The Design Line: 8-14 January, 2022
The Design Line is back, because chairs have been on television, NFTS have invaded a Fijian island, and doctors have genetically engineered a pig’s heart to make it fit for a man. Read on for your weekly fix of design news.
Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey, co-presenters of Inside the Factory, looking very pleased indeed to know how Ercol makes its Windsor chairs (image: Simon Hanna, courtesy of the BBC)
Lurvley chairs!
Design doesn’t have the greatest time on British television. Outside of the occasional Jonathan Meades documentary thrown from on high like a scrap from the lord’s table, it tends to be restricted to Grand Designs, Ugly House to Lovely House, or else increasingly forced attempts to shoehorn various craft disciplines into The Great British Bake Off format (why would anyone ever have to design and make a chair in two days?): all enjoyable in their own right, but perhaps not the best public outreach for the field. It was a welcome surprise this week, then, to see presenter Gregg Wallace (best known for shouting about how puddings are “LURVLEY!” on Masterchef) visit the Ercol furniture factory in Buckinghamshire (his co-presenter Cherry Healey tasked with rounding out the episode with investigations of timber procurement and the health dangers of excessive sitting). Filmed as part of the ongoing Inside the Factory series, the episode followed the creation of the brand’s celebrated Windsor chair and managed to cram a surprising amount of detail about the manufacturing process into its 59 minute running time, as well as tapping into the basic pleasure of seeing industrial machines and handcraft processes in lingering, ASMR-worthy shots. Wallace is no design savant (“Bit posh for a chair, innit?” he bellowed upon learning that a CNC machine is being used; “It’s taking loads off!” is roared at the sight of a lathe), but his clear enthusiasm for the making process is infectious. For anybody wishing to learn more about furniture manufacture, and particularly beginners to the field, we heartily recommend it.
All at sea
Mining cryptocurrency is bad for the environment. This is not news. A study published back in 2018 warned that electricity-hungry Bitcoin alone could be the thing that tips global warming above the fatal 2°C. As temperatures rise, sea levels rise. Fiji is moving scores of settlements further inland to escape the rising tides. So, buying land in the South Pacific doesn’t seem like a sound investment. And yet. Welcome to Cryptoland, a vaguely sketched cryptocurrency utopia planned for Nananu-i-Cake, a 600-acre Fijian island that’s on sale for $12m. Crypto fans Max Olivier and Helena López Jurado want to sell 60-acre plots on the island as NFTs to raise money to build a resort that will become “the number one crypto destination on earth”. A toe-curling animated sales pitch full of bad jokes paints a picture of a tropical isle filled with McMansions, a themed nightclub and “The Hub” – because of course there will be a co-working space in paradise. The concept has been widely mocked, but it’s not dissimilar to the Oxagon, Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a floating industrial district for its smart city Neom. Now all we need is someone to design a new Atlantis for the Metaverse.
The Great Wall of China, complete with its restored period Bottega Veneta branding: a design detail the original builders insisted upon (image: courtesy of Bottega Veneta).
A billboard visible from space
Bottega Veneta really wants you to have a Happy Chinese New Year, so much so that it has plastered the message across the Great Wall of China on an enormous screen for all to see. The screen also took the time to exhibit the Bottega Veneta name and logo in its signature green and orange colour palette – which is every bit as tasteful and respectful towards an ancient monument as you might imagine. As part of the marketing campaign, the fashion brand has (at least) pledged to donate to the renovation and maintenance of the Great Wall’s famous Shanhai Pass. The project marks the latest example of fashion’s wider commodification of cultural landmarks, such as Fendi hosting a fashion show at the Great Wall, as well as others at Rome’s Temple of Venus and the Trevi Fountain. Such events were hardly devoid of commerce, but there does seem a meaningful difference between staging a catwalk at a monument (fashion shows – at least in principle, if not always in practice – have a cultural as well as commercial merit) and transforming that same monument into a giant billboard. Let’s just hope that the donation to the Shanhai Pass is a large one.
Architects, just imagine developing the heck out of all of this: now’s your chance (image: Rob Batersby, courtesy of Tate Liverpool).
