Design Line: 2 – 8 December
From gift giving to prize receiving, from competitions call outs to penning letters on government action on AI, this week’s Design Line is full of activity, activism and announcements. Read on to learn more.
Everyday objects infused with social critique in Jesse Darling’s exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, 2023 (image courtesy of Angus Mill).
When objects speak
“What I’m trying to do is to make visible the fact that all the big stories and big structures that we really believe in are just flimsy and arbitrary.” So explained artist Jesse Darling, speaking to The Guardian in light of his nomination for the 2023 Turner Prize – an award which he subsequently won on Tuesday. Darling had been a popular pick for the prize amongst art critics, yet there is much in his work that will thrill a design audience too. Darling’s installation at Towner Eastbourne, this year’s host for the prize, deploys metal crowd barriers mangled into anthropomorphic forms; hazard tape twisted into a psychotic maypole-esque structure; and ring binders filled with concrete to offer a witty, incisive reflection on the decline of Britain, and the nation’s seeming blindness to the impermanence of many of the structures, systems and infrastructure that once made for a liveable, supportive society. It is a powerful piece of social critique, told through the everyday objects and infrastructure that surround us, and a deserving winner of the award. For anyone who believes in the communicative power of design objects, Darling’s work provides a masterclass in how they can be used to tell stories. “I started thinking at some point about my relationship to things and materials,“ Darling explains in the film he made to accompany the exhibition – we strongly recommend visiting Towner to see what conclusions he reached.
Tiles that tell stories of collaboration and long-term relationships (image courtesy of Giles Round and Brent Cross Town).
Communal enamel
Back in 2016, Giles Round’s Design Work Leisure (DWL) studio created a new series of public artworks for London’s Blackhorse Road, Victoria and Vauxhall stations: murals of handmade tiles that, Round told Disegno #11, would “include variance, no matter how perfect the production”. Now, Round has repeated the trick with Time passes & still I think of you, a modular frieze of colourful enamel panels installed at Brent Cross West station, which the artist dedicated to his late mother. As with the earlier project, Round has worked on the new commission with architectural enamel fabricator AJ Wells, which has a longstanding relationship with both the London Underground and the Paris Metro to produce their signage and cladding. This relationship between artist and collaborators is an element of his work that Round places considerable importance on. The DWL, for example framed its mission as being “to devise, research and develop bespoke products for the physical environment of the network, for staff and passengers to enjoy”, and the new work at Brent Cross West seems no exception: it is beautiful art, executed using the skills of specialist manufacturers, and designed for as broad a public as possible to enjoy. What’s not to like?
Thanks to AI manufacturing, this plastic won’t go to waste (image courtesy of Batch.Works).
A nice dataset
Calling all UK students, the design competition klaxon is blaring. The Design Council, the UK's national strategic advisor for design, has announced a competition for students from GCSE to masters level to create a design that has a positive impact on the planet and their community that can be 3D printed. The Products for Planet competition outlines that successful designs are ones that “clearly identify the intended user group and demonstrate demand from the future users” and will be gifted to these intended users at the end of the process. The competition is held in conjunction with Batch.Works who will undertake the manufacturing. In taking part, there’s a motivating factor for Batch.Works, who will use the submitted designs to pilot its AI-powered Additive Manufacturing (3D printing) technology. In order to do this, Batch.Works – which has created the technology along with Matta.ai and PlusX innovation – needs to print 10,000 parts on these new machines, training the AI to spot faulty prints and learn how to avoid them, thus cutting down on future waste during manufacturing. The scheme demonstrates the rising need for data sets in this kind of collaborative AI-cum-design manufacturing. If these machines can be trained on data sets based on designs that have been created with considerate and sustainable briefs, well, so much the better.
Toyo Ito during the archival hearing in 2019, as part of the Meanwhile in Japan series (image courtesy of CCA).
A gift of architectural scale
'Tis the season for gift giving. And Toyo Ito has, this week, given possibly the most generous gift that a Pulitzer Prize winning architect could give to a cultural institution. On Wednesday the first pieces of Ito’s archive arrived at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), to whom he has donated the work that his office (formerly called Urban Robot) produced between the period of 1971 and 1995. Some commentators were affronted that the Japanese studio’s history has been gifted to a museum and research centre across the seas. But, to them, Ito has said: “The CCA is an architectural museum and research centre I have the utmost trust in. […] I have the confidence that the CCA offers unparalleled accessibility for future researchers from around the world to study my works.” His comments remind us that gifts like these are not simply given, they also must be earned. The CCA has been in conversation with Ito since 2018 when Kayoko Ota, curator of the CCA c/o Tokyo programme, began a series of conversations with contemporary Japanese architects. Furthermore, the centre has a proven track record of deeply engaging with its archive through curatorial research, exhibition making and activation programmes such as its Find and Tell residency, each of which emphasise new readings of its collection. It is within this rigorous context that Ito hopes his early-career and work will be the subject of new discoveries. This, it seems, will be a gift that keeps on giving.
A shape shifting collection launch
At 3pm on Wednesday, in the company of the vloggers, ASMRtists and the comedy cats that populate YouTube, something intriguing took form. Dior premiered its hour long documentary Dior Metamorphosis (concealing and revealing). The video’s description bills itself as “dedicated to the #DiorCruise 2024 collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri”, the fashion house’s creative director. The film aims to honour the inspiration behind the collection with a large focus on Frida Khalo as well as indigenous makers of Mexico. Chiuri is particularly keen to champion women, highlighting their immense making skills which she says are often overlooked due to their gender and the undervaluing of craft. About halfway through the documentary she reflects: “My effort, together with Dior, is to be able to convey that behind this work [of women’s craft] there are cultural values, that need to be retold in a different way and celebrated.” It is in this idea of a new form of sharing stories that the documentary is interesting. That Dior is disseminating its collection through online spaces such as YouTube breaks down the usual barriers of exclusivity of runway shows and fashion weeks. While Dior is not entirely moving away from exclusive launches – the latter part of the documentary largely consists of footage of the collection's runway event – the shape shifting, nay metamorphosing, of how Dior presents its work is welcome, both in the acknowledgment of where ideas come from and in the inclusion of newer, broader audiences in an often elitist industry.
Should we hold the creators of AI accountable for its environmental impact (image: A row of Cloud TPU v5p AI accelerator supercomputers in a Google data center, courtesy of Google).
Lassoing the beast
The proliferation and temptation to use AI is everywhere. Cue moves from campaigners and lawmakers to try and introduce some kind of order on this rapidly expanding technology. This week President Joe Biden’s AI executive order (released in October 2023) was criticised in an open letter from 17 environmental and protest groups arguing that the order does not go far enough to mitigate the impact of AI large language models (LLMs) on the climate. The argument is two-fold. Firstly: the executive order does not do enough to address LLM’s physical environmental impact in terms of energy and resource use (see ‘The Biggest Machine on Earth’ in Disegno #30 for a look at web design, cloud computing and their environmental impacts). Secondly, they argue, the bill does not do enough to recognise the risk these generative AI technologies pose in terms of spreading disinformation about climate change and climate change denial. It’s hard to fathom that it has been just over a year since ChatGPT has launched, and within that time period Google has also been developing its own AI platform Gemini (launched this week) which it hopes will be a direct rival. Meanwhile with talks also taking place in Brussels concerning the European Union’s AI Act, it seems that lawmakers and governments are struggling to keep up with the sheer pace of these easy to access and easy to use models.