Design Line: 30 September – 6 October
Frosted lava lamps; abandoned rail systems; Ai brooches; and fashion in space. Design is nothing if not varied, as this week’s Design Line makes abundantly clear. Read on to find out more.
A frosted lava lamp, courtesy of Sabine Marcelis (image: Mathmos).
Frosted lava
The original Mathmos Astro Lava Lamp (1963) is a fascinating piece of design (and for those who agree, we recommend a forthcoming essay in Design Reviewed #3 that will be going into more depth). The lamp is essentially decorative, but achieves its ornamental effect through practical, elegant engineering: the design uses the heat produced by a lightbulb to melt its constituent wax, while the carefully tapered shape of its bottle is sufficient to create the temperature gradient that generates its tumbling visual cycle. It is a difficult design to improve upon, but we nevertheless very much enjoyed the new take on the Astro launched this week by its manufacturer Mathmos. Designed by Sabine Marcelis as a limited edition, the new version recasts the lamp’s metal elements in neutral white, as well as adding a light frosted finish to the glass bottle. This latter tweak disguises the lamp’s contents when the light is turned off, but adds a new layer of atmosphere when in operation. It is a design that remains true to the original, but which distills its basic idea into a subtly different expression. Marcelis’s design work always focuses on colour and materiality, and her lava lamp leans into this – which is what made the original, designed by Edward Craven Walker, special too. Allowing materials to do what they do can be beautiful. Credit to Marcelis for finding a new form for an old idea.
Essential news, but sadly X’s new UX design does not award it the prominence it deserves (image: Disegno).
A UX design crime
Microblogging sites bring any number of social challenges (trolling, disinformation, the list goes on), but their ability to distribute news quickly and effectively is clear. This week, however, has seen Elon Musk introduce a new design to X (née Twitter) that seems to impact upon the site’s ability to deliver this service. Moving forward, the platform will no longer display headlines for links posted on the site. Instead, news stories now consist of an image that users need to click on to be taken through to the link (a setup that looks identical on first glance to how any other image posted on the platform appears). It is a design change, Musk has argued, that “Will greatly improve the esthetics.” Musk’s ideas of improved aesthetics largely consist in making the site less legible to users, and increasing the difficulty of parsing what it is you’re actually looking at. This is a change that is advantageous to X – Musk has made no secret of both his hostility towards formal news organisations, and his desire for users to remain on X rather than clicking through to other sources – but corrosive towards users. Regardless of one’s feelings about “legacy news”, the interface of any media platform should work to clearly signal the provenance of the information it distributes. Anything else, regardless of aesthetics, is poor design.
All hail Aqui Thami, the 2023 Hublot Design Prize winner (image: Hublot).
A sign of the times
The Hublot Design Prize has developed a reputation within design as a talent scout, with the awards scheme early to flag up the talents of previous winners and nominees such as Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Maya Bird-Murphy. As such, we read this week’s announcement of the 2023 winner with interest. This year’s award went to Aqui Thami, a self-taught artist and activist whose Mumbai-based practice is focused on improving the social situation of women and girls in the city. The outcomes that Tham reaches are varied – she has worked across performance, posters, zines, and photography, as well as founding the Sister Library, a feminist space managed by its local community – but her social imperative is consistent. “If you’re not working with the community, and you’re not sharing resources,” she told the V&A in 2018, “then what are you doing?”. Thami is an interesting winner, not least for the manner in which her practice speaks of wider shifts in the field. Increasingly, younger practitioners are defined less by the medium or discipline within which they work, but rather by their social ambitions (a shift that may also speak to the rise of collective practice, as seen with the likes of Resolve and POoR). As a barometer of emerging practice, the Hublot Design Prize seems to have struck again.
An early visualisation for HS2 – now imagine it with a big red cross through it (image: HS2).
