Disegno No. 27

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In the Circumstances Words Oli Stratford

As you might imagine, 2020 has not been a banner year for international design media.

The projects and events that we typically report on have largely been cancelled; the travel we undertake has been variously paused, complicated, or otherwise rendered unwise; while the funding model we rely upon has been so thoroughly obliterated that any prospect of economic recove- well, perhaps best not to get into that last one. We haven’t even been able to go to those bougie prosecco press receptions, as is our wont.

Not that the challenges facing the media have been unique – the last few months have been horrendous for everybody. It’s a period that has seen deaths from Covid-19 rise to 1.03 million; that has highlighted the complete absence of equity within our societies; and which has wreaked devastation upon small businesses and community services, while concurrently enabling others to swell their wealth grotesquely (the Institute for Policy Studies found that US billionaires increased their worth by $845bn between March and September 2020).

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the prosecco thing.

Tough times, then, and it’s with this in mind that you may notice that this issue of Disegno is somewhat Introduction

dierent to those that have come before. Gone (for now) are some of the project stories, reviews and travelogues that typically make up these pages. In their place have come a series of essays highlighting some of the social issues that design has faced over the preceding months, as well as a renewed interest in conversations, interviews and roundtables as formats for critiquing design.

The problems facing design do not admit of easy redress, as the content of this issue makes clear. How can public spaces and services be restored to safe operation in the midst of a pandemic? What can be done to reduce the extraordinary material waste produced within current manufacturing models? When will the industry address its severe lack of racial diversity, representation and opportunity? These issues belong to society at large, but carry a particular significance to design. If the world needs to be remade (and it does), might designers not take a particular interest in how that remaking be done?

In the circumstances, it would not have felt right for too many of these issues to be tackled by single authors: too didactic; too onerous; too one-note. Hence the roundtables. As a format, it captures something of the discursive spirit we wanted. With the various lockdowns, we’ve all been cooped up in our own spaces for too long.

It felt like time to start listening to one another again.

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28 28t table light www.bocci.com @bocci

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Contents 33

Essay That Good Sound Football’s artificial crowds

37

Essay On Censorship Dissecting Section 230

Masthead The people behind Disegno

43

Made for Interiors from Spain We’re Here, We Have the Capability Dispatches from the Spanish design industry

Essay Useful for Some; Fatal for Others The issue with obligatory calorie counts on menus

47

Essay Fluid Memories, Static Monuments A headless Columbus in Boston

Essay On Behalf of the Invisible End-User An inequitable e-scooter rollout

52

Roundtable Once More, With Empathy Curating as a form of care

59

Roundtable Situating Blackness A discussion with Where Are The Black Designers?

5

Introduction In the Circumstances

8

Contents

10

Contributors

12 14

21

25

29

Essay The Future of Fairs What is design without its industry meet-ups?

Essay The Revolution Will Not Be Branded Social struggle, commodified

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70

Interview A Fashion System of One’s Own A look into Bethany Williams’s social manufacturing

78

Report The Power of the Poster A Polish revival in divided times

91

Conversation Dead Stock, Live Stock How to upcycle textiles on a massive scale

103

Conversation Redesigning Globalisation Reflections on a system in crisis

115

Conversation A More Plastic Design Translating a much misinterpreted material

123

Roundtable Don’t Make it Permanent, Don’t Make it Beautiful Finding the way through Covid-era transit networks

Contents

Contributors Reet Aus is on a mission to save the planet by turning trash into trend. p. 91

Natalie Kane is devastated by the recent sacking of Gunnersaurus. p. 33

Seetal Solanki is an international materials translator. p. 115

Inma Bermúdez has long advocated for working from home. p. 14

Charlie Koolhaas tells stories of our human planet’s wildest attempts to live together. p. 103

Jada Stevens enjoys visiting transit networks and has a decent collection of fare cards to show for it. p. 123

Georgia Bronte is a mental healthfocused journalist based in postlockdown London. p. 43

Jess Kilubukila is trying to ride his bike in Kinshasa. p. 59

Zosia Swidlicka is a writer, as well as a guide at Tate Modern. p. 78

Sarah Manning is currently finding her way around the universe. p. 123

Alexander Taylor is an industrial designer who has just launched ATID. If you build it, they will come! p. 91

Jordi Canudas just moved to the countryside and is getting ready for new design explorations. p. 14 Kaia Charles commissions contemporary art interventions for NOW Gallery. p. 59 Natsai Audrey Chieza loves the smell of rain and all the microbial critters that make it. p. 59 Tim Fendley helps people avoid getting lost. p. 123 Dian Holton is senior deputy art director at AARP. p. 59

Dana Francisco Miranda is enjoying both the beginnings of autumn and the fall of monuments. p. 21 Mitzi Okou is the co-founder of Where Are The Black Designers? p. 59 Mariana Pestana believes that design can make humans empathise with other types of bodies. p. 52 Ligaya Salazar has been thinking about the subjectivity of seeing. p. 70

Kate Jeffery researches space and makes brains out of glass. p. 123

Peter Smisek is still refusing to make sourdough and occasionally daydreams of future press trips. p. 25

Georgina Johnson founded The Slow Grind. p. 52

Francesca Sobande is listening to noughties emo albums on repeat. p. 29

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Destiny Thomas is the CEO of Thrivance Group and believes the best change happens at the speed of dignity. p. 47 Sumitra Upham hopes the design world’s recent interest in care and empathy will not be short-lived. p. 52 Rianna Walcott researches race and social media. p. 37 Kajsa Willner has recently launched a podcast on designers’ role in society. p. 115 Bethany Williams is a fashion designer whose collections come out of social manufacturing projects. p. 70 Theodore Zeldin is the author of An Intimate History of Humanity. p. 103

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The Quarterly Journal of Design #27 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com

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Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnomagazine.com

Deputy editor Kristina Rapacki kristina@disegnomagazine.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Commercial executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@disegnomagazine.com

Creative producer Evi Hall eleanor@disegnomagazine.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long along@thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Cover The front and back covers of this issue were drawn by Leonhard Rothmoser.

Contributors Reet Aus, Inma Bermúdez, Georgia Bronte, Jordi Canudas, Kaia Charles, Natsai Audrey Chieza, Tim Fendley, Dian Holton, Kate Jeffery, Georgina Johnson, Natalie Kane, Jess Kilubukila, Charlie Koolhaas, Sarah Manning, Dana Francisco Miranda, Mitzi Okou, Mariana Pestana, Leonhard Rothmoser, Ligaya Salazar, Peter Smisek, Francesca Sobande, Seetal Solanki, Jada Stevens, Zosia Swidlicka, Alexander Taylor, Destiny Thomas, Sumitra Upham, Rianna Walcott, Bethany Williams, Kajsa Willner and Theodore Zeldin.

Advertisers Associative Design – associativedesign.com p. 13 Bocci – bocci.ca p. 7 Carl Hansen & Son – carlhansen.com pp. 2-3 Ercol – ercol.com p. 9 Homo Faber

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– homofaberevent.com p. 20 Interiors from Spain – interiorsfromspain.com pp. 14-17 Laufen – laufen.com inside back cover Squarespace – squarespace.com p. 1, inside front cover Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de p. 4 Vola – vola.com p. 11 Zanat – zanat.org p. 18 Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Arcoprint Extra White 110gsm. The cover is printed on Arcoprint Extra White 250gsm.

All of the paper used in this issue is from Fedrigoni UK. Thanks Many thanks to Mitzi Okou and Where are the Black Designers? for their curation and moderation of an essential discussion; Charlie Koolhaas for her patience and support; Ligaya Salazar, Natalie Hodgson and Bethany

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Williams for helping us to battle technical gremlins; and Tim Fendley for all his help.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and helped make Disegno #27 possible. Not least to Colt and Tilly, who have swapped their rambunctious lives as pub cats for a spell as kindly home office companions.

Contents copyright The content of this magazine belongs to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Contact us Studio 2, The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ disegnodaily.com Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

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Featuring an expertly curated mix of contemporary and luxury Portuguese design and innovation.

ANDY stool by Ottiu // ORIGAMI hand-tufted rug by Ferreira de Sá // WILLIAM armchair by Defontes MINI PIETRA side table by Mamoa Design // MANDEVILLA table lamp by Creativemary CLOCHE floor lamp by Homel Design Furniture // HAT vessel by &blanc Photo shoot at Casa Allen, Porto, Portugal

We’re Here, We Have the Capability Lou seating collection, designed by Inma Bermúdez for Calma (photograph: Mariela Apollonio).

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Ibiza chair, designed by Eugeni Quitllet for Vondom.

Alya Executive chair, designed by Lievore Altherr Molina for Andreu World.

Made for Interiors from Spain

A conversation about the Spanish design sector and the opportunities therein.

The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020 between Inma Bermúdez, whose Valenciabased industrial design practice works for brands such as Lladró, Ikea and Rado; and Jordi Canudas, a founding member of OKAY Studio, whose eponymous Barcelona-based research studio has worked with Marset and the Elisava Escola Superior de Disseny.

Jordi Canudas Spain

has good industry, which means that there is room for designers to work here. Our design sector is quite young, however, having grown up towards the end of the dictatorship in the 1960s.

At the beginning it was very strongly influenced by other countries in terms of its language and style, particularly by Italy, but in recent years it has been restructuring itself and we are beginning to see some changes. Spanish design is starting to find its own voice.

Inma Bermúdez As a nation, we haven’t had the level of discussion around our design heritage as Italy

Band chair, designed by Patricia Urquiola for Kettal.

or Scandinavia. What we do have, however, is very good handcraft and industrial production, which are important tools. Our design scene has adapted to that. In Spain, it’s possible for a designer to work with smaller ateliers and companies. The country is full of small workshops which enable that way of working.

Jordi I think the know-how is here, but we need to protect that. In the past, some companies have resorted to importing from China because it’s cheaper, but the quality is also lower. We’re lucky that Spain has a lot of industrial tissue through its family-based companies and, if we can look after that knowledge, it presents a lot of possibilities for designers. The most important thing to remember, however, is that Spain is so culturally diverse; you have so many different traditions in different areas that finding unity between them is a challenge. When you talk about possibilities as a designer, you have to adopt the mindset of the globalist, even within a single country.

Inma That’s true in terms of studios too. Spain’s designers used to be based mainly in Barcelona and Valencia, whereas now you can see them in Sevilla, Galicia, País Vasco, and Madrid. These areas have become interesting and it shows that things are now moving differently within the country. More and more, we’re seeing small studios trying to do things differently and collaborate with local workshops.

Things are moving down an alternative path to the globalism and industrialisation that we have seen in the past. Especially after the pandemic, there seems to be a spirit of working together among companies, a number of whom have already signed an open letter to the Spanish government saying, “We’re here. We have the capability. We can help to rebuild or prepare for the crisis that we are going to face.” That is something very new – to come together and try to face this as a group – but it’s needed. We need to trust and see the value of design, because the world is facing so many challenges in the years ahead. We need creative people to find solutions.

Jordi I think our greatest strength is our diversity. If you try to define what Spanish design is, you can’t. It might be helpful for marketing if you could define a single style or language, but to me it makes so much more sense to say, “Look at how many different types of design and designers we have.” And I think that a part of Spanish culture is to try and make new

Made for Interiors from Spain

Dipping Light, designed by Jordi Canudas for Marset.

1950s and 1960s, whereas he has really pushed them with his humour and style. Jaime is a unique designer, but so too is Patricia Urquiola, for instance.

Jordi Or Martí Guixé, who is a very special character in the scene and completely unique. That’s what I mean when I say it’s very hard to find stereotypes.

Inma If you travel abroad to international design shows, you’re seeing more and more Spanish products living alongside those from the traditional design nations – companies like Sancal, Andreu World, Expormim and Gandia Blasco. People may not know that they’re Spanish brands, but the level of quality is very high. Conversely, you’re also seeing more Scandinavian or German designers deciding to work with Spanish companies. Look at Sebastian Herkner for Gan. Jordi Or Stefan Diez for Vibia, Raw Edges for Gan Rugs, and Mathias Hahn for Marset.

Inma These designers are working for Spanish companies because they’re strong and they have good catalogues. That tells me, “OK, Spain is important.” We have the industry and there are big names coming here to work with our companies.

We have good products.

Panellists Imma Bermudez and Jordi Canudas

things and to be innovative. There is that openness.

When I designed my Dipping light in 2014, it was initially a home experiment – a light where the lampshade could be created by dipping it in paint.

When I initially showed it to lighting companies, they didn’t get it, so I just started making it on my own. But I grew tired of dealing with the management side of things – all the problems with production and shipping. As a designer, I’m someone who has fun when I’m challenging something that’s already established or creating something new. So I was so happy when [Barcelona-based lighting brand] Marset got in touch about Dipping light, because they helped it become so much better as an industrial product than what I had been able to achieve on my own.

As a company, they had the flexibility to incorporate that project into their catalogue, which is something I really value. In a way, that open character seems to have something to do with Spanish-Latin culture.

Inma In general, I think Spanish design has a freshness of approach and a creativity in finding solutions. We don’t panic if we see a problem. Look at Jaime Hayon, whose work has revitalised Fritz Hansen. Before Jaime, that company was dominated by designs from the

Flora Bloom 1 rug, designed by Santi Moix for Nanimarquina.

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Fluid Memories, Static Monuments Words Dana Francisco Miranda It is a long, hot summer night in June.

A red night that recalls the racial violence of 1919 and the uprisings of 1967, except this night is now. In the North End of Boston, protesters who have taken to the street to proclaim that Black Lives Matter also decapitate a statue of Christopher Columbus in the city’s Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park. This headless figure joins the many other statues that have been toppled or defaced across the globe. Yet, why did Columbus find himself the victim of such a public beheading?

It may seem unnecessary to point out that statues are not identical with the figures they represent.

That Christopher Columbus’s many atrocities – including the enslavement, genocidal abuse, and murder of Indigenous people – are not usually represented in the symbol of Columbus, should be apparent. Symbols magnify the meaning of what they represent, even if they often achieve this, paradoxically, by means of reduction and omission. However, when one deals with the messiness of symbolic renderings of history, especially public history, then by necessity one deals in ambiguity. Columbus can be both a hero for Italian-Americans and a central character in the “Doctrine of discovery”. In this way, cultural celebrations can all too easily play their part in legitimatising colonialism.

Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park was established in 1967 by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organisation, in a primarily Italian-American neighbourhood of Boston.

The aforementioned statue was erected by the Friends of Christopher Columbus Committee in 1979. While these historical details may be irrefutable, what cannot be established is the objective significance of the monument – or, at least, an objective view upon which all observers could definitively agree. Although

the statue has now been placed in storage while the city reconsiders its “historic meaning”, its eventual decision will doubtlessly still be considered controversial and divisive. When you are dealing in histories, how could this not be the case?

This is exactly what we must interrogate: monuments have a propensity for dealing – and, indeed double-dealing – in histories. One can spend days, weeks, and months speculating on what Boston should or must do with this statue while still misunderstanding the lack of fidelity between memorials and the histories that they represent. Nevertheless, we persist. We ask: why was Columbus allowed to stand for so long undisturbed and which narratives about him were allowed to dominate public perceptions? The fact that people have complicated lives, in which they often do as much bad as good, means that their histories will equally be unbalanced.

It may be easy to say that both supporters and detractors of Columbus have judged the man through a reductive lens: the left hand fails to appreciate his accomplishments, while the right hand fails to measure his slaughter. Yet the fact remains that even though a person cannot be so easily summed up, it does not follow that when the scales of justice are measured, the balance will come out neutral. When people get together, they must not only evaluate history but also assess their criteria for making judgments. Even with these difficulties, we are still obligated to judge the wounds of colonialism. Khalid Warsame conveys the issue well in his essay ‘This Vast Conspiracy of Memory’ when he writes: “Imagine inflicting a wound and then rearranging the very fabric of a society solemnly to preserve its memory while pretending it doesn’t exist; it is a grotesque and criminal synecdoche.” Some crimes are too significant to be understood in the context of a balance sheet. This is where our capacity for judgment is crucial. We must judge which monuments belong in public, and such judgment demands more than an arithmetical accounting.

Such judgement requires, first of all, that we understand how monuments function.

In their paper ‘Monuments, Memory and Marginalisation in Adelaide’s Prince Henry Gardens’, geographers Iain Hay, Andrew Hughes

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and Mark Tutton argue that “Memorials and monuments are political constructions, recalling and representing histories selectively, drawing popular attention to specific events and people and obliterating or obscuring others.” The act of lifting up a narrative means that representations of history are always partial, although this need not be due to any nefarious reasons. Placing a person or event in concrete form requires being selective. However, because public monuments are approved and maintained by governments, the histories involved are typically selected because they serve political purposes. In a study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, two of the largest explosions of confederate monuments erected in the US were found to have occurred during periods of Black disenfranchisement (1900-10s) and advancement (1960s), when white supremacists deemed their vision in need of concrete support. And because history is always broader than the set of events and agents that are selected by governments for commemoration, this act of selection inevitably also functions as an act of obliteration and obfuscation.

Forgetfulness of these dynamics entails that the multiple meanings, interpretations, and histories that are accounted by monuments become partial and static. Monuments become immobile and resistant to change or alteration because these structures have a penchant for lifting up a particular narrative or generalising history at the expense of other readings. This static nature, of course, makes sense – the very act of memorialising through constructing tangible objects in stone, glass, or steel is meant to convey permanence. Yet staticity is a produced phenomenon. The fact that this perspective seems common-sense or represents a dominant view does not eliminate the fluid process of remembering.

We can always remember otherwise.

This brings us again to the North End’s Columbus. Considered aesthetically, one would be hard-pressed to describe the austere, plain marble statue as beautiful or a work of art. By contrast, the force and creativity it took to decapitate the statue in the dead of night is rather impressive.

As a direct engagement with history, the protesters were able to proffer differing interpretations

of Columbus. The voyager who “discovered” the “New World” and helped justify the dispossession of Indigenous land is instead recontextualised as a mass murderer, and the Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park becomes seen as a black mark.

As Mahtowin Munro of the United American Indians of New England stated: “It’s a park dedicated to white supremacy; it’s a park dedicated to Indigenous genocide.”

The United States is, however, more reticent when it comes to naked celebrations of Indigenous enslavement, genocide and dispossession – colonial history, even in New England, is often tempered to favour claims of multiculturalism and diversity. If this is the case, then why is Columbus still so celebrated in certain circles? One suggestion is that insofar as the US is a nation founded on and maintained through settler colonialism, Columbus functions as an introduction to a national narrative of discovery. As the American justice Joseph Story once remarked, the “Doctrine of Discovery” granted Europeans “an absolute dominion over the whole territories afterwards occupied by them, not in virtue of any conquest of, or cession by, the Indian natives, but as a right acquired by discovery.” Columbus represents this uncomfortable legal precedence, whether or not his defenders choose to overlook his role in settler colonialism. Moreover, in order to maintain the “official” view of Columbus and the nation, any alternative meanings that could account for such grievous wrongs are frequently stunted or erased. This is why Francis Mazzaglia, chairman of the board of the Italian American Alliance, can so easily ask: “Who else has discovered America because of Columbus?” Instead of representing what was lost and murdered through discovery, Columbus becomes a preamble to the story of immigration.

Or, more insidiously, politicians try to neutralise the controversy of monuments by claiming that they can represent multiple stories. This sentiment can be seen when Lydia Edwards, a Boston City councillor, argues that “We need to acknowledge that certain symbols can cause pain” and also that “We need to honor Italian heritage” in reference to Columbus. This ideological position seeks to resolve political

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disagreements between Italian-Americans and Indigenous people by allowing for both of their histories to be represented and acknowledged.

In this way, a monument becomes “neutral” – neither side takes precedence or is forgotten.

But can a monument neutrally represent white supremacy? In a conversation I recently had with the philosopher Nir Eisikovits, we spoke about what it would mean for the decapitated Columbus statue to remain on the waterfront.

How would viewers confront the ambiguity of this headless figure? What histories or narratives would they tell their children? Could we actually have an honest conversation about colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty – let alone racism, given that that Columbus was beheaded during the Black Lives Matter protests?

Much would be possible if this transformed statue were to remain on the waterfront. Even if its presence led to renewed engagement, however, it need not mean that the Columbus has a “neutral” representation. Historical neutrality is too often thought of as being capable of representing history – even conflicting meanings – in monuments without also offering endorsement. Neutrality is framed as offering not judgment, but rather unbiased representation. Yet the act of beheading is a call for judgment. Decapitation is meant to convey to the public that this statue is not simply meant to be viewed, but also must be evaluated.

Viewers must decide whether the beliefs and actions of Columbus require condemnation, or even amputation from our public life.

The plain fact is that accepting a “neutral” representation of white supremacy undermines and degrades our capacity for judgment. For non-white people to adopt such a view requires conceding that their judgments are subordinate and irrelevant, and for whites to read white supremacy in such a manner is at best a logical paradox, since they would have to “neutrally” entertain a doctrine that asserts that white judgments, histories and lives are, by necessity, superior. Human judgment can only function rigorously where it examines white supremacy critically. Perhaps it is through this play with decapitation that the staticity of monuments could become more fluid and the critical skills demanded by adequate judgment could be

sharpened. This would require, however, that we become more prone to examine the backside of the embroidery, the knots and tangles that form our historical views. Yet, as James Baldwin writes in Nothing Personal, it is “in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims and, at the same time, its perpetrators, should, by virtue of these two facts, be rendered unable to examine the myth, or even to suspect, much less recognize, that it is a myth which controls and blasts their lives.”

For a state to play with monuments, it would have to concede the power to politically construct histories. It would require a different way of engaging with monuments, both in terms of how they are constructed and experienced.

This would mean that communities could themselves begin to construct and deconstruct monuments outside of the constraints required by state approval. However, it is far more likely that governments will instead continue to establish formal commissions and committees to review the “meaning” of monuments. Think of the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm in London or the committee to assess Chicago’s public art collection, both of which have been newly established in the midst of protest. For Boston’s North End, this means that a decision about the future status of Columbus will most likely be made by a committee. Speculation is always imperfect – there are futures in which Columbus is fully restored to his pedestal and futures in which the entire park is remade – yet what remains static are the systems by which people can engage with monuments.

The fact that this particular Columbus statue was also painted in 2004 with the word “murderer”, decapitated in 2006, and marked with the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in 2015, shows just how sluggish city and state governments can be in dealing with historical confrontations. Instead of addressing the reasons why Columbus had been targeted or what histories his presence served to erase, each time the monument was restored to its original condition. One could, of course, contact the Boston Art Commission (BAC) or one’s elected officials to lodge a complaint, but the bureaucratic process involved renders all disagreements into the format of a formal review, whereby political

Essays

actions are only acceptable if legible through the government. Moreover, preservationists do not typically engage in acts of removal. Until the BAC established a deaccession policy which allowed for the removal of artwork in 2017, its primary roles were curation and restoration.

