The Design Line: 23 - 29 April
What time is it? The Design Line time! This week, the winners of the first Terra Carta Design Lab are announced; Design Shanghai gets postponed; Thomas Heatherwick shocks us all with a tree-themed design; DJI takes a stand on Ukraine; Elon Musk makes his bid for Twitter; and Disegno has an exciting new project to announce.
HRH was clearly very moo-ved by this bovine gas mask (image: Zelp).
Designers with a mission
“Good morning angels.”
“Good morning Sir Jony Ive and His Royal Highness/Charlie.”
This, no doubt, is how the Terra Carta Design Lab will begin each day. Launched by Ive and Prince Charles, Terra Carta is a scheme created in conjunction with the Royal College of Art that will see young designers attempt to tackle climate change. Launched in July 2021, the scheme has now announced its four winners, all of whom who will receive £50k in funding and mentoring from Ive and the wider Terra Carta network. Although there is a slight smack of techno-utopianism about the whole thing (couldn’t we push for political change instead of asking students and recent alumni to design our way out of jeopardy?), the project deserves real credit. The winners are a worthy bunch (Aerseeds create nutrient and seed pods from food waste; AMPHITEX is a carbon neutral performance textile; The Tyre Collective aim to the microplastics produced by the wear of tyres; and Zelp is making wearables for cows to neutralise their, erm, methane) and it is good to see such initiatives receive the funding they need to develop their ideas further. Enthusiastic, talented designers (slightly bizarrely led by the heir to the British throne) tackling real problems – we wish them the best of luck.
Design Shanghai, which has been postponed, in rosier times last year (image: Design Shanghai).
Design Shanghai postponed
The Coronavirus pandemic continues to play havoc with the international design fair calendar, with Design Shanghai as the latest casualty. The event was due to take place from 9 to 12 June this year, but as the five-week-long lockdown of the city continues with no end in sight, the fair been pushed back to the autumn. Shanghai’s population of 25m people have been living with major restrictions since late March, when an Omicron outbreak threatened China’s zero-covid policy. There are reports of food shortages, mass evacuations for residential disinfection, and electronic door alarms being set around infected households. It’s a draconian response from a state that has staked everything on trying to keep covid deaths low. Meanwhile in Europe and America, governments have all but shrugged their shoulders and rolled back even the lightest of interventions such as mask mandates and free testing. This zero-covid versus living-with-covid divide will continue to have knock-on effects on all industries, not just with supply chain disruption but the loss of opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration and creative exchange.
Bring me a shrubbery! Thomas Heatherwick hopes to join the Knights Who Say Ni Tree (image: PicturePlane, courtesy of Heatherwick Studio).
Heatherwick branches out
A tree design from Thomas Heatherwick? Groundbreaking. If you’ll excuse us a Miranda Priestly moment, it seems as though the British designer is running a little low on new ideas. Trees are a recurring theme for Heatherwick, who used them liberally on the Eden tower in Singapore, Little Island in New York, and a complex in Shanghai called, imaginatively, 1,000 Trees. Now Heatherwick Studio has unveiled plans for – you guessed it – Tree of Trees, a tree-covered, tree-shaped sculpture for London’s Buckingham Palace to commemorate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Due to be made from recycled steel, the 70ft sculpture is a nod to a campaign to plant trees to commemorate Lizzie’s 70 years on the throne, and the 350 saplings will be given away after the celebrations. Londoners are doubly wary of this public artwork plan. He may have given them the Routemaster, but Heatherwick was also the creator of Boris Johnson’s failed Garden Bridge project. After the so-bad-it-was-good saga of MVRDV’s The Mound, there’s plenty of concern that the Tree of Trees will look as sparse as a European royal’s family tree.
Droning off
Major drone manufacturer DJI Technology has broken ranks and suspended sales of its products in Russia and Ukraine, an unprecedented move for a Chinese company during the ongoing war. China has so far refused to economically sanction the country for its attack on Ukraine, but DJI said that it was against its principles to risk its equipment being used in warfare. “DJI abhors any use of our drones to cause harm, and we are temporarily suspending sales in these countries in order to help ensure no-one uses our drones in combat,” a spokesperson for the brand said. Ukraine had previously accused DJI of allowing its AeroScope receiver technology, the inbuilt security feature for tracking its drones, to be hijacked by Russia to order missile strikes on Ukrainian drone operators. AeroScope is supposed to be used to monitor civilian drones getting too close to, say, an airport, but it’s a worrying example of how recreational design and technology could be misappropriated for violence. While there have been no confirmed reports of this actually happening, DJI clearly wants to shut the stable door – although as both sides have drones and receivers, this particular horse may have already bolted.
Is design just a game? Well, you tell us! (image: Ramak Fazel).
Drafting Design
Not to blow our own trumpet (nevertheless: parp!), but Disegno did some news of our own this week. We’ve partnered with the Netherlands’s Het Nieuwe Instituut to launch Design Drafts, a new writing programme intended to nurture new voices and perspectives within design writing and criticism. “What a great initiative,” you might say admiringly, and, well, that’s certainly the idea. For its inaugural iteration, Design Drafts has issued an open call focused on the theme “Is design just a game?“, with applicants invited to apply to the programme with a proposal addressing the issues that it raises. Six writers will then be selected by an international jury to join the three-month programme, with each writer supported to create a piece of long-form, paid writing that will be featured in Disegno #34, as well as in a stand-alone publication. If you’ve always wanted to try your hand at design writing, and have a fresh perspective that you think the industry could do with hearing, why not apply now? We’d love to hear from you!
An unpleasant Musk
Well, that’s that then. On Monday, Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for $44bn, declaring that “[free] speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” Increasing free speech is one of many nebulous ambitions that Musk has spoken about in his plan to redesign the social media giant: he has also suggested plans for a “dislike” button on Tweets, a scheme for “authenticating all humans”, and promised to unlock the “tremendous potential” within a business that remains heavily reliant on advertising and which hasn’t turned a profit for eight of the last 10 years (with plans for the company to take on an additional $13bn in debt as part of Musk’s deal). The oddity of why exactly Musk is so determined to own Twitter aside (even for the world’s richest man, $44bn is a lot of money), it’s not even clear what concrete changes he plans to introduce at his new purchase to unlock that “tremendous potential”, bar rowing back on the platform’s already fairly minimal content moderation policies (he has already organised an online pile on against Vijaya Gadde, a Twitter executive, for a past moderation decision – a woman who is, erm, due to become one of his employees). But, hey ho, what could go wrong? Why wouldn’t you want a digital town square to fall into the private ownership of a man who who has promised to overhaul it or “die trying”?