Design Line: 9 – 15 September
Things have gone awards heavy in this week’s Design Line, with the London Design Festival, Japan Art Association and Hyundai all dishing up gongs. Yet it has also been a week of goodbyes, with Sarah Burton announced to be departing Alexander McQueen and disposable vapes set to be banned in both the UK and France. Read on to find out more!
POoR Collective’s Bringing Home to the Unknown (2021) installation, created in conjunction with students from Mayesbrook Park School: a socially minded project that seems to set the tone for the 2023 London Design Medals (image: Luke O’Donovan).
Victory of the community
Ahead of next week’s London Design Festival (LDF), news broke on Wednesday as to the winners of the festival’s 2023 London Design Medals, and the results make for interesting reading. The scheme’s main award went to Hanif Kara, a structural engineer and the co-founder of AKT II, whose recognition signals a refreshing willingness on the part of the awards to look beyond obvious big-name designers, and instead celebrate those from less publicly heralded fields, but whose work is essential to the successful execution of design and architecture. Similarly laudable was the recognition of Pooja Agrawal and POoR Collective in the scheme’s Design Innovation and Emerging Design categories. Agrawal is the co-founder of not-for-profit Public Practice, whose work focuses on connecting architects and local authorities to improve the quality of the built environment; Agrawal is also an important advocate for diversity in the field through initiatives such as Sound Advice. As opposed to flashier forms of technical innovation, it is a pleasure to see the award recognise the innovation present in Agrawal’s community-minded way of working. POoR, meanwhile, was honoured for its work in integrating communities with the built environment, with a particular focus on empowering younger generations to have a say in these processes (something the studio will discuss as part of its participation at Disegno and Brompton Design District’s upcoming talks programme). The group’s founders Shawn Adams, Larry Botchway, Ben Spry, and Matt Harvey-Agyemang are fabulous winners, and representative of a growing interest industry-wide in co-design processes. Finally, it was good to see ceramicist Magdalene Odundo pick up the Lifetime Achievement medal, winning praise from the awards for her “inclusive approach to the practice of her craft”, drawing on different ceramic traditions from around the world. If the class of 2023 is anything to go by, the future of design seems to be social.
Let’s all stop trying to engineer this (image: Ryan Sun, via The Guardian).
Ain’t no sunshine when Earth’s gone
Designing the weather seems like something out of a science fiction story – the plot might centre on a mad scientist who decides to save the planet by diverting sunshine from Earth by installing giant mirrors in outer space. Hooray, no more global warming! While it seems strange to imagine designing at a planetary scale, geoengineering (also known as climate engineering) is already underway, with the above scenario a genuine proposal being investigated. As the climate crises escalates and the Earth’s temperatures warm at a terrifying rate, scientists, researchers and governments have increasingly looked towards solar radiation management and carbon capture as means of mitigating the damage. Currently, these suggestions exist mostly theoretically as computer simulations, but as more funding from governments is made available they’ll likely tip from propositions into realities. But be warned, the unknown impacts of playing god with the weather and atmosphere “could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events,” writes David Kitchen, a geologist and climate researcher, in The Conversation. “There’s a good chance that geoengineering meant to help one region would harm others. That’s because ocean and weather systems are globally interconnected.” Currently there is a “legal void” and lack of framework around who decides which projects go ahead and who will be held responsible if something goes wrong. Alarming stuff. So Disegno was pleased this week to see a report released by the Climate Overshoot Commission, calling for governments to place a moratorium on efforts to geoengineer until further research on consequences has been undertaken and international legal frameworks have been put in place. The report suggests research should continue, but no actual geoengineering take place. Whether governments, international alliances or wealthy individuals heed their warning is another story altogether. The irony is that while geoengineering may help slow climate collapse, the underlying culprits – our extensive use of fossil fuels, deforestation, and unsustainable agricultural practices to name a few – carry on wreaking harm. Geoengineering would only ever be a temporary (and rather risky) plaster.
Ella Nartey’s award-winning Waste Not (image: courtesy of the RCA).
Rewarding left-of-the-mobility-field ideas
In 2016, the Hyundai Motor Group partnered with the Royal College of Art’s Intelligent Mobility Design Centre (IMDC) to create the Hyundai Kia Innovation Laboratory, an industry-funded research lab aimed “to foster the creative exploration of the future of mobility”. This week, a new aspect of this partnership emerged when the winners of the inaugural Hyundai Awards for Excellence in Sustainability and Creative Practice were announced. Selected from graduating students in 2023, the winning works were chosen for being “projects that question current norms within society, and suggest solutions or provoke emotions in the face of climate change and the challenges around sustainability.” Ella Nartey and Qing Duan (Interior Design MA, 2023) won awards for their designs of a zero-waste restaurant and vertical farm fuelled by renewable energy respectively, while Eileen White (Print MA, 2023) won the Aesthetics & Craft award for developing a technique to transform homemade, grown, recycled or waste materials into non-toxic darkroom chemicals for photographic development. These ecologically hopeful and materially-rich works are not the kinds of projects one might have expected Hyundai to choose, dealing in the world of cars and mobility as it does, but perhaps it represents a shift in the company’s focus in the years since its partnership with the RCA was set up. It is encouraging to see a brand engaging with other disciplines and, especially, learning from emerging practitioners whose projects are optimistic and not jaded by the realities and restrictions of bringing products to market.