Altogether, this seems an impoverished way of engaging with monuments. Commissions, at their best, can allow individuals to engage in democratic debate or enter into decision-making processes that are respectful to all parties. Yet they also result in quagmires in which middle grounds are created where there should be none. Or they allow for direct action to be stymied in favour of deliberation. The result is not only that the public loses interest, but also that “official” processes become reified as the only proper way of engaging with history. This is why a static engagement with monuments is often thought to be a solution. For instance, the historian David Blight recently argued in The New York Times that a national “task force or commission” needs to be established to “comparatively study the issues of ‘repair,’ monuments and memorialization, and promoting a richly pluralistic version of American history to the largest possible public.”

This commission would thus focus on shaping a “new” national memorial landscape rather than prescribing actions to local governments and groups. But even so, one would be hardpressed to believe that this task force would have decapitation listed as a best practice. In this way, government commissions still limit the ways in which the public can enter into debates or modify memorials. The reduction of acceptable political actions – whether it be the renunciation of direct action or protest – only serves bureaucratic assemblies. It is once again the state asserting control over which narratives and histories will be represented publicly. But commissions are not a solution to history.

This brings us back to the idea of fluidity and ambiguity. If we can recognise that monuments are multidimensional, ambiguous and fluid, does that also commit us to leaving Columbus standing tall? Does he deserve a chance for public engagement? So long as the ways in which people engage with monuments – and the ways in which cities deal with these issues – are static, we may

be better served keeping Columbus in storage.

Monuments cannot be treated in isolation.

Until we are ready to deal honestly with the past and the present, we cannot actually use monuments fluidly. Moreover, until we also erect monuments and memorials to Massachusetts figures who have been less celebrated in public – we might think of Weetamoo and Metacomet, Elizabeth Freeman, Crispus Attucks, David Walker, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Melnea Cass – we will continue to replicate historical injustices. A balanced perspective cannot be given if we will still have an unequal number of white or European representations. The toppling of problematic figures must include erecting new monuments.

Even then, this would only be a partial reckoning. In truth, most of us are ignorant of our cities, neighbourhoods and memorials which dot the landscape. Our geographies are limited to the practical and mundane. We live in the static.

But it would be a mistake to think that monuments – these concrete histories – are themselves only practical or fixed. While our relation to the built environment all too often reveals a natural attitude that treats objects in public as ordinary and rightfully belonging, we can think otherwise.

Instead of uncritically absorbing or consuming these public objects, we are more than capable of interrogating our histories as well as our relationship with these monumental practices.

We are capable of confronting, even decapitating, the myths and wounds that form the fabric of our social lives. And it is this capacity for meaningmaking that I find beautiful.

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The Future of Fairs Words Peter Smisek I can’t recall my last normal day before the Covid-19 pandemic, but I can clearly remember the first day when any illusion of normality slipped away. On 11 March, I attended a press breakfast for Clerkenwell Design Week in London’s Charterhouse.

The 2020 Salone del Mobile in Milan had already been postponed at that point.

Two weeks later, it would be cancelled.

The atmosphere was solemn. Two small dispensers of newly purchased antibacterial gel stood guard at the entrance, along with a notice stating that there were still about 80 or so elderly residents living in the complex’s almshouse and infirmary.

The consternation among the participants was palpable, despite friendly elbow bumps between the assembled writers and PRs. A longtime friend arrived just before the presentation and went in for her usual hug. It felt uneasy. We were assured that the event would go ahead as planned. It didn’t.

Just six days later, Clerkenwell Design Week was postponed from May to July, and two months later it would be cancelled entirely. I skipped the mini croissants that day, the fear of contagion being, for once, stronger than my innate gluttony.

For those whose livelihoods depend on the seemingly insular world of design biennales, furniture fairs, and the accoutrements that go with them, the possibility of a future without mass gatherings was stark. There would be no Salone this year, no Venice Architecture Biennale.

Museums were closed and countless design and architecture exhibitions would be cancelled or postponed. But trade fairs are important.

In 2019 the Salone del Mobile received 386,000 visitors, while its wider design week, Milan’s Fuorisalone, welcomed even more. Italy’s €22bn furniture industry is heavily reliant on Milan and the close proximity between manufacturers, designers, buyers and journalists that the Salone has engendered since its launch in 1961. By 1967,

when the fair broadened its remit beyond Italian manufacturers and opened up to international exhibitors, Salone was well established as one of the most important trade fairs in Europe.

It’s a place where brands and designers have their reputations made, and where millions are spent on hotel stays, bottles of prosecco, installations, parties and tote bags. It is wasteful, but virtually every industry, from automobiles to computer games, puts on a similarly bloated extravaganza somewhere in the world.

Given Salone’s economic importance, Marco Sabetta, the fair’s general manager, is keen for it to “go back to its normal routine” in 2021, albeit with more emphasis placed on the synergy between its digital and real-world components.

“Reading the messages of support, I believe that international visitors will be more eager to be in Milan,” he tells me. “As far as social distancing, we are currently designing a new format. Display solutions are still under review, but it will allow everyone to try out the furniture and see it up close.” This physical proximity may seem trivial, but the extent to which fairgoers are able to interact with products, designers, and brand representatives in a fairly straightforward fashion is vital. As Sabetta notes, restrictions brought about by the pandemic have led to renewed appreciation of “what we’ve always taken for granted: personal relations and genuine contact.”

As the pandemic deepened, brands initially scrambled to re-arrange their schedules for 2020, hoping that normal business would resume later in the summer. One by one, however, fairs from across all sectors of the design industry announced postponements and cancellations – tech behemoth the Consumer Electronics Show, Chicago’s NeoCon, the London Festival of Architecture, and various fair components from the London Design Festival were all scrapped. September’s edition of Maison & Objet went ahead as a digital fair, although, at the time of writing, France has been put back on the “unsafe” list for UK travellers – it’s unlikely that London-based designers and journalists would have hopped on the Eurostar to visit the accompanying Paris Design Week. Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design finally took place in a socially distanced form at the beginning of September, having been postponed since May. But the long,

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fair-less summer, and the ongoing unpredictability of containment measures, have already caused many brands to take digital presentations more seriously. Building up a native audience is difficult, however, particularly for companies which have never established themselves as digital content creators in their own right. As such, the role fell, in large part, to digital outlets.

Websites and blogs such as Dezeen seemed poised to respond to the unexpected turn of events.

The website’s Virtual Milan (later rebranded as the Virtual Design Festival, or VDF, following an outcry from Salone de Mobile) was borne out of “desperation given direction by conversations we were having with brands” that had been set to showcase new products in Milan, according to Dezeen’s founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs. Positioning itself as a festival rather than a simulacrum of a fair, VDF could attract more diverse digital programming – not just virtual product launches, but also interviews and debates with designers, architects and curators who operate outside of the furniture industry and the commercial fair circuit. For audience members, the shift to digital has broken down geographical boundaries and increased the accessibility of highcalibre speakers. Rather than having to orchestrate complex and potentially time-consuming travel, event organisers now need only 45 minutes of a speaker’s time, which can be dialled in from anywhere around the world. The increased willingness of audiences to engage with design online could even help to dampen the influence of the industry’s jet-setting editorial and curatorial cliques – the same curators, journalists and artistic directors, all attending the same events, year after year. “[Salone] did become very bloated and brands kept going because they thought to not attend would be too much of a statement,” says Fairs. Much depends on the economy, but he foresees a consolidation and possibly a “de-gentrification” of what he calls “the circus” of Fuorisalone. In recent years, international consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Airbnb and Nike have spent big in Milan to create interactive installations and experiences which visitors would often only have a minute or two to see before dashing off to tick another

item off the list. Sometimes not even that – personally, I have given numerous installations, such as Studio Swine’s apparently ephemeral smoke bubble-blowing tree designed for COS in 2017, a miss because I had already read about them extensively in the Fuorisalone previews. “Perhaps,” speculates Fairs, “we’ll see a more sort of humble approach to things [in future]: less polished; fewer fireworks; less money being thrown at PRs just to get a venue.”

Milan, for better or worse, has come to play an outsized part in the editorial agendas of both print and online publications. And not just because of the fresh content. “It’s the most important week for us in the year, financially,” says Fairs. “The pandemic itself boosted our audience by 20 per cent. Many people assumed we’d be all right, since our business is online, but it was actually crushingly hard.” Salone typically brings in all manners of revenue for Dezeen, explains Fairs, but these were all wiped out by the pandemic. “We’re [normally] back-toback filming, doing interviews, talks, editorial promotions. During the initial phase of the lockdown, our recruitment website was down 98 per cent, advertising was down 80 per cent.”

Print seemed to fare even worse. Without the ability to plan around releases, and uncertainty surrounding the fairs, commercial advertising dropped off a cliff. In the UK, Blueprint moved online and Icon downsized yet again (shedding yours truly in the process). Amsterdam-based FRAME carried only four single-page ads in its July/August issue. As a reader, I found it rather beautiful. As someone vaguely familiar with the funding model of most of today’s design magazines, the effect was chilling.

Not all brands were content with simply promoting their wares though already established channels. Vitra, for instance, participated in VDF, but also physically mounted the showcase it had intended for Milan at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The brand also produced a number of promotional films around the display that were then shared online. Throughout the pandemic, Vitra published a series of white papers titled ‘The Road Back to the Office’, which explore the design of offices and how these will change as a result of social distancing. Before Covid-19,

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such digital initiatives were generally seen as a complementary way for brands to reach new audiences on their own terms. The manufacturer already had a substantial online reach and will also present its first ever “Digital Summit” in October, an initiative which had initially been planned as a physical event. Vitra has found that online audiences are larger than physical ones and sufficiently interactive but, as a spokesperson told me, they are monitoring the situation and still plan to re-enter the fairs circuit. It would seem that online audiences are easy enough to reach, either through established outlets or through developing one’s own online presence, but I was nevertheless told that Vitra is “still focused on meeting with our community in person wherever possible.”

Making a meaningful connection online is proving difficult for designers too. “Digital product launches have been really hard,” says London-based designer and architect Adam Nathaniel Furman, who launched a collection of ceramic tiles and rugs during the lockdown.

“It’s very difficult to reach potential clients and press, and I have not made any new [connections] since [the pandemic] started. There simply isn’t the same dynamic on Zoom.” Some weeks after our conversation, Furman posted on Twitter suggesting he was considering leaving the design profession: “I am contemplating leaving the design industry completely. What fun things do you think I should look into?” The danger here is that a generation of young designers will miss out on chances to make contacts within the industry despite participating in online events – a process that would further entrench the already established names. Digital programming may have its place, and has certainly expanded access to those unable or unwilling to travel to design fairs, but business is still reliant on some degree of in-person connection.

Similar sentiments are echoed on the cultural side of the design sector, which, though less commercial, still relies on visitor numbers.

“There is no substitute to the physical,” says Victoria Broackes, the director of the London Design Biennale (LDB) and a former senior curator at the V&A. “At the V&A, I worked on the David Bowie Is exhibition,” she says. “[I remember]

going in there and seeing vast numbers of people all jostling elbow to elbow. Now you just have to think, gosh, that is gone forever.” LDB itself was postponed from September 2020 to June 2021, with an interim online-only exhibition called Design in an Age of Crisis set up in collaboration with the international affairs institute Chatham House. When it opens, the biennale will aim to support social distancing by issuing timed tickets and instituting one-way routes through the exhibition, while the later date will ensure that participants are able to finish and mount their work safely when coming from abroad.

Social distancing and travel restrictions are having a considerable impact across the board. “[The pandemic] has forced us to think about the model of the biennial and to question things like transporting pieces from continent to continent,” says Mariana Pestana, architect and curator of the upcoming Istanbul Design Biennial. A number of key components of the exhibition programme have already been re-conceptualised for the digital era: for instance, an open call titled ‘The Kitchen’, in which participants were invited to submit work highlighting the connection between ecology, gender, domestic labour and culture, will now be presented as an online cooking show.

Another part of the biennial, ‘New Civic Rituals’, will see a number of permanent interventions and installations realised across Istanbul’s public spaces by local and international partners working in collaboration. Their placement outdoors largely sidesteps the city’s restrictions on the size of indoor gatherings, while also creating a more permanent legacy in Istanbul without the transience and wastefulness associated with design biennials.

For example, one research project found that girls are far less likely than boys to use a city’s public spaces, and so a dance stage dedicated to them will be installed permanently as part of the Biennial. As Pestana points out, the challenge for her team was not so much to invent new forms of engagement from scratch, but to adapt to the practical challenges arising from the pandemic, and instead focus on the local.

The travel restrictions brought on by the pandemic have reinforced the importance of engaging local and regional audiences who are unlikely to be as affected as international

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hundred people, thousands can, and have, tuned into some of DDW’s recent live streams according to Konijn. [In late September, Eindhoven’s mayor John Jorritsma cancelled the physical portion of DDW in line with new Covid-19 guidelines, ed.]

This may sound like good news for design aficionados, but given that most digital events are free, it may also threaten their commercial viability, especially if they normally rely on ticket sales. And if visitors stay away, so will sponsors.

Citing their own financial difficulties, French carmaker Renault and the Dutch State Railways have already withdrawn their support as main sponsors from DDW, for instance. The world of design fairs and biennials is intimately connected to the creaking machinery and profit margins of global commerce. If these events adopt a lighter touch and a more locally-oriented approach, it will become challenging for event organisers to maintain the premise of the international exchange of ideas which attracted investment in the first place. They could even slip into a parochial mode ripe for cheap political propaganda and nationalism.

As a result of constraints on numbers, manufacturers and brands will need to refocus on smaller targeted gatherings. “You can say it’s actually not about the number of eyeballs, but the quality of those eyeballs,” explains Fairs.

“So that’s why some brands are now saying, ‘Well, let’s have a really nice dinner for 10 people in, say, Amsterdam.’” Design, it seems, could become more open on the surface, yet even more exclusive underneath. If distancing measures and disruption continue for too long, we may also see a strengthening of the existing hegemony – only large brands, well-known designers and platforms with the largest cash reserves could come out relatively unscathed. In any case, critical and accessible online platforms become even more of a necessity.

It seems undeniable that the pandemic is accelerating already-existing trends. It would be ideal for all of us to fly less and only take trains when necessary. Walking the walk, rather than just talking the talk on sustainability, if you will.

Fairs and biennales could, and should, be working more closely with local talent – be they writers, critics or curators. Online lectures may finally

visitors. “I’ve always been rooted in the local community,” says Alice Stori Liechtenstein, organiser and curator of the Schloss Hollenegg for Design, a residency programme for young designers which takes place in Austria’s Styrian countryside. “I speak to the very international and to the very local, and usually there’s no middle ground. Maybe we will get some people to visit from Vienna now.” The pandemic, she says, has forced her to look for local photographers, video editors and 3D mappers, rather than rely on international networks.

While localism may be important, Schloss Hollenegg for Design has also continued to operate digitally, reinforcing the need for a multichannel approach. The exhibition was captured virtually and Stori Liechtenstein gave a presentation and a tour as part of Dezeen’s Virtual Design Festival, as well as broadcasting it on the Schloss Hollenegg Instagram. The residency programme itself was amended when an American participant could no longer travel, and a young designer from Austria was invited instead.

For others, the opportunity to scale back may carry with it the possibility to discuss sustainability more seriously. The upcoming Dutch Design Week (DDW), which is held in Eindhoven every October, has been titled ‘The New Intimacy’ in response to the pandemic and will go back to basics after welcoming more than 350,000 visitors in 2019. “We’re expecting roughly 50,000 people,” says Jorn Konijn, the event’s head of programming. “[But] we have had complaints in recent years that there was no real connection between a person who is genuinely interested in a designer’s work and the designer.” The event will now be scaled back to roughly 35 showroom and exhibition spaces dotted around the city – all observing social distancing – while participating designers who are unwilling or unable to travel to Eindhoven can set up and curate their own virtual showrooms. In theory, this small-scale setting could make it easier to engage with designers one-on-one, albeit at the 1.5m distance prescribed by the Dutch government. It also remains to be seen whether similar intimacy can be extended online. Virtual talks and lectures are planned, and are expected to rapidly expand access to the event.

While a lecture room may only seat two or three

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become the new normal and provide a muchneeded interface between the local and the global.

What the lasting impact of these changes will be, however, is anyone’s guess. As the world economy starts recovering from the pandemic-induced recession, much will depend on how and whether governments help struggling businesses in different sectors of the economy, and whether we see any additional focus on culture and environmental sustainability. Much will also depend on the safety and availability of a vaccine in the future. Whatever the future holds, it may be prudent to remember Dieter Rams’s famous motto, “Less, but better.” The alternative – less and worse – is too awful to contemplate.

The Revolution Will Not Be Branded Words Francesca Sobande Although the term “woke” was popularised during the late 2010s, the expression and its political meaning emerged long before then. The notion of striving to “stay woke” – aware of and committed to addressing racial and social injustice – stems directly from African-American history, creativity, and activism, appearing in a 1962 glossary

accompanying William Melvin Kelley’s New York Times article, ‘If You’re Woke You Dig It’.

Despite this, contemporary consumer culture frequently employs the term “woke” in ways that whitewash its genesis, confusing capitalist endeavours and corporate spin with collective racial justice action and sustained organising.

The fact that the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) recently published an online article about brands “going woke” highlights how the word has entered the lexicon of the corporate world. “2019 supercharged brand involvement in issues of social responsibility,” wrote the CIM. “But as more of these stories come to light, the more polarising these issues can become. Do businesses, of all sizes, risk losing mass reach if they continue to pursue a ‘woke’ strategy?”

In May 2020, the fatal police brutality and anti-Black violence inflicted upon George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (among other Black people in the US), galvanised Black grassroots organising and the Movement for Black Lives. In response to this, many brands rushed to issue public statements about racism and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. “WE STAND WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY AGAINST RACISM AND INEQUALITY,” tweeted the toy company Lego, for instance, promising to donate $4m to charities supporting Black children and promoting education about racial equality: “THERE IS MUCH TO DO.” Meanwhile, UK advertising trade bodies and leaders from ad agencies pledged their “solidarity with the Black community” by signing an open letter which stated their alleged intention to “maintain inclusive cultures that are sensitive to the enduring injustice and pain of racism”. During this same time, fashion brands such as Versace have peppered their social media content with phrases like “say no to racism”, while fellow luxury brand Prada distanced itself from prior criticism of “blackface” merchandise it had produced in 2018 by referring to “the injustices facing

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espouse and their history of unethical labour practices is found in a 2020 Retail Gazette article that lists “the retailers going beyond solidarity for Black Lives Matter”. Published on 12 June, the article exemplifies how brands are commended for their supposedly “tangible action” in response to social justice issues, even if those same brands have been extensively critiqued for their unethical labour practices. Included on Retail Gazette’s list are the fashion brand PrettyLittleThing, whose parent company Boohoo has faced accusations that workers in its UK supply chain are paid below minimum wage, and Amazon, whose abuses have been well documented. The commodification of “woke” is also evident when reflecting on how certain celebrities, such as the Asian-American actor and comedian Awkwafina, have been hailed as woke, even as they have been critiqued for appropriating Black culture. As such, over the last half decade, conversations concerning wokewashing have garnered momentum, with Pepsi’s 2017 Live for Now commercial, featuring American model and TV personality Kendall Jenner, representing something of a pinnacle of the phenomenon.

Released on 5 April, Live for Now was a film commercial that tactlessly invoked images and ideas associated with Black social justice movements to sell a soft drink. Such was the backlash, that Pepsi pulled it a day after launch, stating: “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding.

Clearly, we missed the mark and we apologize.”

The ad depicts a stand-off between protestors and police, which is immediately defused by Jenner offering a police officer a can of Pepsi.

It was a crass deployment of the white saviour archetype, as embodied by Jenner, but the commercial may also be interpreted as promoting an essentially consumerist notion of activism – one that emphasises the imagined potential of personal purchasing choices to prop up structural change and resistance movements, but which ultimately contradicts what activism actually entails. Such a focus on individual consumption in the context of protest imagery – choosing a can of Pepsi over another kind of soft drink – is symptomatic of how some brands push their products on the pretence that they care about

the Black community”. Across various sectors, brands pledged to “hire more Black people” and claimed they would “amplify Black voices”, and “diversify” their industries. Many commercial organisations’ carefully crafted PR statements still circulate, perhaps signalling the ongoing attempt to frame brands and the ad industry as woke.

For more than five years, as part of my research into the media experiences of Black women in Britain, I have been exploring how brands attempt to portray themselves as supporters of Black and social justice activism.

The assumed woke attributes of brands have been praised by some media, but this form of strategic marketing can symbolically, and sometimes ambiguously, merely gesture towards activism.

A case in point is when brands are celebrated for featuring images of activists in their campaigns, regardless of the reality that many companies’ dubious employment conditions are at odds with the principles of racial justice upheld by the activists that they aspire to be associated with.

In 2019, for instance, Nike’s Dream Crazy won the award for outstanding commercial at the Creative Arts Emmys. Narrated by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and published alongside the slogan “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”, the commercial is built around Kaepernick’s ostracisation from the NFL after he took the knee during the American national anthem in 2016. “We believe Colin is one of the most inspirational athletes of this generation, who has leveraged the power of sport to help move the world forward,” Nike executive Gino Fisanotti said of the advert. However, since the release of Behind the Swoosh in 2011, a documentary that addressed the company’s connections to sweatshop labour, Nike has faced repeated criticism concerning reports of child labour and unethical treatment of people working in its factories around the world. To what extent are Nike’s recent campaigns around Black Lives Matter and matters of racial justice and equality part of ongoing rehabilitative efforts to shed its association with the exploitation of those working in sweatshops?

Another example of the disconnect between the social justice principles that brands

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social movements, as well as implying that personal consumer habits are a meaningful mode of supporting such movements. Just as there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so too is there no activism that is branded.

Live for Now is one of many examples of woke-washing, an expression encompassing superficial advertising that frames individuals or institutions as being invested in tackling social injustices. Two years after this commercial and the word “woke” entering the Oxford English Dictionary, the digital marketing news outlet Marketing Dive referred to 2019 as “the year of ‘woke-washing’”. Marketing Dive reported industry experts warning that “an uptick in socially and politically aware advertising can read more as chasing headlines than meeting real consumer demands,” and that it could “degrade trust in the industry.” Despite such warnings, woke-washing seems to be thriving in 2020. Discussions and debates around the term have surged in recent years, moving from niche corners of the internet to the centre of much marketing industry and academic discourse that wrestles with the corporatisation of activism, such as the evolution of commercial LGBTQIA+ Pride events.

