The Design Line: 10 – 16 September
Another week has passed and things have happened. Thank God, then, that Design Line was there to document them all, offering up your weekly serving of the best recent design news.
Go on – help clean up your elders’ mess (image: The World Around).
Trust in youth
Let's face it, the world isn’t doing brilliantly on climate. Those in power seem determined to ignore the problem, while corporations and petrochemical giants remain committed to setting the Earth on fire. So, while older generations continue to stoke the flames, perhaps it’s time to give younger people a shot at saving the day. Step forward the Young Climate Prize, a new initiative launched by Diego Marroquin and Beatrice Galilee’s New York-based nonprofit The World Around. Open for applications until 31 October, the prize is looking for people under the age of 25 who are “working on their own self-started projects that address, draw attention to or mitigate climate change in their community”. The prize will select 25 winners, who will go on to receive lectures, presentations and mentorship from designers and design thinkers including Sumayya Vally, Frida Escobedo and Joseph Grima as they develop their ideas further. So, if you’re a young person with a suggestion about how we could improve the world, why not apply? Trust us, you can’t do any worse than the old guard.
All hail Sandy Powell, this year’s London Design Medal winners (image: Tim Walker).
Medals galore
Wednesday saw the announcement of this year's London Design Medals, a programme overseen by the upcoming London Design Festival (LDF). Four awards are given in total, with the titular London Design Medal bestowed on a maker who has “distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.” This year, the top prize has gone to costume designer Sandy Powell, with the judging panel citing their desire to recognise an often overlooked area of design (for which they should be commended) and praising Powell’s work on films such as The Favourite, Caravaggio, Shakespeare in Love and Orlando. Part of the honour of the award, according to Powell, is that the medals programme recognises “design across the board, not just me and other costume designers.” There’s truth in this, with both this year’s Design Innovation Medal and Emerging Design Medal (awarded to design entrepreneurship and young designers respectively) demonstrating a pleasingly broad definition of the field. While last year’s Emerging Design medal went to furniture and object maker Mac Collins, this year the award returned to its previous tendency of recognising work in emerging technologies. Joycelyn Longdon, a PhD student from Cambridge University on the Artificial Intelligence For Environmental Risk (AI4ER) programme, was selected for her research integrating the fields of machine learning, ecology and indigenous knowledge to investigate the role of technology in forest conservation. Meanwhile The Design Innovation Medal went to Indy Johar, architect and co-founder of 00 and Dark Matter Labs, whose work aims to expand building and architecture beyond public planning to think about the social infrastructure that constrains building practices – think policies, systems and institutions. In this same vein, the Lifetime Achievement Medal went to photojournalist Don McCullin for his stellar work documenting conflict zones and his social reportage – a fascinating, politically resonant form of creative practice that is far removed from the glossy installations and brand presentations that typically dominate LDF.
A man signing away a fortune (image: Patagonia).
The best billionaire
“Despite its immensity, the Earth’s resources are not infinite, and it’s clear we’ve exceeded its limits. But it’s also resilient. We can save our planet if we commit to it.” With these words, Yves Chouinard, the billionaire owner of sportswear brand Patagonia, announced that he was giving the company away. The move was the latest entry in Patagonia’s long history of environmental activism (since the 1980s, the brand has donated 1 per cent of sales to environmental groups), but Chouinard’s decision was nevertheless interesting for its radicalness. As opposed to selling the company or going public (“What a disaster that would have been,” Chouinard wrote. “Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility.”), Chouinard’s family has donated 2 per cent of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust designed to oversee the company’s mission and values. The remaining 98 per cent of stock will go to a nonprofit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible”. It’s a bold step and an interesting challenge to the profit-at-all-costs model that corporate leadership typically follows. “As of now, Earth is our only shareholder,” Patagonia said. “ALL profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’.”
The Stockholmsmässan, soon to house a subtly rebooted edition of its annual design fair (image: Stockholm Furniture Fair).
What’s in a name?
After three Covid-prompted postponement, the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair is to return in February 2023. But the event is not returning from its time in limbo entirely unchanged. This week’s saw the fair’s organisers announce a new graphic identity from Swedish design studio Stockholm Design Lab, coupled with a change in the event’s name: henceforth, it will be the Stockholm Furniture Fair. OK, so the name change isn’t exactly earth shattering (and is, to be honest, what most people called it anyway – although perhaps that's the point), but it does suggest a desire to put the past two years behind the fair and relaunch with a new, more focused event. While Stockholm has been on hiatus, the Nordic region has seen Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign festival grow in importance, providing an outlet for Danish brands, in particular, who would previously have been reliant upon Sweden’s trade fair. It may prove a wise time for renewal: the return of a focused, smartly curated Stockholm (which has made the excellent decision to appoint Front as its 2023 guest of honour – strangely, the first time a Swedish studio has received the honour) is something to celebrate.
LED astray
Beware the blue light of LEDs! Or at least that’s the warning from a new study conducted by academics at the University of Exeter, which has found that the replacement of sodium lights on buildings and streets in Europe with LEDs has resulted in increased blue light radiation that is causing “substantial biological impacts” across the continent. Published in the journal Science Advances, the study argues that blue light suppresses the production of melatonin, which regulates sleep patterns, prompting a deterioration in sleep that can lead to chronic health conditions over time. Also acknowledged in the paper was the role of blue light radiation in reducing the visibility of stars, which “may have impacts on people’s sense of nature”. Interestingly, the study singled out the UK as one of the nations worst affected by the transition to LEDs, especially in terms of melatonin suppression – a nation, presumably, of people whose street lights are making them tired and emotional. Hmm, if only there were a recent example of bizarre national hysteria that might support this.
Four Chicago guys, planning Chicago things (image: Chicago Architecture Biennial).
Directing a rehearsal
This week brought news of the artistic direction behind the fifth iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, with the honour this time falling to art collective Floating Museum (Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Faheem Majeed, Andrew Schachman, and avery r. young). Focused on work that digs around the interstitial spaces between communities, institutions and architecture (they’ve done a series of interesting projects exploring monuments and memory through sculpture and oversized inflatable structures, for example), Floating Museum seem a good fit for the biennial, particularly given the fact they’re based in Chicago and so should be well placed to reflect upon its urbanism. Themed This is a Rehearsal, the biennial has said that its fifth edition will survey the ways in which “contemporary environmental, political, and economic issues are shared across national boundaries but are addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation.” Which sounds very much like any architecture biennial, really, but the involvement of Floating Museum is enough to have us excited. Roll on its opening in September 2023.