The Design Line: 3 – 9 December
Change is a central theme in this week’s Design Line. The last ever Boeing 747 rolls off the assembly line in the US, and cult video game Dwarf Fortress gets a redesign. Fast fashion giant Shein promises to change its ways, and the Earthshot Prize allocates funds to design projects that could change the world. One thing stays the same, though – Design Line is written by humans, not a chatbot.
The final 747 has flown the nest of Boeing’s Seattle factory, pictured here in 2002 (image: Meutia Chaerani / Indradi Soemardjan via Wikimedia Commons).
Queen of goodbyes
Farewell to the Boeing 747, the original jumbo jet. This week saw production of the famed plane finally come to an end, 53 years after its debut in 1969, with the last 747 leaving Boeing’s Washington factory ahead of delivery to Atlas Air in early 2023. Dubbed “the queen of the skies”, the 747 was an iconic design, instantly recognisable for its distinctive hump that enabled the addition of a second deck. Although the 747 had gradually been squeezed out by smaller, more fuel efficient aircraft over the course of its lifespan, there was a time when it formed a cornerstone of many airlines’ fleets and it set the standard for all wide-bodied aircraft that followed in its wake. There is, as such, a certain sadness to seeing the design retired, even if it is in the name of greater fuel efficiency (which, let’s face it, the airline business could do with). Still, 53 years in production is not bad going for any vehicle, and the plane’s distinctive form is unlikely to be forgotten any time soon given its place in pop culture history (it is, lest we forget, the plane in Die Hard 2). So rest easy 747 – you had a good innings.
Journalist Iman Amrani lifted the lid on the Shein labour situation this year (image: Channel 4).
Not so Shein-y shiny
It was a rollercoaster of a week-and-a-bit for ultra-fast fashion brand Shien. Last week ended with the announcement from financial advisory firm money.co.uk that the Chinese company was the ‘Most Popular Fashion Brand’ of 2022. With the new week, came new news. On Monday Shien announced that, after an independent investigation found (surprise, surprise) labour rights violations in the production lines of their clothes, they will invest $15m over the next three to four years into a Responsible Sourcing Programme. The report found that staff at one factory subcontracted by the fashion giant were working over 13-hour days with only two to three days leave a month, and another factory had no fixed structure for time off in place. Shein may have been the most-Googled brand in 113 countries in 2022 and far outperformed rival brands such as Zara, Nike and H&M but its villainous practices including poor labour conditions, use of toxic chemicals and plagiarism of independent designers continue to come to light. An alarming Channel 4 documentary Inside the Sheen Machine: Untold released in October, which triggered the aforementioned (less critical) investigation, exposed the poor working conditions of many of Shein’s outsourced staff. The platform only manages to keep their clothes so cheap while adding around 700-1,000 items to its offerings per day through these dirty tricks – which makes us wonder if the Responsible Sourcing Programme is just a form of reputation laundering.
Earthshot winner Talal Hasan can now rock on with his carbon capture system (image: Earthshot).
Hit me with your best shot
Carbon emissions trapped in rocks, stoves powered by sugarcane, and biodegradable plastic made from seaweed are some of the design projects that have been awarded the Earthshot Prize this week. Set up last year by the UK’s Prince of Wales, the annual awards give each winner £1m towards their environmental innovations. Oman-based Talal Hasan, who won for his project 44.01, is developing a way of turning carbon dioxide into peridotite, while the women-led Mukuru Clean Stoves has developed cookers that burn processed biomass in order to make them less polluting and safer for home use across Kenya. And if you ordered a takeaway from Just Eat this year, you may have received a takeaway in a box made from seaweed by Notpla, a packaging startup from London. Also taking home the prize is Kaushik Kappagantulu with their Greenhouse-in-a-Box system to help farmers protect their crops, and conservation training scheme Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef. “The Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet's greatest challenges,” said Prince William, who faces his own challenges much closer to home as his estranged brother’s documentary airs on Netflix this week.
Annabelle Tan makes history with a hat-trick (image: Annabelle Tan).
All the President’s Medals
Now in its 186th year, the Royal Institute of British Architect (RIBA) President’s Medals have been running a tad longer than the Earthshot Prize. Annabelle Tan, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, won the RIBA President’s Silver Medal, which highlights the best student design project produced at RIBA Part 2. Tan’s scheme, named A Journey through Past, Present and Post-Tropicality, is an examination of Singapore’s landscape and natural resources that highlights how Western colonialists framed the tropics as Other in ways that continue to shape its built environment. If the entertainment industry has its EGOTs (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), the architecture world may need to come up for an equivalent for Tan, who has already taken home the Bronze and Dissertation RIBA awards in previous years in the RIBA's blind judging process. Earlier this year Tan’s project took home the Sir Banister Fletcher Prize and Medal, the Ambrose Poynter Prize and the Bartlett School of Architecture Medal. The Bartlett has hailed her as the “highest-awarded student in the history of RIBA”; Tan is certainly one to watch.
Robotic wordsmithing
Q: Why was the AI ethics committee so worried about ChatGTP? A: Because they were afraid it would start chatting up other models!
Here at Disegno, we thought this a surprisingly amusing dad joke – for an AI chatbot. The joker in question was ChatGTP, an AI chatbot given the prompt “write a joke about the ethical implications of ChatGPT.” Jokes aside, this new AI tool from research lab OpenAI has been released free of charge in a "research preview”. It has been breathlessly heralded by some as being as significant as the release of the first iPhone, or as having the potential to put Google out of business. Trained on a huge trove of texts from the internet, the chatbot engages in conversations and generates texts in response to prompts. Its outputs range from fairly convincing student essays and clever coding advice to biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. ChatGTP’s sophistication and convincing human-ness have certainly caused a digital stir. The Twittersphere exploded with reactions ranging from scepticism to awe, giddy excitement to strong criticism. Some worry that it may replace writing-based careers (Disegno’s team better start retraining) although it apparently suffers from lack critical thinking and nuance (so we might be okay, for now). Others are outraged that it gives students a new and handy way to cheat on exams. Whatever your position, it seems a canny move by OpenAI to crowd-source opinions on the ethical sticking-points, dodgy loopholes and potential (mis)uses of the product before they inevitably take their AI cash-cow to market.
New dwarves please
It may not sound it, but Dwarf Fortress (2006) is kind of a big deal – a towering achievement in the history of video game design, to the degree that the game was among the first 14 titles collected when MoMA started collecting within the medium back in 2012 (an endeavour you can read more about in our recent interview with curator Paola Antonelli). The game's premise is simple – Dwarf Fortress is a colony management simulation in which you oversee a community of dwarves attempting to build underground cities (which inevitably end in disaster) – but it has become known among fans for the depth of its systems and its rich seam of humour. There’s just one problem – Dwarf Fortress is famously inaccessible to newcomers. In large part this barrier to entry has been down to the game’s complexity, but its text-based graphics and interface have also proven a stumbling block for many. Rejoice, then, that this week saw the launch of a new edition of the game on Steam and Itch, replete with user-friendly pixel art and in-game tutorials! For the first time, the game’s dwarves and associated creatures actually look like what they’re supposed to be rather than a jumble of ASCII code. While Disegno personally prefers the old style, it’s a pleasure to see developer Bay 12 Games make design tweaks that open the game up to new audiences and make it more accessible to boot. There’s never been a better time to start leading your dwarves to certain doom.