Join us for this week’s Design Line, which is busy plotting its winding path across design’s tricky terrain, carefully placing its stout walking boots so as not to trip over England’s new plastic ban, tramp through Sabine Marcelis’s design collection for Ikea, or splat straight into NASA’s proposed redesign for airplane wings. Happy hiking!

A truss-braced wing / for less polluting

“Most of you all think of NASA as a space agency and as an aviation agency,” said NASA's administrator Bill Nelson this week, speaking to a room full of journalists in Washington DC. Correct – NASA does flying to the Moon an’ that. But Nelson went on to urge the assembled press to also recognise that his organisation was “a climate agency,” pointing towards a new design collaboration with Boeing as evidence of his point. Titled the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, the scheme will see the two organisations collaborate to develop a new wing design that would create less drag and, therefore, require less fuel – an approximately 30 per cent reduction on that used by current designs. This new wing, called a transonic truss-braced wing, would see the wings of single-aisle airliners become a lot longer and thinner, with stabilisation provided by a brace emerging from the bottom of the plane’s body. “The aerodynamics of this kind of a configuration have actually been known for a long time,” said Bob Pearce, associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, but the challenge is creating the new structure without adding excess weight to the aircraft. Still, a noble goal, particularly given that single-aisle airliners currently account for close to half of worldwide aviation emissions. Should all go to plan, the technologies will come into commercial service in the 2030s.

Rich in PFAs, Thinx underwear has proven to be utter pants (image: Think).

Worst in class

This week, Thinx, designers of menstrual underwear systems, settled a $5m class action lawsuit. Allegations were made that the intimate garments contained per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they take so long to break down and accumulate in the bodies of people and animals. PFAS are the same toxic chemicals that made Teflon, and their toxic potential makes them quite literally the opposite of what you would want nestled near your orifices. It’s a particularly pernicious case as Thinx had been merrily advertising itself as non-toxic, and as a healthier, more environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional pads and tampons. It is not, however, the first scandal to hit the startup, which made its name with much-imitated advertising campaigns featuring suggestive fruit. Co-founded by self-styled “SHE-eo” (sigh) Miki Agrawal, Thinx branded itself as a hip, feminist and progressive answer to the testosterone fuelled landscape of startups. But whistleblowers alleged that Agrawal exploited and sexually harassed her mostly female staff. Agrawal exited the company and started starting up yet another company, Tushy, a bidet extension for your loo with similar tongue-in-cheek advertising. Meanwhile Thinx’s loyal customers have been left frustrated by the lawsuit, which will only reimburse buyers $7 for up to three pairs of underwear, despite the garments being priced much higher. Alternatively, they can choose a 35 per cent discount on their next purchase – if they trust the brand’s statement that “the settlement is not an admission of guilt or wrongdoing by Thinx”. The quest to design sustainable, non-toxic and comfortable menstrual products continues.

Raise a toast to Sabine Marcelis’s designs now being within affordable reach (image: Ikea).

Sabine Mar-sell-this

It’s been no secret in recent years that Sabine Marcelis is a talented designer. The Rotterdam-based practitioner has long created exquisite gallery pieces that offer thoughtful, beautifully executed reflections on colour and light, but it has been a pleasure to see her work now begin to enter the commercial collections of brands such as Established & Sons and Hay (as well as the public arena represented by her recent curation of the Vitra Design Museum’s permanent collection). It was a further treat, then, to see her work find its widest audience to date with this week’s announcement of Varmblixt, a new product collection for Ikea. Comprising glowing lights in soft, natural curves; glassware doughnut serving dishes; wool rugs with rounded coffee tables; and jolly glass tableware, Varmblixt represents the kind of play with colour and form with which Marcelis has made her name. At least from initial imagery – the collection is scheduled to launch in February 2023 – it appears a successful translation of Marcelis’ refined palette from the realm of high-end galleries to affordable, mass-market objects. It is a suitably broad canvas for a designer whose work deserves a wide audience.

On the banning bandwagon

England’s environment secretary Thérèse Coffey announced a ban on a range of single-use plastic items this week. The ban limits the use of plastic plates, trays, bowls, cutlery, certain types of polystyrene cups and food containers, as well as balloon sticks (a somewhat surprising named inclusion). With the ban coming into force in October 2023, it is encouraging to see the English government finally realise that plastic is, well, not-so-fantastic. Of course, other counties including Scotland, Wales and France clocked onto this much sooner, having already implemented far more aggressive and comprehensive bans on plastic, suggesting that England is rather late to join the save-the-planet party – albeit with no balloon sticks in sight. Environmentalists have already observed that the ban does not go far enough, however, exempting pre-packaged supermarket ready meals and failing to address the huge swathes of plastics that are wrapped, vacuumed and sealed around things such as vegetables and snacks. Others say that it is single-use culture, rather than plastics themselves, that should be the focus of new actions. While the ban may be a limited and overdue step, here at Disegno we’re hopeful that the ban may redirect some of the money that was being spent on the 2.7bn items of single-use cutlery used every year in England, and turn it towards scaling up the use of fossil fuel-free and biodegradable materials made from organic matter such as seaweed and mycelium – things that designers have been developing for years but which have, so far, seen limited wide-scale adoption. It’s a tentative applause from us.

Sued for scraping

This week saw Getty Images announce that it was initiating legal proceedings in the UK courts against Stability AI, the company behind the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. The root of the issue is how, or on what, the AI was trained to produce Stable Diffusion’s imagery.According to Getty, Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” from its archive of stock photos, with these shots forming the backbone of the data used to build the AI. “The driver of [the lawsuit] is Stability AI’s use of intellectual property of others – absent permission or consideration – to build a commercial offering of their own financial benefit,” said Craig Peters, Getty’s CEO. It is a vexed issue and the lawsuit is likely to be one that the tech world pays close attention to. Companies such as Stability AI believe that their use of image data scraped from online sources is legal, covered by laws surrounding fair use of copyrighted materials, whereas companies such as Getty and visual artists (many of whom are conscious of the possible impact on their own work of the rise of image generation) believe that their intellectual property rights have been violated. It is a potentially landmark case, with implications for how the nascent field of AI art tools will be legislated moving forward, and how these tools will need to be designed in response. “I don’t think it’s about damages and it’s not about stopping the distribution of this technology,” Peters told The Verge. “I think there are ways of building generative models that respect intellectual property.”

Credit credibility

The good news: fossil fuel tyrant Shell is to rapidly ramp up spending on carbon offsetting, investing more than $450m per year on climate projects in order to mitigate its emissions. The bad news: these offsets largely don’t work. This was the depressing finding from a new joint investigation launched by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the voluntary offsets market. Verra approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets, calculating the positive environmental impact of, for example, reforestation projects, and then authorising equivalent credits for sale to companies to counteract their own emissions. According to the investigation, however, which is disputed by Verra, a series of scientific studies have found that around 94 per cent of the credits approved by the standard’s forest offsetting projects should never have been approved, arguing that only a handful showed any evidence of actual deforestation reductions, and that baseline scenarios of forest loss predicted by the schemes appeared to be overstated by about 400 per cent – meaning that the offsets weren’t really doing much, erm, offsetting. It’s bitterly disappointing news (although did anyone really think that corporations would be able to buy their way out of climate collapse?) and suggests that our current methods for measuring emission reductions need a rapid overhaul. As it stands, Shell’s $450m annual investment seems to be – surprise, surprise – essentially worthless.

Design Line: 14 – 20 January

Clinging On

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