Design Line: 4 – 10 February
It’s a big week for remixes on Design Line. Burberry’s new rebrand cribs directly from its archives, while Anish Kapoor revisits his big shiny bean typology for New York, where the trains are also getting a new twist on their typical carriage design. Meanwhile the Scandinavian Design Awards mark the comeback of the Stockholm Furniture Fair, and Olson Kundig debuts a composting funeral home.
The archive is the limit for 2023 rebrand designs (image: Burberry).
Old is the new new
The tide of the sans serif logo typeface may be about to turn. After years of major brands ditching their individual curlicues and logo marks in favour of uniform footless fonts, Burberry has bucked the trend by switching back this week. Burberry’s last monogram and logo, designed in Helvetica by Peter Saville for former chief creative officer Ricardo Tisci, was only introduced in 2018. But Daniel Lee, who took over from Tisci at the end of last year, is clearly keen to make his mark. Lee appears to be taking Burberry back to its branding roots with an old-school serif font and a slightly spruced-up version of its 102-year-old equestrian logo. First debuted in 1901, the logo features a knight riding a prancing horse decked out in its finest regalia with the Latin motto “Prorsum”, which translates as “Forward” (see also: utterly, entirely, onward). This could be an isolated case of one new creative director looking to capitalise on the heritage of the brand and his connection to it (Lee was born in Bradford, England), but fashion loves a trend. Maybe 2023 will be the return of ornament in logos. It’s nice to have a break from the monotony of the tasteful, but somewhat overdone, sans serif, at the very least.
A train for all
Disegno has been getting all aflutter over train interiors of late. In Design Reviewed #1, we looked at Map Project Office’s design for London’s new Elizabeth Line train, and this week our beady eye tracked across the Atlantic to New York’s new R211 trains, launched by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) for the city’s C line. Train carriages are amongst the most widely used interior spaces within cities, and it should be a civic priority to apply proper design consideration to them. Municipalities have a duty to ensure that their transport functions well, and serves as many different people as possible: unglamorous, but essential work. On first glance, the R211s seem encouraging: the trains are wider than their predecessors and have done away with individual carriages in favour of open gangways. Similarly, more accessible seating and wider doors have been introduced. These are design changes that help everyone (speeding up boarding and providing easier movement within the train), but which may prove particularly useful to those with mobility issues. It’s a smart move, and one that shows the impact that design can have – providing public services for all is a noble pursuit.
Just some of the things you can use Bard to get wrong (image: Google).
Chatbot wars
OpenAI’s text prompt-based chatbot ChatCPT seems to have got search engine designers a little rattled. This week, both Microsoft and Google rushed out their own software based on the system, to mixed results. “The race starts today, and we’re going to move and move fast,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as the company launched a new version of Bing based on a souped-up version of ChatCPT’s AI. Suggested uses include prompting it to write you a holiday itinerary from search results. Hopefully it will go better than Microsoft’s 2016 foray into chatbot design, where its conversational Twitter bot Tay had to be killed in less than 24 hours when it turned out to be racist. Microsoft and OpenAI have been partnering on developing these new systems, but Google appears to have been caught on the hoof. Having declared a “code red” at the company at the end of 2022, Google launched its conversational chatbot Bard this week. Powered by its own machine learning system LaMDA, Bard can give you lunch ideas based on what you have in your fridge or plan a party for you. Unfortunately, in its first demo it also, uh, totally made stuff up about the James Webb Space Telescope despite the facts sitting right there on the NASA website – a mistake that, hilariously, seems to have wiped more than $100bn off the value of Google’s parent company Alphabet. The internet has enough fake news without teaching robots how to write it, but in the arms race for the latest chatbot gimmick tech it seems that companies are forgetting the reason a well-designed search engine is so prized in the first place. Finding out facts might be about to get a whole lot harder.
The jury recreates a Renaissance painting (image: Scandinavian Design Awards ).
And the winner is
Design loves a gong, with the industry’s annual calendar seeded with an ever increasing number of awards programmes and medals. This week saw the launch of a new addition to the field, the Scandinavian Design Awards: a pointedly region-wide award launched to coincide with the return of Stockholm Furniture Fair after a two-year absence (during which time Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design festival has risen to prominence – an ascendancy that has, presumably, not gone unnoticed in Stockholm). Perhaps the big winner at the event was Denmark’s BIG, which claimed the awards for both architecture and sustainability with its eco-factory for Norwegian furniture producer Vestre, while Finland came in for some love through the victory of designer/maker Antrei Hartikainen. Yet the night’s top prize, Best Designer, always seemed destined to go to a domestic studio, with the evening culminating in its celebration of Folkform, the Stockholm-based studio of Anna Holmquist and Chandra Ahlsell, who specialise in projects interrogating the making traditions and material culture of Scandinavia. Meticulous and thoughtful in their investigations, Holmquist and Ahlsell are worthy winners – a fine public face for the welcome return of Sweden’s annual contribution to the international design calendar.
Compost to compost
Death comes for us all. But many contemporary societies have become pretty squeamish about the subject, especially in America where the mortuary industry sprang up during its civil war in response to embalming and cremation became cultural norms. Both options are environmentally unfriendly, however, involving chemicals or carbon respectively. But those looking for a more sustainably designed afterlife may be in luck. This week we got the first glimpse inside Seattle-based funeral startup Recompose, where corpses become compost. Architecture studio Olson Kundig has turned a warehouse into a plant-filled space with a bank of stylish white stainless steel pods that can turn a human body into a pickup truck-full of organic matter that’s perfect for nurturing trees and plants. The 31 composting vessels are filled with wood chips, straw and alfalfa, stacked altogether in a hexagonal framework to save space. Recompose pumps in air and rotates each vessel regularly to speed up decomposition, after which the remains are dried before being returned to their next of kin. The startup claims it saves a metric tonne of carbon emissions per person compared to traditional burial or cremation. As this awareness of sustainable alternatives for burial grows, institutions are preparing to make big changes. This week the Church of England said it was starting to consider the theological considerations of human composting. Coffins, they’re so last century; we’re composting now.
A magic bean
Anish Kapoor may go down in history as the artist who tried to annexe the blackest black, but when he’s not gatekeeping colours he’s making very shiny public installations. Late last week, New Yorkers got a glimpse of their very own mini-Bean – a pint-sized version of the 20-metre-long Cloud Gate in Chicago, affectionately nicknamed the Bean. The mini-Bean (official name still pending) is a large silver organic shape that appears like its bubbling out from underneath the Herzog & DeMeuron-designed 56 Leonard Street, like the lovechild of Flubber and a disco ball. Made from polished silver steel, the sculptures are meant to look like liquid mercury and make for funhouse mirrors for passersby. The 14m-long mini-Bean was always part of the plan for the 250m-high supertall skyscraper, but the building completed in 2017 and has been distinctly bean-less for over five years despite costing the developer $8m. A combination of the complexity of the installation’s rounded form, and delays caused by Covid-19 keeping the artist’s British team out of the country as well as delaying the shipping of parts, kept the piece in bean limbo. Kapoor actually bought an apartment in the building when it opened, so as a piece of public sculpture it will presumably raise the value of his own property, making it less of a gesture to the city than a boon to his own portfolio. But then you should never look a gift mini-Bean in the mouth. The naming ceremony is due to take place in spring, but we would like to pitch Beanie McBeanface as a contender.