In September 2020, London’s Museum of Brands opened When Brands Take a Stand, an exhibition which was meant to open in March but had been delayed by Covid-19. The exhibition presents “TV commercials, posters and packaging” that explore how brands have engaged with social and political issues such as “fights for equal rights”. In the months since the original opening date, there has been a sharp increase in the number of brands commenting on matters regarding racism and Black lives, prompting conversations about the hypocrisy of corporations that claim to be both “anti-racist” and advocates of Black activism, but whose track records tell a different story. Sephora, for instance, is a French multinational chain of personal care and beauty stores which was the first company to sign a “15 per cent pledge” to sell more Black-owned brands.

It is also known for its racial profiling of Black customers, as reported by the musician SZA in 2019. In response to the reckoning surrounding racial consciousness that has occurred within

retail in 2020, Sephora is now taking more substantial steps, including commissioning a landmark study on racial bias in retail, led by Cassi Pittman Claytor and David Crockett, experts on race and discrimination within marketplace contexts. If such a study results in long-term action on the part of brands, it could be a positive move towards more meaningful industry efforts than performative social media statements.

Ad Age magazine publishes a “regularly updated blog tracking brands’ responses to racial injustice”, listing examples such as Facebook’s 2020 launch of “Black Business August” in support of National Black Business Month. The launch of a pro-business month that focuses on commercial activity, as opposed to a long-term strategy to address structural anti-Blackness, does little to distract from the fact that, in 2020, Facebook was hit by its largest ever advertiser boycott over its ineffective efforts to tackle racism on its platform.

Brands continue to vie for a reputation comparable to Ben & Jerry’s, the US ice cream manufacturer which has issued statements condemning white supremacy and voiced support of BLM for years.

Ben & Jerry’s has previously published articles about systemic racism, slavery, and mass incarceration, as well as donating millions of dollars to social causes every year. Nevertheless, brands are not activists. To suggest otherwise is to diminish the efforts of activists who, unlike brands, are not profit-oriented and typically work without institutional support or the types of funds and resources that are readily available to commercial organisations.

Sadly, brands show little sign of ceasing to (mis)use notions of social justice activism as part of their marketing. What we are currently witnessing is far from a new wave of branding, however. In 2012, NYU Press published Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, a book highlighting how marketplace activity has been simultaneously entangled and at odds with activism for a long time. “Within contemporary culture it is utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something,” write Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser. Since the Black is Beautiful movement became established in the US in the 1960s, brands have attempted to tap into

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discourse surrounding it, as evidenced by Proctor & Gamble’s 2007 My Black is Beautiful campaign.

“This is a movement,” said Maureen Lippe, president of the agency running the campaign for Proctor & Gamble, as reported in PR Week.

“And our biggest challenge is to keep this movement going and coming up with initiatives that will resonate within this community.”

What makes the woke-washing of the 2010s unique, however, is the rise of social media and its role in both activism and corporate marketing. The one-to-many communication flows used by brands before the ascent of the internet have been usurped by more dialogic and democratised media production processes afforded by new media technologies. A relatively broad demographic of people (reductively categorised by brands as “consumers” and “target markets”) can now publicly talk back at brands and call out cynical advertising. For every brand that reduces liberationist work to shallow and self-serving representational gestures, there is at least one person, if not many more, who may use digital tools to combat such marketing narratives.

That Pepsi took down its Live for Now campaign is a prime example of this.

The continued existence of woke-washing, however, despite the backlash it has generated, is perhaps evidence that some brands believe there is no such thing as bad press. Alternatively, its persistence may indicate that brands are attuned to the reality that many people expect companies to take a clear stand on socio-political issues.

‘The Dying Days of Spin’, a 2018 FleishmanHillard Fishburn report, took a case study of 1,000 UK consumers and found that up to 80 per cent stopped using a product or service provided by a company if they disagreed with its response to a specific issue. “The issues that society is choosing to confront and correct are growing in number, perceived importance and anticipated rate of change,” wrote Stephanie Bailey in the report’s introduction. “This is both a fact to be celebrated as well as one to be cognisant of as a business.” Such research may be interpreted by some brands as a call to express their opinions on social issues, but may also result in activity that is more symptomatic of woke-washing than a sincere commitment to social change.

Some industry conversations about antiBlackness and racism have already dwindled since they surfaced in spring 2020, but many brands are still shoehorning in language and visual representations associated with Black lives without doing anything substantial to address how they are complicit in the maintenance of structural oppression. Fast-fashion company Missguided, for example, still has a statement on its website encouraging people to donate to various charities associated with Black Lives Matter (“We stand – and will always stand – for diversity and equality. Where we can, we’ll use the privilege of our platform, to empower and promote inclusivity”) as well as suggesting related shows to watch, podcasts to listen to, and books to read. Nonetheless, the brand has only this year agreed to publish details of its suppliers, after having been accused of airbrushing its potential involvement in unethical working conditions by organisations such as the Labour Behind the Label campaign.

As the sociologist Ruha Benjamin poignantly puts it in her vital book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), “economic recognition is a ready but inadequate proxy for political representation and social power”. Brands that claim to aid Black activism by adopting a superficial approach of incorporating more images of Black people in their campaigns, or which solely signal their interest in the purchasing power of Black people, mistakenly equate economic recognition with the dismantling of white supremacy. Marketing industry discourse includes claims that marketing practitioners are seriously reckoning with racism in their industry, including Vogue Business reporting in June 2020 that “Influencer marketing, long lacking diversity, faces a reckoning”. Still, what tends to be missing from some of this discussion is a recognition of the limited nature of the type of structural change that marketers and brands claim to contribute to.

A redistribution of resources is a necessary component of addressing structural inequalities and, arguably, this requires the abolition of freemarket capitalism. But saying that marketers, advertisers, and public relations practitioners are not at the helm of radical work in this field is not the same as suggesting the complete

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redundancy of such efforts. I recognise attempts to address racial injustices within these sectors, including discriminatory hiring practices, while still acknowledging that such efforts are not the same as radical work towards dismantling the capitalist, colonialist, and anti-Black structures that have led to the existence of marketing and branding as we know them today.

Some woke-washing may resonate with pockets of centrist and liberal demographics who seek to self-soothe through shopping, and whose critique of capitalism stops short of robustly questioning the motivations of brands that frame themselves as woke. Some may see woke-washing as a sign that the struggles represented in marketing, albeit shallowly, have become more societally acknowledged. Yet representation by and within commercial contexts is a far cry from liberation. Just because certain social issues are alluded to in advertising does not mean that they are being effectively tackled by the majority in society.

To insinuate that people or institutions can market, advertise, brand, and buy themselves and society out of the grips of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is, at best, misguided. At worst, it is just another political and public relations tactic that reflects profitable industry trends, rather than a genuine commitment to abolishing oppressive structures. Contrary to what brands may imply, systemic oppression will not be ended through people’s purchasing of products or celebration of their spending power. The commodification of activism and social causes is part of, and a symptom of, the structural problems that must be tackled. It is not the solution to tackling them that some brands present it as being; despite their dogged determination, the revolution will not be branded.

That Good Sound Words Natalie Kane I’ve always had a complicated relationship with football. My family are all Chelsea supporters, although I was left out of football when younger because of some archaic assumptions about what hobbies women should and shouldn’t have. I grew up around it, and so would watch matches as part of life’s background noise and peripherally knew what was going on.

But it wasn’t until I was older and met people who had an entirely different relationship to the game that I got it.

As I allowed myself to become more curious, I began to encounter facets of football I didn’t know existed. I ended up watching far too many interviews with Doctor Sócrates, the Brazilian medical doctor-turned-footballer who loved nothing more than discussing radical left-wing politics and philosophy over beer and cigarettes; I learned about the still hard fought-for drive for LGBTQ+ inclusion in football, the tragic suicide of Justin Fashanu (the first openly gay professional footballer), and the resultant Justin campaign; I met socialist community club fanatics; and, to cap it all off, I started supporting Tottenham Hotspur (sorry, Dad). I’d thought there was just one side of football and one type of fan – I’m glad to have been proven wrong.

These days I tend to watch matches with people, rather than following the game as a regular, every-week-down-the-pub type of fan. I still check the scores and know how Spurs are doing, and I still enjoy reading about football, but I’ve always liked the sport most when watching collectively.

As Covid-19 hit, however, it was only a matter of time before sport and live entertainment of all kinds were ordered to change. Suddenly, the thousands of voices we hear every week in the terraces were silenced, the final whistle blown.

In March, all matches in England’s Premier League were postponed until 30 April, before eventually being rearranged as part of “Project Restart”.

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do if either were commissioned to work within a stadium. The people behind the orchestration of atmospheric audio aren’t artists, however, or don’t consider themselves as such. Rather, they are sound engineers whose job it is to remix sounds to best reproduce how they think a crowd might react. There are engineers doing this kind of work independently of atmospheric audio, too.

In an interview with Sportsbible, “crowd noise DJ” Andres Salazar (responsible for the crowd sound for DAZN’s coverage of Germany’s Bundesliga), explains how he took his own approach, owing to the fact that the Bundesliga had made all crowd noises from last season’s matches available online. Salazar samples existing crowd recordings before splicing them together to create “45 minutes of crowd singing, chanting and making noise”. He likens the process to mixing, noting the difficulty of the process: “[It’s] really hard work to get that good sound.”

That good sound.

That good crowd sound is something television executives have attempted to recreate before. Consider the laugh track, or Douglass track, named after its creator Charley Douglass.

Invented in 1953, it was introduced to broadcasting shortly after, not, as one might think, to replace live audiences, but because audiences couldn’t be relied upon to laugh in the right way, or to laugh in the exact same way for the length of time that it takes to film a television show (a long time in the days of single channel cameras). This artificial augmentation of laughter – transforming genuine reactions into the ideal, muted but satisfying, collective laugh – was termed “sweetening” by audio engineers. It generated and sustained an industry standard of laughter: a common expectation of what good chuckling should sound like.

Douglass went on to create the Laff Box, or Audience Response Duplicator, a machine which could conjure any laugh into the world. The Laff Box was designed to fill the void that might arise when a studio audience didn’t respond exactly as desired – much like the EA Sports MIDI board, but with more cranks and levers. At around 2fttall, and looking like an organ and a typewriter had a fight, the Laff Box contained 320 laughs, including a 30-second “titter track” of people

The remaining games of the 2019/2020 season were played behind closed doors from mid-June.

Understandably, crowds were left out of these plans. The idea of letting thousands of people into stands was unimaginable, so clubs and broadcasters had to find ways to try and keep as much of the match-day experience intact as possible. This has led to a number of technological attempts – some more imaginative than others – to preserve a degree of normality in football at a time where uncertainty seems the only constant.

Enter EA Sports’s “atmospheric audio” – a modern box (or rather, MIDI board) of match-day tricks that is now being employed by a number of football broadcasters, most notably Sky Sports.

Atmospheric audio is an automatic crowd noise generator, operated by someone sat at a desk conjuring digital voices at the touch of a button.

This library of crowd sounds originated in video games. It was added to FIFA 15 in 2014 by EA Sports, having been built up from audio recorded

by Sky Sports during live games, and has been used in the annual game series ever since, refreshed only once for the 2020 edition. As such, anyone who tuned into Everton’s Goodison Park stadium on Sky Sports during the pandemic heard what the broadcaster had previously captured for a video game version of Goodison Park. The sounds that you hear (although you can choose to turn them off) are those of football past: a continuous rumble of historical voices which, at the touch of a button, can be whipped up into celebration or plunged into outrage.

Watching the 19 July Tottenham versus Leicester match (in which a 3-0 victory to Spurs saw two goals from Harry Kane – no relation, sadly – and an own goal from James Justin), I toggled the crowd sound on and off. When off, you can hear the players shouting to each other, barking instructions, encouragement and, to OFCOM’s horror, swearing. When on, all of this is lost in an immediate flood of crowd presence. Engaging atmospheric audio is the closest feeling there is to magicking people out of nothing – a wizard wheeze to make an unusual situation a little more comfortable and normal. Nevertheless, there’s something uncanny about hearing the voices of people who are no longer there; like something the sound artists Bill Fontana or Susan Philipsz might

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laughing quietly, children’s laughs, and the occasional well-placed belly laugh. Like matchday sound engineers at Sky Sports pressing the correct “Ooh” on a touch pad, Douglass sensed the right call to make based on what was in front of him and then set his machine in motion. Not everyone was a fan, however, and many found its trickery disarming and fraudulent. One of my favourite stories comes from Larry Gelbalt, co-creator of the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H, who noticed the absurdity of inserting laughter into certain situations. “[Our] show was a film show – supposedly shot in the middle of Korea,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “So the question I always asked the network was, ‘Who are these laughing people? Where did they come from?’”

These debates around the uncanniness of designed audience responses are not dissimilar to those now swirling around football.

The sound collages created by Salazar or the sound engineers at Sky Sports seem intended to construct a sense of normalcy and nostalgia – something we’re keen to preserve at this present time. The good sound that Salazar finds is one that is warm, consistent, familiar, unsurprising, and which provides a sense of certainty at a time when uncertainty reigns. Nostalgia frequently misrepresents, however, and there’s much about football that isn’t romantic. In compiling their audio banks, do the sound engineers have to go through and remove the swearing, the racism?

The referee’s a wanker?

In a blog post titled ‘You’re Not Singing Any More: Watching Football in the Wake of Covid-19’, the author Juliet Jacques writes beautifully about her experience of watching these carefully soundtracked matches as a long-time Norwich City fan. Jacques describes the “total alienation” she feels in response to how engineers have tried, and failed, to replicate the match-day experience she understood from many years watching both at home and pitch-side. “I just note that whoever is creating the soundtrack has it all wrong,” she writes. “[Three] down with ten minutes to go, the crowd noises would not be unified chants of On the Ball City but grumbles, boos and the thud of seats flipping up as people fucked off down the pub.”

This gets to the problem of what goes wrong when design tries to emulate a collective

experience that is so delicately organic. While televised sport has always undergone a level of behind-the-scenes augmentation before being beamed to people’s homes, this has never previously amounted to one person building an experience for the many out of moments stolen from a collective past. This new development, ultimately, comes down to football as a business.

As much as there may be a romanticism around “the beautiful game”, so too is there financial anxiety around maintaining audience engagement to help ease the return of crowds when, and if, stadiums reopen. The days when ticket sales alone kept the lights on at Premier League clubs may have been long gone even before Covid – only 19 per cent of Man Utd’s £627m turnover in 2018/19 was match-day revenue – but there’s a worry that if fans don’t see themselves in the stands anymore, they won’t feel part of the club and will begin to drift away. After all, a club is nothing without its fans (and their financial support).

In one of the more technologically ambitious attempts at fan engagement, Danish Superliga team AGF Aarhus decided to create a “virtual grandstand” for their derby match against Randers. The club invited 10,000 fans to log in through Zoom to watch the match “together”, placing large video screens around the pitch to project streams of their faces at inhuman proportion, gawping lovingly at their favourite midfielder. In the centre of the stands, a five-byfive Zoom grid replaced the usual raked seating.

As with all Zoom calls, the chaos gods ruled. Each fan could choose the angle of their camera and backlighting, which inevitably meant that some were barely legible and looked more like anonymous witnesses giving testimony than die-hard fans lending their support. Getting up to make a cup of tea or taking a beer from the fridge left behind an empty screen, although presumably some level of VJ-ing was happening to prevent any less-than-desirable spectatorship. Pre-recorded crowd sound was piped in for the majority of the match, although the fans were unmuted when goals were scored. A game attempt, then, particularly when you consider that Zoom has some buggy features concerning unavoidable latency connection issues which affect any attempt at collective sound making. Have you

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ever tried singing Happy Birthday with more than two people to someone on Zoom?

Other issues emerge with this kind of strategy, not least that digital technologies have seen people develop a different relationship to spectatorship (don’t pretend that you haven’t spent more time looking at yourself on a video call than those you’re in the meeting with).

Deindividuation, for instance, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in large groups and which describes the way an individual can lose themselves in a crowd. In a football context, it’s what may make you feel able to shout your loudest for the striker to GET IT IN FOR GOD’S SAKE GET IT IN, despite normally being a shy and retiring type. In darker moments, it emboldens those with racist inclinations to feel incensed enough to express these thoughts and get away with it.

When our presence as fans is suddenly broadcast, will we become kinder, and anxiously aware of being watched? Or will a whole different pattern of behaviours emerge?

So far, most of football’s design interventions have been for the benefit of the crowd at home. But what about those on the pitch – don’t they deserve something specifically for them? Yamaha is currently in the process of developing Remote Cheerer, an app that would let fans chant remotely and specify exactly which section of the stadium they want their voices to appear from. Aside from representing a moderator’s nightmare, this technology may be hindered by the fact that the sound would be coming from many different rooms, rather than being generated in the single space of the stadium.

“If I’m shouting into a microphone in a room, it captures the audio dynamics of the room I’m in, so you trap that unique sound signature,” says Wesley Goatley, a sound artist and researcher who looks at the use of audio interactions in connected technology such as the Amazon Echo.

It is research that has led Goatley to explore anxieties around sound and our social and behavioural relations to it. According to him, the Remote Cheerer may trigger further alienation.

“The acoustic reverberation that’s played in the stadium itself would be different than if the voice was really there, so you’d have to normalise every voice for it to sound ‘normal’,” he says. “There’s

a lot of processing that would need to be done to get to the ‘normal’ we’d expect.”

Of course, there are other options to change the dynamic within a stadium. In exchange for a charity donation, German club Borussia Monchengladbach has offered its fans the opportunity to fill a seat in their Borussia-Park stadium with a cardboard cut-out of whomever they choose to represent them during matches.

This has meant that alongside cardboard human fans, there are now a few hundred human-sized cardboard dogs but, hey, who’s complaining. It’s certainly better than the offering from FC Seoul, whose management quickly regretted its decision to fill the stadium with two dozen life-size “real love dolls” emblazoned with adverts for a sex toy retailer – the club was slapped with a 100m won (£67,000) fine. FC Seoul, in their defence to league officials, claimed not to have known that these particular guests were sex toys.

Clubs seem to go to such extremes because a community can make or break a team. While not every club has the budget of a Premier League outfit, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t meaningfully engage with fans during the era of physical distancing. Cork City FC (CCFC), for instance, is a supporter-owned League of Ireland team – the kind of club that is worth paying attention to, because their community ownership model enables some of the game’s greatest progress. Alongside regular Zoom quizzes led by volunteers and supported by staff whose skillsets were diverted, CCFC discovered that one of their die-hard fans, Trevor Carey, had a treasure trove of historical material from the club’s past: hundreds of hours of taped matches that he’d driven up and down the country to collect. Using this archive, CCFC gave fans the opportunity to sign up to watch around four matches a month through Patreon, with proceeds going to support the club. At 7.45pm on their usual match day, CCFC fans instead watched highlights from the past, following along on Twitter with commentators from the club. The whole project was fan-instigated and fan-led, with CCFC facilitating and lending resources where they could. There’s giving in to nostalgia and then there’s doing something fun with fans who love the club. No fancy apps, no Zoom screens, no sex dolls.

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Football was one of the first pillars of entertainment to be brought back as lockdowns eased, with many players voicing concerns about it happening too soon. In his 17 May column for The Sunday Times, Derby captain Wayne Rooney wrote, “The concern is not so much for ourselves, like whether you might pick up an injury, but more about bringing coronavirus home and infecting those around us. People’s lives are at risk.” However, guidance soon changed as June came around and play swiftly resumed, albeit behind closed doors and with Covid compliance officers joining the coaching staffs. Nonetheless, it remains hard to imagine thousands of bodies congregating again, celebrating, hugging, and touching each other. There’s a whole other essay to be written about how stands will have to change, for instance. Their current design is akin to a sardine tin and changing that would be a mammoth task, requiring wide-reaching architectural reimagining.

So many of the design responses by clubs have centred on trying to instil a sense of what we’ll be able to return to when all of this is over.

But in trying to retain a sense of normalcy, an uncanny football dream state has been conjured – one that sounds, and sometimes even looks, like something we recognise, but which isn’t really the same thing at all.

The harsh reality that I, and perhaps many other fans, have not quite come to terms with is that football isn’t going to be the same – not for a long time yet. Design, as a discipline, as a philosophy (or whatever we’re calling it these days), wants so desperately to provide solutions, but to so many football represents a community, a coming-together, and a signal of everyday life humming along. Of course it’s a multimillion pound venture too, and it has severe exclusionary problems, but let’s not be a snob about it: football is something that means an awful lot to an awful lot of people because of how it brings them together. It’s going to be very hard to design for that without considering the voices of the many, who are used to being so very, very close together.

On Censorship Words Rianna Walcott Twitter, that beautiful cesspit: multifaceted, uplifting, degrading.

As a relatively young, discourse-based platform, Twitter’s charms lie in the brevity and ephemerality of its content; its ability to host millions of contentcreators who can interact with each other, or simply scream into a void. Unlike other platforms of its kind, Twitter encourages a network that is held together by common interests and communal identity. Hashtags and trending topics act as organising principles for conversation, and scrutiny moves quickly – the Twitter feed of today is not the feed of tomorrow.

In comparison, Facebook (the older social media network with a larger user base) is organised around a user’s central timeline – a chronology of personal achievements and life events, ordered by the images, events and relationships that build a person’s life. Discourse on Facebook typically occurs between networked individuals who have some form of connection offline as well as online – you are more likely to argue with an aunt, or an estranged school friend, than a stranger.

As with all social spaces, both platforms come with implicit and explicit social rules that order their operation. In contrast to a traditional publisher, however, governance of these spaces is not a matter of external law. Rather, it falls to the platforms themselves, for which we have Section 230 of the United States’s 1996 Communications Decency Act to thank. Section 230 allows online platforms to act as hosts for conversations without becoming liable for said content. It’s a move that frames content producers – i.e. users – as publishers in their own right, making them legally distinct from the platform and able (theoretically) to retain ownership over their intellectual property. It is, according to the nonprofit Electronic Frontier

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neutral. In September 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated this stance in a post on his platform, stating that “Trump says Facebook is against him, liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.” Meanwhile, Section 230 ensures that they retain immunity from the consequences of making user-generated content available, even when those consequences may have significant political implications. In 2018, for instance, it was revealed how the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook’s data to influence national elections through propaganda hosted on the site. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape,” Alexander Nix, the company’s CEO, was later secretly recorded boasting. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

While platforms such as Facebook and Twitter may attempt to adopt a politically neutral standpoint, there is nothing in the law that actually mandates this. Sites are not required to carry user-generated content: they aren’t legally obliged to host both sides of a political debate, nor are they required to or restricted from highlighting misinformation. In his Vox interview, Wyden confirmed that Section 230 is not about political neutrality, but rather “all about letting private companies make their own decisions to leave up some content and take other content down.”

This was intended to ensure that platforms appear liberal or conservative not from external input, “but through the marketplace, citizens making choices, people choosing to invest.

