Stories
Personalised Insights and Core Functionalities
From Disegno #25, Tamar Shafrir goes beyond the banal, circle-heavy interfaces of period-tracking apps to examine the profitable industry of harvesting fertility data.
After Plastic
Sony’s Hirotaka Tako and Philip Rose tell Disegno how industrial design is moving beyond plastic with the help of rice husks, bamboo and glowing digital fungi.
The Robotics of Modern Parenting
Michael David Mitchell wonders if the Snoo, a robotic crib designed by Yves Behar, is the solution to the alienation and difficulty of bringing up a baby in modern America.
From Victoriana to Victoriana
Disegno speaks to fashion designer Mary Katrantzou about pushing the envelope for colour and pattern with her postage stamp butterfly tile collaboration with Villeroy & Boch.
A Fashion System of One’s Own
As a new display of Bethany Williams’s work opens at London’s Design Museum, we revisit our interview with the designer from 2020 about working in fashion during lockdown.
Puffin Poem
Poet Richard Osmond explores in verse a design project from Goldsmiths’ Interaction Research studio: sunglasses for puffins.
From Rouge to Rage
Glenn Adamson and Sarah Archer explore the changing cultural significance of the colour pink, accompanied by an assortment of rose imagery, shot by Theresa Marx at Berlin’s Terrassenhaus.
A Bacterial Banquet
The Portal Tables project at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, sees The Decorators explore commensality, with a series of inflatable furniture that invites humans and microbes to dine together.
Source of the Amazon
Disegno speaks to Danielle Dean about Amazon (Proxy), a multimedia installation that has Amazon Mechanical Turk workers retell the story of Henry Ford’s failed plantation in the Amazon.
Divine Inspiration
Designer Max Lamb shares a series of objects made from Portland limestone and reclaimed wood, created for a modernist church in London.
A Point in the Path
Disegno speaks to Mac Collins about receiving the Design Museum’s inaugural Ralph Saltzman Prize and his hope to plot a non-linear route through the discipline.
Parallel Designs
Studio Weiki Somers does the design time warp for The Roaring Twenties, an exhibition at Museum Kranenburgh in The Netherlands that remixes objects from the past and the present.
Relearning History
Disegno discovers the original pioneer of DIY and the secrets of the Soviet space race at Vitra’s exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today.
A Floral Algorithm
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg talks about surrendering control, designing for other species, and digital gardens as part of her new project: Pollinator Pathmaker.
Lightning Rods
Kristina Rapacki explores the history of vaccine hesitancy and asks how graphic design could communicate more effectively with the public to combat online misinformation about immunisation from Covid-19.
Bend it Like Morrison
From logo to lounge chair, Magnus Englund charts the creation of Jasper Morrison’s single-piece plywood furniture through the history of Isokon Plus.
Kazam!
To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Eames Office, the practice has launched a new edition of Charles and Ray Eames’s groundbreaking 1943 Molded Plywood Sculpture. To mark the occasion, Disegno sat down with the designers’ grandson, Eames Demetrios, to discuss the sculpture’s significance to their practice.
Embedded Design
As the NHS prepares to roll out the IUB Ballerine, Helen Brown explores the uncomfortable history of design for contraceptive intrauterine devices.