The Quarterly Journal of Design #31 Winter 2021/22
This issue includes: Fitting photos with Matty Bovan; bacterial beauty in Shellworks’ biodegradable packaging; a study of the architecture of Himalayan Ladakh; OnlyFans and the crusade against online ass; lonely day trips to Gipsön, Sweden’s secret radioactive island; plant-based design with Studio d-o-t-s, Ioana Man, Fernando Laposse and company; and MSCHF’s consumerist satire.
UK £15
Contents 3
Introduction The Sugar Pot
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Contents
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Contributors
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Masthead The people behind Disegno
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Timeline September to November 2021 in review
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The Online Ass Wars No porn please, we’re social media monopolies
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Fitting Photos Behind the lens with Matty Bovan
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A Topography for Encounter A journey into Herzog and de Meuron’s M+
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Inverted Grounds; Tethered Geographies Resistance and ecological interdependence in Ladakh
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Welcome to the Island Day trips to a secret land of radioactive waste
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Plants ≠ Objects Conspiring with vegetal life to change design
The Spicy Present MSCHF turns product design into performance art
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The Biodegradable Aphrodite Sated bacteria and sustainable beauty packaging
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MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO
London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193
The Online Ass Wars Words Carolina Are Illustrations Exotic Cancer
In an interview from November 2019, a spokesperson for Facebook, whose parent company Meta also owns Instagram, told me that it feels there are other platforms where users can post nudity and sexuality-related content. As became clear from the company’s Terms of Use update in December 2020, this kind of content was no longer welcome on the platform.
Disegno
Disegno
Inverted Grounds; Tethered Geographies Words Oorvi Sharma Photographs Oorvi Sharma and Tushar Verma
Section through Skurbuchan Khar in Skurbuchan, Ladakh (illustration: John Harrison).
In 2019, the Government of India made two major changes to the nation’s constitution: it amended Article 370 and abrogated Article 35A, dissolving the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories. Prior to these changes, Article 370 had accorded Jammu and Kashmir a constitution and legislative authority, while Article 35A granted special rights to permanent residents of the state, including employment and property. The government’s unprecedented and unilateral move to amend the constitution will indelibly alter socio-political relationships and urban development in the region.
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Of the two new territories created through the changes, one bears the name of the former state, while the other is Ladakh: a bucolic and resource-rich region that abuts the country’s disputed borders with Pakistan and China on the Tibetan plateau. Historically, India’s central government has provided special protections for Ladakh’s population, deeming its idiosyncratic socioeconomic and political identity in need of safeguarding. The constitutional reform is likely to be profoundly experienced in Ladakh’s built environment, which is now vulnerable to rapid urbanisation and national interests. The political changes have accelerated development proposals in the region, where advice from local conservationists and scholars is being overlooked in the pursuit of political power, capital and economic growth to support an expanding middle class. The demands for infrastructure and the national interests that are now pressuring the region threaten Ladakhis’ venerable construction wisdom with hightech homogeneity. Resistance toward external investment has attracted a broad range of academic, economic and political stakeholders; efforts to implement the reinterpreted knowledge of indigenous Ladakhi structures and ways of living may help to maintain autonomy of regulation by the region’s historical patrons. Ladakh exhibits a strong regional identity – characterised by inaccessible mountain areas, fuel and material limitations – and sensitivity to population change. These elements, among others, have resulted in paths to urbanisation that are markedly different from those in lowland areas or more “Western” settings. Most importantly, there exists in Ladakh a tradition of human and ecological interdependence – a generational ideology of environmental maintenance that must be neither overlooked nor overtaken. In terms of the constitutional revision, the most significant change that Ladakhis may experience is alienation from their previous dominion over matters of land ownership. As a result, planned urbanisation in Ladakh contrasts with pre-existing construction ecologies, which resist recognition as “urban”. The region’s pastoral and agrarian counterparts to its largest city and co-capital Leh1 are often not designed by planning professionals or the state, and the means and methods of urban aggregation should remain controlled by 1
This article specifically focuses on Leh, but the territory’s joint district of Kargil also urgently requires care.
small and local private and political entities. The situation in Ladakh, while culturally unique, reflects a wider global debate about prosperity derived from development. For whom are its benefits intended and how can exogenous investment be harnessed while still preserving indigenous forms of governance and management that sustain ancient knowledge of ecological stewardship? Silk Route Islands Historically, the liminal position of Ladakh was its raison d’être. Much has been written about how the territory was a conduit for the formidable trade routes that crossed the Himalayas, connecting India and Tibet to central Asia. These routes, found amidst the highest mountain chains in the world, cultivated a seasonal convergence of political, religious and economic connections to which Ladakh contributed labour – porters as well as beasts of burden. Due to its tethered but isolated geography, Ladakh became an intersection of the Islamic and Buddhist worlds, and of Tibetan and Indic cultures; as a corollary, the Ladakhi people adapted to external influences while maintaining their own identity and autonomy. Prior to their conquest in the 1840s by the Dogras, then the rulers of Kashmir, Ladakh was an independent kingdom that had been governed by a line of hereditary rulers. The region was thus profoundly heterogeneous, especially in the Kashmir Valley, which was predominantly Muslim and Ladakh Buddhist, while the Jammu region exhibited a Hindu majority. Jammu and Kashmir merged with India in 1947 under the Indian Independence Act, which partitioned British India into independent India and Pakistan. As a result, Ladakh’s geopolitical terrain was irrevocably transformed by the tightening and subsequent closure of its international borders with China, Tibet and Pakistan. This process eventually shuttered the region’s strategic commercial networks. Jammu and Kashmir’s designation as an integral part of India, as established through the 1947 Instrument of Accession with India, was formally reinforced by evolutionary, legal affirmations in the form of Article 1, Article 370 and Article 35A in the Constitution of India. Through this shift of governance, Ladakh transformed from a peripheral area of the Dogra kingdom to part of the frontier of the Indian nation. As a result, Ladakh was subject to the administrative control of Jammu and Kashmir, which chose to retain an independent constitutional structure that allowed for autonomy
Disegno
A Topography for Encounter Words Juliana Kei Photographs Bowy Chan
Growing up in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, I have a vague memory of boats carrying earth to fill in the harbour. I remember a different coastline and skyline, a different airport. Later, we started calling this newly made land West Kowloon, an addition to the southern part of the Kowloon peninsula that faces the Hong Kong island.
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