Design Line: 24 – 30 June
It’s a week of whimsy in this edition of Design Line, featuring a playful new museum for children from the V&A, a cute concept car for Renault by Sabine Marcelis, a Nike jacket that opens its own vents when you sweat, and an Xbox disguised as a Barbie DreamHouse.
They weren’t kidding around with this museum redesign (image: Luke Hayes, courtesy of the V&A).
Child’s play
A rebrand is a tricky thing, but the V&A has pulled it off with aplomb this week with the Young V&A. Formerly the V&A Museum of Childhood, the institution occupies a Grade II* listed building in East London and re-opens to the public on 1 July after a three-year-long £13m redevelopment from AOC Architecture and the V&A’s curatorial team. Once designed to showcase objects relating to childhood (a raison d’être that led to rather a lot of creepy dolls on display, if we’re honest), the museum in its new guise is one that is entirely for children, from toddling babies to teens of 14. Three new galleries titled Play, Imagine and Design have been devised to cater to different age groups while remaining accessible to all children – and adults in touch with their inner child. Play is catered to the smallest of humans, with colour-coded and sparkly displays of objects arranged from floor height upwards, with soft places to bump into, alongside an arcade where older children can play video games that includs a version of the museum rendered in Minecraft. Over in the Imagine gallery, costumes and toys that encourage imaginative play, including a room filled with dollhouses from all eras, geographies and architectural styles are arranged around a mini theatre for dress-up games and performances. Upstairs, the Design gallery is arranged to foster the minds of a future generation of designers, with displays focusing on objects made from sustainable materials and pioneering technology such as 3D-printed Hero Arm prosthetics for children. There’s plenty of seating around, too, so carers can relax while watching over their charges as they charge around. It’s a fun approach to curation that, frankly, a lot of museums for adults could learn from.
Go, go, go Renault Twingo (image: Carl Kleiner courtesy of Renault).
Not road legal but can be driven
Disegno has always had a soft spot for the original Renault Twingo – a 1992 hatchback whose semi-circular headlights had something of the look of a sleepy, moleish face, blearily peering out at you from down the road. It was, as such, a great pity that subsequent iterations of the car stripped away its eccentricities, settling into a far more conventional (viz. bland) aesthetic. Three cheers, then, for Sabine Marcelis, who has developed a new electric concept car version of the Twingo that restores it to its 90s pomp. Marcelis’s practice abides in considerations of colour, transparency and materiality, and her work on the Twingo has moved her preoccupations around furniture and lighting into the realm of automobiles. The concept Twingo has all-white bodywork that reveals its structural mouldings, illuminated by occasional lighting elements (Disegno particularly likes the illuminated “grill” that sits below the eye-like headlights and which is all a bit 😬), while the red interior features pleasingly monolithic mono-element sunshades and sunshades. The translucent red steering wheel, which resembles a giant boiled sweet, is the pièce de résistance. It is only a concept, but undeniably a beautiful one. “We wanted to create an object that would still be a car,”notes François Farion, Renault’s director of design, innovation and sustainability, “it is electric; it is not road-legal but can be driven; the incredible steering-wheel works, even if you hit a curb (which we did to test the robustness of the prototype!).” Well, the heart knows what it wants: Renault, make it road-legal and get the Twingo back out there!
Don’t go folding my heart (image: Google).
Know when to fold
A phone with a folding screen – the gimmick that no one really asked for, but which tech designers are determined to deliver, with varying degrees of success. This week, people finally got their hands on the Pixel Fold from Google, but the screens are already under stress. According to a report from The Verge, there are sad screen situations to be found everywhere, from professional reviewers to posters on Reddit. A reviewer for Ars Technica only managed four days with their Pixel Fold before its pixels folded, the OLED screen dying on his desk after only the lightest of use. The problem appears to be a design issue – the protective plastic layer that covers the thin-enough-to-flex glass atop the OLED panel doesn’t quite stretch the edges, creating a weak point for damage to begin and then spread fromm. Google has partnered with iFixit, the self-repair website, to provide guides and spare parts to allow people to fix their own Pixel Folds at home. It’s an admirable attempt to tackle programmed obsolescence and the obscene amount of e-waste polluting the environment, an estimated 50m tons of which is produced across the world each year. But, if the Pixel Fold is breaking within a week of its release, no amount of replacement screens will stop it from becoming another wasteful enterprise to join the growing pile.
