The Design Line: 9 - 15 April
Spring is traditionally a time of sprucing up, and you may have noticed that the Design Line has had its own zesty new makeover.
The news and commentary is still as fresh as ever this week, however: we say goodbye to the Nakagin Capsule Tower; toast Het Nieuwe Instituut’s appointment to the London Design Biennale; admire Le Bambole’s new look; pore over OpenStreetMap; watch robot dogs patrol Shenzhen; welcome an accessible app; and mourn the delay of an installation at the Met.
The replaceable tower finally gets replaced (image: Noritaka Minami).
Capsule collection
It is the end of the road for the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, the one-of-a-kind metabolist landmark that has been unable to escape the city’s real estate boom. Demolition has officially begun on the residential building, with scaffolding being erected ahead of the iconic round-windowed capsules being removed. Built in the 1970s, architect Kisho Kurokawa had grand plans for its living capsules to be detached from the twin concrete cores and replaced every 25 years, like a plant renewing its leaves. As architect and writer Aki Ishida recounts in Disegno #32, the tower was a symbol of a particular kind of Japanese masculinity, built for and by businessmen in a period of economic largesse. Maintenance issues and shifting societal norms saw the tower fall into disrepair, although design enthusiasts campaigned hard to preserve the building, diligently restoring capsules to be used as offices and holiday rentals. Photographer Noritaka Minami, who has been documenting the tower for over a decade, managed to quarantine inside the building at the end of 2021 to capture some final images of the architecture – alongside Ishida’s essay, you can see Minami’s work in our latest edition, which you can order online here.
A new direction
Since its launch in 2016, the London Design Biennale has been somewhat hit and miss. The event is organised around national and territorial pavilions, although this description gives the impression that equivalent bodies are behind each display. They’re not. Organisers range from government-backed bodies through to one-person bands, with divergent budgets to match. As such, the quality and level of critical engagement on display has been, erm, uneven to say the least. Yet change may be on the horizon, with an announcement this week that the Netherlands’ respected Het Nieuwe Instituut, led by its director Aric Chen, will take the reins of the 2023 edition. Het Nieuwe’s presence alone is encouraging (a curatorial body rather than a big name designer), but the biennale also appears to be aware of the limitations of its national pavilion format. The 2023 edition will be titled “Remapping Collaborations”, with Het Nieuwe developing a process that will encourage participants to create “new forms of international cooperation and participation“. It could, admittedly, be a soundbite, but it’s promising nevertheless. “The era of globalisation as we’ve known it is transforming into a new condition that we can’t yet define,” Chen explained. “What we know for sure, however, is that in confronting our ever-growing planetary challenges, working together is more critical than ever[…].”
To map or not to map
During peacetimes, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a very good thing: a free to use, editable map of the world, whose geodata underpins services the world over. Yet during warthe data that the project gathers becomes a double-edge sword: simultaneously critical to humanitarian efforts to deliver aid, but also of strategic use to militaries searching for targets and potential impediments to their advance. This is the debate now playing out in Ukraine, where OSM mappers have implored the wider community “to refrain from any mapping of the territory of Ukraine at the moment”, citing the “possible use of open data by Russian invaders to plan attacks on military and civilian objects”. Citing possible cases where OSM’s geodata has already been used by the Russian military, OSM’s Ukrainian mappers have begun a programme to “amend (delete, modify, revert to the previous state, etc.) any found cases of mapping related to military or critical social infrastructure facilities”. Meanwhile, the not-for-profit Humanitarian Open Street Map has reported that Ukrainian road data has already been downloaded more than 300 times since the conflict began, with no means of telling by who. “It is being used, and we want it to be used by humanitarians,” explained the body’s executive director, Tyler Radford. Here’s hoping.
It looks fresh – you won’t be surprised to learn it’s had some work done (image: Tommaso Sartori).
Ageing gracefully
It’s been exactly 50 years since the launch of Mario Bellini’s Le Bambole armchair caused a stir, not due to its slacker squashy silhouette so much as the decision to advertise the design with Oliviero Toscani's images of a topless Donna Jordan’s prancing atop it. The chair has, however, endured beyond its brash advertising hype and remained in production ever since. This week, however, its manufacturer B&B Italia announced that it has overhauled Le Bambole’s production method. Disembowelled of its traditional metal structure, Le Bambole is now made with a rigid recycled polyethylene chassis layered with a recycled PET undercover and a much reduced amount of polyurethane foam as padding – a decision driven by improved ease of disassembly. B&B is a brand that has long touted durability and timeless design as core sustainably credentials, so it’s refreshing to see serious manufacturing and process-driven thought behind the redesign. Whether the method actually fulfils its aims will remain unclear until some of the new Bamboles reach the end of their lifespans, but by welcoming recycled and separable materials into the design, Le Bambole has shown it can grow up in a manner befitting its mature age.
Dog days of Shenzhen
As China continues to operate a zero Covid policy in the face of the country’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic, major cities have been put under severe restrictions. In Shenzhen, surveillance drones buzz through the sky and robots deliver much-needed groceries to residents, who are still confined in their homes. And then there’s Preserved Egg, a volunteer-operated robot dog who is being steered around his neighbourhood to tell residents to stay indoors or report for mandatory testing. Quadruped robots tend to leapfrog over cute right into the territory of the uncanny valley, but while the videos on social media of Preserved Egg scuttling along empty roads are more than a little unsettling, the megaphone taped to his back lends a somewhat comic air. It’s a curious mixture of high and low tech, and of citizen volunteers offering up their remote-controlled technology to reinforce state regulations.
Don’t let the cliché tech name fool you, Staybl is a sensible app (image: Staybl).
Steady on
Despite all the accessibility possibilities that could be explored, the majority of UX design in tech assumes that the user is able bodied and neurotypical. It was interesting to see, therefore, the new Staybl app that allows an iPad to be adapted for use by people with health conditions that cause hand tremors, such as Parkinson’s disease. Staybl uses the iPad’s internal accelerometer to detect when the iPad is being shaken and responds by counterbalancing its in-app web browser window. The app avoids using slide and swipe gestures, which can be harder to use with motor control issues, and has pages designed for ease of readability with larger fonts. Staybl is free to use and was developed as part of a two-year pro-bono collaboration by the German Parkinson’s Association and advertising company Havas Creative. It’s an exciting example of how existing technology can be adapted with simple tweaks, with plans in the works to bring Stabyl to a wider range of devices.
Dear the Met: more Afrofuturism soon, please. We all liked Before Yesterday We Could Fly (image: Sade Fasanya).
Better late than never
In Disegno #32, the journal covered Before Yesterday We Could Fly, an Afrofuturist period room installed at the Met in New York that took aim at (among other things) the institution’s lack of engagement with and support for Black artists and culture. It was a much needed, elegant corrective to the Met’s historic failings and one that prompted Abraham Thomas, the museum’s Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design and Decorative Arts, to note that the museum “can't afford for a project like this to be a flash-in-the-pan outlier.” To further his point, Thomas announced the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), a summer 2022 rooftop installation from artist Lauren Halsey that would “draw upon many themes related to Afrofuturism and the power of speculative imagination”. It was a pity, therefore, to learn this week that Halsey’s work was to be postponed to spring 2023, with the Met citing “a logistically challenging time” as the reason for the delay. While it would have been powerful to see Halsey’s piece maintain the momentum initiated by Before Yesterday We Could Fly, delayed pleasures are often all the sweeter, with Halsey stating that the extended development period would allow her to create as full and encompassing an experience as possible. “I’m a maximalist,” she explained.