The Design Line: 7 - 13 May
The Design Line continues apace this week. It’s the end of an era at Apple as the iPod bids adieu, El Salvador’s Bitcoin city debuts its design just as the crypto market crashed, and an ear-tingling ASMR exhibition goes on tour.
The iPod is finally shuffling off its mortal coil (image: Apple).
Farewell sweet iPrince
“[The iPod] took off like a rocket,” remembered Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division in the early 2000s. He wasn’t wrong. This week saw Apple bring to a close its production of iPods after a near 22-year production run, a period that has seen the tech giant sell an estimated 450 million units of the device’s various iterations. Developed by Jony Ive and his team, the iPod was a transformative piece of design – a device that changed the way the world listened to music (both for better and worse – the iPod is an important stop along the path towards our current streaming culture and its financial implications for artists); paved the way for Apple’s later iPhone and the wider rise of smartphones; and which broadened Apple’s remit from being a manufacturer of desktop computers to a world leader in consumer electronics hardware, software and services. In truth, the iPod has been a diminished product for years – ever since the company moved away from its delightful click wheel and adopted the touch screen of later models that basically transformed it into a less functional iPhone – but the overall impact of the early iPods on the design landscape is difficult to overstate. Two decades later, its work is finally complete. Go easy, then, into that good night, gentle iPod – even rockets need to come back down to earth sometimes.
“A golden city in the shape of a Bitcoin, what could possibly go wro–” (image: Twitter).
All my coins gone
It’s been a week of moderate highs and low lows in crypto. It started out strong, with the Vatican announcing it was getting in on the NFT hype by turning its own priceless collection of art into VR experiences. The Holy See promised the NFTs weren’t for sale, just to help people see the art “regardless of their socio-economic and geographical limitations.” You’ll still need a desktop or a VR headset, though. Then El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele doubled down on plans to build a Bitcoin city by the sea that would be powered by a volcano (we foresee no problems with this at all. Atlantis? Never heard of her), revealing a blingy all-gold scale model by Mexican architect Fernando Romero. In plan form the city will look, inspiringly, like a Bitcoin. There will also be a viewpoint on the volcano, because no modern city worth its salt would be seen dead without a pointless height-based attraction. But then the cryptocurrency markets crashed. Hard. Algorithm-run TerraUSD, the third biggest “stablecoin” that is supposed to be tied to the dollar broke its peg and is now trading at $0.14, taking tokens associated with it down in the panic. Spooked investors started pulling out their money and $200bn was wiped off the market on Thursday. With Bitcoin down over 50 per cent, El Salvador’s dream of a crypto city could sink beneath the waves before it even breaks ground.
An unhappy opening
“Last night,” London’s Royal College of Art posted on its Facebook page this week, “we were joined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak at RCA Battersea to celebrate our new design and innovation campus.” How lovely, you might think: central government acknowledging the importance of the arts (even if, erm, Sunak was accused in 2020 of telling those in creative fields to leave their disciplines and retrain, stating “I can’t pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were doing at the beginning of this crisis”) and celebrating the opening of the school’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed facilities. Not so fast, however. Discontent soon bubbled up when some students took to social media to say that they had been asked to leave the new building early in order to facilitate the event, two weeks before the final build for their end of year exhibitions. “THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART,” tweeted The RCA Working-Class Collective, “IS KICKING OUT STUDENTS TO MAKE WAY FOR TORY MP, RISHI SUNAK”. The new campus had received £54m in public funding, meaning that some kind of governmental presence was always likely at its opening (however uncomfortable that may feel), but it’s a shame that events could not have been organised so as to avoid student discontent at what should have been a purely happy occasion.
Nurdles: the love child of an oil slick and a ball pit (image: Wikimedia Commons).
Nurdle nightmares
What are nurdles, you may ask? “The massive, unregulated source of plastic pollution you’ve probably never heard of,” says Vox, which published a frankly terrifying report this week on this threat to the planet. Make no mistake, the design industry is heavily implicated in this silent scandal. Nurdles, aka pre-production plastic pellets, are the building block of plastic products, the embryonic stage between pure petroleum and injection-moulded items. Despite their cute name and appearance, these tiny balls of pure plastic slowly kill animals that mistake them for food, thereby disrupting the food chain. They’re the biggest source of micro plastic pollution in the ocean after tire dust. Tiny and light, they wash down factory drains or blow off cargo containers, and once they’re in the wild there’s little to be done to contain the insidious spheres of petrochemicals. “We’re making these nurdles and basically spilling oil, just in a different form,” said oceanographer Mark Benfield. Once hailed by designers as a miracle material, plastic has turned out to be something of a Pandora’s Box of pollution.
Trolling all the way to the top
Facebook misinformation campaigns have blighted another election as Filipinos went to the polls on Monday. Once-exiled Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, won in an apparent landslide victory after an online push to rehabilitate the family's reputation. In a country where 90 per cent of the population access the internet via social media, the fight to influence flow of information on Facebook is a dirty one. Lawmakers called for an investigation into government funds suspected of being funnelled into misinformation campaigns months before the election, but to no avail. Troll farms are big business in the Philippines; despite links to election skullduggery abroad, there’s been little to no regulation placed on the private platform kings of Silicon Valley, USA. These public communication systems owned by a handful of private companies keep proving themselves vulnerable to interference but they keep on proliferating unchecked. It’s even more concerning when you remember that Facebook’s parent company Meta is currently building an underwater sea cable to better connect the African continent to the internet.
Can you hear/feel the love tonight (image: Ed Reeves)?
Feels good to be back
Weird Sensation Feels Good had a tough start in life. Curated by James Taylor Foster for Stockholm’s ArkDes, it was an exhibition examining ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and its role in online cultures and design discourse that opened in Sweden in April 2020, right as the world was going into lockdown. Although the museum hosted an innovative virtual vernissage to open the exhibition up to the wider audiences forced to stay at home, it was a pity that an exhibition which proved so bold in pushing design programming into a previously untapped area of digital culture (kudos to Taylor Foster) launched at a time when, inevitably, a limited number of people were able to experience it in person. Three cheers, then, that Weird Sensation Feels Good is now back, having travelled to the Design Museum in London where it opened this week. It’s an opportunity to delve into ASMR, the effects of sensory material inputs on the body, and their wider implications for the design field. And, curatorial merits aside, we just can’t wait to lounge around on the vast, coiling pillow that ĒTER Architects created for the exhibition design.