The Design Line: 3 – 9 September
Our condolances to Great Britain and the countries of the commonwealth as they mourn their late queen. Yet as the British love to say, the show must go on. As such, Design Line is here with the latest news including satellite smart phones, a design school rebellion, and a fashion cancellation for fossil fuels.
Sending out an SOS… from space (image: Huawei).
Texting from orbit
Huawei pipped Apple to the post this week with its announcement of the Mate 50 and the Mate 50 Pro phones, which will be able to send short texts via satellite. The Chinese tech company revealed its new products the day before Apple’s now-famous September event, with a sense of corporate mischief that could surely be seen from space. The American tech firm duly announced that the iPhone 14 will come with the ability to send an SOS using satellite connectivity. Apple has enlisted the services of Globalstar, a satellite company based in Louisiana, USA, to enable its service, while Huawei will use China’s global BeiDou network. The satellite service is only for emergencies in remote locations where there is no cell coverage or wifi – not for texting your mates if they want something from the shops – so unless you’re a regular backcountry explorer, the capability seems a little excessive (potentially designed to appeal to suburban dwellers with a true crime fixation). However, considering specialist satellite phones are expensive, bulky, and usually require an antenna, it’s impressive to see the technology be integrated into smartphones.
We will not be ranked
A group of major US architecture schools have come together to rebel against a system that would rank them against each other, the Architects’ Newspaper reported this week. The deans of Rice Architecture, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning have refused to participate in the 2022 DesignIntelligence Schools Survey Program, stating that “design education is not a popularity contest.” The annual survey conducted by the consulting firm ranks national design firms by categories such as “Most Hired From” and “Most Admired”, having done away with the gauche title of “Best” some time in 2015. “Schools like ours have more in common than differences,” said the deans in a letter. “Our differences – in curriculum, faculty, facilities, and culture – are of benefit to our students and the professions.” In light of the pandemic, the schools want to focus on what they can do for their students rather than keeping up with the Joneses. It’s the scholar’s “I am Spartacus” moment.
The 2022 Pride parade in Chennai, India (image: Shantanu Krishnan / @shantanukrishnanphotography)
App-t timing
Four years since India abolished Section 377 (a ban on gay sex introduced by British colonisers in 1860) Indian matchmaking website matrimony.com has announced the launch of its own dedicated queer dating app. The app, named (in a stroke of originality) Rainbowluv, will serve what matrimony.com sees as a gap in the market. “When it comes to serious matchmaking, the LGBTQIA+ community has been largely underserved and we wanted to provide a safe and trusted platform for them," chief marketing officer Arjun Bhatia said in a statement. Although pitched as a welcoming and widely inclusive app (the platform is keen to publicise that it includes more than 45 gender identities, 122 orientation tags and 48 pronouns) Rainbowluv may struggle against existing competitors. Rainbowluv requires members to use government ID cards to verify users’ identity for safety reasons; something surely to make a user pause considering recent history and the fact that same-sex marriage in India is not legally recognised. Citing the need for ID cards for safety reasons suddenly doesn’t feel so safe.
Selasi Setufe is the brief setter for Design Ventura 2022 (image: Julian George).
Ace Ventura, design detectives
One of Disegno’s favourite programmes, Design Ventura, launched its 2022 edition this week. Students in years 8, 9 and 10 (aged 12 to 15) from all over the UK are invited by London’s Design Museum to gather in teams of four to six and create an idea for an object that could be sold in the museum’s curated shop. Children are guided through the whole process, from determining a target audience, generating creative ideas, refining the design and finally pitching their project. Supported by Deutsche Bank, Design Ventura is now in its thirteenth year. For 2022, students have been invited to design a project that “responds to a sense of ‘Place’”. Apart from designing a useful object with a particular user in mind, students have to be savvy and create a product that can retail for around £12 but only costs £7 for materials, manufacture and packaging. “My advice is to keep your materials and processes simple,” says architect and Black Females in Architecture founder Selasi Setufe, who set this year’s brief. “Consider the environmental and ethical implications of your idea,” she adds. “Is it accessible? Is it inclusive?” Last year the winners at Cambourne Village College created Eco Seed, a doughnut-shaped device for germinating plants. We are excited to see what this year’s new crop of young design talent brings.
Reject fossil fuels, embrace sheep’s wool (image: Woolmark).
Not so woolly thinking
Perhaps it’s because this Disegno writer has reached a certain age, but the natural fibre content of a garment has started to matter far more than its fashion credentials. So it is with a certain sense of vindication that the new campaign from Australian wool industry body Woolmark has been received. Instead of a cute scene containing shots of frolicking sheep, the marketers have gone for the jugular with a short video and stills of models covered in black oil. Shot in the style of a glossy dystopian horror film, men and women struggle through a weird cliffside swimming pool filled with petrochemicals, like particularly lithe mammoths trying to escape a tar pit. Once on dry land they strip off to reveal fresh, clean woollen garments. “Every 25 seconds an Olympic-sized pool of oil is used to make synthetic clothing,” reads the caption, using a stat taken from an Ellen McArthur Foundation report. “Wear wool, not fossil fuel,” encourage posters depicting models half clean, half slicked in oil. It’s a no-holds-barred message for the fashion industry, which usually only uses grimy imagery for sexy mechanic photoshoots. But it’s more timely than ever, particularly considering a recent investigation into unwanted used clothes from the UK being dumped in the seas off of Ghana. Not only are synthetic fabrics made from fossil fuels, they can’t biodegrade, haunting us and the environment with our fashion faux pas for centuries.
Binning the rotten fruit
Despite how it permeates every aspect of our daily lives, the way that much of the internet has been designed remains murky. Forums that incite the real-world harassment of people can stay dissipated and hard to police through being online, protecting their evil ventures from shutdown or prosecution. So it was with KiwiFarms, a notorious offshoot of the far-right cesspit 8chan, which managed to evade censure thanks to the protection of web services provider Cloudflare. A multi-billion-dollar American company that hosts a fifth of the web, Cloudflare had previously refused to deny KiwiFarms service, even as its users published individuals private details online (doxxing), sent law enforcement to their homes (swatting) and harassed trans people to self harm and suicide. Trans twitch streamer Keffals started a campaign to shut it down after KiwiFarms denizens sent armed police to her door and stalked her across continents. A former FBI assistant director warned that KiwiFarms could become a “threat of domestic terror” after a Republican senator was swatted. This week, Cloudflare finally bowed to pressure and gave KiwiFarms the boot. The forum attempted to move to Russian providers but was dropped again and the trash took itself out. Good riddance.