The Design Line: 2 - 8 April
Toot toot, it’s The Design Line, your weekly go-to roundup of the most interesting news from across design. This week we have an incubator programme for Black designers, a Lego HQ by CF Møller, and Meta moves to design its own in-app currency system.
Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab welcomes its first cohort of Black designers and artists (image: Chris Strong, courtesy of Rebuild Foundation).
Black excellence
Given Virgil Abloh’s tragic passing last year, it was a pleasure to see fresh projects that he worked on emerge en masse this week. His final collection for Louis Vuitton menswear was worn on the red carpet at the Grammy’s by global megastars BTS this week (although the world could have done without the ceremony’s decision to honour him as a “hip hop designer); Mercedes-Benz revealed an exceptionally ritzy car that he created in collaboration with the automotive brand; while a group of 14 Black designers and artists were appointed to a new scheme for which Abloh had served on the jury. The inaugural cohort of the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab have been offered a three-year incubator programme set up by the Prada Foundation and Theaster Gates, the artist and 2022 Serpentine Pavilion designer. Gates and Prada founded the programme in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, with the 14 recipients receiving mentorship and creative opportunities, as well as financial support for the duration of the scheme. It’s a laudable scheme, not least for the money behind it. If big name institutions such as Prada want to attach themselves to campaigns for racial equity (and remember that Prada does not have the finest track record here), they need to be prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
Zuck needs bucks
Despite its much vaunted rebrand as Meta and resultant schemes to rule the metaverse, the company formerly known as Facebook is facing something of a stumbling block on its way to Web3 domination. The popularity of its platforms is falling as younger users flock to TikTok, with less users meaning less eyeballs to sell adverts to, which means less money. According to the Financial Times, the finance brains at Meta are therefore hard at work on new revenue streams, including a currency for the metaverse. Not a cryptocurrency, but rather in-app tokens or coins controlled by Meta that would be dangled as rewards for posting – and could presumably be bought with real money in a manner similar to in-app purchasing. Leaked memos also suggest that Meta could start offering small business loans to users, a very old-fashioned style of capitalism for the former champions of disruption. The moneymaking schemes have apparently been dubbed “Zuck’s Bucks” by employees – a moniker Disegno is sure staff are just as fond of as they are their own nickname for Mark Zukerberg, “The Eye of Sauron”. Because nothing says you love your boss like drawing similarities between his management style and an all-seeing evil eyeball whose gaze burns your soul.
This cheery fellow welcomes you to Lego HQ (image: Adam Mork).
Chock-a-block
“Didn’t LEGO just get a new building?” we hear you cry. True, there was much fanfare around Bjarke Ingel’s multicoloured Lego House that looked like it was tiled in legos – but that was way back in 2017. It’s old news! As such, a brand new Lego campus designed by architecture practice CF Møller opened this week, whose entrance is marked by a cheery extra large Lego lad (see image above to fully gauge his levels of cheeriness) who greets the 2,000 employees who will work from it. As to be expected of a children-first company, Lego has installed lots of primary colours in its interiors and included themed meeting rooms that look like bricks cantilevering off the roof. Although, given how most technology companies and startups over the past decade have embraced a veneer of preschool playfulness, there’s little to distinguish the new HQ from those of, say, Google or Airbnb. Lego’s hometown of Billund in Denmark is now carpeted in Lego structures (so don’t go walking across it in bare feet); perhaps the company plans to go the route of Vitra and have a sprawling complex of architect-designed buildings, all snapping together like so many toy bricks.
Into darkness
A light was shone upon the dark(er) side of cryptocurrency this week, as German police officials finally busted Hydra, the largest dark web market currently in existence. Having received a tip-off, officers swooped on a hosting company and confiscated the servers used to run Hydra – along with some £16.7m of Bitcoin. Before it came to facilitate a zoo full of Bored Ape NFTs and pension funds eyeing up cryptocurrency portfolios, Bitcoin had a far less salubrious reputation as the untraceable currency for illegal activities online. Hydra specialised as a marketplace for illegal drugs and stolen data, with an estimated £1.2bn of sales made in 2020. Blockchain technology isn’t just an extraordinarily energy-intensive, climate-destroying venture – it also facilitates the anonymous laundering of cyber-crime’s ill gotten gains. And like the many-headed monster it was named for, Hydra has many operators, none of whom have been arrested yet and could simply pop up and start all over again.
Katherine Fleming is the Getty Trust’s new CEO (image: courtesy of New York University).
Getty goes green
The Getty Trust, America’s richest arts organisation, has a new leader and one with climate change on her mind. Katherine Fleming is taking over as president and CEO from James Cumo, who is retiring after a decade in the post. Fleming, previously the provost of New York University, has pledged to focus on the climate emergency and how it intersects with conservation of cultural heritage. “Climate change is going to be one of the major, if not the major, defining features of human existence over the coming century or so,” says Fleming. “In terms of walking the walk, as well as talking the talk, I’d be interested to find out more about the Getty’s practices at home.” With an endowment of $9.2bn, the Getty Trust examining its own carbon footprint will be no small feat. Greece, where Fleming has honorary citizenship, has been desperately calling for the international community to take action to help protect its ancient cultural heritage sites from the ravages of climate change. With time running out before the damage becomes irreversible, such a major institution making the issue a focus will surely be welcomed.
Billionaire on board
Elon Musk has a love/hate relationship with Twitter. He met the mother of his two most recent children on the platform after she beat him to the punch to tweet a niche joke about AI. But he’s also repeatedly wiped tens of billions of dollars off of Tesla share prices with his trigger-happy tweeting fingers. Now, however, he’s on the board of the social media platform. On Monday it was revealed that the Mush had purchased a 9.2 per cent stake in the company for a cool $2.4bn. Mere pocket change for a man whose net worth is an estimated $267bn, all invested in a company that doesn’t actually make any money at the moment. Musk is also too rich to bother with trifling things such as the law either. He apparently didn’t bother to alert the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he was buying such a large stake. The rocket-loving billionaire then celebrated his new acquisition with restraint and maturity, of course, tweeting out a much memed image of himself smoking a joint and crowing that the next board meeting “is gunna be lit” and polling his followers on their thoughts on the Twitter algorithm. Defecting to TikTok is suddenly looking even more attractive.