The Design Line: 18 - 24 June
We're halfway through the year, but have no fear, the Design Line is here! This week’s roundup includes gamifying disasters, Apple’s first union, and a look at Bjarke Ingels’s Juneteenth Museum.
Yinka Ilori’s canopy of cones, resplendent in summer hues (image: Linus Muellerschoen).
The colours of the Flutgraben
Hotel Estrel, the venue of Europe’s next furry convention, has unveiled a striking new pavilion by Yinka Ilori as part of its growing art collection. Located on the banks of the Flutgraben in Berlin, the Filtered Rays pavilion is constructed from a re-used scaffold skeleton, which has been adorned with translucent polytetrafluoroethylene cones similar to the stacked glass insulators seen on overhead electrical lines. The pavilion is awash with the kind of rich colour work familiar from Ilori’s wider practice, such as his new studio in Acton, which Disegno had the privilege of visiting and showcasing in our last issue. Filtered Rays is Ilori’s first permanent work in Germany, adding to his international repute as a designer, and will serve as an arts and events space designed to offer a “meditative and reflective experience”. Although intended as a permanent installation, the pavilion has been constructed so as to be easily disassembled and relocated – who knows where it may end up next.
Just a normal, everyday “escape room experience” (image: Ubisoft).
No smoke without fire
No enough attention is paid within design discourse to the intricate and immersive worlds created by video game artists. So, if you need convincing that game artistry is amongst the most exciting and expansive new media we have, try listening to the conversation for the BBC between Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry and the video game creator and writer Naomi Alderman. It’s often where the most exciting conversations are being had, too; art critic Gabrielle de la Puente, one half of The White Pube, has pivoted away from gallery reviews to game reviews, for instance. So it must be frustrating for game artists when years of hard work gets subsumed by a game launch mired in controversy. Assasin’s Creed Unity (2014) had one such ignominious debut. While there was praise for the game’s sumptuous visual recreation of 18th-century revolutionary-era Paris, it was widely panned for its general bugginess, including its infamous disappearing face glitch. As part of its creation, developer Caroline Miousse spent two years creating a historically accurate Notre Dame, but her work was overshadowed by the general discontent around the game until the real thing was almost destroyed in the 2019 fire. With a glorious 3D rendering gathering dust, Disegno would normally applaud game developer Ubisoft for giving this piece of virtual design a chance to shine. However, the decision to re-release Miousse’s work as Save Notre Dame on Fire, a “multiplayer VR escape-room experience” seems, frankly, in poor taste. This piece of “edutainment” (shudder) sees players take on the role of firefighters attempting to save holy relics while battling flames. Gamifying a disaster is a horrendous precedent to set at the best of times, but setting a virtual Our Lady of Paris on virtual fire seems virtually sacrilegious.
Apple’s first recognised union feeling fine. (image: @machinistsunion via Twitter).
Towson takes the first bite
This week saw Apple store workers in Towson, Maryland, vote 65 to 33 to become the tech giant’s first recognised union. The company had previously campaigned against the union, but staff seem to have been prepared for its union-busting tactics, having had the opportunity to study an earlier failed unionisation campaign in an Atlanta store in May. Throughout this earlier campaign, Apple had reportedly used tactics such as “captive audience meetings" and videos outlining why its management felt unionising would be a curtailment of their business practice. More generally, the Towson campaign can be seen as part of a wider movement amongst staff of multi-million dollar companies, where employees are increasingly organising in order to have stronger leverage in debates about pay and job security. In March, for example, Chris Smalls led Amazon’s Staten Island workforce to a historic win in a vote to unionise, while 158 Starbucks have unionised since December 2021. More than two dozen additional Apple stores have also expressed interest in starting unions and, in response, the tech giant has teamed up with the same law firm as Starbucks, Littler Mendelson, to counter further union action. Yet while the companies scramble to lawyer up, the success of cases such as Towson may, with any luck, inspire more workforces to organise.
The Meta wears Prada. (image: Meta).
