Design Line: 30 December – 5 January
It’s the first week of the new year, which means the return of ‘Design Line’, Disegno’s weekly digest of the best design stories from around the world. Stop by each Friday for our regular roundup of stories that have caught our eye over the last seven days, be they weird, wonderful, worrying or warmhearted. Read on for your first design briefing of the new year!
A picture of Mickey Mouse in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie (now free to use to illustrate Design Line).
Mouse out of the house
Niche for some, an exciting opportunity for others – the turn of each year heralds the entrance of new media into the public domain in the US. The law allows the free use of a creator’s work after a set number of years following the publication of their work. As such, creatives were flexing their fingers when, on 1 January 2024, Mickey Mouse entered the public domain after 95 years of Disney copyright. The iconic character, now free from the shackles of copyright, will be freely available in the form of a version from the 1928 film Steamboat Willie. The film introduced the characters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse to the world, and has been praised as a key moment in Disney’s subsequent success. Disney knows the commercial importance of its mice, so has fought hard to keep hold of their exclusive use. Copyright protection over the pair was originally due to expire in 1984, but Disney successfully lobbied to extend the length of copyright protections (and did so once again in 1998) – an extension of the law that became popularly referred to as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. Colour versions of Mickey, along with the more familiar, larger eyed versions which evolved after Steamboat Willie, will still be protected (something that creatives will have to bear in mind when using Mickey’s image). Nevertheless it goes without saying that Mickey, taking his first steps into the digital AI fuelled world of 2024, is due to encounter some creative surprises.
Notre-Dame has come a long way in five years, but its windows remain a sore spot (image courtesy of Baidax, via Wikimedia Commons).
Cathedral Controversy
Ever since it was heavily damaged in a 2019 fire, Paris’s Notre-Dame has proven a lightning rod for debates over architectural restoration: the balance to be struck between faithful recreation, and the introduction of new elements in recognition of the changes a structure has undergone. If the first week of 2024 is anything to go by, this year is likely to prove no different. In December 2023, France’s president Emmanuel Macron suggested that a series of stained glass chapel windows which survived the fire, designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, architect of the cathedral’s 19th-century renovation, be replaced with contemporary designs (and the originals displayed in a museum). Cue immediate consternation, with a petition launched by La Tribune de l’Art protesting the plan reaching more than 125,000 signatories in the new year. Quibbling over windows may seem small beer, but the petition argues that Macron’s plan is at odds with the restoration’s general fidelity to Viollet-le-Duc’s plan, of which the windows form part of “a coherent whole”. Nevertheless, the introduction of one or two new elements hardly seems the worst sin. Thankfully, La Tribune de L’Art’s founder Didier Rykner has suggested a sensible compromise: commission contemporary stained glass windows to replace the plain windows in the cathedral’s north tower. “It would also have a magnificent symbolic role,” he wrote. “[It] was in the north tower, when they fought the fire that threatened to bring down the bells and, in turn, the cathedral, that the firefighters risked their lives to save the monument.”
A study used machine learning and satellite imagery to create the first global map of vessel traffic and offshore infrastructure, offering an unprecedented view of previously unmapped industrial use of the ocean (image courtesy of Global Fishing Watch).
Sea change
It used to be the case that what happens at sea, stays at sea. The vast liquid-y mass has been notoriously difficult to monitor and this poses a problem because a lot happens at sea – from offshore energy development to fishing activities that feed the more than 1 billion people who rely on the ocean as their main food source; from conservation efforts to the shipping of 80 per cent of the world’s goods; from the movement of people to clandestine and downright illegal pillaging of the ocean’s resources and creatures. It is a welcome development, then, that Global Fishing Watch (a non-profit backed by Google) published new research this week in Nature outlining its use of deep-learning AI combined with satellite imagery and vessel GPS data to map movements on the oceans with more accuracy than ever before. The paper reveals that “72 to 76 per cent of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with much of that fishing taking place around South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa”. Likewise, 30 per cent of transport and energy vessels roam the waves without accessible monitoring. The researchers argue that the lack of global data on the ever-growing “blue economy” is hampering conservation efforts and creating huge blind spots for policy makers. While using AI to monitor movements often comes with security and privacy concerns, this use of it seems an exception. What happens at sea, should definitely not be staying at sea any longer.
