Design Line: 29 April – 5 May
Future time is of the essence on this week’s Design Line, as the UK contemplates design for the Coronation and its railway clocks, while America ploughs millions into the future of AI, and Iceland’s DesignMarch asks: what happens now?
Ethical AI
It’s probably not a great sign for the ethical implications of designing AI technologies that the man whose work on neural networks saw him regularly touted as the "godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, quit Google this week, expressing regret for his life’s work and telling the New York Times that its “hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using [AI] for bad things.” Not to be deterred, however, the Biden administration has announced plans to do just that, with this week seeing it pledge a $140m investment from the National Science Foundation to launch seven new National AI Research (NAIR) Institute, with Vice-President Kamala Harris meeting with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to discuss AI’s potential risks. Harris revealed that she had reminded the CEOs that “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products”, but this warning butted up against Hinton’s reflections from his time at Google. Sounding a warning over companies’ desire not to be left behind by their rivals, and therefore their willingness to rush technologies to market, Hinton cautioned of the dangers ahead: “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
Tadao Ando meets the Met
As a public display of private wealth in a time of widespread hardship, the Met Gala ranks quite highly on the let-them-eat-cake-o-meter of the cost of living crisis. This week, some of the world’s hottest famous people gathered together to try and dress to a fashionable costume party theme. This year, the dress code was dedicated to Karl Largerfeld, the late director of Chanel, in honour of the upcoming exhibition Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty. Famous as much for his fatphobia as his fingerless gloves, Lagerfeld was a man whose cat still travels by private jet, so seeing the great and the good cosplay as him (or the cat, Choupette, in some nightmare-inducing interpretations) really added to the fall of Rome vibes. Aside from Pedro Pascal wearing red shorts, one redeeming feature was the venue design from Tadao Ando. Rather than an overplayed red carpet, the Japanese architect lined the entryway and stairs with white, adorned by curving lines of blue and red. Ando was referencing a piece by 18th-century painter William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, that attempts to find the most beautiful line. A highbrow reference relating to the exhibition title that went over many internet commentators’ heads – jokes about Colgate toothpaste abounded. Press barriers and chandeliers made out of recycled water bottles were a nice attempt to highlight the climate crisis, but next to the glittering jewels and champagne brand-sponsored afterparties, they felt a little like a drop in a large, opulent ocean.
Time for change
Everybody likes Hans Hilfiker’s 1944 Swiss railway clock, to the degree that the design has long since burst forth from its Alpine stronghold and now forms the basis for a vast number of the clocks marking time at stations across the continent. Well, a challenger to Hilfiker’s classic design may soon emerge. The UK’s Network Rail, in partnership with the RIBA and the Design Museum, has announced a competition to find a new design for a timepiece to be used across the British rail network. The competition is open internationally to practitioners and students from across art, design, engineering and architecture, and is careful to stress that it has “purposefully elected to use the generic term ‘timepiece’ rather than ‘clock’” as part of a bid to “avoid the conventions and connotations associated with referring to such instruments as ‘clocks’”. A nice challenge, then, to find a design that can present time in a communal format within stations, as opposed to passengers relying on their mobile phones. The competition is open to registrations until 8 June, although practitioners do have to pay to enter, which seems to double down on the exploitative elements of a competition structure (shortlisted entries will at least receive a £7,000 honorarium, with an eventual fee of £35,000 for the winning design). Nevertheless, for those able and willing to cover the fee, it’s a compelling proposition – a chance to see your work writ large in stations across the country.
DesignMarch becomes DesignMay (image: DesignMarch).
