The Design Line: 16 - 22 April
It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down with The Design Line on Friday. This week’s industry news includes Netflix’s subscriber exodus, a new gaming console that takes design seriously, a New York interiors concept store, the latest in the Amazon unionisation saga, and a London landmark gets a stay of execution.
Netflix is shedding subscribers, but gaining curatorial attention (image: Netflix).
A receding stream
This summer, London’s Design Museum is set to stage an exhibition “celebrating Netflix’s design journey”, so it was interesting to learn this week that said journey may have hit the skids before the exhibition even gets out of the blocks. The world’s largest streaming service announced that the first quarter of 2022 had seen it shed 200,000 subscribers, a loss it attributed to its decision to pull out of Russia, its hike in subscription prices, and increased competition. In response, Netflix has pledged to clamp down on password sharing (that’ll get new subscribers flooding in!) and double down on improving “the quality of our programming and recommendations”. Disegno wrote about the design of Netflix back in 2019 and how its model was shaping television and film, but it now appears to be a victim of its own success. Envious of Netflix’s reach, giants such as Amazon, Disney and Apple have all built up rival services, creating a situation in which viewers need multiple subscriptions if they’re to watch everything they want – somewhat defeating the point of services that bill themselves as one-stop shops for content. Whatever happens, it makes for an interesting context for that upcoming Design Museum show: what could easily become a corporate puff piece, suddenly has scope to probe at the future of media.
It’s small and yellow, and it has a lovely crank (image: Panic).
A handsome crank
The industrial design of video game consoles is typically a ropey affair, albeit one that seems to have little impact on their relative success (just consider the Reddit thread “How ugly would the PS5 have to be for you to not buy it?”). While hardcore gamers’ indifference to the aesthetic of consoles is understandable, the relatively paucity of the field is a shame when you consider that consoles are now an everyday object in millions of domestic interiors. It was a pleasure, therefore, to see the launch this week of the Playdate, a handheld device from developer Panic that features industrial design from Teenage Engineering. As you would expect from Teenage, a studio that made its name with highly aesthetic music equipment, the Playdate is a beautiful, joyful device: a cheerful yellow block of electronics, replete with invitingly chubby buttons and a lovingly silly hand crank on the side that has been incorporated into the gameplay of its various titles. In a relative desert of industrial design, the Playdate stands out – a refined form that nevertheless stays true to the fun of video game aesthetics (it's essentially a slicker take on the classic Gameboy). As consoles become increasingly ubiquitous, let's hope the Playdate sets a design standard that others rise to meet.
Ye olde English pub names are finally trendy (image: Six Bells)
From farm to tableware
Audrey Gelman is back, and she’s defined a new strain of interior design aesthetic primed to dominate the Instagram feeds of a certain demographic. As co-founder of the women-only co-working space The Wing, Gelman was the progenitor of an interiors look that could be described as the physical embodiment of Girlboss, Gatekeep, Gaslight. Think pink velvet, baroque prints and curving mirrors – Instagram backdrop catnip for fourth-wave feminist entrepreneurs. Gelman’s tenure at The Wing came to a sticky end when the company tried to ride the activist coattails of the Black Lives Matter movement, pushing current and former employees to reveal the discrimination and harassment they hasd experienced as Black and brown women working for the brand. Gelman resigned, but two years later she’s back with a rebrand and a whole new business venture. The Six Bells is a “a new old country store” in New York where one can purchase $400 quilts, wooden candlesticks, and soap disguised as rustic fruit. It’s all very cottagecore meets Midsummer Murders, monetising urban corporate workers’ desires to get back to the land without having to risk mud or the smell of manure. But there’s an uneasy undercurrent within The Six Bell’s immersive marketing strategy, which centres around a fictional village in Suffolk, England, called Barrow’s Green. Interactive illustrations of Barrow’s Green depict an architectural mishmash of neoclassical homes, a cricket green, and a plethora of posh white residents with elaborate backstories. As Grace Lavery put it in Curbed, it’s an uneasy fantasy of a “reactionary kind of Anglophilia”. The yassification of Poundbury, if you will.
Damming the Amazon
Amazon burst its banks this week, with leaked audio from an all-hands meeting ending up in the hands of journalists from The Verge. According to their report, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy can be heard on the tape attempting to make the case that joining a union will be less empowering for employees. “We have unusual empowerment for our employees,” claims Jassy, whose empowered warehouse employees run an extreme risk of injury in their warehouses ,while Amazon’s corporate staff face mental burn out due to insane deadlines. But unions, Jassy warned his staff, would bog down change in bureaucracy and destroy the “connectivity” and “bond” between workers and management. It’s unsurprising corporate speak for “please don’t ask for better pay and conditions”, but it does make us curious about how the Amazon suits may be feeling behind the scenes now that their union busting attempts have started to fail. Following the historic unionisation of a warehouse in New York last month, an Amazon facility in New Jersey has filed for its own union election.
M&S reprieved
A longterm staple of the British high street, Marks & Spencer (M&S) has now become the heart of a very British scandal. In November 2021, Westminster City Council approved Pilbrow & Partner’s plan to demolish the store’s Orchard House (1929) superstore on Oxford Street, replacing it with a new build “of the highest environmental standards” from which the shop would be able to continue to sell its range of slightly posh ready meals and affordable bras and checked shirts. The fact that the new build would contain 40,000 tonnes of embodied carbon seems of little consequence to all concerned, with the London mayor’s office ruling in April that “grounds did not exist to allow the mayor to intervene” in the proposal to replace quite a nice existing building with a 10-storey Goliath. Yet a late twist in the tale emerged this week, with the UK’s Communities Secretary Michael Gove issuing a Article 31 holding direction: an order that gives the government time to consider Pilbrow & Partners’ scheme before final planning permission is granted. With increased awareness of the environmental need to retrofit and reuse existing buildings, rather than demolish and rebuild, there is still time for all involved to see sense and allow Orchard House to blossom once more.
A masterplan for Kharkiv
On 21 April, Kharkiv’s mayor Ihor Terekhov outlined the state of Ukraine’s second largest city. “Huge blasts, the Russian Federation is furiously bombing the city,” he explained in a televised address, with 1 million people remaining in the city after around 30 per cent of its population have already evacuated. Only three days earlier, however, Terekhov had met with Norman Foster to discuss the rebuilding of the city, with the architect sharing a manifesto detailing plans to create a new masterplan for Kharkiv that would “assemble the best minds with the best planning, architectural, design, and engineering skills in the world” in order “to deliver the city of the future now and to plan for its life decades ahead.” While the desire to rebuild is laudable, and there is much to be said for forward planning and optimism, it was curious to see reconstruction plans made quite so public (splashed across British newspapers and architecture publications) while the conflict remains ongoing. Foster’s aims are no doubt noble, but is it a scheme that might have benefited from less of a PR maelstrom growing up around it?