The devastation in Derna (image: Ayman Al-Sahili, via The New York Times).
The tragedy of Derna
Libya’s coastal city of Derna was devastated this week, when Storm Daniel swept across the Mediterranean and hit the northern African country’s coastline. The ferocity of the storm caused two dams protecting the city to fail, allowing water to flood into Derna and sweep entire neighbourhoods into the sea. Current estimates suggest that more than 10,000 people in Derna alone have been killed, while across the region tens of thousands have been displaced. The storm’s ferocity has been widely discussed in terms of climate change, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather conditions, but the scale of the tragedy has also seen fingers pointed at the Libyan government for a perceived failure to prepare for Daniel’s arrival, warn or evacuate residents, as well as questions over the upkeep of essential infrastructure. “We say Mother Nature, but this is the act of man — it’s the incompetence of Libya’s political elites,” Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute policy research centre, told The New York Times. “There’s no words you can find to describe the biblical level of suffering those people have to endure.” Libya has been badly affected by years of political and financial instability, with the nation’s infrastructure having suffered underinvestment and poor maintenance as a result. The two dams that burst were built in the 1970s, with reports suggesting that they had subsequently received no maintenance since 2002. The flooding in Libya may be an act of nature, but the hand of humanity is all too visible in the rising frequency of extreme weather, as well as in the neglected upkeep of essential infrastructure. The result is an unspeakable tragedy.
So long, Sarah
It’s the end of an era, with designer Sarah Burton scheduled to leave her role as creative director of Alexander McQueen following the studio’s show at Paris fashion week later this month. Burton has been at McQueen for 26 years, joining immediately after her graduation from Central St Martins, and was quickly appointed the house’s head of womenswear. Yet it was following the 2010 death of the brand’s founder, Lee Alexander McQueen, that Burton rose to greater prominence when appointed his successor as creative director. Burton has been credited with consolidating the work of her predecessor, steering McQueen’s evolution from a critical darling to an established luxury brand. If her tenure lacked some of the drama and excitement of its forebear, this was not necessarily the task set her: instead, Burton successfully established industry relevance for a studio whose identity had been indelibly connected to its founder, and which many believed would struggle following his death. Burton’s departure has come as a surprise to many in the industry, although is seen as part of wider organisational change at the brand’s parent organisation Kering. It is sad to see Burton leave McQueen, a company to which her career has been devoted, but she can be proud of everything that she accomplished there.
Puff puff gone
Disposable vapes are design objects in the most commercial sense. Produced in brightly coloured, ombre hues, and with excitingly vibrant names such as “Triple Melon”, “Banana Ice” and “Mad Blue”, they are maximised to appeal visually, in small sleek forms that are convenient to buy, carry and dispose of. It’s these characteristics that have led UK government officials to argue that the products are specifically targeted towards children and teenagers, with reports this week that government ministers are moving to ban their sale in the UK. Pressure has come from a cross section of medical professionals, local government, and waste campaigners given that disposable vapes face the double charge of carrying health risks, as well as creating a huge single-use plastic and lithium battery waste stream. It’s a backlash echoed in France, with Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne speaking on RTL radio earlier this month about the French government’s ban on “puffs” (disposable e-cigarettes) which would take place at the end of 2023 as part of a wider anti-smoking movement. Vaping, whilst introduced as a less harmful alternative to smoking, has encouraged a sector of younger consumers who have never smoked to instead head straight to vaping. Product design has played no small role in this, as explored by Natalie Kate in ‘Asks For a Hit of Your Juul’, an essay from 2020 in which she explored the sleek Apple-like appeal of Juul e-cigarettes for Disegno #25. But if Juul – a refillable, rechargeable vape – encouraged a rise in young vapers, then the intervening period has seen vapes become ever brighter, cheaper, more accessible and, crucially, more disposable.
The face of a perpetual winner (image: Lars Borges).
Kudos to Kéré
In 2022, Diébédo Francis Kéré collected the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize and was also appointed an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in the UK, and this year the architect has added to his accolades with the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture. Honoured alongside artists Vija Celmins and Olafur Eliasson, Kéré drew praise for his work in using locally sourced materials within contemporary architecture, establishing a mode of practice in which buildings are sympathetic to, and take their form from, their immediate context. “By combining local materials and skills with innovative design and smart engineering solutions, while maintaining a focus on working with local communities, Diébédo Francis Kéré has transformed architecture not only in Burkina Faso but also across Africa and beyond,” read the jury citation. Kéré is now comfortably established as an international star, and his ongoing recognition by major bodies is hardly surprising, but he remains a worthy choice for the accolades that he receives. In an age of climate collapse, Kéré’s resistance towards off-the-shelf solutions, and commitment to contextual design that accounts for local materials and building techniques, feels contemporary through and through.