May brings DesignMarch
Iceland's design week, DesignMarch, used to be in March – as the name suggests. The event had already started sliding towards April when the pandemic struck, then a temporary pushback to May was so popular that they’ve decided to keep it. Mere weeks from the summer solstice, Iceland in May is almost permanent daylight and its residents are overjoyed to be out and about. Of all the design weeks Disegno has attended, the sense of community and camaraderie in Reykjavik this week was unmatched. You could barely get through the doors of some of the dozens of pop-up exhibitions and displays around the city for Wednesday’s opening night parties, which followed a day of Design Talks at Harpa, the Henning Larsen-designed concert hall. The theme of DesignMarch 2023, What Now?, is a deliberate provocation that takes in all the knotty questions about what on Earth the future holds. Sustainability was front and centre of many exhibitions, of course, with the Reykjavik Edition (favoured hotel of recent celebrity guest and temporary Icelandic resident Jodie Foster) hosting an exhibition from Seaweedworks, a new venture promoting the work of artists finding new ways to design with fashion. French design graduate Tanguy Mélinand is undertaking a live demonstration of his work with Breton seaweed, which he cures and crafts into beautiful couture clothes and accessories. Other highlights included 3D-printed ceramic vases by Guðrún Kolbeinsdóttir whose collapsing shapes were informed by graphs charting increasing ocean acidity, and sex toys made from Icelandic clay by Antonía Berg and Elín Margot as an ecosexual approach to environmentalism.
Raining on the new reign’s parade (image: via Building Design).
New reign, same shit
As the UK stands on the cusp of the coronation of King Charles III, How we celebrate the Coronation: Designs for a new reign could easily have made a valuable contribution to discussions around urbanism and architecture. It has been widely pointed out that Charles’s interventions within the discipline have fallen short of the relative progressiveness of his positions regarding agriculture (including in this recent essay by critic Rob Bevan), but regardless of Charles’s own views, a point of symbolic change within a country is no bad excuse to reflect on its future. Edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, and published by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, How we celebrate the Coronation includes 55 short essays that aim “to provoke debate and to spark action” about how the UK’s built environment might be improved. Yet despite the forward-looking gloss of this idea, the methodology by which the publication has been put together appears to be staunchly retrograde. In her review of the book for Building Design, historian Emma Dent Coad praised a selection of the pieces, but also noted that the publication was heavily London-centric (an ongoing issue in the UK) and that of the 55 contributors, only 5 were women (“don’t the editors know more than five women with informed and intelligent positions on the built environment?”). The result, Dent Coad notes, is a publication that resolves into a creaking parade of the great and the good (and male) of the architectural establishment, which makes for a pamphlet that is “fluffy and inconsequential, even embarrassing”, and which ducks discussion of “land value,[…] supply line problems, construction quality, of workforce shortages and all the other issues facing the future of the built environment”. As a clarion call for a new era, then, it seems to fall short. “Maybe architecture students should be made to read it,” Dent Coad concludes, “to understand the drab, male-dominated, self-referential world they are entering.”
New York City gears up for new garbage trucks (image: Sam LaRussa).
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Get in the bin
New York City’s war on rats continues apace, as the city government increasingly attempts to kick its open-air rubbish collection system to the curb. A new report from the Department of Sanitation published this week, ‘The Future of Trash: Waste Containerization Models and Viability in New York’, muses on the trouble with bin collection. The Clean Curbs pilot (which features in ‘Rat Wars’, Disegno #35) has proved successful, but scaling it up provides a headache. Currently, the locking communal bins require manual collection, maintenance and wholesale behavioural change in the community. But it’s not as simple as switching to the kinds of bins that can be docked to a waste-removal truck, as America currently has very limited capacity for this kind of vehicle design and manufacturer. Other cities around the world, notes the report, have snazzy underground waste systems, but New York’s infrastructure is already very dense below and above ground. Wheelie bins are no good because they would struggle with the snow and ice that blankets the city during the winter months. Currently, New York’s garbage is plonked out on its 26m feet of curb space – “one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in the world”. If 150,000 of the city’s 1.5m parking spaces were given over to new stationary trash containers, the report estimates, this could be combined with a fleet of automatic side-loader (ASL) trucks that would hoist the bins in, as they do in Madrid and Rome. The report sets out a concrete goal for industrial designers looking for an ambitious project: “develop a first-of-its-kind stationary shared container and associated collection truck suitable for scaled use in a dense urban environment in the United States.” To the bin drawing board!