The Design Line: 1 – 7 October
October has arrived, bringing with it a fine serving of autumnal design news. Read on for stories including the V&A finally cutting ties to the Sackler family, Coperni’s spray-on dress, the European Union’s move against charger clutter, and much more.
Better late than never
In summer 2019, the V&A’s director Tristram Hunt went on Radio 4’s Today programme to mount a defence of his institution’s ties to the Sackler family: multibillionaire backers of cultural institutions as well as, erm, facilitators-in-chief of the US’s deadly opioids crisis. Faced with calls to sever ties with the family – whose funding of the arts has long been criticised as a means of artwashing the reputation of its company, Purdue Pharma – Hunt stood his ground. “Like many other cultural institutions,” he told Today, we receive very generous support from the Sackler family and we’re grateful for that.” A little over two years later, however, the V&A appears willing to cede said ground, with the museum set to its rename both its Sackler Centre for Arts Education, and its Sackler Courtyard. It’s a key win for PAIN, the pressure group founded by artist Nan Goldin to expose “the institutions that have been complicit [in the opioids crisis] by accepting [Sackler] donations for years”. With organisations such as the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum having already removed the Sackler name from their sites, the V&A was seen as one of the last major holdouts and its decision to finally take action is one to welcome. “It’s amazing,” said Goldin when informed of the decision. “It’s a big victory for people who go to museums and do not want to see the name of the family who helped ignite the overdose crisis.”
The European Commission’s Margrethe Vestager, showing off the sort of thing she’s banning (image: via Twitter)
A sensible standard
Rejoice! After years of faffing around with chargers of every conceivable type and form to keep our army of portable devices fuelled with electricity, this week saw the European Parliament finally take action. From 2024, all new tablets and smartphones sold in the EU will have to use a USB-C charger (with laptops given until 2026 to make the shift over). It's a no-brainer decision given that the only people benefitting from divergence between brands were the brands themselves, which should bring blessed standardisation and convenience to a field that has been far too complicated and wasteful for far too long: a simple solution to issues around e-waste, technological lock-in, and pointless expense. The only downside to the ruling, from Disegno’s perspective here in London, is that Britain is reportedly not “currently considering” following the eminently sensible example set by the EU. Whoever knew that the British state could be contrarian and stubborn for no good reason?
Geek chic
“I’m a little bit of a geek,” explained Sébastien Meyer, creative director of fashion brand Coperni, with this geekery in full effect during Paris Fashion Week when Coperni closed its runway show by spraying a white off-shoulder dress onto a near-nude Bella Hadid. Produced by technology company Fabrican, the dress is made by a series of natural and synthetic fibres suspended within a polymer solution; once sprayed onto the body via an aerosol, the liquid evaporates, leaving behind a non-woven fabric. Billed by Meyer as representing a “possible future” (personally, Disegno isn’t sure why anybody might think clothes in a can would be the future), the dress and technology made for compelling theatre, and captivated attention across social media; indeed, WWD have reported the “media impact value” of the event at $26.3m, the vast majority of which it attributed to social media. Amidst such hype, however, it's worth remembering that the actual design value of Fabrican’s material seems questionable given that the resultant dress was fairly standard and nondescript (the company is also exploring applications within medicine, which seem more promising), with Harper's Bazaar news director Rachel Tashjian describing the approach as "a gimmick, and nothing more”. Tashijan’s assessment seems on the money, but the power of a gimmick shouldn’t be underestimated either. $26.3m in media impact for one dress is not bad going.
Live-streamed disasters
If there is a more apt metaphor for the 21st century than live-streaming the devastation of extreme weather conditions through home surveillance technologies, Disegno would like to hear it. This week saw Hurricane Ian devastate Florida, where it destroyed communities and essential infrastructure, and has left a death toll that has now risen to close to 100 people. Amongst those who where fortunately able to escape the path of the hurricane, many were subsequently left to watch the destruction that it wrought through apps connected to video doorbells and similar providing a live stream of events from afar. The resultant footage is curiously intimate and bizarre, showing neighbourhoods swallowed up by the storm, but viewed as if peering through a front door’s peephole. “We were glued to our video cameras watching all of it,” Paul Hirt, a Venice resident told The New York Times. “A feeling of dread settled in because we had no idea how much higher the water would rise and how long it would remain.” It is a curiously 21st-century way of engaging with extreme weather, a phenomenon which, thanks to climate collapse, seems set to become an increasingly common 21st-century occurrence.
Disegno especially enjoyed the AI-generated bear’s strangely red human hand (image: Meta).
Text to video
Everyone in design is probably familiar with DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion and their ilk by now: online generators that take text and transform it into an image. It’s a fascinating form of technology with interesting implications (as well as some troubling social corollaries) for the ways in which creative disciplines may generate imagery in the future. But while practitioners are still trying to wrap their heads around what these generators could mean for their work and practice, technologists are already pushing ahead to the next frontier: both Meta and Google have now announced text-to-video systems, which transform written descriptions into short video clips. The technology isn’t necessarily new (CogVideo came out earlier this year), but the new programmes from Meta and Google – Imagen Video and Make-A-Video respectively – appear a cut above their forebears. Text-to-video systems remain in their relative infancy, but the pace with which the technology has already advanced is impressive; Disegno found itself quite moved to witness Make-A-Video’s poignant take on “A teddy bear painting a portrait”.
The autumn/winter 2022 edition of Elephant. Why not pick up a copy (image: Elephant)?
Elephant leaves the room
As we pitch towards the precipice of a global economic downturn, things are getting scary. Not least in the arts industry, where precarious business models that rely on outside investors and for-profit models are often the first to suffer when the cuts come. The week began with sad news from Scotland that the Edinburgh International Film Festival and its cinemas would shutter immediately, with the Covid-19 pandemic followed by rocketing energy bills sounding the death knell for the arts charity. Then yesterday came more unhappy news as Elephant magazine was shuttered by its owners. The radical art magazine burst onto the scene in 2009, determined to address the elephants in contemporary galleries and beyond. Its tenacious editorial team fearlessly addressed issues such as race and gender in an industry notorious for glossing over them. The magazine was bought in 2017 by Colart, a Swedish-owned art supply business that tried to expand the Elephant brand with a shiny art space in the west London White City development. The pandemic scuppered that too, and now Colart is citing a downturn in demand for art supplies as the reason for pulling the plug on the magazine. Disegno stands in solidarity with our comrades at Elephant, and with everyone who lost their jobs this week. The culture world is left a lot poorer.