The Design Line: 1-7 January, 2022
Welcome to the Design Line, a new weekly feature giving the Disegno take all the latest design stories from the past seven days. Covering current affairs, new projects and big news, we’ve got you covered. So let’s not delay – we’re diving right into 1-7 January, 2022.
A very slippery customer indeed: Santiago Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione bridge over Venice’s Grand Canal (image: courtesy of Comune di Venezia, shot by Filippo Leonardi).
It’s a trap!
Look, bridges are hard. They have to successfully span a body of water, as well as achieving this in such a way that people can cross without maiming themselves. That’s two things at once! And say what you like about Santiago Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione (2008) in Venice, but it does successfully span a body of water. Admittedly, maiming has been an issue – but that’s simply the result of trying to meet multiple requirements. The specific problem, if you must know, is that the bridge’s glass floor has a tendency to make people slip on account of being made of, erm, glass. “That is not a bridge,” one Venetian told The New York Times. “It’s a trap.” Since the bridge’s opening in 2008, the city’s public works department has reported “almost daily” falls, several of which have resulted in serious injury. Well, enough is enough for Venice, which this week announced a €500,000 plan to replace the glass with trachyte stone. But who is to blame for the whole sorry affair? Surely not Calatrava, whose practice has designed 36 other bridges without incident? Oh, apart from its glass Campo Volantín footbridge in Bilbao, which had to have a rubber mat laid across it in 2011 because so many people fell over while crossing it. But that’s just nitpicking. Like we said, bridges are hard.
The bitcoin barricades
It’s been an inauspicious dawn to the new year for cryptocurrency and Kazakhstan, as the Central Asian country descends into bitcoin-propelled chaos. Riots have broken out over the country’s rocketing fuel prices, prompting a state of emergency to be declared, Kazakhstan’s government to resign, and its president to call on Russia for military aide. While events have come to a head this week, trouble has been brewing for months, with cryptocurrency at the heart of it. In May of last year, China made bitcoin mining illegal, prompting its miners to move on to (Kazakh) pastures new. This influx of miners, combined with wider crypto bull runs in 2021, saw Kazakhstan’s mining industry swell, in turn placing pressure on its energy infrastructure. By October, the Financial Times was reporting that blackouts were plagued Kazakhstan's towns and villages, with the government blaming three power plant failures on the energy-intensive actions of miners. The removal of a fuel price cap fanned the flames of discontent in a country whose citizens already faced inflation and glaring income inequality under an autocratic government. We’re all supposed to be packing our bags for the metaverse, yet digital currencies are having decidedly real-world consequences. If we were betting people here at Disegno, we’d put our 0.000032 of a bitcoin on there being more crypto crises before the year is out.
The September 2021 Maison&Objet trade fair. If you would like to see a similar scene IRL, you shall simply have to wait until March 2022 (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet, shot by Anne-Emmanuelle Thion).
Probably safest to be fair
Farewell the design fairs of early 2022, we hardly know ye. While the new year had been optimistically earmarked as an opportunity for the design world to begin resetting itself after two years in the wilderness, it would seem that Covid-19 had other ideas. In December, IMM Cologne announced that its next edition would be delayed from January 2022 to January 2023, explaining that the pandemic made a fair “not realisable in the current situation”. Now, two of the industry’s other heavy hitters have followed suit: Paris’s Maison&Objet has pushed its fair from January to March 2022, citing new rules from the French government, while Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair will be moved from February to September 2022 (although Stockholm Design Week will go ahead as planned in February). It may be dispiriting to see the pattern of the past two years repeated – with design’s calendar wiped out, once again, in one fell Groundhog delay – but with cases rising globally as Omicron runs riot, it seems the sensible decision. All eyes now turn to spring for the rescheduled Maison as well as the launch of April’s Salone del Mobile in Milan. Easter is, after all, the traditional time for resurrection.
To Foster a grievance
Norman Foster cares about the environment. We know this because he appeared at the COP26 climate conference, correctly arguing that the construction industry does not sufficiently account for the environmental costs of embodied carbon and needs to “take a much broader, wider look” that extends beyond operational omissions. Well said, Lord Foster! So, presumably, he was delighted by a new RIBA and Architects Declare sustainability report that called for nations to start report construction “emissions on a consumption-basis”, with this new approach including “all sources of emissions”? Wrong! The architect’s practice Foster + Partners has refused to endorse the report, explaining to Dezeen that RIBA’s call to move from emissions-based to consumption-based reporting “could lead to confusion” for its deviation from the Paris Agreement’s emissions-based focus, subsequently offering their “assistance in amending, as appropriate, the relevant clauses in the report”. Well, that’s very kind, but for a practice calling for greater consideration of embodied carbon, Foster + Partners certainly seems to offer a neat line in resisting attempts to consider embodied carbon. Let’s just be thankful that they don’t have a track record of designing concrete-heavy megaprojects. We wouldn’t want to think there were any vested interests at play.
Blood in the water
It was a takedown of a design-led startup in what’s been dubbed Silicon Valley’s “trial of the century”. Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest female self-made billionaire, has been found guilty on four counts of conspiring to defraud investors. Her blood-testing company Theranos promised to revolutionise the medical field, but its flagship product proved to be an expensive shiny box (said shine coming courtesy of designer Yves Béhar) that gave sick, vulnerable patients inaccurate results. Holmes’ claims that she was an enthusiastic go-getter with no idea of the skullduggery going on in her company were undermined, however, when she admitted to photoshopping the logo of biomedical giant Pfizer on to documents she sent to potential benefactors. It’s the kind of ingenuity you might admire of a teenager manufacturing a fake ID, less so of an entrepreneur asking to handle people’s cancer screenings. Pfizer, in fact, had declined to partner with Theranos after failing to be impressed by its technology, but Holmes’s copy and paste trick made it look as if Theranos had been endorsed by the biomedical giant, with investors subsequently funding Theranos to the tune of almost £1bn. Holmes now awaits sentencing, with each of the four charges against her carrying a maximum of 20 years. A billionaire being punished for defrauding rich investors may feel like a bloodless crime, but plenty of vulnerable people and patients were collateral in the Theranos long con. Will Silicon Valley change its ways? The jury is still out, but the Theranos trial has shown that smoke and mirrors in the form of shiny decks and a product that looks futuristic (even if it's a flop) brings all the investors to the yard. After all, most of the tech industry's biggest innovations are just regular things – taxis, friends, food delivery – dressed up in a sans serif font and labour violations.
Would you like an excessive amount of information about this dog’s underlying health and general activities? Well, now you can, thanks to the Invoxia Smart Dog Collar (image Invoxia).
It’s a dog’s life
It’s been a mixed bag for pet owners this week. Here’s the bad news: your fluffy friends could be risking your immortal soul. Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic Church, said people who choose to be child-free in favour of having pets are “selfish” and putting their own humanity and the future of their countries at risk. Hmm. The supreme pontiff slamming pets may make for a snappy headline, but the Vicar of Jesus Christ has rather missed the point that many young people simply cannot afford to raise a child. So the Church of Rome may be furious to hear that heretical parents of fur babies are about to get a brand new gadget to help them raise a happy and healthy pup. Reject clerical collars, embrace the Smart Dog Collar by Invoxia, the breakout star of the 2022 CES technology fair. Thanks to mini radars, the collar can monitor your pooch’s vital signs, as well as acting as a GPS tracker and activity monitor. The tiny radars, it turns out, are just what you need to monitor a heartbeat through a nice furry coat. Invoxia has been bold enough to ask the real question puzzling moral philosophers of our day and age: what use is tracking your own walkies and sleepy time on an app if man’s best friend can’t join in too?