This is not about neutrality. It’s never been about the republisher.”

Political neutrality may not be legally required, but it is likely the most profitable avenue for social media platforms, allowing them to retain the broadest user base for data gathering and advertising – a model that Senator Elizabeth Warren has labelled a “disinformationfor-profit machine”. “Big tech companies cannot continue to hide behind free speech while profiting off of hate speech and disinformation

Foundation, “one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet”.

Section 230 allows the internet as we know it to exist, insofar as it lets websites host user-generated content without any of the legal implications faced by print publishers. In the case of criminal content, such as child pornography, Section 230 shields a website or app as long as it is unaware of crimes being committed on its platform. While platforms are legally obliged to report such content if discovered, they are not required to search it out. According to Section 230(c)(2), the act’s protection extends to all online providers that act in “good faith” to restrict access to “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable” content. It is the legal framework around which social media platforms have been designed – without it, they would be heavily restricted and censored, erring on the side of caution in avoiding liability. If every tweet opened Twitter up to the possibility of a libel lawsuit, you’d find Twitter censoring a lot of tweets.

Today, however, the freedom of social media platforms to govern their own spaces has become increasingly contentious, particularly given that the shape of the internet is vastly different now than it was 30 or so years ago.

Section 230 was instated to protect small start-ups from costly liability lawsuits – what Ron Wyden, one of the co-authors of the law, called a “sword and shield” in a 2019 interview with Vox. “[The] shield is for the little guys, so they don’t get killed in the crib,” said Wyden, “and the sword would give platforms the opportunity to take down things like opioid ads while providing protections for the good actors.” But the law did not anticipate global social media, nor its being dominated by a handful of monopolistic companies. These giants not only have unprecedented power over our media landscape, but are also authorised by Section 230 to operate almost entirely according to their own internal rules. The blanket protections that the law provides further entrenches their power by making them accountable to no-one but themselves.

The platforms seek to justify this status quo by maintaining that they are politically

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campaigns,” Warren told Vox in 2019, and her concerns over the current system are not atypical – users from both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly unsatisfied, with both rightleaning and left-wing users complaining that social media spaces exhibit bias towards their political opponents. Nevertheless, the platforms persist, with Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, telling Vice’s Motherboard that Twitter’s ‘fundamental mission’ is to “serve the public conversation”: “[In] order to really be able to do that, we need to permit as many people in the world as possible for engaging on a public platform, and it means that we need to be open to as many viewpoints as possible.”

The situation reached a head on 26 May 2020, when President Trump alleged, without evidence, that postal votes enable electoral corruption: “mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet as containing misinformation, displaying a link beneath the tweet that it highlighted with an exclamation mark: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots”. Clicking the link takes the user to a Twitter-curated page of fact-checking articles from CNN and the Washington Post, and a series of tweets from journalists debunking Trump’s claim. The choice to flag Trump’s tweet is in line with Twitter’s new “misleading information” policy, updated on 11 May this year, which states that flagging a tweet can “provide additional explanations or clarifications in situations where the risks of harm associated with a Tweet are less severe but where people may still be confused or misled by the content”. Notably, the tweet itself was not removed – it only had additional context added below it.

In a remarkably petty response to what he perceived as censorship, Trump threatened to repeal Section 230 with an executive order that would allow federal agents to challenge tech giants over their moderation standards. Trump followed this executive order with a tweet that made clear the personal nature of his feud with Twitter, and his belief that the platform unfairly targets conservative users. “Twitter is doing nothing about all of the lies & propaganda being put out

by China or the Radical Left Democrat Party,”

he wrote. “They have targeted Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States.

Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!”

Free speech laws, as they exist in the US and which govern American companies such as Facebook and Twitter, protect individuals’ rights to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information free from government censorship and retribution. Freedom of expression is not, however, the same as freedom from consequence and, crucially, Twitter is not the government.

The irony of the leader of the American government – with his overwhelming levels of visibility, power and privilege – decrying the curtailment of his freedom of speech is overwhelming. Freedom of speech does not give carte blanche to hate speech, or libel, or misinformation.

Concerns surrounding censorship and challenges to free speech have also come from liberal-leaning quarters, however. On 7 July, a now notorious open letter was posted online

by Harper’s, signed by 150 writers and academics, condemning an “intolerant climate” for free speech. The letter critiques the “restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society” as though those are equally horrifying ends of a binary; as though being dismissed on social media holds the same weight or destructive implications for a livelihood as being repressed by a government.

In its equation of disparate phenomena, the Harper’s letter claims that “censoriousness[…] [is] spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” The vague examples of censorship that the letter actually alludes to, however, dismiss the possibility of any consequences to (or valid criticism of) viewpoints, swallowing these up under the need to resist the nebulous threat of “cancel culture”. The letter suggests that it is “now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”, although no concrete examples of these transgressions are given – we are simply assured that the retribution is “hasty” and “disproportionate” to casual

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misdeeds such as “running controversial pieces”, making “clumsy mistakes”, or even just “quoting works of literature in class”.

This inflammatory framing of overblown punishments for innocuous behaviours is in itself manipulative and, again, comes with an irony – the signatories represent some of the world’s most prolific authors and academics, many of whom have long enjoyed privileged access to traditional publishing platforms. The tides of public opinion may be damaging to the career of the everyman, but their impact on the established elite is likely to be negligible. Trump continues to speak and enjoys a global audience whether he is factchecked or not. As does Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, one of the Harper’s signatories, who presumably felt compelled to sign the letter following the backlash she has experienced after repeatedly muddying our collective childhood memories with ill-informed, dangerous views about the transgender community, and who regretfully will not stop speaking – no matter how often her fans beg her to. There seems little self-awareness from these powerful figures campaigning against the restriction of their already bloated influence – if there are groups who suffer reduced visibility under censure, by platforms or the general public, it isn’t them.

The paradox stings.

The platforms themselves do, of course, play active roles in shaping and generating conversation, but this is largely thanks to their advertising-based algorithms and users’ personal networks shaping these spaces differently for each user – not over-zealous and politicised moderation policies. I, for instance, exist, work and play in Black Twitter, but my neighbour might only be fleetingly aware of the side of the platform that I live on. Regardless, Twitter and Facebook position themselves slightly differently when it comes to moderating speech, but their policies have a similar general impact, and both use interstitial warnings and the removal of posts as their main moderation tools. As the larger and wealthier company, Facebook invests more financially into moderation, but does not publish the detailed rules its moderators use to determine what to allow or delete. There is therefore limited transparency as to what is permissible on

Facebook, and a high chance of having your content removed without explanation, or made less visible to followers via a process of “shadowbanning” – a term used to refer to the obscuring of a user’s content without their knowledge.

In 2018, Facebook finally published a list of moderation guidelines to show something of how its moderators decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, intellectual property theft and hate speech from the site – part of what Zuckerberg termed Facebook’s effort “to develop a more democratic and independent system for determining Facebook’s Community Standards”.

These guidelines continue to change over time, as Facebook adapts to workarounds implemented by users to evade moderators, and also as the company works to improve poorly received policies that have left certain groups unprotected.

The notorious “protected categories” blunder, exposed in June 2017 by ProPublica, meant that attacks against protected categories – those based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease – were monitored, but collapsed when it came to “subsets” of protected categories. It was a lapse that saw “white men” considered a protected group, but which did not extend this moderation to “Black children” because “children” as a subset are not considered a protected category. An algorithm that doesn’t take into account the racialised hierarchies and systems of oppression that leave Black children significantly more vulnerable to attack than white men is worthless, and particularly distasteful in light of Facebook’s reliance on small armies of underpaid content moderators in the Global South.

The subsequent modification of the rules to resolve this issue was an encouraging sign.

Following the publication of the guidelines, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, told reporters that their public availability was a potential risk due to concerns that hate groups will be able to adapt workarounds to Facebook policy, but that “the benefits of being more open about what’s happening behind the scenes outweighs that.”

Bickert added that the category of “Black children – that would be protected. White men – that would

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also be protected. We consider it an attack if it’s against a person, but you can criticize an organization, a religion”. This reformulation of aspects of a problematic policy shows how critique can be levelled at platforms, and how the platforms can, in turn, go on to provide transparency and improved moderation.

In contrast, Twitter takes a more hands-off approach to content moderation.

On its ‘Safety and Security’ page, users are reminded that people are “allowed to post potentially inflammatory content, as long as they’re not violating the Twitter Rules”.

Twitter relies on both automated moderation and a global content moderation team, stating that it will “not screen content”, “remove potentially offensive content”, or “intervene in disputes between users”. Instead, users are encouraged to do their own work to screen their feeds by blocking and ignoring undesirable users, and reporting offensive Tweets for the attention of Twitter moderation to deal with. Rather than being removed, offensive or misleading tweets are placed behind interstitial warnings in the name of transparency. “There are times when we could simply disappear something. We don’t do that,” said Gadde in an interview with Motherboard in October 2019. “We downgrade things and we put them behind interstitials and we’re very clear when we’ve done that,” she went on to say, “and the reason for that is because our platform is meant to be transparent. We need people to trust that it operates in a certain way.”

This is patently false – some Tweets are “disappeared”, and justifications as to what remains visible but behind warnings and what is deleted are variable. In an earnings letter to shareholders published in October 2019, Twitter declared its commitment to “proactively reduce abuse on Twitter” by cracking down on abusive tweets, stating that more than 50 per cent of tweets identified as violating Twitter rules are now flagged and removed by automated moderation tools before they are reported by users. The issue, however, is the ongoing lack of transparency about what content is deleted, or placed behind warnings, or allowed to remain. Multiple users have complained about inconsistencies in Twitter’s moderation.

Most recently, on 2 October, Twitter told Motherboard that users are not allowed to openly hope for Trump’s death following the announcement that he had contracted Covid-19, and that tweets that do so “will have to be removed” with the corresponding accounts put into a “read only” mode. Twitter referred to an “abusive behavior” rule from April 2020, arguing that it would “not tolerate content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual or group of people”. This statement was received with incredulity and derision by many marginalised users, who are regular victims of death threats with no such action taken by Twitter. As the actor Mara Wilson tweeted: “Do you know how many people on here are constantly calling for genocide against Jews or Muslims or Black people or LGBTQ people”.

These inconsistencies surrounding what harmful content is removed, placed behind warnings, or simply ignored, challenges Twitter’s own vision of itself as a platform that is transparent with its moderation policy.

Twitter’s historical ambivalence to conflict on the site, and the desire to create a platform where all opinions (however offensive) can be shared, has led to an environment where hate speech flourishes, especially among white supremacists. Unlike Facebook, Twitter has not banned accounts related to the ideology – ideologues of white supremacy, such as Richard Spencer, have accounts – and has instead adopted a position of “researching” how white supremacists use the platform to see whether leaving their accounts online may be a necessary part of a deradicalisation process. In her Motherboard interview, Gadde said that Twitter believes “counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for deradicalization, and we’ve seen that happen on other platforms, anecdotally.” This decision, of course, comes at the expense of users of colour – the targets of white supremacists who have to share space with them at the cost of their own wellbeing.

For some users, the protections provided

by Facebook and Twitter are not encompassing enough, while for others the moderation makes

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them feel as though their content and ability to express ideas is being repressed. What ought to be incontestable, however, is that Facebook’s policy of colour-blindness, which defends protected characteristics equally – i.e. treating disparaging comments about white men with the same severity as those about Black children – operates outside of understandings of how racialised hierarchies affect groups differently in the offline world, and leaves some groups more vulnerable than others.

Platforms already have a hard time making sense of the differing needs and experiences of the demographics using their spaces, and algorithmic bias further complicates the issue. Although Twitter and Facebook have provided some insight into their moderation policies, tech companies are under no legal obligation to reveal how they moderate content. This makes it near-impossible for users to meaningfully critique and improve practices that adversely impact them. For example, many Instagram users are aware of how algorithms may limit the reach of their posts, but not how, or why. In August 2020, journalist Paula Akpan investigated the impacts of shadow-banning, and the consequences it has for minoritised users specifically. Shadow-banning affects content Instagram identifies as “borderline”, but not in direct violation of its community guidelines.

What qualifies as borderline is unclear, but in practice, Akpan found that minority users suffer shadow-banning disproportionately. Similarly, in October 2019 the digital newsletter Salty interviewed its userbase and found that of the 118 participants surveyed, “many of the respondents identified as LGBTQIA+, people of colour, plus sized, and sex workers or educators.” These users “experienced friction with the platform in some form, such [as] content taken down, disabled profiles or pages, and/or rejected advertisements.”

Fat users are more likely to have content that shows skin labelled as inappropriate nudity; Black bodies are flagged as sexually suggestive content more often than white ones; and, famously, men’s nipples are allowed to proliferate where women’s fear to tread. Akpan highlighted the racial bias that allows for some unfair practices to flourish: “despite attempting to make ‘neutral’ systems, programmers and technical designers do not exist

in a vacuum. Rather, they live and work in a society that has always understood the bodies of Black people through constructs established under colonialism, including the idea that Black people are morally lax and present themselves as sexually aggressive.”

In cases like this, where moderating practices and algorithmic biases are clearly discriminatory towards marginalised groups, colour-blind approaches to moderating social media spaces are patently inadequate. Were the algorithms and rules of moderation used

by Facebook and Twitter made visible to marginalised users, perhaps we would be able to do a better job of making the spaces safer for ourselves, rather than relying on the powerful to do it (badly) for us. Currently, the most vulnerable simply try to protect one another, as we have always done. Facebook’s closed groups and community pages provide spaces for connective networks to form around shared experience, and participate in community-based rules, practices and moderation which keep these groups safe. On Facebook, Black activist pages moderate language to evade wider surveillance by the platform, creatively avoiding talking directly about white people and white supremacy, for instance, by changing spellings slightly: “white” becomes “whyte”, or “yt”, or “w*hite”.

This self-moderation allows groups to avoid scrutiny, both from potential aggressors, and from platform moderation that still doesn’t accommodate for the nuances of hierarchical oppression.

Similarly, on Twitter, Black users are deliberately reducing their visibility, and thus their vulnerability to surveillance and hate speech, by utilising creative ways of speaking about race without using direct language.

Users are moving away from the hashtag as an organising principle of discussion, after relentless poaching of our ideas, language and cultural production. While Section 230 affirms that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” in practice Black content is rarely attributed to Black creators: tweets are still scraped without consent by

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journalists surveilling Black Twitter; trends led

by Black users are appropriated by brands without due credit; and everyone uses speech patterns derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) while denying its origins with Black people. Examples of these regularly dominate our media, where hashtags created and popularised by Black Twitter users become news fodder, as with #BlackLivesMatter, or even the popularisation of terms we use to describe our experiences like “misogynoir” – a word that describes the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism that Black women experience, but which is rarely attributed to its progenitor, the scholar Moya Bailey. As Rachelle Hampton notes for Pacific Standard, “The same formula usually follows: The hashtag will trend, media organizations will compile a list of tweets (typically without consulting the user), and publish a piece.” The lack of consent, or opportunity to benefit from our own experiences and creativity is the violence here – Section 230’s mandate on treating the user as publisher of their own content falls short of protecting Black users’ intellectual property.

In order to bypass the need for the hashtag and evade this surveillance, Black users are instead constructing culturally connected networks. Circles of influential, networked Black users can spark a discussion that spreads through their predominantly Black followers, or live-tweet television shows as a community so that topics trend at specific times. If you somehow miss a topic trending on Black Twitter, you probably have a private group chat of other Black users who can bring you up to speed. These dense, homophilic networks ensure that, whether a topic is hashtagged or not, it will invariably come to the attention of its intended audience, and has the added benefit of limiting discourse to its community, thereby reducing the possibility of surveillance. The inclination towards linguistic self-censorship, and careful pruning of personal networks allows marginalised users to experience the platform on their own terms and with their own curated audience: at 9pm in the summertime, my Twitter feed is dominated by Black Britons tweeting about Love Island. In February, we watch Love Is Blind as a family.

Useful for Some; Fatal for Others Words Georgia Bronte One medium apple: 81 (90, to be safe).

A cup of watermelon: 50. A bagel: 165, 170 when rounding up. A slice of Margherita pizza: 290, so it might as well be 300.

As a recovering anorexic, I don’t need charts or information tags to tell me the calorie content of most foods. They are branded onto my subconscious through years of obsessive food behaviours – and I wish they weren’t. I’m not alone in harbouring this kind of encyclopaedic knowledge of how much energy foods contain. An estimated 1.25 million people in the UK suffer from eating disorders, and that number rises year on year, with the lower end of the age range decreasing at the same time. That’s disturbing, especially considering that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder. Ten per cent of anorexics don’t make it through the illness. Most sufferers of restrictive eating disorders are acutely aware of calories.

A short while after the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson disappeared from the public eye having contracted Covid-19, he reemerged in July 2020 like a phoenix from the ashes with a new drive to Get Britain More Thin. “The urgency of tackling the obesity timebomb has been brought to the fore by evidence of its link to increased risk of Covid-19,” ran his Better Health campaign line, and so it was official: the man whom the nation’s right-wing press would have you believe could do nothing wrong supposedly got so ill because he was (selfadmittedly) “too fat”, and so Britain must get thin.

Fast. A verb as well as an adverb, sadly, and one of the keystones of the objectives set out for the nation. Useful for some; fatal for others.

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know the number of calories in things. Everyone already knows a Big Mac is packed with calories – McDonald’s has been putting it on the menus in its restaurants for years. Everyone still eats them.

No-one is surprised to find out that a KFC bargain bucket is not a low-calorie option. This is to say nothing of arguments advanced by fat activists, either, who have challenged the idea that being overweight is always necessarily equivalent to being unhealthy. “[‘Fat’] is a neutral word,” noted the activist and comedian Sofie Hagen in a 2019 article for The Guardian. “If you look it up, it doesn’t say good or bad.”

A 2017 study led by Philippa Hay, chair of mental health at Western Sydney University’s school of medicine, found that anorexia accounts for around 8 per cent of eating disorder cases – not an enormous proportion, admittedly, but when you consider that binge eating disorder accounts for 22 per cent, bulimia for 19 per cent, and other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED) 47 per cent, it is unsurprising that many sufferers are already concerned about how a blanket policy such as the proposed calorie counts will trigger them. Eating disorder charity Beat published a report in June explaining why such strategies are “concerning” and why it does not believe the approach will prove effective, while a number of Change.org petitions have also been launched by eating disorder sufferers.

At the risk of overgeneralising, the stereotypical image of an anorexic counting calories is pretty accurate much of the time for many sufferers. As such, to see calorie counts boldly shouting out from the pages of a menu would be the essence of the overused word “triggering”. It could prompt a relapse for a recovering sufferer, or push someone already on the precipice of a very serious illness over the edge. Many people with eating disorders develop an obsessional focus on numbers: weight, clothing size, calories, fat grams, and body measurements.

The constant struggle to control these numbers is unbelievably time-consuming, and something that must often be unlearned before the illness itself can be sent into remission. To be confronted with the numbers that I have tried so hard to put to one side would be a kick in the teeth for my recovery. Research supports my suspicions:

A series of initiatives were put forward in record time, with the aim of saving the NHS £100m by encouraging overweight people to lose an oddly specific 5lbs. Proposed means to help people lose those 5lbs included a ban on junk food advertising before the watershed (fair enough); the launch of a weight loss app (scores of them already exist, but not an entirely terrible idea); and mandatory calorie counts on menus of restaurants with more than 250 employees (an entirely terrible idea).

While there are holes to be picked in all of the proposals, it is the mandatory calorie count initiative that has the potential to be the most destructive, and the hardest to avoid. One of the unexpected takeaways from the months that the UK spent in lockdown was that society suddenly became aware of the things it had been taking for granted. Time spent with friends; bags of flour; the gym; restaurants. Restaurants, we realised, are a cornerstone of British leisure culture. Much missed over their months of hibernation, their place in society was made clear by the fact that when restrictions eased and the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme [whereby diners could claim a 50 per cent discount on food and soft drink bills from participating restaurants to incite a boost in the hospitality industry, ed.] was introduced, 100m meals were eaten in restaurants under the scheme during August. That’s a lot of meals, and a lot of menus. Were calorie counts to be made mandatory in restaurants, most people would be unable to avoid them and, as a piece of national policy governing information design, its effects would be considerable. For me and the 1.25 million people like me who are affected by eating disorders, this aggressive form of societal control would be at best unhelpful and, at worst, potentially fatal.

Of course, a national policy to reduce obesity is important. There is undoubtedly good intention behind the government’s proposals, but they fail to take into account not only the sensibilities of restrictive eating disorder sufferers, but also the general human condition.

Obesity and eating disorders are not separate issues: many obese people suffer from eating disorders, and in many cases obesity can be a symptom of eating disorder-related behaviours.

Also, people don’t get fat because they don’t

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a 2017 study by Ann Haynos and Christina Roberto found that people with anorexia nervosa or bulimia “ordered food with significantly fewer calories when the menu included a calorie count compared to when there was no calorie count stated, whereas people with binge eating disorder ordered food with significantly more calories when the information was provided”, which doesn’t sound encouraging for either camp.

When I reached out to other sufferers on Instagram about their views on calorie count on menus, the responses echoed my thinking. “I went through a period of my life suffering with an eating disorder and at the time I visited LA, which is actually the perfect place to have an eating disorder because so many restaurants would have the calories on the menu,” SJ, a recovered anorexia sufferer, told me. “Because of the extreme fear of numbers, I would even opt out of healthy things or just throw them back up because everything was a numbers game to me. I would be frightened to see those numbers on restaurants in the UK, because now I see eating out as a pleasurable experience and I know I would be counting in my head, adding everything up and fretting about numbers. I fear for those who have suffered longer and harder than me”.

SJ’s thoughts were almost identical to those of author Lydia Davies, who has written two books about her journey from being an anorexic on the brink of death, to a happy and healthy image of recovery. “After spending a near decade trying to re-train my brain to not associate food with numbers, by simply forcing myself not to look it up, I am now faced with the prospect of not having the choice. Eating out may go back to being a triggering, anxiety-inducing experience again,” she told me. “Part of recovery is learning to find pleasure in food again, and being able to enjoy the social aspect of sharing meals and eating out.

To reach this point takes great courage, strength, hard work and time. I think it’s a real shame and extremely disappointing that eating disorders have failed to be considered in this drastic and damaging decision. It says a lot about how seriously mental health is really being taken, especially given the significant rise in eating disorders and other mental health illnesses during the pandemic.”

Davies’s second point resonates with me intensely. I entered a new round of therapy just before lockdown began in the UK. Not only could I not get outside to exercise, but the hospital where I have treatment was converted to a Covid-19 ward, forcing me to adapt quickly from the safety of my daily hospital sessions and supervised meals to the uncertainty of one Zoom call per week with my therapist. As society slowly emerges from this unusual period, with our “lockdown bodies” and our newfound social anxieties, there could not be a worse time for calorie counts to appear in what we are learning to savour as our leisure time. We do not need more anxiety.

