The Design Line: 31 December – 6 January
New Year, same Design Line! We kick off our design world commentary for 2023 with: a trawl through the New Years Honours list, the curious case of the fuzzy Birkin bags, and the mysteries of the caves solved by a furniture conservator. Plus, good news for gamers, but bad news for technology companies.
Project Leonardo could change the game for players with mobility issues (image: Sony Interactive Entertainment).
Gaming for all
It’s CES 2023, which means technology companies are lining up in Las Vegas to show off their shiniest new gadgets and baubles. Some border on the comical, such as Samsung's Bespoke AI Wall Oven, which can livestream a video of your cooking to the internet. Others feel more dystopian, such as Movano Health’s Evie ring, which can track the wearer’s menstrual cycle – a data risk that doesn’t feel worth taking in the post Roe v Wade world. But gimmickry aside, there have been some exciting developments for tech designed for disabilities. Makeup brand L’Oreal has made a motorised makeup applicator called HAPTA to help people with limited mobility put on flawless lipstick. And Playstation debuted Project Leonardo, a controller kit that can be customised to adapt to the user’s disabilities. Importantly, it’s designed to work straight out of the box, and can be combined with third-party accessories. Playstation worked with experts from AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up to ensure the controller works for people with motor disabilities. Sticks and buttons can be swapped out and placed at optimum distance, and players can also programme their preferences. The flying saucer shape looks epic, too. Project Leonardo is a welcome new player to the gaming controller arena.
Lesley Lokko is on the New Year’s Honours List (image: Jacopo Salvi, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia).
Two sides of the establishment
OK, so we all know that the UK’s honours system is systematically rotten and colonial, but this week’s announcement of its New Year’s Honours List, at least from an architecture perspective, was actually kind of good – at least in terms of its selection. Recognition came for architect and academic Lesley Lokko – whose curation of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale is to focus on how the discipline’s “questions of equity, race, hope and fear converge and coalesce” in Africa and its urbanism – as well as Indy Johar, the co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, who has framed his work within the field as addressing “outdated institutions and inadequate infrastructures incapable of coping with planetary-scale challenges”. Both, in short, represent the more progressive, socially engaged side of their field, and their selection for formal recognition is refreshing. What a pity, then, that this was paired with the news that Michael Gove, the UK’s housing secretary, had just endorsed a report by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange calling for the creation of a new architecture school that would ”wholeheartedly revive traditional architecture” – a report every bit as tedious and irritatingly retrograde in its framing of current architectural practice and theory as you would imagine. Damn you, British establishment – you almost got us faintly on side for a moment there.
Is it art or trademark infringement (image: MetaBirkin)?
Birks vs Berks
My Birkin. Another Birkin. But what makes these two Birkins different, and what small feature about them divides the Hermès collector community? Well, in this instance, one of the Birkins is a MetaBirkin – an NFT created by Los Angeles-based artist Mason Rothschild – and fashion brand Hermès is still not happy about it. While NFTs are something Disegno had hoped to leave in 2022, with their facile designs and planet-destroying power requirements, the legal case has been billed as one of artistic freedom versus trademark infringement. Named for the actor Jane Birkin, the bulky leather bag shouldered its way to wealth signifier thanks to Hermès’s tried and tested marketing tactic: making it eye-waveringly expensive and very hard to get hold of. So Hermès was less-than-thrilled when Rothschild started making virtual versions of the bag covered in fuzzy fur. The French fashion house sued the artist way back in January 2022, but legal wrangling has dragged on a full year, with the case now set to go to trial on 30 January 2023 after a US judge closed out 2022 by rejecting both sides’ calls for a summary judgment. An 186-year-old luxury brand coining it with thousand-pound accessories using manufactured scarcity, or an artist making bank with thousand-pound crypto-backed pictures: neither party offers much in the way of a hero to root for, but the case could set an interesting precedent for ripping off luxury brands in the metaverse.
From furniture conservator to cave painting code cracker (image: PA via BBC).
Linguistic restoration
For anyone in design looking for a side hustle, may we suggest Ben Bacon as inspiration? A furniture conservator by profession, Bacon hit the news this week when his independent research into cave paintings successfully decoded a series of mysterious symbols from 20,000 years. Ice Age depictions of animals have been found across Europe, but archaeologists had previously failed to explain the markings surrounding many of images. When Bacon’s research, conducted online and in the British Library, suggested that the marks might refer to a lunar calendar, however, professional academics began to join his team. This week, the group published its initial findings in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, with further papers due to follow. Bacon’s decoding of a repeated Y marking on the paintings as a symbol for birth led the group to determine that the markings offered a record, by lunar month, of the animals' mating seasons. It is a stunning discovery, with potentially profound consequences for the understanding of the development of proto-language in humans, and one made all the more compelling by Bacon’s self-confessed status as “effectively a person off the street”. What’s more, in a week in which the UK’s prime minister Rishi Sunak has announced (incredibly vague) plans for England to introduce mandatory mathematics education to address the fact that “data is everywhere and statistics underpin every job”, Bacon’s intrepid visual analysis and archival research is a welcome reminder that other fields have much to offer also. Viva the furniture conservators!
Tech regret
They’re some of the most powerful forces shaping contemporary design, but the tech giants have experienced a start to 2023 that has been, erm, chastening. Amazon, for instance, has announced plans for 18,000 job cuts as it struggles with “difficult economies” (despite having more than doubled its maximum base pay to $350,000 for select corporate and tech employees less than a year ago), while Apple has seen its market value dip below $2tn, having risen to more than $3tn just a year ago, with the company buffeted by rising interest rates, fears over Covid disruption to its Chinese production facilities, and global economic concerns. Things were arguably even bleaker for Google and Meta, however. This week saw the former’s efforts to escape a $162m antitrust fine in India dented when the country’s National Company Law Appellate Tribunal refused to pass an order that would prevent its competition watchdog from fining the company. Legal penalties were also the order of the day for Meta, with EU regulators determining that its method for obtaining permission to collect users’ data for personalised advertising (effectively by denying them all services unless they consented) was illegal. The result is a $414m fine, as well as an ongoing issue for the company’s lucrative online advertising business. In summary – welcome 2023! So far you’re proving an annus horribilis for the tech giants.
Arata Isozaki (1931 - 2022) (image: Wikimedia commons).
Fond farewells
The design world has said goodbye to some of its greats these past few weeks. Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood (1941- 2022) died aged 81, leaving behind a legacy that stretches over half a century, from her punk-infused handmade clothing of 70s London to a global fashion brand. A designer of iconoclasm and contradiction, she maintained her anti-establishment views while establishing an empire, espoused environmental ideals as part of a notoriously destructive industry, and met the late Queen for her OBE with no knickers on. Architecture meanwhile is mourning the twin losses of Arata Isozaki (1931 - 2022) and Renée Gailhoustet (1929 - 2023). Isozaki’s career spanned many eras an oeuvres, from his brutalist designs for postwar Japan in the 60s through to hi-tech postmodernism in the 80s, and finally huge global commissions for organic forms. His design for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles in the 80s made him one of the first Japanese architects to build outside his home country, and he was awarded Architecture’s highest accolade – the Prtizker Prize – in 2019. French architect Gailhoustet, who died this week, was a stalwart supporter of social housing design her entire life. She masterminded low rise high density housing projects in the Parisian suburbs, most notably the Ilot Basilique in Saint-Denis, as well as on the island of Réunion. She died at her home in the Le Liégat apartment complex, which she designed herself.