The Design Line: 16 - 22 July
As Western Europe surrenders to the heat wave, the Design Line is doing its bit to help out, packaging up the latest red-hot design news in a more comfortable, chilled out format.
Feel the burn
Like many in Western Europe, Design Line spent much of this week inside, cowering sweatily as record-breaking temperatures scorched the continent. Wildfires broke out across France, Portugal, Spain and Greece, killing some and forcing thousands of others to evacuate their homes, while cities faced their own challenges: many country's infrastructure simply hasn't been designed to withstand the burning temperatures that are now de rigour as climate collapse bites. Cue London’s Hammersmith Bridge, for instance, needing to be wrapped in a silver insulation foil jacket by engineering firm Arcadis: a measure designed to reflect the sun and keep the bridge chains below 18°C, the point at which it would need to be shut (no small feat when ambient temperatures rose to around 40°C). Roads and railways were similarly disrupted in the extreme heat, while data centres were also affected as operators shut down computer equipment to avoid damage from overheating. Over in the United States, meanwhile, New York's subway surrendered to heavy rains, with the internet awash with photographs of flooded stations and water gushing down through ceilings and onto tracks. Infrastructure, simply put, is not equipped to deal with our current climate and the problems are only going to get worse. Thank god, then, that governments are taking these issues seriously: just think how awful it would be if elected officials were actively blocking climate action or else studiously avoiding the issue in favour of stirring up toxic culture wars to score political points. Just imagine the state we'd be in!
Honk if you’re emoji (image: Emojipedia via BBC)
Tap, tap, goose
It is a lovely day in the village, and you are a horrible [insert goose emoji]. Lovers of mischievous ganders rejoice, the emoji family has expanded once more to include everyone’s favourite feathered terrors. The goose is one of just 31 new emojis listed for the 2022 release, which was announced this week by the Unicode Consortium. It’s a significant reduction on the 112 released in last year’s batch, but the latest pixel pictograms manage to cover a lot of ground, from new shades for the heart shapes, to peas in a pod, lilacs and a highly detailed knobbly root ginger. The animal kingdom will be better represented with a crow, moose, donkey and a jellyfish. The choice to reduce the influx of new emojis was intentional. "The Unicode emoji subcommittee want to take more time to consider what will go on the emoji keyboard,” editor in chief of Emojipedia Keith Broni told the BBC. "In previous years a lot of things were added.” This slimmed down emoji edit hints then at a new direction for the Unicode Consortium, which has previously experienced internal tensions over the extreme popularity of the Emoji Keyboard. A 2016 Buzzfeed exposé on the California-based nonprofit, which was founded to translate alphabets into code, leaked emails that showed some members were less enamoured of the limelight-hogging coded cartoons. “Emoji, emoji, emoji. It’s all about emoji,” fumed typographer Michael Everson, who was enraged by his medieval Cornish characters falling by the wayside in lieu of yet more emoticons. Everson at least may be pleased this year, then, to find that emojis appear to be the only commodity impervious to inflation in this economy.
The Nike Rise store in West London (image: Nike).
Digital experience in physical space
In 2011, around 84 per cent of all Nike sales went to wholesale customers. In 2017, however, the brand announced a pivot, launching its “consumer direct offense” to increase direct consumer sales (D2C) through its own stores and digital channels: as of the company’s 2021 fiscal year, D2C now make up 39 per cent of Nike’s total sales. Online platforms have played a key role in this, particularly during lockdowns, but Nike has also invested heavily in its physical stores, launching a series of new design concepts intended to revitalise its bricks and mortar offering. In the last fortnight, for example, the brand launched a new store in West London that is its first in EMEA to utilise the company’s “Nike Rise” concept, while Seoul welcomed a new “Nike Style” space. While the differences between these concepts is rather opaque to anyone outside of the company (at a push, Style seems to focus more on content creation, with a “Content Studio” designed to support customers’ in creating social media in the store; Rise emphasises a connection to the store's immediate surroundings, displaying realtime data around sport in the area), both follow a familiar principle of trying to make retail more immersive and experiential. While considerable effort has been put into these stores’ physical attributes to achieve this (the West London store features an interesting milled glass facade and internal panels made from unfired clay in place of drywall to reduced embodied carbon, for instance), it is clear that the integration of digital technologies is central to the strategy: Style incorporates augmented reality experiences through QR codes, while Rise uses RFID-enabled footwear tables to browse product data. The future of retail, at least for Nike, seems to be in mixed reality.