It isn’t astonishing that eating disorder sufferers would be affected by the introduction of calorie counts on menus, but since the policy’s announcement and the subsequent backlash there has been little information about how menus will have to be redesigned to accommodate the numbers on the pages. Many restaurants take pride in the minimalism of their menus, often reducing dish descriptions to single words for the sake of style. How would such carefully designed documents look with clumsy numbers printed on them? The government has championed a “traffic light” system for labelling on supermarket food items (with a hard-to-ignore red hue for unhealthy items, and calming green for the “safer” options), which if applied to menus would make calorific food figures even harder to avoid for those who might be triggered by them.

Recent studies have shown that displaying calorie counts on menus actually has little or no impact on the ordering behaviours of the general population. ‘Estimating the effect of calorie menu labeling on calories purchased in a large restaurant franchise in the southern United States’ is a 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal, which found that while calorie counts did initially lead to a 4 per cent reduction in calories per order, “this association diminished over time”. I can relate to that. It’s like when someone discovers that drinking a glass of wine actually has more calories than they thought. They minimise their intake for a few weeks before eventually realising that they didn’t drink wine for dietary purposes anyway, and soon return to exactly how they were before.

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“traffic light” system, which grades supermarket items by calories, sugars, fats and salts. Someone with an eating disorder can pick up an item and the first thing that will catch their eye is the colour (if the salt level is in red, it may fall within your calorie allowance, but still be unhealthy), as opposed to focusing instantly on the number of calories, which is usually written in a small font underneath its percentage of an adult’s daily recommended allowance. The differing font sizes on the front of supermarket packaging nutritional information labels make the unavoidable numbers less affronting to eating disorder sufferers than a single glaring figure would be, and may be something that restaurants could take into account when they redesign their menus.

Similarly, perhaps the numbers could be displayed on the reverse of the menus so that diners have the choice of engaging with the information or not.

“There are definitely people who could benefit from having the calorie figures available, but I see no reason that this can’t be something that is hidden on the flip of a menu or something that can be enquired about so that it doesn’t need to be right in the face as a huge potential trigger to anyone with an eating disorder,” says James, someone who is staunchly opposed to caloriecounting having lost a lot of weight through doing anything but. “Things could simply be labelled as high calorie (with details available on request), as a more sensible and caring alternative that would cater to to all people without creating unnecessary stress for eating disorder sufferers.”

As our post-Covid leisure culture gradually gets back on its feet and more restaurants open, more opportunities to socialise become available to me, and I relish the freedom that they bring.

I look at menus with the hope that all I will see in terms of numbers will be the price. I have eaten fish and chips in the park with friends, and, although I would have been able to work the calorie count out in my head, I didn’t; I ate a deep-dish pizza on a date, the calorie count of which would probably have totalled an entire day’s energy for me had I checked, yet I still went on to finish a full three meals that day.

I am increasingly aware that my NHS eating disorder therapy finishes in a matter of weeks,

I am aware that my ED-tainted lens means that I may not be the best-equipped person to speak on behalf of the general public.

As such, I asked someone who is (self-proclaimed) overweight how they feel about the new proposal.

“Restaurants are not the place to spread this message,” replied Andy. “It’s tokenistic. It would not affect my choices. I’m 42, male, fully aware that I’m already fat and unattractive, and I’m past caring. Calorie counts might have affected my choices when I was younger and cared more.

That’s 300 calories, that’s 900 calories; I’m still going to be fat tomorrow – who cares?”

One of the reasons why calorie counts on menus would have been unhelpful for Andy, he says, is that he would most likely eat “smaller choices in company, and then secretly eat alone”.

This has been a common finding in studies, with most calorie counters tending to make up for lost calories at restaurants when they get home – one of the main reasons why most dieticians and doctors warn against crash dieting, and why crash dieters often end up heavier than they were at the start of their calorie-counting “diet”. “I used to get the salad in public and grab a burger on the way home,” Andy told me. Even as an anorexic, I know the shame of eating alone late at night, having cut my calories during the day.

So, what might be more constructive?

There is an unavoidable health issue in the UK that pertains to food intake. Government statistics on obesity for 2020 have shown that the majority of adults are overweight or obese – a figure that stands at 67 per cent for men and 60 per cent for women, and there can be no doubt that the issue has to be ameliorated. Clearly it would be shortsighted to attempt to tackle it solely by placing energy counts on menus, rendering restaurants off-limits to an entire section of society. A better angle could be to address information surrounding nutrition as opposed to the cold, hard data of the calorie count. Let’s not forget, you could eat an avocado and have consumed many more calories than if you had eaten a packet of Doritos.

Supermarkets have been under pressure to help curb the UK’s expanding waistline for years, for instance, and one of the most effective methods that has been implemented into our daily routine – and subconscious – is the aforementioned

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after which I will have limited support from my eating support team unless I am re-referred to the service. The responsibility of preventing relapse falls solely on me, and the health strategies of the government. I am not alone in my position, and I feel the sensibilities of every sufferer in the same position as I am, even more so should the new policy proposals be implemented as they stand. As a society, we can’t afford to reduce one of our newly-permitted tastes of normal life to be reduced to a number.

On Behalf of the Invisible End-User Words Destiny Thomas In the spring of 2018, Los Angeles’s transport ecosystem was changed forever by the introduction of dockless Bird, Jump, and Lime e-scooters. It was as if we all woke up one morning to find brightly coloured mini-mobility machines piled up on every corner of the arts district; scattered across downtown; lining the beachfront corridors; and leaning up against the walls of the city’s high-end shopping districts.

Although these scooters had been aggressively introduced into the streetscape by tech startups, there was a surprising lack of instructions for how to access and use them. If you wanted to try them out, you needed both the time to learn the basics, and enough money to cover the near inevitable mistakes of parking incorrectly or accidentally

leaving the meter running. The scooters made certain people more visible (both on the street and in data), while making others invisible and adding to the complexity of their mobility.

A few weeks after e-scooters’ initial introduction in California (and within months across the rest of the United States), stories began to emerge (often leaked by current or ex-employees) about e-scooter companies placing restrictions on travel to and from certain neighbourhoods.

In response, the companies cited concerns about scooter theft, hacking, and vandalism. Meanwhile, people with disabilities and elderly citizens shared videos of e-scooters blocking passageways and whizzing past them at 15mph on sidewalks, causing them to lose their balance. Elsewhere, homeowner associations complained about the impact of e-scooters on the aesthetic quality of their blocks. Faced with this kind of backlash, the e-scooter industry went into limbo for several months. Once cities like Los Angeles had realised there was a need for regulations, however, the e-scooter industry was permitted to continue limited operations while policies and deployment structures were negotiated. The result was a season of nominally-regulated e-scooter rollouts, almost entirely focused on areas that already had plenty of alternatives for travel. Nobody, it seemed, could figure out who exactly e-scooters were for.

Determining who e-scooters serve is important. In the late 1990s, for instance, Black and Brown children were being taken off of streets and thrown in jails for riding homemade electric scooters on public roadways. Or consider the fact that over the last three years, Southeast Asian gig economy workers in New York have faced impoundment and imprisonment for using e-bikes to deliver goods faster – it was only during lockdown that City Hall brought the crackdown on e-bikes to an end, announcing “We will be suspending enforcement while restaurants are take-out and delivery only.” Because of mobility’s complex history in the United States, many people still struggle to understand it as a set of choices.

Destinations such as grocery stores, offices, favourite parks, and the homes of friends and family are static pinpoints on the maps which make up our individual networks of connectivity, and we rarely see ourselves within the context

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describe the polarity across experiences of people moving through cities today. Ellison writes about an unnamed man whose experience is rife with so much social erasure that the reader begins to wonder whether or not he is literally invisible.

At one point, the character describes the ways people fail to engage with him. “My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own,” he says. “I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled.

I am an invisible man.” His solution is to create a home underground where, ironically, he is able to see his own reflection and body for the first time.

While the initial rollout of e-scooters left companies, transportation agencies, and regulators negotiating over whom the scooters should serve, how revenues would be taxed, and which policies should accompany their deployment, a community of invisible end-users began to emerge: e-scooters moved underground. In Los Angeles, investigative reporting by Curbed reporters Alissa Walker and Jenna Chandler revealed that students had started to use the scooters to get to and from school: “The students say the scooters are fun, affordable, and efficient,” Walker and Chandler wrote. Gig economy workers looking to save money on the overheads associated with cars have also started opting for dockless scooters to make deliveries at shorter distances, while social service providers began advocating that the startups should subsidise the cost of micromobility for clients to improve access to quality of life destinations – locations that are essential to meeting basic needs, especially for marginalised people. The people and communities that e-scooter companies had failed to see had leveraged their invisibility, innovating on their own terms.

While the tech industry was busy trying to make e-scooters appealing to people who already had a wealth of mobility options, it had missed the opportunity to also create a mobility solution for the unseen and immobile among us.

An LAist article by Ryan Fonseca described this botched rollout of e-scooters as a “grand experiment” – a pilot season which would help

of the broader network – most of the time, we’re simply in survival mode. Movement is an ebb-andflow, a rhythm we begin to develop as adolescents: complex, yet predictable. Travel is the demanding prerequisite of every aspect of our lives, meaning that for those of us who don’t live in a realm of autonomy and excess, mobility is high-stakes.

This makes innovation a destabilising nemesis.

The idea of shifting modes – trying new vehicles, or changing the layout of infrastructure we’ve come to know – is unsettling. We already know where we need to go and how we will get there – life demands this level of foresight.

What this means is that scooters can’t simply be injected into city spaces under the assumption that people will immediately take to them. As such, when cities began to scrutinise e-scooters’ deployment, the tech industry and press stepped forward to give us the detailed pitch for e-scooters that had been bypassed in the initial rollout of the vehicles. A 2018 article by Levi Tillemann and Lassor Feasley in Wired, for instance, touted the scooters as efficient, easy to manufacture, nimble, and easy to store: “Micromobility can be just as transformational as solar power or electric vehicles – with impacts that will be felt much sooner”. A cursory analysis of this claim reveals a number of assumptions about e-scooters’ benefits, but the far more problematic selling point was the premise that scooters are catalysts for what Spin refers to as the “freedom to move.” “Spin partners with cities, campuses, community groups and businesses to provide dockless scooter-share services to get you where you need to go,” says the brand. “With Spin, you’re free to move.” Yet a 2018 analysis of e-scooter distribution in Washington D.C. by the mobility data company Coord undercuts this claim, finding, as summarised by journalist Eillie Anzilotti, an “excess availability [of e-scooters] in wealthier areas, that are already well-served, and a lack in lower-income neighborhoods”. It quickly became clear that e-scooters had fortified freedom of movement for some, while making potentially harmful assumptions about those among us who are invisible on the streets and in data.

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was first published in 1952, yet it continues to perfectly

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startups collect data that would inform who their target customer base should be and help them “figure out how the devices might fit into local governments’ wider vision for mobility”.

The dockless bicycle sharing model introduced in the mid-2010s had already demonstrated how unprepared transportation agencies were for new forms of mobility, and how long it would take to even begin negotiating operating agreements.

In the United States, such agreements typically enforce data privacy laws, ensure equitable access to the service, and limit the monopolisation of the service by individual companies. In Los Angeles, one characteristic of the bike share schemes that was replicated in the e-scooter rollout was the conscious omission of predominantly Black, Brown and low-income neighbourhoods. It is glaringly obvious that while the e-scooter startups were unsure and unbothered about who they’d target as end users, they were, at least initially, incredibly certain about who they didn’t want using their products.

In May 2020, Tom Holub of Bike Lab published a map of Los Angeles that showed how bike share coverage of the city sat in relation to its Black neighbourhoods. The visual was stark. “Bike share does not reach the Black areas of the city at all; in fact, there’s not a single bike share station located in a census tract that is even 25% Black[…]” wrote Holub. “This disparity is consistent in every U.S. city I’ve looked at; bike share gets located in whiter, more affluent areas, because there’s no money in selling services to poor people.” This, despite the fact that many mobility companies emphasise equity as part of their applications to cities to receive approval to operate. In 2019, e-scooter company Scoot Networks pledged to “serve more of San Francisco than other operators who will focus on the busiest and most lucrative neighborhoods”, eventually receiving approval from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which described the company as “a safe, equitable and accountable scooter share service.”

Once Scoot Networks began operating, however, it put no-parking restrictions in place in Tenderloin and Chinatown – two of the seven “communities of concern” that the company had promised to serve as part of its original application to the city.

Compounding the negative impacts of an investment strategy rooted in intentional erasure is the fact that e-scooters could actually serve as very good mobility solutions for low-income communities and neighbourhoods with limited existing transportation options. For communities who have experienced historic disinvestment and marginalisation, e-scooters provide timely intracommunity connectivity; they also improve access to transit, often eliminating an entire leg of route layovers. A 2019 pilot scheme in low-income neighbourhoods in Chicago revealed that there is a roughly one-month window of opportunity for obtaining buy-in and trust from communities that have traditionally been under-funded and unseen. This means that companies have to get things right early, and then maintain the level of service and access over a long period of time in order to establish a permanent relationship with these communities. According to a 2019 Baltimore e-scooter equity program, once that trust is built, e-scooters fit beautifully into the pre-existing nexus of travel established during our formative years. To test this hypothesis, the City of Baltimore conducted a study on “Equity Zones” – areas defined by the city as “historically underserved neighborhoods which have been subject to housing and transportation discrimination[...] result[ing] in limited access to private vehicles and reliance on first/last mile connections to transit.” What Baltimore officials found was that even in the midst of a global pandemic, when all micromobility ridership was trending downward, “rides originating from Equity Zones have declined less than overall rides.” The study added that “by improving multi-modal infrastructure, you’re creating space for vulnerable roadway users, which can then lead to bike and scooter usage taking off in those areas.”

In late-2018, when municipal governments and e-scooter startups realised that end-users were self-innovating and investing in things like access for food delivery workers, not all service providers responded with access programmes.

Instead, companies such as Bird introduced a series of reactive regulations, and enforcement efforts followed. These responses including bans on the use of scooters on sidewalks and outright

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The jury is still out on whether or not it’s too late for the tech companies to get it right.

But in places such as the UK, whose Department of Transport is currently trialling e-scooter rental schemes, there are several steps that can be taken to improve the rollout. Existing methods for analysing transit ridership and latent travel demand, for instance, miss the mark on micro-analysis. The longstanding issue with transportation planning is that it is based on methods and analyses that start and end at blanket assumptions regarding mobility behaviours. E-scooter strategies should include a comprehensive assessment of who is missing from this current discourse, as well as mapping exercises and datasets pertaining to mobility options. Think about the hyper-criminalisation and vigilantism Black people are faced with in the built environment and how, without policy-based protections, e-scooter deployment will exacerbate those dangers. Consider the possibility of e-scooters evolving into other e-vehicles that facilitate assisted mobility needs for people who would otherwise not have access to motorised travel (wheelchairs, seated scooters, cargo carriers, etc.). Imagine the reduction in bus reliance and the savings school districts would make if they could incorporate an e-scooter mode into their pickup and drop-off protocol. Pricing models and parking options ought to be structured in ways that enable users to have multiple stops along one trip – a common travel pattern for low-income users. Find the invisible among us, those beneath the maps, and plan for them.

In areas experiencing rapid gentrification, transformative transportation investments and amenities could spur housing speculation and displacement in vulnerable neighbourhoods – this may be why e-scooter companies initially focused deployment in areas where displacement and homelessness are less common. In these areas, communities would benefit from a cooperative model (or a low-cost franchise option) which could afford an extra layer of protection against speculation and predatory redevelopment in low-income communities. As with most investments in underserved communities, the deployment model for this business line needs policies that ensure protections and

bans on e-scooters in cities such as New York.

What was once a whimsical and unrestricted travel option now became a criminalising surveillance mechanism in low-income communities and a capitalistic travel demand dataset for the tech industry. In Los Angeles, Lime and Bird can store user data for an indeterminate amount of time, while Councilman Paul Koretz has recommended pulling permits for e-scooter companies refusing to cooperate in criminal investigations. The desire to place restrictions on where users go and how they anchor the use of scooters to their productivity in the gig economy, coupled with inequitable enforcement, has everything to do with who the end user is. It was only when tech companies were on the chopping block and facing the possibility of having to pull e-scooters out of commission that they began to argue that e-scooters were essential to first and last-mile connectivity and met the needs of marginalised communities – which they do, but why wasn’t this the basis of the rollout to begin with?

Today, deployment maps in major US cities still indicate a reluctance to actually meet the needs of underserved communities through e-scooters. What this effectively means is that, under the guise of equity, e-scooter companies only deem Black and Brown people, and people in low-income neighbourhoods, to be a viable source of labour for maintaining, re-deploying, and charging e-scooters. These jobs are structured as gig-economy employment, which defines workers as independent contractors. A 2018 study

by Edison Research found that 55 per cent of Black gig economy workers said that such work provided their primary source of income. “Part of the idea behind the independent contractor/employee distinction is that independent contractors can take care of themselves in the market[…],” explained Charlotte Garden, an associate law professor at the University of Seattle when asked in 2019 by Vice about the e-scooter industry’s involvement with the gig economy. “But the persistence of objectively terrible labor conditions inside and outside the platform economy shows how that principle doesn’t always hold; sometimes people are dependent on the companies they work for and relatively powerless to either demand better or walk away.”

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sustainability. The rollout of electric scooters in the United States revealed the likelihood that end-users – those for whom scooters fill a gap – will be long-term partners and essential to the sustainability of the service.

We don’t actually live in two separate worlds. What is above ground is all we have and, more often than not, it prioritises those who are most visible and most resourced. This industry and the municipalities that regulate it have punished the very creativity that is now being sold to the people who’ve been punished.

E-scooters are an evolution in connectivity that has the potential to improve a lot of lives – if we engage the unseen. As Ralph Ellison wrote: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Essays

Once More, With Empathy A roundtable about empathy as a tool for addressing inequalities and failures within design culture.

Panellists Georgina Johnson, Mariana Pestana and Sumitra Upham

The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020.

Present on the call were Georgina Johnson, the founder and editor of new anthology The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance, which traces how the creation of new, empathetic values within the design industries might address the field’s failings around sustainability and move towards more regenerative practices and modes of thought; Mariana Pestana, curator of the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial, which opens in October 2020 and is themed “Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one”; and Sumitra Upham, curator of programmes for the Istanbul Design Biennial, as well as a senior curator at the Design Museum. She is currently leading the 2020 Designers in Residence programme, the theme of which is “Care”.

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Georgina Johnson I’ve

come to a junction in the road where I’m re-imagining professionalism and trying to undo a rhythm in myself. I’m undoing many ideologies that have been indoctrinated subconsciously – through education, media and broader culture – about how we have to continuously produce. I think society has anti-human ideas around time: ideas around what

“I had to say ‘I want to write how I talk’. There needs to be space for that. Using your own voice cannot be deemed ‘unprofessional’.”

Images courtesy of Georgina Johnson and The Slow Grind; and the Istanbul Design Biennial.

—Georgina Johnson

we should be doing with our time and what our output should be. So right now I am undergoing an empathetic process where I am giving myself more time, and where I accept that everything isn’t going to be done exactly how I picture it. I’m embracing the idea of things evolving on their own. I was coming to this awakening a few years ago when I started on the project that has now become The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance. It may be the first intersectional creative environmentalist text – one that considers and proposes paths towards a more symbiotic and reparative relationship with human and non-human communities, which have been extracted from to the point of decline and systematic exhaustion. It’s addressing questions of creative, social and environmental regeneration in response to ideas around sustainability. It’s questioning the hyperacceleration of society and how that doesn’t give us a moment to pause and think about whether the modes in which we’re living, or the structures we’re a part of, are conducive to having a balanced life and positive mental wellbeing, and how those connect to societal injustice, inequality and inequity.

It’s fertile ground for an intersectional education – centring on themes of empathy, race and postcolonialism, climate justice, mental health, material culture, and slow fashion – to encourage a deep unlearning.

Sumitra Upham I

had the honour of writing the foreword for The Slow Grind and I think that what your book allowed for was the time and space to properly reflect on some of these issues in a more concentrated way than life ordinarily allows.

Georgina A lot of people who hadn’t written long-form before, or hadn’t written in that style, attempted it for the first time with The Slow Grind. It was interesting to see that it became an active, energetic space that could accommodate completely different tones and approaches. I felt that it became quite a democratic process, in that it met people where they were and encouraged them to explore different ways of working with texts and exploring their ideas through writing.

It encouraged me to do the same, because I hadn’t written an essay in a really long time and was quite conscious of style, but I had to lay those things down and say “I want to write how I talk.” There needs to be space for that – using your own voice cannot be deemed “unprofessional”.

Mariana Pestana Allowing yourself to be true to yourself in the things that you do professionally is so brave, but I find it incredibly difficult to actually do. When I did my PhD, my supervisor was Jane Rendell and she wrote this book about situated writing called Site-Writing. Jane really encouraged me to develop a certain truth in the way I wrote and I definitely became much more conscious of making an effort towards not being what I think of as “professional”.

She helped me become more comfortable with not just following a norm – that I perceived as the way that things should be done. But in hearing you, Georgina, speak about empathy and its connection to time, the way that I have been thinking about it is more in terms of scale, at least in my curatorial practice. It’s become about proposing an understanding of design as being concerned, not just with a primary function or primary client, but with the many entities that are impacted by the creation of any design. That’s what I mean by scale – thinking from the very large scale of landscapes impacted by extraction due to the production of a design, for example, down to the very tiny scale of the microbial or chemical reactions that happen within a system of production and consumption. By having that consideration, we could develop a culture of deeper attachment towards the things that surround us.

Sumitra For me, curation has always been something that’s enabling, nurturing and supportive. I came out of a school of thought that looked at curation

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Above: The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to

Creative Balance, an anthology edited by Georgina Johnson.

Below: Mush Rooms by Bureau (Daniel Zamarbide) with Walter el Nagar and Filipe Felizardo, part of the Istanbul Design Biennial.

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in relation to education, and in terms of creating spaces for encounter, participation and open-ended production. Empathy is something that I hadn’t explicitly acknowledged in my practice, although it has been inherent in the way in which I have collaborated with people in various different forms and at various different scales. When I met Mariana and she invited me to work on the Istanbul Design Biennial, it was an opportunity to think about empathy as a form of design, which was something I hadn’t done before. With the pandemic and various lockdowns, it’s been a challenging time to curate a biennial. We’ve had to radically rethink not only the programme or model of the format, but also question what purpose a biennial can serve in this current landscape. The biennial is inherently, or has historically been considered, exhausting, wasteful and extractive. These are all issues that we were aware of from the outset, and which we were determined neither to speak to, nor make visible in our biennial.

