been retrofitted with two 37.5m-high sails on her deck. Ship charterer Cargill hopes that Pyxis Ocean’s experimental journey will collect valuable data about the ability of sails to save on fuel costs. The ship is headed to Brazil and, if all goes well, will then cross the oceans to Denmark with a cargo of grain. Engineering firm BAR Technologies, together with Yara Marine Technologies, designed the sails, which are made from steel and fibreglass. Their design allows them to pivot automatically, and will hopefully reduce the ship’s fuel consumption by 30 per cent. With all these wooden buildings and sailing ships, it seems like the past may yet hold some design solutions for the future.