Welcome to the metaverse, same as the oldaverse
Meta is a thoroughly modern company. We know this because they’re called Meta for one thing, and they're also engaged in designing the exiting digital worlds into which we will soon be escaping as the physical world collapses around us. Yet for a company that paints itself as thoroughly future-facing, Meta's activities are frequently retrograde. This week, for instance, the company agreed to pay a $115,054 settlement to the US Justice Department after its online advertising systems were discovered to be restricting who was able to see housing ads based on their race, gender and ZIP code – pernicious forms of discrimination and urban segregation that are, sadly, as old as time. But Meta is not one for self-reflection. It’s too busy looking relentlessly ahead, as shown by this week's revelation of its vision for how people will dress in the metaverse: the Avatars Store, a space stocked with digital garments designed by the likes of Prada, Balenciaga and Thom Browne. Fine Maisons one and all, yet for a space that would seem to enable far greater creative possibilities in dress – liberated from considerations such as physical materiality, cost, and traditional aesthetics – the results seem, erm, underwhelming: an assortment of familiar looking suits, hoodies, logo sweatshirts and skirts. While conventional garments can presumably serve as forms of self expression in digital space just as they can in conventional reality, it's difficult to see the Avatars Store and its digital wares as much more than a money-making exercise: a form of conventional brand-building that doesn’t even extend to building an outfit from scratch (as it stands, you can only buy pre-made, single brand looks). As the New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman noted, the programme seems to facilitate little beyond fashion as “a vehicle of brand advertising”. We’re beginning to think that Meta’s brave new future may not be so different to what we have now.
Right building, wrong city (image: BIG).
BIG mistake, HUGE
Bjarke Ingels’ architecture practice BIG is as used to attracting headlines as outsized as its founder is outlandish. In this vein, news that the studio is designing the National Juneteenth Museum for Fort Worth, Texas, did not pass without notice from the architecture commentariat. First there was (understandable) concern that such a prominent commission for a project marking the abolition of slavery was going to a practice headed by a white European. However, project lead Douglass Alligood – a New York-based Black architect who has worked for global firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merril and Gensler – is clearly well-suited to the undertaking. “The National Juneteenth Museum will be at the core of a vibrant centre to the long neglected Historic Southside,” said Alligood. “As a Black architect, this project is one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.” The museum is the brainchild of activist Opal Lee, who successfully petitioned the US government to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Unfortunately, this week’s launch was sidetracked by a visual hiccup, however. Renders of the museum, which has a distinctive star-shaped golden canopy, featured a prominent iconic skyline in the background. Unfortunately, the skyline wasn’t that of Fort Worth, but actually that of Austin, which is some 303km away. While renderings do sometimes force perspectives for extra impressiveness, this seems like an honest geography-based mistake.
The wood workshop at Sylva Foundation Wood School: your potential summer digs should you apply for Field Notes (image: V&A).
Wood you like to try something different?
Recent design discourse has been no stranger to exploring the role that a revival of localism and craft could play in the reorientation of industry in an age of climate change, yet such pursuits in practice often remain niche and inaccessible to those without ready access to formal training and expertise. It was refreshing, therefore, to learn this week of Field Notes, a summer school launched by the V&A’s Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures programme in conjunction with the Sylva Foundation. The programme is aimed at anyone over the age of 18 with an interest in woodwork and forests, and aims to equip its participants with the opportunity to “develop professional making skills” through classes, talks, seminars and mentoring sessions. The programme will ultimately result in a series of objects produced from underutilised, home-grown timbers, but the scheme’s open call stresses that it is searching for a diverse group of participants who are prepared to question the “environmental, socio-economic and political structures” that surround “sustainable systems for sourcing and making locally”. It sounds an exciting opportunity, with applications now open for eight participants and further four places available for “embedded observers”. For anyone interested in the role that woodcraft may play in future making practice, and the need to seriously consider its surrounding sociopolitical entanglements, we recommend applying.