Design Line: 28 October – 3 November
The past week has seen the return of Phoebe Philo to fashion; the opening of Adidas’s first store in West Africa; the launch of a new graphic design series from Paula Scher; the staging of an international conference on the dangers of AI; and much more. Keen to find out what that much more actually is? Well, you’re in the right place: read on for this week’s Design Line.
Don’t expect to see too many of this coat knocking around (image: via Phoebe Philo).
Limited production
“The Phoebe Philo business model is designed to create a responsible balance between production and demand. For us, this means producing notably less than anticipated want.” And so Phoebe Philo returned to fashion, six years after her departure from Celine. The first collection from Philo’s namesake brand was highly anticipated and, for the most part, seems to have met expectations. The bulk of reviews have praised a confident, considered collection, albeit one that does not stray far from what the designer had been producing at Celine (which is no bad thing – why reinvent if your work remains relevant?). Of more novel interest, however, is the model behind the label. Philo’s clothes are only available through her own website, with a plan for the first set of garments to be made available in staggered drops. Production of each design will be limited to a select number of garments (around 100 on average), with Philo suggesting that her company’s restricted mode of operation is a means of limiting production for ecological reasons. It is, of course, also a blatant means of generating hype and demand (particularly for luxury goods that come with a heavy price tag – one coat is £12,000, another is POA), but it remains commendable that Philo has made sustainability a central element of her brand communication. How it maps out remains to be seen, but if sustainability can benefit from some of the glamour and cachet associated with luxury drops, it may prove no bad thing.
Presenting: your new solar laureates (image: Justine Trickett).
Here comes the sun
In 1969, The Beatles released a song celebrating the end of the “long and cold dark winter”. It is an ode to spring that revels in the arrival of the sunshine and reminds us that “it’s alright”. But in 2023, with the coming of more extreme heat, harsher sunlight and a rapidly warming planet everything decidedly does not feel alright. “This is a timely moment,” says curator George Kafka, “to research and reframe the role of the solar in our lives.” As such, he and the Future Observatory team at the Design Museum chose “Solar” as this year's theme for their Design Researchers in Residence programme. Rising to the challenge of interrogating what it means to live and survive on a heating planet are the new cohort of researchers who were announced this week – April Barrett, Eliza Collin, Jamie Irving and Freya Spencer-Wood. They will spend the next year developing projects examining the housing retrofit agenda, the scent of plants under environmental stress, peatland restoration, and waste heat produced by data centres, culminating in an exhibition. Previous editions of the residency - themed Restore and Islands – have seen thoughtful, thorough and holistic research developed by the residents. Now, here comes the sun research and, with it, perhaps a slim ray of optimism that if we create the spaces, time and funding to consistently support deep thinking about how design and the climate crisis intersect, it may be alright just yet.
Professor Scher, the maestro of graphic design (image: BBC).
Scher, of course
You can’t watch TV without interacting with graphic design and yet, despite its proliferation, there is a distinct lack of TV about graphic design. Architecture and interior design are well served from popular TV churn to one-off documentaries (anything from Grand Designs, Your Home Made Perfect, Architectural Digest’s Youtube channel to Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect). In craft, similarly, it’s hard to find a discipline that hasn’t been covered in a Great British Bake Off style TV competition. Graphic design content, however, remains thinner on the ground. In this context, there is understandable excitement about the launch of Paula Scher’s graphic design series on BBC Maestros. Over 21 episodes, Scher covers her own work and career, as well as offering introductions to logo design, typography and editorial layout. Individual episode-cum-lessons are dedicated to significant case studies from Scher’s portfolio, from the Windows 8 logo to creating the brand identities for the Met Opera and New York City Ballet. The first female partner at Pentagram, Scher’s impact on the industry should not be understated. Walk along a UK or US street and you’re likely surrounded by her work: Coca Cola, Shake Shack, and Bloomberg to name a few. Indeed looking to other TV dedicated to graphic design, Netflix’s Abstract is an obviously go to. The designer that presents its graphic design episode? Scher, obviously.
Thinking through food systems, courtesy of Climavore (image: Climavore).
Food networks
For the past eight years, Climavore has been one of the most interesting programmes in contemporary design. Launched by Cooking Sections, the studio of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Climavore encompasses a series of investigations that examine climate change, community and ecology through the lens of food production. The programme has already produced a number of fascinating investigations around fish farming, desertification and fertiliser run-off, and this week saw it launch its first Climavore Assembly, an international conference aimed at examining food infrastructure and “cultural and artistic tactics for ecologically-driven action and policy making”. Hosted by Rome’s Museum of Civilizations, the conference brought together museums, educational institutions, practitioners and activist groups to explore the “role culture can play in a transition to food justice rooted in ecological infrastructures”. It is a vital topic, and one that Climavore and its collaborators have done well to promote and platform for close to a decade – with the emergence of the new Assembly, momentum is only likely to grow further.
Adidas’s new/old store in Lagos, designed by Oshinowo Studio (image: Adidas).
When Adidas Adapts
Adidas is a brand that trades in the realms of newness – new looks each season, new sportswear trends and new markets. Its newest news is that it has opened its first ever flagship store in West Africa. This news, however, comes with a touch of the old, with the company having commissioned architect Tosin Oshinowo and her Oshinowo Studio to retrofit a 1970s building in the heart of Lagos rather than building a new shop. The brief called for the design “to draw together Nigerian art, culture, and aesthetics with the global brand’s style and personality,” says Oshinowo’s website. As such, the architects drew on corrugated aluminium, a material widely used in Lagos’s mass housing projects, to create a striking contemporary facade. The building transforms this simple material using a combination of solid and perforated aluminium sheets and LED linear lighting to create clever optical illusions of transparency and opacity while diffusing natural sunlight and preventing overheating. The design additionally integrates a solar power system and a sewage treatment plant used for irrigation, and retained the existing 25-year-old trees. It is a design that values the old or unwanted, repeatedly reusing resources for different purposes. In commissioning an architect who is critically engaged with creating projects sensitive to local vernacular, the climate crisis and ideas of scarcity, Adidas has broken with its industry’s penchant for newness. By embracing the old, Adidas has, ironically, demonstrated its engagement with a new way of thinking for today’s contexts.
Follow the arrow towards more sustainable practice (image: UK Government).
An eye on AI
This week saw 28 countries, AI researchers and assorted tech leaders assemble at the UK’s storied Bletchley Park for a conference aimed at addressing one of the key questions of the day: how should artificial intelligence be regulated and safely used for human benefit? The result was The Bletchley Declaration, a document signed by the attending countries pledging to “resolve to work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible A.I”, along with a promise from UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that tech companies have agreed to allow regulators to vet their artificial intelligence tools before releasing them to the public. It seems a promising move, and one that seems in line with the US government 's recent executive order that tech companies must share test results for artificial intelligence systems before they are released, although alarm bells may sound over the fact that the agreement Sunak described is a voluntary one, rather than anything mandated by law. Sunak has warned that tech companies cannot be allowed to “mark their own homework”, which is no doubt true – ensuring that everyone sticks to this arrangement, however, may be more challenging.