Design Line: 5 – 11 August
From climate change to cats, it’s another bumper edition of Design Line. Urge Collective has released a report full of salient tips for reducing the carbon impact of museums taking their shows on the road, Apple TV+ faces legal action from an author claiming they cribbed their Tetris film from his book, and Tesla enters the pet care industry.
When you said Cybertruck for cats this isn’t what we expected (image: Tesla via Dezeen).
Cybercat
Disegno believes wholeheartedly that cats provide a good reality check for designers. Our feline friends frequently show disdain for expensive, specially designed cat products, and instead opt for more DIY, guerrilla solutions: bespoke cats beds are abandoned in order to sprawl in the middle of the human bed; scratching posts are shunned in favour of a perfectly good side of the sofa; expensive toys are met with crushing ennui, followed by immediately jumping into the box in which they were delivered. Fundamentally, cats don’t want to be designed for (at least not in any straightforward way), having twigged as to the folly of solutionism years before their human counterparts caught up. And yet, *sighs*, this week saw Tesla announce it would be selling its new “Cybertruck Multifunctional Corrugated Cat Litter” in China – a ¥89 branded cardboard cat bed that is loosely modelled on the design of its forthcoming Cybertruck. The bed features a built-in “scratch board” made of “thickened and moisture-proof corrugated paper” and, to be honest, we’ve already lost interest – just give the cat a normal box and it would be much happier. The product is clearly a publicity stunt, but a mildly irritating one all the same. Over the last year and a half, design has become much better at sensitively exploring what it means to design for, with, and around other forms of life (with positive initiatives from Het Nieuwe Instituut and Formafantasma, for instance) – trust Elon Musk to set things back.
Museum’s can’t leave carbon calculations at home when exhibitions go on tour (image: Urge Collective).
A collective urging
Taking exhibitions on tour is an important part of museum goals to reach as wide an audience and generate as much revenue as possible, but it’s a process that can really rack up those carbon emissions. Sustainability action group Urge Collective, together with the Future Observatory at London’s Design Museum, has put together a new report published this week. ’Strategies for Reducing the Carbon Impact of Temporary and Touring Exhibitions in the Museums and Galleries sector’ audits Waste Age: What Can Design Do? and makes recommendations for future exhibitions looking to be more sustainable. For Waste Age, Urge Collective made the carbon case for switching out single-use vinyl print-gun signage, re-using elements from previous shows, and selecting biodegradable display materials. Suggestions for future projects include: running fewer exhibitions for longer periods of time; setting a carbon budget at the outset alongside the financial one; collecting a shared bank of materials made available for reuse between cultural organisations; and sorting out a standardised carbon calculator. Interestingly, a lot of the sticking points identified by the report are financial ones. Museum departments are under pressure to deliver as many new exhibitions a year as possible to get people through the door, and budgets are assigned individually – so there’s little incentive for one exhibition to plan to reuse another’s materials over commissioning its own single-use structures. The report is essential reading for the cultural sector.
Jamie Reid (1947-2023)
This week saw the death of Jamie Reid, a designer who may not have been a household name, but whose work achieved renown around the world. Reid was the figure behind the anarchic cover art for the Sex Pistols’ single ‘God Save the Queen’ – a design that The Art Newspaper labelled "arguably the most iconic punk image of all time" – as well as providing the iconic album art for their album, Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. Described by his gallerist John Marchant as an “artist, iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, rebel and romantic”, Reid created graphic work that was every bit as rich as this tribute suggests, informed by his interests in radical politics, protest art, spirituality and gnosticism. “I believe that you can actually change things,” Reid told The Press and Journal in an interview two months before his death. “It is possible. People might go in for the nostalgia but they will also see how my work can be overly political and slightly spiritual. It’s more relevant now than it’s ever been.”
Scandaling upwards
The Barbican has been rocked by racial scandals of late, so it was a surprise to learn this week that the Sir John Soanes Museum has tapped their artistic director to be its new director. Will Gompertz, who has only been with the Barbican since mid-2021, will take over from from the Soane’s Bruce Boucher in January 2023. Gompertz certainly has a lot of experience in the arts world. Before the Barbican he was the BBC’s arts editor, and prior to that he was the director of the Tate Galleries. But his stint at the Brutalist performing arts centre has been dogged by controversy. Gompertz began in June 2021, just as Barbican staff published a book collating their allegations of institutional racism. The institution promised to undertake “a radical transformation”, but this summer Resolve Collective pulled their exhibition Them's The Breaks after a series of anti-Black and anti-Palestinian incidents (see Design Line: 17 – 23 June). Once again, the Barbican apologised and promised to look into it, but patently the place hasn’t been as radically transformed as hoped. Not that it seems to have harmed Gompertz’s career prospects. "I look forward to championing the museum and Soane’s vision,” he said. “Bringing audiences to our newly restored home and taking Soane’s vision out into the world.”
Apple might be about to learn an expensive lesson about citing your sources (image: Daniel Ackerman).
A dangerous game
For anyone interested in the world of video game design, and thrilling tales about Cold War-era licensing and distribution of products, Disegno can heartily recommend Daniel Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect, the story of how Tetris became a worldwide sensation after corporations competed to extract the game from Soviet Russia (it was a key source for Disegno editor Oli Stratford’s ‘Tetris Effect’ in Disegno #22). Allegations emerged this week, however, that Disegno might not have been the only ones impressed with Ackerman’s work. The author has announced legal action against Apple and other parties, alleging that the recent Apple TV+ film Tetris knowingly copied “the exact same feel, tone, approach, and scenes” as his book. To those who have not seen Tetris, it is a thrilling tale about Cold War-era licensing and distribution of products, telling the story of how Tetris became a worldwide sensation after corporations competed to extract the game from Soviet Russia… you can, perhaps, see Ackerman’s point (in fact, Disegno had simply assumed the film was a licensed adaptation of the text – more fool us). Tetris received good reviews (including in Michael David Mitchell’s ‘Death is in the Air’ from Design Reviewed #2: a study of the recent spate of Hollywood movies about 80s and 90s era design and marketing), but the story of its own making seems to be shaping up to be as full of chicanery and intrigue as the tale it tells.
Architect and historian Jean-Louis Cohen (image: via Arquitectura Viva).
Jean-Louis Cohen (1949-2023)
This week, the architecture world mourned the loss of Jean-Louis Cohen, who died suddenly at the age of 74. Art Forum reported he suffered a fatal allergic response to a bee sting while holidaying in Ardennes. The Sheldon H. Solow professor in History of Architecture at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, Cohen was widely considered a leading expert on Le Corbusier. Phaidon, where Cohen published a visual biography of Le Corbusier’s life and works, described him as “undoubtedly France's most authoritative and knowledgeable historian of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism”. Born in Paris in 1949, he trained as an architect at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, the Unité Pédagogique no. 6, and Architecte DPLG. Cohen took up his appointment at NYU in 1994, splitting his time between New York and Paris, teaching and lecturing at at Princeton University, TU Delft, and the University of Sydney. He also held positions in the French government, and was chosen to steer the development of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, an architecture museum in Paris that opened in 2007. Although he dedicated much of his life’s works to the imposing figures of 20th-century modernism, Cohen never lost sight of architecture’s social value. “The current architectural scene cannot be reduced to the monumental feats or excesses of a handful of well-known architects,” he said in a 2019 interview. “It’s a pity, in my view, to see architecture flattened out or understood only as dealing with the big monuments of states and corporations. Architecture is a practice that can, and in many cases does, produce our living environment.”