Redesigning Britain
Look, it’s not been a glorious week for public life in Britain. Just as Withnail and Marwood once went on holiday by mistake, so too did the nation’s Prime Minister disgrace his office by inadvertently attending a party in his own garden – but let’s not judge, we’ve surely all been there (the situation, not the No 10 garden, although judging by reports from lockdown a lot of people have been there too). Anyway, it wasn’t a great advert for the nation, but while Britain’s political institutions may be rapidly eroding, elements of its built environment are about to receive a fresh lick of paint. Liverpool’s Tate, International Slavery Museum and Maritime Museum have all launched architecture competitions to redevelop their galleries, while RIBA also announced a contest for a £20m refurb of its 66 Portland Place headquarters in London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew revealed a competition to design three treehouses for its sites. Phew! That’s not even mentioning the Barbican’s announcement of the shortlist for its own planned £150m overhaul. What a lot of rebuilding! Here at the Design Line, we wish the best of luck to all practices entering these myriad competitions. For those not selected, commiseration drinks in the No 10 garden?
Larceny starts at Home
January saw tech behemoth Google gratifyingly humbled by the little guy (well, relatively speaking): sound system manufacturer, Sonos. Late last week, the United States International Trade Commission found in favour of Sonos in it allegations against Google for infringement of five audio technology patents. Back in 2013, Sonos had partnered with the mighty Google (before its foray into smart hardware devices) and shared key details about its multi-room technology. Google released its own Home speaker three years later, designed using the same technology as the Sonos system, including control of synchronised devices through a smartphone. For shame Google! Sonos’ well-aimed legal slingshot means that Go[og]liath must now comply with a cease and desist order and a ban on imports of the offending devices into the US. In response, Google has released a statement outlining that customers will no longer be able to control the volume of their speakers as a group, but must instead undertake the arduous task of adjusting them individually – a terrible hardship, we can all agree. Enjoyable though it may be to see the tech giant not get its own way for once, Google Home owners are not best pleased. Essentially, smart Google Home speakers are set to become less intelligent.
Disegno likes to start off its daily Wordle by playing “chair” (image Invoxia).
Wordle on the street
If a game exists online but isn’t monetised, does it make a sound? The internet has gone potty for Wordle, a five-letter word guessing game with a simple and unfussy design. Once a day you visit the website and encounter a tabula rasa of six rows of five grey tiles. Plug in your first five letter word and a correct letter in the correct place turns green, while a correct letter in the wrong space switches to yellow. Everyone has six guesses. After the game, people flock to share scores cryptically on social media using a pattern of black, yellow and green emoji squares. It’s a fascinating example of how quickly humans can pick up a new tool and adapt existing ones to communicate competitive joy. But Wordle is also an anomaly in the economy of tech design, where gamification and flashing pixels are meant to keep us focused and clicking, exchanging microhits of dopamine for attention that can be charged for. John Wardle, Wordle’s developer, doesn’t offer a paid-for option of more daily challenges, and there are no ads on the website. Soon there were scores of rip-offs and reskins of the game cluttering the App store to make a quick buck off the craze. Apple has clamped down on these clones, but if nature hates a vacuum, then tech hates free fun where nothing and no one is the product.
This doctor holds the future/a pig’s heart in his hands (image: courtesy of the University of Maryland Medical Center).
“This has never been done before,” said Bartley Griffith, director of the cardiac transplant programme at the University of Maryland Medical Center. You can say that again Dr Griffith! Late last week, Griffith made history by leading the operation to transplant a genetically modified pig’s heart into the body of David Bennett Sr., a cardiac patient who had exhausted all other treatment options. The possibility of a pig’s heart only emerged as a final twist in the tale. Although it remains early days, we’re delighted to learn that Bennett appears to be making good progress. Happy news then (albeit not for the pig), but wherein the design, we hear you cry? Well, xenotransplantation (the transfer of organs or tissues between species) shouldn’t work: even conventional transplants between humans carry a high risk of rejection. To get around this, Bennett’s heart came from a pig that had been monkeyed around with: its genome had been edited to eliminate anything that would trigger an aggressive rejection response, and bolstered with new genes to aid a successful transfer. Gene editing tools such as CRISPR (which we covered back in Disegno #14) have long been heralded as a potential way of transforming genomes into design materials, opening up new frontiers in biotech, medicine and agriculture; Bennett’s porcine transplant and its ilk may have never been done before, but we’re likely to see them a lot more moving forward. For better or worse, biology is now a design field.
Words: The Disegno editorial team and Francesca Anderson