Design Line: 25 February – 3 March
It’s been a big week for sending things in this edition of Design Line. Ukraine sent a message to Putin with Banksy stamps, while China revealed the design of a new launcher to send people to the moon. Nokia inadvertently sent mixed messages with a digital-first brand redesign intended to steer the company away from mobile phones, while a rival Nokia sent things back in the opposite direction with the launch of a new smartphone. And the architecture world gave a rousing send-off to the late Clive Sall.
If you want to send a message, be sure to include the right postage (image: Ukrposhta via Dezeen).
Stamp of disapproval
To mark the anniversary of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the Ukrainian postal service Ukrposhta has launched a commemorative “FCK PTN!” stamp featuring the work of Banksy. The graffiti artist allegedly visited the town of Borodyanka in 2022 and spray-painted an original piece on the wall of a ruined house. Arguably Ukraine had more than enough to deal with without Banksy also turning up, but people seem to have appreciated the message of the piece, which features a small child judo-slamming a grown adult. In case the metaphor of Ukraine’s David standing up to Russia’s military Goliath isn’t clear enough, the message telling Vladamir Putin to get stuffed is written in Cyrillic text on each stamp. There’s no word on how Putin has taken this postal mockery, but the original piece was designed to satirise his passion for judo. The Russian president is a big fan of the sport, having written a book on the topic, although his honorary eighth dan black belt was stripped, along with other titles, by the International Judo Federation when news of the invasion first broke. The stamps come in sets of six, with Ukrposhta releasing 250,000 sheets along with a range of merchandise that includes envelopes, postcards and a hoodie, with a percentage of proceeds going to support educational causes in Ukraine.
CVs at the ready, the Design Museum is looking for a new leader (image: courtesy of the Design Museum).
Hail to the chief
Prepare yourself for the museological bun fight: London’s Design Museum is searching for a new chief curator. The role’s current incumbent, Justin McGuirk, was appointed in 2015, but since 2021 has split his time between his curatorial duties and secondary role as director of the museum’s Future Observatory initiative: a national programme for design research to support the UK’s response to the climate crisis. It is perhaps a sign of the growing importance of this programme to the museum, which receives millions in funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, that it is to now become McGuirk’s sole focus. It leaves an important, but challenging, role wide open. The Design Museum’s chief curator has the platform to shape a major strand of the UK’s design discourse, but is under pressure to marry curatorial depth and critical engagement with the museum’s need for popular, blockbuster exhibitions that generate revenue. Given that 97 per cent of the museum’s annual income is not generated through guaranteed government funding – and its most recent annual report lamented the fact that the pandemic’s impact on the cultural sector had prevented well-attended shows such as Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street and Amy: Beyond the Stage from becoming “what could have been outstanding box office hits in more normal times” – the new chief curator will clearly have a balancing act on their hands. For those who feel up to the challenge, you can apply here.
It’s nice, but we would have preferred the salmon (image: Nokia).
Crisis on infinite Nokias
It has been a very confusing week for Nokia news. On Sunday, the Finnish telecoms firm revealed a new logo that had been designed, in the words of CEO Pekka Lundmark, to disabuse people of the notion that “we are still a successful mobile phone brand,” which “is not what Nokia is about.” Instead, the company now sells networking equipment and licenses its tech patents – something that is somehow embodied by snipping a couple of strokes off the letters in Nokia (although God knows why it didn’t just go back to its original, and truly excellent, 19th-century logo that features a salmon poking its head out of a roundel to say hullo). Anyway, this branding news was all well and good, but complicated by the fact that a new Nokia smartphone had been released only a day earlier to considerable public fanfare. Manufactured by HMD, which acquired the rights to produce Nokia mobile phones in 2016 (and which uses the old Nokia logo – don’t worry, we’re confused too), the new G22 is a smartphone designed to be repairable, with access to spare parts supported by iFixit. It’s a fine idea – there’s no real excuse for any smartphone to not be easily repairable – but awkward timing. One Nokia declares it’s launching a new design that represents the future of smartphones; the other Nokia announces it’s so completely and utterly done with smartphones that it’s overhauling its entire branding to make that clear. Oh Nokias – don’t you two talk to one another?
Moon landing moves
This week, China unveiled the design for its new lunar lander at the National Museum of China in Beijing as part of celebrations for 30 years of the country’s human spaceflight programme. China, which is yet to put people on the moon, announced it aims to do so by the end of the decade, and its new spacecraft will play a key role. Rather than imitate the US’s Apollo landings, however, the Chinese lunar lander will use a staged descent, with the lander stage doubling as the ascent module that will then take the astronauts back into orbit to dock at a crew launch spacecraft. The propulsion stage, meanwhile, will break off and land separately, after which it will be left behind on the Moon. The Apollo lunar landers, by contrast, landed together, with the descent stage then serving as a launchpad for the ascent stage. Details of China’s new design are sparse, but SpaceNews reports that the model features expected elements such as docking mechanisms, a lunar rover, and a ladder for astronauts to reach the Moon’s surface. This new lander will only deposit its crew for a couple of hours, but the landing is part of China’s grander plan to build a robot-run International Lunar Research Station in the 2030s (although Russia’s involvement in this plan has somewhat complicated matters geopolitically).
A question of sponsorship
Should fossil fuel and petrochemical giants be able to launder their reputations using the cultural sector? Er, no, clearly not, but that has never stopped the bastards before: London’s Science Museum is in bed with the Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor; the Vitra Design Museum staged a show on plastics sponsored by entirely impartial observer BASF, the world’s largest chemicals company; and the V&A has previously gone on record as arguing that fossil fuel sponsors are “thinking very carefully about a zero-carbon future”, so it’s probably fine and stop asking questions, please. Meaningful change to this queasy relationship is unlikely in the short term (museums need cash; oil jerks have cash), but a point of interest in the debate emerged this week with questions raised over the future of the British Museum and BP’s 27-year sponsorship agreement. In disclosures obtained by the group Culture Unstained, the museum confirmed that it had held no meetings or correspondence about renewing its funding arrangement with the fossil fuel company for more than a year before their most recent contract expired in February. Is this the end of a hateful long-term relationship, or simply an act of keeping shtum while the sponsorship prepares to morph into a horrendous new form? Only time will tell.
Clive Sall (1962 – 2023)
Tributes have been paid this week to the architect and educator Clive Call, co-founder of the maverick architecture practice FAT and the London School of Architecture, who has died at age 60. Sall was in the original lineup for FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) where he worked on projects such as Outpost, Adsite, Roadworks, Red Dot, Picnic and Anti-Oedipal House, before leaving in 1998 after falling out with the other members. He went on to become a senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art, before a stint as the head of the school’s architecture department. Sall helped found the LSA in 2014 while running his eponymous practice and his profound impact on those who knew him best is clear from the friends and colleagues who have eulogised him. “Clive was one of the few people I would trust with my life,” LSA founder Will Hunter told the Architects’ Journal. “He is gone far too soon. But – WOW! – he sure lived his life.” FAT co-founder Sean Griffiths, meanwhile, said that despite Sall’s reputation as “something of controversial person” he was a “an extremely energetic presence” who spearheaded the studio’s engagement with artists. “Only the newly acquainted, dim-witted or otherwise deceived couldn’t see that his notorious bluntness masked a profound sweetness and generosity,” LSA faculty member Peter Buchanan told Building Design. “What we have lost is not only a very good teacher, but a truly kind and wonderful human being.”