Closing the doors
Winter is a dark and cold time in the Northern hemisphere, and bad news before a holiday period often stings the sharper. Sadly, in a statement released just before Christmas 2023, online magazine Design Week announced its permanent closure in January 2024. The magazine was launched in 1986 by Jeremy Myerson, a writer and current professor emeritus at the Royal Collage of Art. Running weekly, it focused on the business side of design, and was released in print until 2011; from then on it moved to online only. In a statement released on 22 December, the team explained that “Design Week’s parent company, Centaur, has made the decision to close the publication as its strategy shifts towards its ‘core audience of marketers, and focuses on training, information, and intelligence’.” The site is now operating until 19 January, using the new year as an opportunity to look back on Design Week’s achievements from 1986 to the present day. It’s a mournful moment to see a design publication close, with the next two weeks a bittersweet opportunity to mull over just how much the design industry in the UK has changed over the span of 38 years. Speaking to Dezeen, Myerson pointed out that Design Week’s closure ”shows just how global design has become. A UK-centric journal made sense in the 1980s at a time when Centaur, the publisher of Design Week, was an innovator and a risk-taker. Not today, it seems.” A fortnight for reflection ensues.
Carlo Ratti will curate the next Venice Architecture Biennale, but his appointment has not been universally well received (image courtesy of Sara Magni, via the Venice Biennale)
An appointment to keep?
Just before Christmas, the Venice Architecture Biennale announced that Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, would be curator of its 2025 edition. It has not been an appointment without, erm, its controversies. Writing in Dezeen, journalist Catherine Slessor mounted a compelling argument that Ratti symbolised a regressive step for the biennale, whose 2023 edition under the directorship of Lesley Lokko met with critical acclaim for its attention towards decarbonisation and decolonisation. Ratti, by contrast, “espouses a cerebral, tech-bro Ted-talk conception of architecture,” Slessor argued, “where technology, however preposterous, is seen as a panacea for the world's problems.” It is, perhaps, a somewhat uncharitable characterisation of Ratti’s work (but not, it must be said, without its bite), yet Slessor’s analysis extends to the suggestion that Ratti and the approach towards architecture that he embodies – as opposed to the overtly political and social critique explored by Lokko – is one that has been deemed acceptable to a biennale that seems to be moving towards the political right. In October 2023, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (a right-wing journalist whose past comments, such as “I am not a fascist. I am something else,” have hardly covered him in glory) was selected by the Italian government as the Venice Biennale’s new president – an appointment in keeping with the current state’s overtly right-wing agenda. “While it's still early days,” Slessor concluded, “it's clear the biennale as a whole cannot help being impacted by the installation of a new president and the accompanying, increasingly strident, political mood music.”
The key to a copilot (image screenshot taken from Microsoft’s launch video).
If you buy a new Windows PC this year, you will notice a new button on the keyboard next to the right-hand alt key with a twisty little symbol. This mysterious button, announced this week and rolling out at the end of January, is the first change in Microsoft’s keyboard design in nearly three decades. It operates as a shortcut to access Copilot, Microsoft’s “everyday AI companion” that aims to change how people search on their devices. While Copilot has been running on Microsoft’s products for a little while, having been rolled out in a flurry of software updates in 2023, it is a significant marker of Microsoft’s future plans that Copilot has been embedded into its hardware too. “In this new year, we will be ushering in a significant shift toward a more personal and intelligent computing future where AI will be seamlessly woven into Windows from the system, to the silicon, to the hardware,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer upon the button's announcement. 2024, he promised, will be “the year of the AI PC.” A grand claim for a small button whose function could have simply been encoded into existing keys, e.g. win+c. There is, however, speculation that Microsoft will announce more Copilot features and functions of the key at the Consumer Electronics Fair next week. Whether the key is a success is yet to be determined. Either way, AI is certainly something that Microsoft is getting keyed up over.