Mariana What became really interesting for us on the biennial, and maybe this was also a consequence of the pandemic, was that it was an invitation for us to think critically about our role as curators. Our process became very slow-paced, at least in the way that it’s going to be experienced by the public. It’s not going to be a spectacular set of exhibitions that are all open at once – it’s going to be a slow burn of events.

This has allowed us, or forced us, to give time to the projects in a different way. I’m not sure all designers would agree with this, because we still have deadlines to meet, but I think that this period has demanded a lot of reflection. More broadly, I think that people have become more tolerant of delays since the start of the pandemic – wellbeing has been an important part of the design process.

Georgina What I’m gaining from what you’re saying is that empathy is an alternative mode of preservation.

It helps us to engage in ways that we might not have considered before. It’s about engaging intimately, and with transparency, with the world around us, making us accountable. Through that accountability, we can come to have more embedded relationships, not just with other humans, but microorganisms too.

How we affect those things, how we’re complicit in their creation and degradation, is a powerful example of how empathy can be a useful tool in regards to sustainability and repair of ourselves, others, and the land and its inhabitants. In The Slow Grind,

for example, I’ve written about how the fashion industry has a huge facade of accessibility and openness, when actually it’s just about commodifying bodies and exhausting culture, labour and resources at all levels. Through that commodification, bodies become dispensable. “I’ll find another person to do the job and they’ll do it for cheaper, or I won’t pay that person,” and whatever else. That body is something that we have to care about. It’s social and psychological because it affects selfhood, and how that is conceived and acted out in the person our culture is commodifying.

There’s a cyclical subconscious response to the pervasiveness of the socio-industrial paradigm.

Sumitra Transparency is key in terms of being a tangible and practical tool. We’re all in this together, particularly

“People have become more tolerant of delays since the start of the pandemic – wellbeing has been an important part of the design process.”

—Mariana Pestana

during the pandemic, and having this personable approach – which is vital anyway – has certainly helped us establish closer relationships with the practitioners that we’ve been working with on the biennial. One of the takeaways for me from this period is that less is more. That’s something I learned from you, Georgina, when we discussed slowing down and not biting off more than you can chew. There is so much value in focusing and spending time with a subject, rather than trying to cram as much as possible into one day. The biennial is reflective of that insofar as we don’t have 500 artists, we’ve got 40 or 50. It’s a small-scale ecosystem and so we’re able to really have meaningful relationships with these people.

Mariana Especially with Covid, it has shown us that the global industrial model has fragilities and we can actually live without it. All of a sudden we can only observe a piece of the world that is very, very close

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to us, and I’ve seen people becoming more resilient.

Where I live in Portugal, many abandoned plots have now been turned into allotments, for example. While I’m fully aware that it might be naive to believe that there’s another way to the current system, I suspect that there is some level of change operating. My hope is that the relationship we have developed to our local landscape is something that will continue post-Covid.

Georgina But I also feel as though people are more aware that, actually, it’s not the pandemic that has made our lives precarious – it’s an unsustainable system.

If we are talking about consumption and waste – water wastage or food wastage or any of those things these are directly linked to our ideals around disposability and ownership – that all stems from a custom of appropriation and dominance that embeds unrealistic limits in society’s consciousness. We think the land should serve us because we “own” it, when actually we need a “serve each other” mentality.

So now that our awareness is switched on, what are we going to do about it? We need a culture of care because if we can move into that mode, there’s a lot of potential. People will stop being defensive and centring themselves, and start thinking about the conditions they’re in, what the language is promoting, what they’re consuming, and how all of that creates an image that keeps our narrative focus on the surface.

But while I feel like we have had this moment of pause and there has been a lot of thinking, I also look around me and sometimes feel like these conversations are happening in an enclave – is there really a mass

level? Considering these possibilities is exciting; manifesting them beyond conversation, even more so.

Sumitra I’ve noticed a shift. People are scared and maybe they should be. It’s a good opportunity to build on that. People seem to be listening in ways that they weren’t previously, but only time will tell. Now is the time to push things through, to shout and be heard, but we need to continue to do that in order to build momentum and to ensure that these conversations progress. In my own sphere, there’s a lot that I’ve learned from working through the biennial that I think is transferrable and which I hope to continue moving forward. I think it goes back to what we’ve been discussing – slowness, building closer relationships, transparency, moments of intimacy. These are the tangible tools that many of us have taken notice of in this period and will now take on with us.

Mariana This time has also opened up a state of exception – the organisations that I’m working with are more open to other ideas about how things can be done. Museums and cultural organisations are generally very risk-averse because there’s a lot at stake in terms of visitor numbers and success in other measurable forms. But now, the risk is already immense, so all of those measuring devices won’t work. That opens up a space where everything is already lost, leaving the potential for a lot more freedom. That’s certainly how I’ve felt. In the context of the biennial, it is all about generating encounters between audiences, the context, and the content.

For example, one section, ‘New Civic Rituals’, is a series of interventions around Istanbul where we’ve tried to establish a “host”, such that there is a community receiving the work. This figure of the host has become quite important in ensuring that the works don’t just get parachuted into the city, but are cared for by an elected group of people.

The way we did that was to create a Young Curators Group – three curators based in Istanbul, who are our eyes and ears there. They were the ones who made the links with the local context.

Georgina Empathy on that level would be possible if cultural institutions place their power in hands other than the ones that currently hold it. It’s the responsibility of institutions to decentralise themselves and invert the centre completely, because I don’t believe that authority should stay in the hands of the same historic institutions. Now is the perfect time to start looking at regenerating networks by putting

“Slowness, building closer relationships, transparency, moments of intimacy. These are the tangible tools we have taken notice of during this period.”

—Sumitra Upham

movement of people concentrating on making this difference? Or is it only people who are already in a position to be a part of these types of conversations?

The question remains, how can we engage on a macro 56

Microbial Fruits of Istanbul by Orkan Telhan and Elii (above), and Hammam by Jawa El Khash (below), both part of the Istanbul Design Biennial.

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economic and social power in the hands of people who wouldn’t have previously had it. Many of these organisations need to become more aware of the space that they take up and how they can think about economics in a way that is symbiotic with the needs of a social landscape that is, at present, really imbalanced. The culture that we’re a part of as curators, thinkers and makers has a weird linearity that is about constant extraction. I want to challenge organisations, institutions, and brands to think about and commit to longer relationships and to create frameworks that bleed into one another.

That needs to be merged with the personal, because a lot of socioeconomic needs are very, very personal.

What keeps people out of the industry in the first place is that they don’t have the means to take space actively. For me, that’s empathetic in itself because it’s thinking about the tone of the industry and asking people to step outside of it and say that they want to do more. I’m trying to explain that this is a long game thing. Rather than striving to be “in the room”, I’m focusing on building the room and affecting the landscape of this industry, upheaving our ideas around “professionalism”, working culture, and creating sustainability. I am looking to make that tangible by reimagining working culture and industry responses to design, but also to culture and communities more widely. Over the last few months, companies have come to the forefront, for example, by posting messages in response to Black Lives Matter on Instagram. Now the challenge is to actually stand for those words.

It takes a while to build relationships and you have to move at the speed of trust. It takes a while for these things to happen and mobilise, because people have to feel as though they’re in safe hands. Here, I’m speaking from the point of view of people of colour and, especially, Black people.

Sumitra This period has really made me think about language in a different way and the harm that it can cause. I’m particularly thinking about language in relation to the Black Lives Matter protests. In order for us to practice, perform, and embed empathy in different areas of society, language had to play a huge part. Language changes experiences and it creates experiences. Maybe there is, or could be, a common language that is empathetic and encouraging and generous. That is the type of tone or linguistic method that we need to adopt in order to empower, relate and connect in ways that we haven’t done previously.

Georgina Relatability,

the practise of empathy and the tone of connectivity, is dependent on your ability to not solely listen, but also hear and – dependent on the dynamics at play – remove yourself from the framing of a narrative. If you are white or non-Black, and in an institution or in the media, then you are in a power position that has the potential to concentrate or dissolve the idea of the Other as it pertains to Blackness. If you are considered Other, then there are inherently different dynamics, histories and lived

“Rather than striving to be ‘in the room’, I’m focusing on building the room and affecting the landscape of the industry.”

—Georgina Johnson

experiences which can allow for more flexibility in language that are more likely to be representative and responsive. Unfortunately people who speak differently are still marginalised, even in the context of design. They never have the same foundation or platform, because legitimisation around language is still weighed down by proximity to whiteness and prefaced by where a person comes from, or who they are. I have felt, especially in my practice, that this has sometimes reduced or Othered me further – “This Black designer”. Yes, I’m Black and I’m speaking about Blackness, but why do you subtitle “designer” with “Black” or “Brown” or whatever else? It’s a double-edged sword because there’s power in using language to promote visibility, but we have to be more aware of the power dynamics.

Sumitra We need to create room for cross-cultural nuances, colloquialisms, slang and other ways of speaking and being. Language is the entry point to these different cultures and ways of being. Until we treat those nuances and complexities behind colloquialisms in the way we do the Oxford English Dictionary, we’re never going to get anywhere. E N D This roundtable has been edited for length.

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Situating Blackness A roundtable about Blackness in the design industry and discussion of the ways in which the term collates disparate identities.

Moderator Mitzi Okou Panellists Kaia Charles, Natsai Audrey Chieza, Dian Holton and Jess Kilubukila

The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020, and developed and moderated by Mitzi Okou, an interaction and visual designer who founded Where are the Black Designers?, a platform that supports and connects Black designers. Present on the call were Kaia Charles, cultural projects manager at Greenwich Peninsula and NOW Gallery, who has previously co-chaired the V&A’s African Caribbean steering group; Natsai Audrey Chieza, the founder and CEO of Faber Futures, a multidisciplinary design studio whose work is focused on the intersections between nature, technology, and society; Dian Holton, the senior deputy art director of AARP (a non-profit working with America’s over-50 population) and who has also worked across publishing, marketing, branding, retail display and styling; and Jess Kilubukila, the founder of design brand Kilubukila, which works with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s design and craft traditions, and which applies the panAfrican language Mandombe to traditional Kuba textiles.

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Mitzi Okou The subject that I want to talk about is

changed. I’ve spent my adult life in the UK, trying to find a way to live in a place that is so intertwined with my place of birth. When we arrived, I enrolled in a grammar school in the South East before making my way to the University of Edinburgh to study architecture. I completed Part 1, then shifted direction to enrol on the MA Textile Futures [now Material Futures] at Central Saint Martins. This is where my interests at the intersection of technology and design and nature were developed and nurtured.

Since then, and in founding my design agency Faber Futures in 2018, I have been working as a designer in science and technology, trying to shape how the confluence of those worlds can bring about more equitable and just human and planetary futures.

Jess Kilubukila I’m a French-Congolese designer. I spent my childhood between France and the Congo, before being based fully in France for my teenage years.

I studied a little bit in the US, as well as in Paris and the UK, before working in institutional finance for the Bank of Africa and Standard Bank. That didn’t give me much energy, so I went into the creative space, where I have since worked with textile design and a bit with linguistics as well. My design practice is a lot about this idea of self-construction. I feel that my Black identity is multilayered – Congolese, French, a bit of London, and a bit Black American when I’m in the US, because that’s how I am looked at there.

And I just moved back to Kinshasa three days ago.

Dian Holton I live in Washington, D.C. but my father was in the military so that took me to a lot of different countries growing up, where I learned how to adapt.

I identify as Black American and I attended Florida A&M, an HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities, ed.] where my field of study was design.

I have mainly worked in media – so newspapers, magazines, and publications – but I currently work for the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons], which is the largest nonprofit in the United States with 38 million members.

Mitzi Even those introductions show some of the diversity that I feel gets lost within how Blackness is portrayed in the media. I’d be interested in hearing about how your upbringing and how you identify influences your design. It’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. I have just gotten comfortable with this limbo of having Ivorian parents but having been born in the US – but I’m still exploring how to bring my narrative into design.

the diaspora and Blackness as a monolith within design. We’re in a time that feels like an uprising or a renaissance, so on top of talking about racial injustice in design, there is an opportunity to go deeper, because I’ve seen very little discussion around this issue. I want to start off by introducing ourselves in terms of what we do within design, but also how we identify. So, for example, I’m an interaction visual designer and I identify as Ivorian-American. Both of my parents are from the Ivory Coast, so my experience of growing up in America is interesting because I find myself in this limbo of relating to people, especially Black people, through pop culture, but then also relating to Ivorian culture through what my parents have told me.

Kaia Charles I’m from the Caribbean, where I was born in Dominica. My parents are from Antigua and Dominica, and I strongly identify as Caribbean. I’ve now lived in London for about 19 years, but before that I have also lived in South Africa and Mozambique, and I’ve spent a bit of time in Nigeria too. I’m a curator, as well as managing and commissioning cultural projects for Greenwich Peninsula, which is an up-and-coming neighbourhood in southeast London, where we’ve done a variety of projects spanning design, fashion, and photography.

Natsai Audrey Chieza I was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, moving to the United Kingdom with my family when I was 17-years-old. I now identify as British-Zimbabwean and it’s very deliberate that it’s that way around – “British-Zimbabwean”.

It’s a decision to move forwards and live in the now.

A lot of people in the diaspora hold back, dreaming of returning home one day, never quite developing a mindset that enables firm roots in the now. Life that way can be transitory, experienced as a kind of haunting. I was born in the 1980s following independence, and am what my parents referred to as a “born-free”. I was part of the generation who was supposed to inherit new freedoms and opportunities after a bloody liberation struggle against British colonial rule. For a while it looked like that: though full of contradictions, I had a beautiful childhood and my parent’s generation seemed to thrive. But then in the late 1990s, the economy collapsed following IMF restructuring and international sanctions in response to the land redistribution programme implemented by the Zimbabwean government. Our worlds

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“I want to talk about the diaspora and Blackness as a monolith within design. We’re in a time that feels like an uprising.”

—Mitzi Okou

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“The idea is to co-design who we are and own it. Let’s not let someone else, whether white or Black, tell us who we are.”

—Jess Kilubukila

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Dian Because of my family background in the military,

I moved around a lot, which made me very open to everything. I can honestly say that I didn’t feel like I experienced racism growing up because I was behind the shield of a soldier. Everywhere we went we were either on base, or else affiliated with the base. If people were racist, they weren’t blatant about it or I was just oblivious to it – it wasn’t an ongoing issue in our household or in the communities we lived in. My parents were very open about things – we had the history books, they collected Black art – so I was surrounded by Blackness, even if we weren’t constantly speaking about it. But my first real experience with being Black, Black American, was at Florida A&M. It was very much a culture shock for me, because although I had been a minority everywhere I went, I had never felt like that. Then, at college, I was in a majority Black space, surrounded by strong identities.

It was an eye-opener for me. I had known I was a Black American, but the sense of identity and realisation of how people viewed me in the US didn’t come to a head until I got to college.

Mitzi That’s a perspective I usually only hear from foreigners, who say that they didn’t feel Black until they went to America. To hear a Black American say that they didn’t feel Black until college is interesting.

Jess In terms of building my identity, I was very conscious of being French when I was in France, but people viewed me as an African. You know the type of question: “Oh you’re French, but where are you really from?” And when I was spending my summers in the Congo, people always saw me as one of those Africans from Europe. It wasn’t until I left France for London that I realised that I was a person, as opposed to an African or a French guy.

In terms of my practice, because I have a foot in a lot of continents, I tend to utilise a lot of communitybased design. The idea is to co-design who we are and own it. Let’s not let someone, whether white or Black, tell us who we are, but let’s show the world the narrative of who we are and construct things in that way. So I’m trying to answer this question and also mix traditional practice and craft with what we would call “design” in the West – although really both are fields of design. In a nutshell, that’s how I’m situating my Blackness in my work.

Kaia It’s really at the core of how I approach curatorial projects. I constantly refer back to the material culture of the Caribbean, which is everywhere in my daily life.

I’ve absorbed it. Houses were curated spaces with objects that had specific significances; we had amazing colours and were not afraid to express identity through colour, which definitely applies to a lot of the public spaces that I’ve since commissioned projects for.

I tend to commission artists who are not afraid of pattern or colour, and I think that comes from my upbringing. I am also heavily influenced by the fact that my parents’ generation really explored the idea of the radical architectural self-build. We have very difficult topography in the Caribbean, and a lot of people built really inventive structures that explored the natural environment and how that then relates to the built environment. These were often built in stages because people couldn’t necessarily afford to build a whole compound in one go, but that process of seeing how houses are built stage to stage was quite influential for me.

Natsai I think Kaia just answered the question for me. It’s not really something that I dwell on too much, but I studied architecture originally and I think that connected and resonated with my parents because of the self-build – everyone builds their own house.

So there was a sense growing up that architecture was a real thing, although I can’t say that there is an inherent Blackness that lives in my work. I grew up in a Black-majority country where all of the power is held by the white minority – which is evident based on who is running the institutions, and based on what an education for an African girl looks like – as well as being surrounded by a consensus that Black people could achieve anything they wanted to achieve because they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were business people. I really struggled to connect those two realities in a way that made sense. I grew up in an incredibly racist country where you were taught an alien, British curriculum by people who did not want you there. People who were allowing you to be there, but putting brakes along the way. From a very early age, I developed a very clear sense of justice.

When you are living in a country that is supposed to be yours, when you have ancestry there, but everything that you are being taught is to deny you that ancestry, to deny you that language, then you form a sense of self that perhaps recognises that all is not well, and that there are a lot of things in this life which you have to fight for, but which don’t have to define you. So there’s a little bit of a contradiction going on in the sense that I am not somebody who navigated the world seeing

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my Blackness as being foremost for me. When I moved to the United Kingdom for university, there was a toxic mix of overt racism from the student body, covert racism from the professors, and classism. You’re being Othered in lots of different ways, by different people and institutions, but I think there’s something very particular to being Zimbabwean and how we were colonised that means we have been conditioned to just get on with it – to do whatever you want and to deal with what comes your way. That means that my practice has not been something that has developed around trying to build an identity of Blackness as it exists in other people’s imaginations.

My sense of Blackness is that I’m a person who has ideas and that should be enough.

Mitzi I was going to ask about centring Blackness, with an emphasis on the fact that Blackness is very diverse. Blackness is not just one thing and different types of Blackness have different types of needs, so I was curious as to what centring Blackness means to you?

Natsai Yeah, how do you centre Blackness? As you say, there’s a continuum to this. It’s not one thing – its multiple things, multiple realities all at the same time in terms of what the Black experience is. My work is primarily concerned with how we build equitable technological and material futures, so the question of who gets to decide how we build these technologies and who benefits from that is always at the front of my mind. The reason why I care so deeply about that is because I know the Global South is not part of the conversation in any way. But I’ve really struggled with being somebody in the diaspora, speaking on behalf of people who are at home, because that is actually a colonising force in itself. I decided a long time ago that I was going to live here in the UK and I decided to stop dreaming about going back at this time in my life.

I was going to do the work here, with the conditions here, but with this constant awareness that there are always disparities in terms of who has access to knowledge systems, to networks, to education.

That isn’t just a racial disparity. It’s about people who might be excluded because they’re deemed to be disabled. It’s about people who are excluded on economic terms because we live in a classist society.

It’s about language and who that excludes, because we might be talking about a scientific concept that a designer does not understand. At all of those levels, I have this sense of asking how we build something

that is for all of us. It is about dealing with what’s in front of us and understanding what those layers and those barriers to it actually are. On a very practical level, in some of the work that we’re developing with partners, that is about asking basic questions. If you could have designers do a residency in your lab for three months a year, how could we build a system to allow for that exchange? If we don’t just want people from MIT going on this residency, how do we provide wider access? Well, OK, let’s make it a global call; let’s also pay for the visas and the flights, because I’m aware of what it means to have a passport that does not allow somebody to just end up in a different country. My multiple lived experiences mean that when I’m thinking about equity, I’m thinking about what a world that is fair and open to as many people as possible looks like. I don’t want to forever only be seen as Black or only be seen as female – there is more to all of us than that. It’s more interesting to focus on what equity means for everyone and then ask how to progress that.

Kaia It’s an interesting one. I would echo what has been said in terms of not being able to speak for everyone.

I guess what I do is to create spaces for discourses and I almost see myself as a facilitator for non-traditional discourses. I don’t only curate work by, say, Black artists, but I am concerned about the visibility of Black artists and culture. It is about supporting, facilitating and creating space for ideas that are not necessarily part of the design mainstream. I know a lot of designers who are now doing extremely well, but who in earlier days were seen as outsiders. Over the last two years especially, there seems to have been an embracing of artists with African heritage or Caribbean heritage, and I’m interested in the legacy of this. It has to be longterm – it can’t be just be a focus for now or just be fashionable at the moment to showcase certain types of work. What is the legacy?

Dian I think I would echo what Kaia said almost verbatim. I’ll try not to rehash, but personally I don’t centre. Work-wise, I don’t centre everything I do around Blackness. I feel like I am a facilitator or an amplifier. I think some people do a great job of centring Blackness in their work, but as a person I’ve learned to somewhat play the game. I have realised that if I’m too forceful with Blackness in my work, I’ll be met with resistance. So the way that I handle this is to try and introduce artists who are Black not only into my work, but also to the people who I interact with,

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either professionally or personally. It’s a long-game strategy. If a project comes up, I won’t come out and say, “Hey, this is a list of five people that you can work with and they’re all Black.” I’ll just float people who I say will be amazing and then it’s down to whomever is approving it. I’ll research creatives who might need a spotlight, or might need to be introduced to an organisation that is very linear. As regards to my personal space and with social media, I’ll do the same thing because I know people are always watching – amplify and introduce. In my social presence, I do more direct amplification of Blackness, whereas professionally it’s more strategic. I feel like social media is a great place because people are watching – I can drop the links in, and people, at their leisure, can then research those individuals.

Natsai Did anything change the day after everyone posted black squares [2 June 2020’s #blackouttuesday campaign on Instagram, ed.]? Was it easier?

Dian No, it wasn’t easier. People were actually being called out for the black squares, because they had misunderstood the purpose of it. A lot of brands who had never done anything for Black people, had never had them in their marketing, whose staff didn’t reflect Blackness, were showing up with a black square but then not doing anything – it was just about saying that they did it. A lot of companies didn’t change, although a few were very open and they did come back with a list of things that they were going to do. I won’t mention any by name, but there were companies that made a conscious and very public change. But a good portion of people still got called out. It was a day of reckoning.

Natsai For me, that was such a pivotal moment, because everything that I’ve been doing by stealth, I can suddenly be very open about. The genie is out the bottle. We can’t pretend that those dynamics are not at play any longer, so when I’m pitching to a client or trying to come up with a project concept, it’s already there in the brief. It’s no longer something that you’re strategically trying to shoehorn in.