It’s getting hot in here, so open all your vents (image: Nike).
An opportunity to vent
For anyone interested in performance wear, a running jacket is a fine thing. It gives you useful pockets for your keys, phone and other essentials when out training, while the extra layer of warmth can be a godsend in colder months. The issue, of course, is that they swiftly transform into a sticky, hellish, inferno-jackets the moment you hit hotter climes. It was interesting, therefore, to learn this week that Nike has professed to have solved this issue through the introduction of “Aerogami” jackets, which feature an automatic venting system that opens and closes to keep you cool during workouts. Overlook the cheesy name, and the technology behind the idea is compelling. The jackets’ vents appear across the front and back of the garment, and have been treated with a moisture-reactive film that automatically expands to open the vent when it detects sweat, thereby aiding evaporation and improving airflow, before contracting to close them off when the body is cooler and drier. It’s an ingenious idea (and one that is visually compelling to watch as the vents visibly open and close) and Disegno is keen to see it in action when the pieces launch later this year (and, also, to find out any implications for the film’s addition in terms of the recyclability of the jackets at the end of their lifespan). Particularly welcome, however, is the fact that the men’s and women’s iterations of the jacket have been developed separately, such that the placement of their vents corresponds to gender specific needs (with the women’s version, for instance, the vents are focused around the area where a sports bra would sit). For runners, lets hope that the summers of our discontent may soon be at an end.
Soulful soles
Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect known for large projects such as the Japan National Stadium and the M2 Building, has turned his hand to something far smaller in scale. This week, details were revealed about the collaboration between Kuma and Fendi for the Italian fashion house’s spring/summer 2024 menswear collection. Models walked the runway at Pitti Uomo 104 in Florence wearing Fendi Flow sneakers with unusual latticed soles designed by the architect, who also reimagined accessories from the fashion house using materials such as bamboo and washi paper. “‘Nature and craft have always been at the centre of my work as an architect and a designer,” said Kuma. “When Fendi asked me to reflect on their bags and shoes, I thought of them like small architectural projects on a human scale.” Architects love to bang on about designing for “human scale”, even when constructing spaces that are inhumanly large, but the Fendi x Kengo Kuma collab is reassuringly tactile and in touch with the natural world. Eschewing leather, bags were made out of birch bark, waranshi – a type of washi paper formed of tree-bark fibres mixed with cotton – and bamboo woven together to create a delicate lattice in a practice called yatara ami. While we may be reaching the point of designer collaboration saturation, the athletic shoes may be a (slightly) more affordable way for Kuma fans to get their hands on some of his work without commissioning an athletics stadium.
It’s a Barbie world, we just live in it (image: Microsoft).
This Barbie is a PR maverick
Is there a single corner of design that the Barbie PR team hasn’t managed to paint bright pink? From the materials shortage brouhaha to the Aldo shoe collection (complete with dinky toy packaging shoe boxes), the gaming technology tie-ins to the architectural hijacking of a Malibu mountain, nothing has been left un-Barbie-fied. This week, Microsoft announced a tie-in with the upcoming movie in the form of an Xbox that’s been made-over to resemble a Barbie DreamHouse, complete with open plan modernist architecture and pool. There’s only one of these magical pink consoles available for a competition winner, but gaming enthusiasts will also be able to get their hands on a range of controllers kitted out in various Barbie fashions – Disegno’s favourite is the Cowgirl Barbie controller complete with cute fringing. The perfect addition to any cosy girl gamer’s arsenal (see ‘Let’s Unpack That’ in Design Reviewed #1). Meanwhile in Malibu, AirBnb is getting in on the act with a mansion house made up to look like a full-scale DreamHouse, complete with an open-air disco dance floor, a pink slide, and a pool with floats that spell out “K-E-N”. There’s still almost a month to go until the film hits cinemas on 28 July, so who knows what rose-tinted tie-ins are yet to be revealed.