100 Liverpool Street proves refurbishment looks good (image: Hopkins Architects).
Stirling work
The RIBA may not have covered itself in glory this year, failing to retain its first diversity and inclusion officer and giving a decidedly milquetoast response to the Bartlett Report, but the announcement of its Stirling Prize shortlist always gets people going. The coveted RIBA-awarded prize for the building deemed to be "the most significant of the year” is awarded annually and has been narrowed down to six projects. Four of the projects are in London and a fifth is in Cambridge – significant architecture apparently stymied beyond the UK’s North-South divide. The sixth, Forth Valley College by Reiach and Hall Architects, is in Falkirk, Scotland, so at least it raises the mean distribution, if not the median or mode. Education was a theme among the shortlisted entries. Along with Reiach and Hall’s college campus building there was Hackney New Primary School by Henley Halebrown, the Sands End Arts and Community Centre for Hammersmith and Fulham council by Mæ Architects, and The New Library for Cambridge’s Magdalene College by Níall McLaughlin Architects. Hopkins Architects, meanwhile, has won acclaim for its 100 Liverpool Street, an adaptive reuse project that converted an 80s office block for commercial use, providing a neat rebuttal to the developers claiming they still need to build more towers in the capital’s financial district to meet demand for energy-efficient buildings. Despite the ongoing UK housing crisis – or perhaps because of it – only one housing project made it to the final six: Panter Hudspith Architects’ Orchard Gardens in Elephant and Castle. The complex contains 228 new homes and is part of the Heygate Estate regeneration scheme, which has seen Southwark Council and developer Lend Lease knock down 1,194 social-rented homes to replace them with 2,500 properties, of which just 74 will be social rent. Who signed off this blatant flouting of Section 106 back in 2013? One Boris Johnson, former London mayor and outgoing prime minister. The shortlist feels significant as a microcosm of the UK right now, just not in the way the Stirling Prize jury perhaps intended.
Blocking the blockchain
It’s been a bruising year for the blockchain, as the cryptocurrency market crashed and scammers made off with allegedly valuable ape-based artworks. On Monday, Land Life, a Dutch carbon offset company that promises to use drones and blockchain technology to enhance its tree planting, started a forest fire in Spain that burnt 35,000 acres. Now Minecraft (see Disegno #26 for a breakdown of its real-world design applications), the hugely popular block-based sandbox game, has banned NFTs from the platform. Mojang Studios, the game developer owned by Microsoft, posted a blog this week stating blockchain technologies are not permitted “to ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience”. The post explicitly calls out the rank profiteering of the NFT market, which aims to make abundant digital resources scarce in order to capitalise on them. In Minecraft, a virtual world that prizes creativity in design, NFTs could make some third-party creator content such as skins (character outfits, essentially) or even entire worlds, a collectable item only available to those able to pay for it. “These uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together,” states Mojang Studios. It’s a neat summation of everything worrisome about Web 3.0, where energy-intensive blockchain tech is being used to create an internet of landlords presiding over pay-to-play enclaves. Here’s hoping that Minecraft taking a stand against the crafty crypto miners will set a new standard for web developers.
Desert drama
A fashion show trades on visual impact and this was certainly on display in Saint Laurent’s decision this week to present its spring/summer 2023 menswear collection in Marrakech's Agafay desert – a nod to the city's importance to the maison's founder. Designed by Es Devlin, the show featured a mirror-clad colonnade, in addition to an artificial oasis, from which, at the show's conclusion, rose a giant, illuminated metal ring – the mother of all TikTok ring lights. The effect was undoubtedly impressive, but Saint Laurent seems to have predicted the inevitable criticism – the brand was quick to assert that the show was carbon neutral. Only non-potable water used in the oasis, which will later be reused in agricultural projects; greenhouse gas emissions will be offset through projects aiming to support the world's rainforests; and donations of material and equipment will be made to local organisations. All very laudable, but a sense of unease remains. Even with these efforts towards environmentalism, would it not have been better to just… not do a show in the desert in the first place? Fashion is always eager for dramatic and exciting locations (Saint Laurent's autumn/winter 2022 womenswear collection was shown at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, for example), but in an age of climate collapse it doesn’t feel too much to ask that brands consider whether natural ecosystems really represent a suitable location for resource intensive temporary catwalks. If you can only justify such ventures through an extensive series of donations and carbon offsetting initiatives, perhaps they're not the best projects to go ahead with regardless.