A confused system
“The facts have changed, and the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction.” So spoke British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, announcing the abandonment of the northern portion of the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail line in response to rising costs – HS2 will now extend no further north than Birmingham. It amounts to a crisis of systems design. Sunak claims that the £36bn saved by cancelling this part of HS2 will go into other rail, road and bus schemes that will serve northern areas of the country, but this offers cold comfort. There are no guarantees as to how this money will be spent; many regions had been counting on the economic benefits of HS2; numerous people had sold their homes in anticipation of the line’s creation; and Sunak’s claim of savings seems to neglect the £24.7bn that has purportedly already been spent on the scheme, whose outcome will now be restricted to a new line between London and Birmingham (two cities that were already fairly well connected). HS2 was always a controversial and contested scheme, but to proceed this far into its creation before suddenly abandoning the plan speaks of poor planning. Sunak is right that flexibility in systems design is important, but so too is clarity. With HS2, it seems clear that confusion reigns.
A seat at the cardboard table (image: Thomas Joseph Wright, courtesy of Gallery Fumi).
Unboxing Box
Cardboard is very chuckable. We use it for packaging, transporting and protecting objects, and then throw it, fancy free, into the recycling bin. But for designer Max Lamb, cardboard could be so much more than a case for other things. His exhibition Box, which opened at Gallery Fumi on 5 October, is a testament to the potential beauty stored in boxes if only we cared to look. The exhibition is filled with furniture crafted from cardboard boxes that Lamb has been hoarding for the past few years. Lamb used the boxes’ sizes and shapes to guide his designs, cutting, scoring them and pasting them together in different ways whilst minimising off-cuts or waste. The result is impressively versatile – some of the tables and chairs are predictably and satisfyingly boxy, while others have graceful curves. Logos and addresses have been left exposed on some chairs, while others make a feature of the corrugated internal structure of cardboard, or else have been treated with a papier-mâché method to give them a terrazzo-like look, or coated with tempura paints that Lamb made from wheat paste, tin and iron. The pieces are surprisingly sturdy, weighty and possessed of impressive structural integrity as a result of Lamb’s careful layering of material. In transforming a mundane object into a charming, functioning furniture collection, Lamb has successfully repackaged cardboard as a valuable material for design.
The first glimpse of the AI Pin, sat pertly amongst pin stripes (image: via Humane).
Fashionable AI
The fashion brand Coperni, helmed by Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, has become known for its interest in science and technology, particularly in light of the spray-on dress it created in 2022 with Fabrican for Paris Fashion Week. A year on, the studio has repeated the trick with Humane, the tech company formed by ex-Apple staff members Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The two brands outfitted Coperni models with AI Pins, the debut product from Humane that professes to be a “connected and intelligent clothing-based wearable device” – in other words, a computer in a brooch. The product is scheduled to properly demo in November, but the collaboration with Coperni seems to have been a sneak peek. Chaudri has previously shown elements of what the device might do during a TED Talk, but the Coperni collaboration was an opportunity to show off its industrial design. In terms of concrete details, the collaboration revealed nothing new beyond confirming that the device is screen-less (an idea that fellow Apple alumnus Jony Ive is also reported to be exploring), but Humane will no doubt have relished the link to fashion. AI, after all, is most commonly seen as invasive and alienating; the opportunity to present it within a warmer context, and downplay the connotations of Silicon Valley technology, is no doubt invaluable PR.
Design in space
It is has been a mixed week for design in space. Positively, Prada announced that it is working with the Texas-based startup Axiom Space to develop the space suits for the crew of NASA’s Artemis III mission, a moon landing planned for 2025. As to what Prada will actually bring to the mission is clearly dependent on how the partnership works. It is easy to imagine that the collaboration could ultimately amount to little more than an easy PR win for the two companies, but Axiom Space is adamant that the fashion house will be deeply involved in all design processes and provide “the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits”. If this proves to be the case, then the story suggests a positive role for design in the future of space exploration. The present, however, feels rather less rosy. This week also saw the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issue its first fine to a company for violating its anti-space debris rule: Dish Network will be required to pay $150,000 for its failure to properly deorbit its EchoStar-7 satellite, which now represents an orbital debris risk to other satellites. The thought of Prada designs soaring into space may be a happy one, but the present reality of humanity’s designed interactions with the solar system are somewhat less idyllic: junked satellites, scattered around the Earth.