Jess From my experience, there were two aspects: a personal and a professional one. On the personal, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced, I had everyone coming at me. “What’s happening? Can you explain it to me? Is that really what you’re experiencing?”

It was exhausting. I cannot be an advocate for everyone and I cannot be having these conversations all the time, because they’re painful as well as exhausting.

But when it came to my design studio, it became

much easier to talk about and advocate for what I was doing. I think corporations, institutions, studios and practitioners became much more open to dialogue.

Even if they didn’t have something to say right now, they were more open to taking a step back and learning. The dialogue was much more constructive, which felt good, even if it didn’t on a personal level.

Dian I definitely think a number of companies were open to having a dialogue, but the proof is in their actions. We can talk all day, but if you’re not putting actions to words, then you’ve wasted everyone’s time.

It’s lip service. Even in my own company, we had a big staff town hall and the CEO talked very candidly about a number of things, which was really good. But shortly afterwards, there were still individuals who had listened to these talks but remained very much tone deaf. I had to reach out to them and say, “You have a lineup of six upcoming speakers and all of them are white brunettes.” Why am I still having to address this?

Did you not hear what I heard? Are you not watching the news? That’s systemic in a lot of companies and corporations. Yes, some of them will happily meet with you, but if they are not actually putting actions behind it, it’s a waste of time – that’s what I felt I saw when the black square was posted. To your point, Jess, it is exhausting. It’s still exhausting when people ask me, “How do you feel?” I’m now just saingy, “I’m present.”

I’m not going to get into this dialogue with you about how I really feel, because you don’t want to know that.

What would help is if you do the work.

Kaia I feel like you can already see that the momentum for the conversation is waning. It’s a furore. If you haven’t been having this conversation five or ten years ago, then at least keep it going now that you are. But I kind of foresaw that this would happen – the appetite to keep the conversation going is not there.

Dian It’s a trend; it was trendy. I feel like we need companies that are willing to actually invest and put the budget in for diversity, equity and inclusion programming, rather than just making random hires.

You’re not going to get everybody to subscribe to that, but you do need to put some action behind it so that the conversation doesn’t just stop over the summer.

It has to be continual.

Natsai When I studied architecture, I was the only Black person, over a period of four years, in the entire department. So the question is, where are all the Black designers, right? Why was it so rare to see Black people in this environment? That’s an education thing; that

Roundtable

is about an entire system of architecture, and talking about the pipeline and where new hires are going to come from. Are people being trained to become new hires? Do they have access to the resources that allow them to sustain their education? Architecture is a very expensive course to engage in, as I found out the hard way, and it’s also about having role models so that people can see somebody at the top of their game in these fields who actually has power. My only role model was Zaha Hadid. But why just her? Why was she the only person with whom I could find some semblance of identity? Today, I think that connection was pretty superficial, because I’d love to have role models who are women, people of colour, and who are developing projects that resonate with who I am as a person. We don’t just want to see people who look like us, we want to see people who reflect our values.

But the pipeline for that is really, really long. For the design industry, it’s possible to think of that scope as being more than just who do you hire, because that’s such a myopic focus. It has to go much, much deeper.

Dian It does. One of the organisations I work with does high school mentoring and for a couple of years students were being bused in from different schools to study graphic design, photography, fashion and a couple of other trades. So you got a nice swath of students who had varying backgrounds and we’d bring in different types of designers so the students could hear from those practitioners. Exposure is incredibly key, especially when you know that parents don’t really support the arts and they would rather these kids go on to study science and engineering and things of that nature. STEM is big, STEAM is not. But how to go deeper? We can go to elementary schools, but if the parents don’t understand the design industries, can we figure out how to bring them into this conversation and turn them into champions and advocates? These parents are engaging with design just as much as the next person, they just don’t realise that these are legitimate careers. For my dad, for instance, it did not click until I graduated and he talked to a recruiter at the newspaper I was working for, who happened to be a Black man. When my dad came out of that meeting, he was my biggest fan. He then championed my profession, but he had needed somebody he could connect with to enable that. We need the guardians and parents to subscribe to design, because we can’t as individual designers and teachers do it alone.

Mitzi I want to go back to your point, Dian, that this

is a trend, because it’s funny how every single summer people are shocked. This happened last year around exactly the same time, and so I don’t know why people are still shocked about this. I don’t know why no one talks about the fact that not only is this a trend, but it’s a vicious cycle. Every summer, innocent Black individuals die, the video gets exposed, and everybody flares up. “Oh my God, we have to do something about it.” We do all this slacktivism and this performative activism, but people don’t realise that the social media is almost working against us. We have this tendency to memeify the deaths of innocent Black individuals by summing up their lives in terms of their final moments. It kind of angers me when people keep using the hashtag “Arrest the cops that killed Breonna Taylor,” because you’re shifting the attention onto the murderers and you’re not making her life about her. It just goes to show that this is a long game. It’s not going to change and people are going to continue to be surprised next summer when this happens again, because it is going to happen next summer, again.

We all know this. Everyone’s going to be on their little performative activism high horse and be like, “Oh, we should do something about it.” And then it’s just going to die down in the fall, as we’re seeing now.

Dian I think people don’t want to put the work in that’s involved in unlearning, because it’s a lot. It takes years to unlearn what you’ve learned, and to talk about painful things.

Natsai It’s also what people are being asked to share and the fact that that is a threat, a very tangible, material threat. If you’ve grown up in a world where everything is yours and you’re now being asked to share, that means your expectations of what is yours have to shift. I think it’s naive to believe that something fundamental has changed.

Mitzi It’s the truth. I think that people are in denial about this and keep thinking that it’s going to change.

Jess Are we? Are we Black people in denial? We’re always saying, “They need to do the work. They need to do something.” I think it’s our job – and this is exactly what we are doing – to build a network, centre Blackness in our actions and try to connect our actions together. In my practice, I’m trying to work by only doing South-to-South collaborations, so not having to go from Kinshasa to London anymore, but maybe going from Kinshasa to Rio de Janeiro, for example, and leaving out the West in terms of

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“We don’t just want to see people who look like us, we want to see people who reflect and resonate with our values.”

—Natsai Audrey Chieza

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institutions and so on. To change things, I think that we have to do the work because otherwise it’s not going to happen. If we can create this network of activists who are political in our business, political in our creativity, political in our designs, then maybe we have a chance. That’s why I came back to Kinshasa.

I’m tired of just talking, of having to justify myself and say something, so I’m going to work and I’m going to lead by example. There are a lot of interesting ventures on the ground, which just need fuel from the community. Before this meeting, I had no idea about what centring Blackness was, but that’s my answer – work together.

Kaia I think that’s really important and valid, but there’s a need for a multi-pronged approach. Making our own connections and shifting the narrative is important, but I think there is definitely still a need for activism.

Not everyone is good at activism, but it’s necessary.

I also think that there’s a need for non-Black people to be informed and not depend on Black communities to be the ones that kind of bring them up to a specific standard. They need to put in the work.

Mitzi The problem is with access, which is what we’re trying to fight for – access to economic equity so that we can do what we want to do. Even on a social level, as designers we’re trying to get jobs, just like our white counterparts, but we don’t have access to the same word-of-mouth networks or we’re faced by the fact that the technology used to hire people and scan for keywords on résumés is kind of racist. The fight that is happening in America is to get access.

Natsai On a fundamental level, if you want to have economic freedom, then at some point you need capital. If a bank is not going to loan you money to start a business, you’re out of the game. But the wealth creation required to build the realpolitik paradigm is dependent on those systems, so it’s a tough old road ahead. That is so different to an African context where there is a little bit more purchase to have the freedom to operate, to being networked in that place, and to having access to people in power in that place. I can definitely speak to that from a Zimbabwean perspective, because there’s so much creativity and coming-together and building-together that is happening based on a real kind of lubrication of the social and economic realm. That is so much harder to replicate here because we are not the gatekeepers at any level and it’s much more expensive. The need for activism, the need to engage with institutions,

is the paradigm that I have experienced in my professional life in the UK. However, after 2 June and #blackouttuesday, I feel like there’s more permission to be more selective about the terms of engagement with powerful individuals and institutions. So I feel somewhat empowered.

It has opened a door and the question is, do you step into it? And if you do, what can you summon to move this thing forward a little bit? Maybe you can make things a little bit better, a little bit more fluid, but certainly not the revolution that I think we need.

Kaia I would completely agree in terms of the different paradigms. I’m always surprised when I’m having what I consider to be a standard conversation about race and inclusion, and the reaction of other people is to perceive what you’re talking about as being aggressive or just uncomfortable. I become uncomfortable just watching their reactions. I just don’t understand why that’s the case and why it’s so difficult. You’ve had such a contribution from Black communities in this country in particular, for so many years, but it’s still so uncomfortable to talk about issues to do with race, even at the most basic level.

Dian It’s power and I feel like it goes back to unlearning the history. It’s hard for people to come to terms with that and it makes them squeamish, particularly when we add the power dynamic that we spoke of earlier.

It should be something we’re able to have a dialogue about, but there’s guilt associated with it. Even if a person is open to embracing everybody, they think about their family history or their generational history and they feel bad. So you end up with white fragility, which you’re now also having to deal with. It’s like, “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m just trying to do my job. I’m just trying to create space for other people who look like me, and giving them an opportunity, because they’re just as talented, if not more so, than some of the people we’ve co-signed for years.”

But it is uncomfortable for a lot of people who are not people of colour. I could only summarise it as guilt.

Jess I have a question for you guys, which I think speaks to an opposite point of view. What is success for you and how could Black success be defined?

We’re talking about different paradigms, which for me are pretty connected. I think it’s easier to be successful in Africa and then come back to Europe and use that success to promote Black people on the ground. So that’s what it would be for me, but what would Black success be for you?

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Mitzi Success for me, and I’m going to be super blunt

about this, was based on being better than my white counterparts in high school. They were getting to do all these things that they had access to because of money. Later on, my definition of success started to become about becoming powerful and rich enough so that my family doesn’t have to worry, but it has now started to revert given the fight that’s happening.

I think a win is if I’m competing for something, even if a white person clearly has a privilege. If I can even get to their level through hard work, just get on the same playing field, then that’s success to me. That’s very skewed by racial trauma, and it’s such a messed up view of success, but there is a bit of that for me.

Kaia Until we’re accepted from a grassroots level up, I don’t think we have been successful. We don’t necessarily need to present an academic argument.

We have lots of great people presenting lots of fantastic theories and academic arguments, but until everyone has been accepted, I don’t think we’ve been successful.

Dian I don’t know what success looks like for me right now. I feel like I’m in The Twilight Zone crossed with Stranger Things. Just getting up every day, I kid you not, I’m like, “Am I going to make it today or am I going to cuss somebody out?” Managing my mental health is probably the biggest thing, which takes time.

I’m really just trying to stay present because I can easily be triggered, which is not a good feeling.

Natsai I struggle with how we define success in a racialised, capitalised system that is built on white supremacy, and which has already extracted so much hard work and labour from Black people. I don’t want to play that game. I don’t want to work harder so that I can be better than or meet people at the level they’re at. Success for me has always been “How do you find a way, as much as possible, to know yourself in all of this?” With the lockdown, success for me has become, “Do I have time to even know how I am?” If I don’t have time to know that, then I’m not doing very well personally, and do I have time to make space for others? I get asked a lot if I can mentor people and my immediate reaction is, “Nope, you can’t trust me with that.” I’ve made myself too busy chasing and striving for whatever this nebulous notion of “You made it” is. But I don’t know that I want to make it on those terms. I want Black people to be able to have leisure and to have autonomy, so that we can heal from the traumas that we have had, and leave more in the tank to keep fighting the good fight.

The healing associated with having more time, and having autonomy as to what you can do with that time, is a source of sustenance. E N D

This roundtable has been edited for length.

Roundtable

A Fashion System of One’s Own An interview with Bethany Williams about fashion design during the pandemic, and her emphasis on embedding social activism in the discipline.

Interviewer Ligaya Salazar

The interview took place over phone in September 2020, and was conducted by Ligaya Salazar, director and curator of the Fashion Space Gallery and the London College of Fashion Arts Programme. Bethany Williams is a London-based designer who trained in fine art at the University of Brighton, before studying menswear fashion design at the London College of Fashion. Since establishing her eponymous label in 2017, Williams has developed all of her collections in conjunction with social enterprises and charities, highlighting issues such as food poverty and youth homelessness. Williams also produces her garments in partnership with making programmes at, among others, HM Prison Downview in Rimini, Italy. She is the recipient of the 2019 Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design and won the 2020 Social Innovation: The Material Evolution Arts Foundation Futures Award.

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Photographs by Ruth Ossai and Bethany Williams.

and the San Patrignano drug rehabilitation programme

The fashion photographs accompanying this interview were shot by Ruth Ossai. They show Bethany Williams’s spring/summer 2021 collection, All Our Children.

Interview

Ligaya Salazar This has been a crazy year in so many

groups onsite, and I didn’t feel comfortable putting on the exhibition without the community being able to see it. So we’re postponing it.

Ligaya Can you tell me what we can expect from that new collection?

Bethany It’s a smaller number of looks – 11 in total, as well as some childrenswear which are miniature versions of the larger looks. We’ve also made some accessories. That collection is going to be called “All of Our Children”, because “Our children” is a term that a lot of the mothers involved with the Magpie Project would have heard from the local council. When they ask the council for help, they’re often told: “These aren’t our children, they don’t belong to the borough, they don’t belong to the UK.” So Jane Williams, the founder of the Magpie Project, and I wanted to talk about collective responsibility for the next generation, and especially the most vulnerable within our society. Given this horrible situation we’re in, I think we all need to be carving out a little bit of hope and light. But it’s been strange doing that from my living room. It’s been tough.

Ligaya With the kind of projects you do, it’s in-person, real-life encounters that are really important to your design. How have you worked with your collaborators during this time?

Bethany The Magpie Project set up a WhatsApp group for anyone who uses the service, so we’ve been using that to send out a series of digital workshops that we’ve filmed. They’ve developed a digital network through which people were sending out food, prams and nappies, and we’ve been using that to send out creative kits through the trust’s volunteers: we put together a flag-making kit, for instance, as well as craft bags, which we’ve worked with the illustrator Melissa Kitty-Jarram on. Melissa also did a drawing video, which we sent out to all the mums and minis [the name that the Magpie Project gives to the mothers and children who use the service, ed.] so they can draw together. In general, WhatsApp has been good because it has allowed us to keep having creative conversations that aren’t via email.

Ligaya How do you come up with the concept for a collection and then roll that out through the different connections you have – community organisations, poets, and musicians?

Bethany Well, on the manufacturing and making side of things, those collaborations never change.

For example, to produce the garments we work

different ways – how has it been for you and how have you adjusted to the new situation?

Bethany Williams When lockdown began, we thought, “Are we going to have orders cancelled? How are we going to survive? Is there going to be any work?”

That was scary and, of course, there were also the community projects we work with which we wanted to keep on checking in with. It’s obviously been a horrible time, but several months on I’ve found that staying grounded in one place has actually been beneficial for me and my mind, and generally for our business as well. Before lockdown, I was doing a lot of traveling for work – I was away for the whole of February, for instance, and was only here for four days during January, during which time we had to turn around a project to take to the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair in January – an installation for an exhibition by Machine-A using deadstock denim. So, in a way, it’s been nice to have time to think about what I want to do. Before now, I’ve felt like I was on a treadmill and didn’t have much control over what I was taking on.

Ligaya Have you been taking on projects during this period in lockdown?

Bethany We’re still spinning a lot of plates, but there are now fewer commitments in terms of traveling and speaking engagements. We are, however, launching a new collection that has been commissioned by

“We all need to be carving out a little bit of hope and light.” —Bethany Williams Somerset House and made in collaboration with the Magpie Project in Newham, a charity supporting mothers with children under five, who are living in temporary or insecure accommodation. We were meant to be launching that in mid-September, along with an exhibition, but because of the UK’s new “Rule of Six” legislation [which came into force on 14 September and banned social gatherings of more than six people, ed.], we aren’t able to do it. The idea had been to bring community projects to Somerset House for the launch, but with the new rule I just don’t feel comfortable bringing those community

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A display of the All Our Children collection at Somerset House, executed in collaboration with the Magpie Project.

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with Making for Change, a partnership between HMP Downview and the London College of Fashion, as well as the Manx Workshop for the Disabled, which is on the Isle of Man, where I’m from. Those stay consistent, but the themes and projects change.

We’ll research an issue in the UK that we’re interested in, find a professional partner who provides solutions within that specific area, and then we’ll work alongside them. That includes introducing them to production partners, as well as helping to fundraise. We donate 20 per cent of proceeds from the collection to the partnering organisation, but we also volunteer and work with them to try and understand what they’re all about. For instance, with Jane at Magpie it’s been all about understanding what she wants to communicate – that way, we can share our media spotlight to portray the message she feels is most important. We try to do the same thing through the collection itself: through the print design, or the storytelling. I think it’s really just about bringing incredible people into the same space, and letting those people do what they do best.

Ligaya What does working with you and your team mean to those charities and communities? Have you had any feedback from them about how those collaborations affect their view on things?

Bethany When working with the Magpie Project, we have had to be super mindful. You need to tread carefully and be respectful. That’s Jane’s space, which she has created to be a safe space for the mums and minis – her first port of call is to make sure that they’re looked after and happy. So it’s really about having a conversation around what she’d like to say through a collection, and what she and the mums would want to communicate. How can we help support that?

To answer that question is a matter of asking questions and listening. With Jane it has been such an amazing experience because she’s a wonderful person and so open to collaboration – she’s very much a part of the creative process. It’s about being open and respectful.

Ligaya One of the other organisations you work regularly with is San Patrignano [SanPa] in Italy.

Bethany SanPa is a not-for-profit drug rehabilitation facility. It was set up about 50 years ago and it has grown dramatically, so there are now about 1,200 to 1,300 people living there at any one time. It’s a free three-year programme, so one of the longest in the world, but it has been very successful with at least a 70 per cent recovery rate. They have a belief that craft has healing properties and operate 50 different

sectors of making, ranging from a film department, graphics department and leatherworking, through to hand weaving, hand-painting wallpaper and wine cultivation. When you enter the programme, you’re

“They have a belief that craft has healing properties.” —Bethany Williams put into one of those craft sectors and that’s where you then work, so it’s about establishing routine. We work with the women in the handwoven textile department, where they produce fabrics from recycled materials.

We’ll usually go out and sample with them, and I’ll stay for five or six days to work there and participate in the community. I think if it was just about substance misuse, people would leave within a couple of months, but it’s deeper than that. It’s about community and the way that you live and work. I’ve been working with them now for over three years, so I’ve seen people complete the project and leave, which has been amazing. To see that kind of progress is incredible and the work they produce is of such a high quality.

It’s a very special place.

Ligaya What do people end up doing when they eventually leave SanPa? Bethany It depends. They may want to stay closer to SanPa, or they may want to go home. They’ve actually set up a plan to help the women, so they can leave for two weeks to see if it’s right for them and, if it’s not, they can come back into the community and SanPa can help set them up a place to live, a job, and some security. I think that’s why it’s so successful: it helps you create a support network, at the very least. So some of the girls can choose to stay and work, while others can go on to work in the textile industry.

Ligaya Collectivity and collective futures seem to run through your ethos and approach towards design.

During the lockdown, you set up the Emergency Designer Network with a few other designers to produce medical scrubs and robes, for instance.

How did that come about and will it continue beyond lockdown?

Bethany It’s continuing. During lockdown, Phoebe English, Holly Fulton, Cozette McCreery and I were

Interview

all receiving requests from NHS workers for PPE and surgical scrubs. We were receiving these requests, but we’re such tiny studios – like, what’s going on here?

So we started chatting to each other, and Holly had a connection with the Royal Free Hospital in London.

We really felt like we should be doing something and applied to the government to be one of its suppliers, but that process was going to take so long. So we ended up working with the Royal Free directly. We got a pair of their scrubs and Phoebe’s pattern-cutter made the pattern from that. I found NHS-certified materials in the UK, and then we found a cutting facility in Nottingham. The ribbing and all sorts of things like that were donated from local manufacturers and designers. We thought we were only going to be doing it with 10 designers, but we ended up with 150 makers!

Ligaya What kind of makers did you attract?

Bethany Everything from big manufacturers producing 2,000 to 4,000 units down to home makers – we didn’t want to discriminate. We have now been connected to networks which have become our distribution and courier services, so we send packs with all the materials directly to the home makers – the materials, the webbing, the patterns, everything already cut, so that they can make the scrubs quickly. For larger manufacturers, we would just send them the cloth.

Everything from the makers would then be delivered to washers, before being delivered to the 40 or so NHS trusts we’re working with. We’d also distribute PPE to people who couldn’t get it through NHS trusts or the government – care homes, for instance. We partnered with Dazed Media to distribute 50,000 masks, [with recipients including] the Black Lives Matter protests and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. Most surgical gowns are non-reusable, and particularly during the pandemic hospitals haven’t had sufficient laundry facilities to clean them anyway. But we wanted to create a reusable product that we could leave to the NHS as a kind of legacy. We are now starting to produce reusable gowns with the British supplier Voltex, and we’ve just sent samples of these to the Royal Free to check and approve. I think it’s really important to have products that are being manufactured in the UK, because if our borders are suddenly shut we’re still going to need to be able to access PPE. Ligaya It’s great that you’re slowly building circularity into the project, because I wanted to ask you about sustainability – it’s a complicated term, but what do you think it takes to be sustainable in fashion?

Bethany It’s a difficult question. We get bracketed under

that term, but I actually find it problematic. It’s such a big word, which can be used to describe so many different processes and philosophies, but we’re all learning and no-one has all the answers. I do, however, think it’s important to research as much as you can and have your own viewpoint as a designer. In my case, I didn’t want to just be thinking about the environment, because what’s really important is the connection between people and the environment. A lot of people are being affected by the climate crisis, particularly those at the bottom end of the income bracket.

Those connections mean it’s important to consider the social and environmental aspects of fashion production together. For me, the most sustainable thing would probably be if I didn’t make any clothes at all, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last three years. We’re making recycled and organic clothing, and doing that in the form of social projects, but is even that sustainable?

Should we stop making clothes and stop working

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with all of the projects that we do? Having said that, I also feel that sometimes you have to be a part of the problem to find a solution, and you can’t forget that fashion employs one in six people on the planet.

Ligaya Your way of working is quite unique in the fashion world, however, and I was interested to hear that you studied fine art before fashion. What impact did that have on how you think about fashion?

Bethany I love textiles and that’s my passion within fashion – taking something discarded and giving it time and craftsmanship. During my art foundation I was already interested in textiles, as well as fine art and photography, but I really didn’t want to go into fashion. I found the whole industry problematic – the waste, for one thing, but perhaps also the fact that it has a bad reputation, generally. So I studied fine art before ending up working for a fashion art publication called Garage, but on the art rather than the fashion side. As part of that, we were doing collaborative projects between artists and fashion designers, which I found interesting and inspiring to be able to work between those two industries.

At the same time I was also volunteering at a soup kitchen in Brighton and doing a documentary for a charity. I was looking at how art had the ability to cause an effect outside of itself and reading a lot into the likes of SUPERFLEX – art collectives which had infiltrated multinational companies or government bodies to get funding they could then use to benefit community projects. I just thought, “Is there a way to connect the projects I work on with the fashion community?” That’s how I started, but the critical thinking component of my fine art degree was so important – just asking the question of why you’re producing something. If you were to make something on the course, you had to really justify it and have a proper understanding of that. Translating that into a fashion context is super important. Why are you making that? Who does it benefit? Who’s made it?

Ligaya It’s almost as if you’ve created your own fashion system before entering the “real” fashion system.

That’s quite a brave step, because there are so many ingrained mechanisms within that industry. What do you think of seasons, for instance? Will we still have seasons in the years to come, or is there a whole different way of creating, making, and selling?

Bethany Well, our collections are project-based, but we do try and release them around the right time to sell.

So we try and release in June for the menswear

schedule to get the right buy-in time with stores.

But I think that may be going out the window – you can release a project when you want to release it, when it’s ready, and not put too much pressure on yourself. What had been happening in the last three years has been really sped up by the pandemic.

The seasons didn’t make sense, anyway, given that you have different temperatures all over the world at different times. Working in a project-based way works for me.

Ligaya The way in which seasonal fashion shows have been run during the pandemic, and who has and hasn’t been showing, has been interesting. What would your ideal future of making clothes and garments look like?

Bethany To me, it’s working with social manufacturing projects and developing those together with partners.

We’ve worked really closely with Making for Change and SanPa for years, so I feel like we’ve got such a strong relationship with them. It’s been interesting with the pandemic to see that they are getting busier with other projects too. Smaller artisan projects seem to be getting loads of work, while larger manufacturers are struggling. I don’t want to have a massive wholesale business and I don’t think that works for us. It’s nice to work with a select group of retailers and then do one-off projects and collaborations. I’d like to work more as an artist than a fashion designer and that’s the next phase – take the critical thinking and apply that to larger organisations and projects. I’m not scared to work with larger organisations and use our methodology to try and help them create their own systems. We have a small impact, but if we had the budgets of larger corporations, it would help us do authentic projects while still keeping our small production going at the same time. E N D

This interview has been edited for length.

Interview

The Power of the Poster Words Zosia Swidlicka

As a child growing up in 1990s Poland, Aga Giecko would often accompany her parents to the polling station on election days.“I remember how each polling station, usually a local school, gave a strong feeling of its local community,” she recalls. “You’d end up chatting to your friends and neighbours surrounded by official government announcements mixed with kids’ drawings. It made it feel like a day of celebration, like people would drop political disputes for a day and realise we were all part of something bigger.”

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Aga Giecko (@agagiecko), June 2020.

designers were creating and sharing poster graphics in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. Several illustrators, such as Aga Giecko and Zuza Kamińska, worked on their own initiative. Countless others, however, including Gosia Herba, Natalia Łajszczak and Grzegorz Myćka, created works for Pogotowie Graficzne (Graphic Emergency), an initiative which rallies designers to create posters around specific political issues, sharing the results online, as well as making them available for printing so that they can be displayed around town or taken to protests.

“We do not agree with the abuse of power against sexual minorities,” the group said in a statement.

“We do not agree with the dehumanisation of nonheteronormative people and the open hostility of the state towards them. We do not agree to police brutality.

The rainbow does not offend! Solidarity is our weapon!”

Politically-engaged posters are an established tradition in Polish graphic design. The country’s most famous design movement, the Polish School of Posters, operated from the 1950s to 1980s, gaining worldwide renown for expressive, hand-painted film posters that often hid underlying political messages. “The posters were often very euphoric, very colourful, very symbolic or allegorical, and they often had a surreal undertone,” explains cultural historian David Crowley in a 2016 interview with culture.pl, a website set up by Poland’s government-sponsored Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Poster artists working under the Communist regime were subject to strict censorship, which resulted in “a completely unique contribution to visual culture.”

These designers found ingenious and increasingly bold ways to toy with state censors and engage viewers in a secret game to see how much they understood.

“This marked out the Polish Poster as fundamentally different to what people expected of Eastern Bloc culture, but also fundamentally different from the design practices that were happening in the West,” notes Crowley.

One of the most striking examples of subversive metaphor in the Polish School of Posters is Mieczysław Górowski’s 1982 poster for the play Policja (Police), by one of Poland’s greatest playwrights, Sławomir Mrożek. It depicts a rope winding through the chin, mouth, ears and eyes of a face. It is an effect that the curators of MoMA’s 2009 exhibition Polish Posters 1945-89 noted “is suggestive of both victim and oppressor: like their prisoners, the police hear, see, and say nothing. Martial law was imposed

This year, in the run-up to the presidential election, the mood in Poland was far less jubilant. Despite the nation experiencing its longest period of true independence since 1795, fears that Poland is being run in an anti-democratic and authoritarian manner have been mounting since the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015.

Most alarming has been the steady overhaul of the judicial system, which has recently given politicians the power to fire and fine judges for actions they deem harmful. The party says the reforms are needed to fight corruption, but the European Commission has opened a legal case against Poland, fearing that politicians could use the reforms to control rulings. Vying for another five years in power, the government has now run a bitterly divisive re-election campaign grounded in homophobia, with LGTBQ+ activism construed as a threat to the nation.

In a campaign speech delivered in Brzeg on 13 June, the sitting Polish president Andrzej Duda attacked LGBTQ+ rights as a direct threat to Polish national identity. “This is not why my parents’ generation fought for 40 years to expel Communist ideology from schools, preventing it from being foisted on children, brainwashing and indoctrinating them,” he declared to supporters. “They did not fight so that we should now accept that another ideology, even more destructive to man, would come along – an ideology which hides deep intolerance under its clichés

“The rainbow does not offend! Solidarity is our weapon!” —Pogotowie Graficzne of respect and tolerance”. Nor was this bigotry restricted to Poland’s government – the nation’s Church leaders also spoke out. On the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, the Archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewski, thanked God that Poland was no longer affected by the “red plague” of Communism, but added that a new “rainbow plague” was coming to “control our souls, our hearts and minds.”

Amidst the hostility and hatred of the campaign trail, however, a completely different story was starting to unfold on Instagram. Polish illustrators and graphic

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Zuza Kami ska (@nekrofobia), June 2020.

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Grzegorz My ka (@grzegorz.mycka), June 2018.

in Poland in December 1981 in an attempt to crush support for Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in a Communist country.”

Contemporary Polish illustrators seem comfortable employing this same mode of graphic communication, matching their forebears for subversive wit while also creating new visual languages to describe the present day. Operating with fewer restrictions than their predecessors, the current generation of Polish artists and designers are free to confront political issues head-on in their work – at least in theory. There is still a risk of their work being labelled “LGBT propaganda” by government bodies and publiclyfunded institutions. Speaking to Art Review, artist and activist Karol Radziszewski noted the dangers of this situation. “Sometimes people ask me how much censorship I experience in Poland, but it’s hard to answer because most of the time, I’m not aware of it: people are making these decisions [in] private,” he explained. “A director might say ‘we’re not putting him in the programme, we don’t need the trouble’ and I’d never hear of it.” It’s a situation that won’t necessarily lead to an arrest warrant, but could well affect artists’ reputations and bottom lines in the long run. As Giecko points out, “It saddens me to see politicians encouraging hatred and misinformed people spitting in their neighbour’s face. Anyone could be next.”

To understand where these tensions have come from, we need only to glance at the past five years of PiS rule. Duda’s policies appeal to voters who feel left behind by previous, more liberal governments.

To them, Duda is the defender of the traditional Catholic values that they see as synonymous with Poland’s national identity, and they welcome his policies, including the controversial judicial reforms, because they believe Duda is taking money from rich, corrupt judges and putting it back in their pockets.

At a PiS rally hosted in Opoczno one week before the Presidential election, for instance, the state-owned broadcaster TVP reported that “women and men admitted to one another that, while each government levied huge taxes, no one had so far shared them so heavily with citizens.” In 2016, for instance, Duda unveiled a generous welfare programme that gives parents a tax-free benefit of 500 PLN (£100) per month per child under the age of 18. It is a policy which risks incentivising women to drop out of the labour market, and which undoubtedly reinforces a traditional

conservative worldview, but it has nevertheless helped consolidate support for PiS among many traditional Polish families. That same year, parliament debated a citizen initiative proposing a five-year prison sentence for any woman found to have had an abortion. The proposal had gained 450,000 signatures and the support of the Church before passing through one parliamentary hurdle.

It was eventually thrown out of parliament following mass strikes and protests, as well as international condemnation. The Church also withdrew its support.

The Parliamentary election of October 2019 presented a chance to vote against another term of PiS rule. Pogotowie Graficzne rallied the design community around the cause by requesting posters reminding people of their civic right and duty to vote. “It was really important to participate in these elections because the government is promoting ideas and values that go against civil freedom and tolerance,” says Myćka, whose poster for Pogotowie Graficzne shows a dog dropping a ballot paper into the ballot box from its mouth. The election date is at the top, the X representing both the 10th month and a vote.

The double meaning, emphasised by the colour red, makes you double take; if you didn’t get the message the first time, you’ll get it the second.

Myćka admits to having an “inborn weakness” for the Polish School of Posters, with which he shares an affinity for dry humour and formal restraint. In one work, Myćka draws a roll of toilet paper in the shape of Duda’s profile. The phrase “papier do du...y” leaves the viewer to fill in the missing letter that determines whether it reads “dupa” (arse) or “Duda”. The caption reads, “Aaah, looks like we’re out. Ink on paper. Toilet paper.” It may be toilet humour, but the message sticks.

“I often base my compositions on the simplest possible shape; a line, a smear, often applied with ink, brush, pencil or scissors, to evoke additional associations than at first glance,” says Myćka.

With brushwork and lettering that recall the painterly scrawl featured in the 70s film posters of Jerzy Czerniawski, Myćka appears to be sending a coded message of hope – that art will always triumph over politics.

Meanwhile, Gosia Herba’s poster of a young woman on her way to vote was displayed in shops and cafes around Warsaw’s city centre in the weeks leading up to the election. Pacing through the centre of town dressed in red flares and a red beret, she is

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Gosia Herba (@gosiaherba), August 2020.

Zuza Kami ska (@nekrofobia), June 2020.

momentum after having been postponed due to Covid-19. “We need to rebuild our community,” Trzaskowski told supporters at a gathering in Ciechanów in June. “This is what differentiates us from our rivals, who have been conducting a policy of fear and divisions.”

As Trzaskowski gained support from those who feared the country’s democratic institutions were at risk, Duda’s lead in the polls narrowed. In response, he launched a campaign designed to position his opponent as an anti-Polish radical, seizing on his support for LGBTQ+ rights as evidence – in 2019 Trzaskowski was the first mayor of Warsaw to attend the city’s Pride march, and he had permitted discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools. Duda’s campaign team published a video spot slandering him with unfavourable footage chopped up in a rapid-cut edit, including a shot of Trzaskowski with LGBTQ+ activists in Warsaw. “Hi Rafał,” it starts. “It’s me, Poland.

We don’t know each other very well.” The spot came days after the announcement of a new policy, the so-called “Family Charter”, which included a pledge to “defend the institution of marriage” by preventing same-sex marriage and adoption and which additionally promised to “protect children from LGBT ideology” by banning sex education in schools. The move was part of a concerted campaign by the government and its institutions to re-stage the entire election as a false conflict between queer identity and Polish identity.

“I really thought that the pandemic, the lockdowns, and all the uncertainty had shown everybody that we are all the same, that there are bigger issues, and that nature has no sex or political views,” says Giecko.

“Unfortunately the presidential campaign focused on very individual and controversial views, digging into extreme concepts that cannot be discussed without endangering the freedom of another human being.”

Following the announcement, graphic artist Natalia Łajszczak illustrated the prevailing mood in the country. In her poster, a map of Poland takes on a nebulous shape; its folds form many faces showing a range of emotions. “The statement drew a turbulent social mood in Poland,” she explains.

And yet, the map’s vibrant hues send a message of hope; that after every storm comes a rainbow.

“This was a campaign aimed at positioning LGBTQ+ people as enemies of Polish culture,”

pursued by a speech bubble which reads “I’m going to vote”. “She is independent; she will vote according to her beliefs,” says Herba. “She is aware of her rights and that her voice shapes reality. No man, father, husband, or partner will impose a choice on her.”

Although Herba has an international following, a Polish audience will find her work’s play on proportions familiar, recalling the social realism posters of the 1920s and 30s that elevate the worker to a larger-than-life character. The oversized figure towering over a distant landscape was a stalwart of this period’s advertisements for factories, tourist destinations and political propaganda.

One of the most enduring examples of this device is a 1930 commemorative poster by Tadeusz Gronowski that celebrates the tenth anniversary of the “Miracle at the Vistula”, the victorious battle that ended the Polish-Soviet War in 1920. Józef Piłsudski, the hero of the day, soars above the Warsaw cityscape, while abstract shapes and tonal gradation hint at a crowd of supporters at his back. At the time, abstraction in poster design was frowned upon by the state, which favoured more literal representations of the nation that could not hide any subversive metaphors. Nevertheless Gronowski’s approach was able to evade censorship, while also gaining approval for a stylistically daring poster that stretched the boundaries of what was acceptable, and paved the way for the Polish School of Posters.

Viewed in the context of the past 100 years, the towering figure in Herba’s poster is as conventional as Piłsudski, or the idealised workers brandishing blades of wheat in social realism posters. Yet her dress, stance and knowing look send a subtle message of resistance. Meeting our gaze and holding it, she seems to be saying, “it doesn’t have to be like back then.

We can vote now.”

On election day, turnout was the highest for a parliamentary election since the first free elections in 1989. PiS retained its majority in the Sejm, the Polish parliament’s lower house, but lost its majority in the Senate as the opposition made gains. It was an election that made the 2020 presidential race narrower than ever. Then, two months before the vote, things took a turn for the worse.

In May, the main opposition party, the centre-right Civic Platform, announced Rafał Trzaskowski as its new candidate. Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, brought new energy to an election that had lost

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Grzegorz My ka (@grzegorz.mycka), 2019.

Aga Giecko (@agagiecko), June 2020.

says Herba. “I just had to show support to my LGBTQ+ friends and their families.” A week before the country went to the polls, Herba’s woman in the red beret and flares came back — this time with a rainbow on her jumper. “I live in a homophobic country where the current president and government are denying humanity to LGBT people. Next week, I’m going to cast my vote. I don’t want to live in a country of hatred and ignorance,” Herba wrote in the accompanying Instagram caption. Many women identified with this image of a strong female and its message of empowerment, even showing up at polling stations on the day dressed as her.

The rainbow also appears in Giecko’s poster, in which she takes us on a fantastical trip to the polling stations of her childhood – an effort to “even slightly counterweight the unprecedented negativity and oppression.” “VOTE!” is graffitied onto the wall, surrounded by sparkles and spray paint marks that could be the remnants of an art class. A ballot box strides across the room with a completed ballot paper sticking out of its top and the stern look of a teacher schooling their pupils. A couple of posters are tacked onto the wall; one shows a flower with a rainbow of petals circling its face, posting a completed ballot paper and high-fiving the ballot box. The other shows a pigeon casting a ballot over a rainbow.

As the election drew closer, other presidential candidates started to pile onto the topic of LGBTQ+ rights in an attempt to gain column inches. Krzysztof Bosak, the ultra-conservative candidate for the Confederation Liberty and Independence party, used an interview with Rzeczpospolita’s weekend supplement, Plus Minus, to argue that “the LGBT movement leads to social depravity and we have a moral obligation to oppose it.” He added that “representatives of these sexual ideologies will stand on the heads of normal people and hound them.” On 7 June, he visited Poznań, where Zuza Kamińska is studying at the city’s University of the Arts. In a speech in the city’s Freedom Square, Bosak claimed that it would be him facing Duda in the second round of the election.

Kamińska, whose Instagram profile is packed with vibrant sketches, protest posters and punchy captions criticising the latest political scandals and advocating for human rights issues, says she is “here for people, not for political reasons.” Her naive, manga-inspired illustration style uses brightly-coloured felt tip pens

and creates an uneasy tension with the seriousness of the political issues she comments on. It’s not surprising, then, that LGBTQ+ rights are a recurring theme on her page, or even that there is a painstakingly hand-lettered post outlining the “seven reasons why Andrzej Duda is not and was not my president”.

But there’s one work in particular that stands out for its compositional similarity to the towering figures we met earlier. In Jak iść to nigdy na Bosaka (If I must go, then never barefoot / for Bosak), a person strides

“I don’t want to live in a country of hatred and ignorace.” —Gosia Herba across the page in fabulous knee-high boots, hands on hips: #drag, the artist notes. Kamińska references the same exaggerated perspective as Herba but, this time, the towering figure has evolved from socialist worker to empowered woman to drag queen. And so the motif is reinvented yet again.

On 13 July, Poland woke up to news from the National Electoral Commission that Duda had won by just 2.4 per cent. A hush fell over Instagram, as Polish designers processed what had happened.

Kamińska drew a person with a face mask over their eyes. “Well done Poland,” she wrote. The BBC reported that it had been Poland’s slimmest presidential election victory since the end of Communism in 1989, but it was to be the calm before the storm. “After the election, the situation intensified considerably,” says Myćka.

On 7 August, the day after Duda was officially sworn into office, police arrested 22-year-old trans activist Margot and placed her in pre-trial detention for two months. She is being prosecuted for vandalising a van belonging to Fundacja Pro-prawo do życia (Pro-right to live Foundation), a group that drives around Poland’s city centres broadcasting messages over loudspeakers and displaying large banners that liken the “LGBT lobby” to pedophiles and claim LGBTQ+ people want to teach four-year-olds how to masturbate. In a civil lawsuit brought against the group earlier this year, the Polish court ruled that its messages were lawful since they are “true” and in line with the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

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experience made him reflect on the abuse that minority groups have to face on a daily basis in Poland.

“Looking at what is happening in Poland today, where LGBTQ+ people have to struggle to have their right to a normal life recognised, and some people are getting locked up because of it, makes my head hurt more than from those kicks,” he says. While tending to his bruises the next day, he created a graphic in which a pair of handcuffs merges with a rainbow. “I’ve never felt discriminated against because of who I am so I will never understand how hard it is for those people, but I am even more convinced that we have to do everything we can to show our solidarity with those who suffer because of who they are, and stand together against all acts of aggression.”

In the 10 days following Margot’s arrest, Pogotowie Graficzne published 44 posters in response to their impassioned plea. Many of these posters were printed and taken to protests, and many more have been shared and re-shared on social media. Online and offline collided as LGBTQ+ politics crashed into the mainstream. Where once Polish poster designers operated in isolation, limited to their surrounding streets, today’s illustrators are able to put out work for the whole world to see thanks to the internet and social media. Instagram now integrates politics and protest movements with its standard fare of brunches and beach trips, while the platform’s sharing and engagement functionalities facilitate a potential reach far beyond that of a printed poster.

While there is a risk that increased exposure will lead to protest fatigue, and a dilution of styles in favour of a homogenous brand of global protest graphics on the part of the designers, the medium’s move into the digital has the potential to further democratise the poster.

Following sustained pressure from Poland’s queer community and its allies, Margot was released from pre-trial detention after three weeks. Activists welcomed the news and rejoiced at the triumph of ordinary citizens over politicians. For now, the situation has calmed down, but there is still much to resolve. “I believe we can all use our platforms to create something positive, show solidarity and unite under a well-designed poster,” says Giecko. “However, I would like to see less politics in our department and more honest work in the political department. In other words – doing our jobs.” E N D

Margot was denied contact with her lawyer and the right to post bail. If convicted, she faces a multi-year prison sentence.

Forty-eight other people were arrested that day too. Videos circulating on social media show random passers-by being pulled off the street and pushed into unmarked vans in scenes reminiscent of World War II roundups. An investigation launched by the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights found that some of those arrested were not protestors but merely bystanders, and that police had also insulted and humiliated LGBTQ+ detainees. A Human Rights Watch dispatch stated of Margot’s treatment: “Another demonstration of the crumbling respect for the rule of law in Poland.”

The next day, thousands of people filled the streets around Poland in one of the country’s biggest public displays of support towards its LGBTQ+ community.

“Fundamental human rights is not a discussion topic,” says Kamińska. “If you see someone disrespecting them, you have to react. Especially if the person doing it is the president of your country. Everyone should feel safe and free in Poland. That cannot be ignored.”

Returning home from the protest in Warsaw, Łajszczak was too full of anger and adrenaline to sleep.

At 4am, she sat down at her desk and started to draw.

The resulting graphic is a striking visual metaphor for human nature. A gradient rainbow arches over the phrase “Byłam, jestem i będę” (I was, I am and I will be), while storm clouds hover above. A lightning bolt is fused with one of the typographic e caudatas in “będę”.

“I wanted to indirectly address the common (and ignorant) refrain that homosexuality is abnormal and unnatural,” she says. “People using this convoluted argument either forget, don’t know or ignore the fact that our lives are based on a social contract that has nothing to do with naturalness. Just as the rainbow is a natural weather phenomenon, the sexuality spectrum is a natural biological phenomenon and has been with mankind since the dawn of civilisation. The way we approach the LGBTQ+ community as a country is purely the result of this and no other social contract.

A contract which, in the case of Poland, should be updated. I was, I am and I will be in your social landscape, so let’s do something about it.”

That same day in Poznań, Myćka was walking home alone when he was brutally attacked by four strangers in the street for no apparent reason. The

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Dead Stock, Live Stock A conversation about reducing material waste within fashion design and the ways in which global industry could better accommodate upcycling.

Panellists Reet Aus and Alexander Taylor

The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020 between Reet Aus, a fashion designer and activist whose eponymous brand oversees the UPMADE Certification, a system that Aus developed out of her PhD studies to help manufacturers integrate upcycling and circular economic principles into their manufacturing; and Alexander Taylor, an industrial designer whose early work in furniture and product design evolved into sportswear when he developed Adidas’s PrimeKnit knitted footwear for the 2012 Olympic Games. This year Taylor launched ATID, a technical apparel brand that produces editioned garments and accessories using deadstock sportswear materials.

Conversation

Alexander Taylor The idea behind ATID was to create

Alexander The KTC factory we’re working with is

a platform for investigation and research into making.

It was born from a conversation with the KTC factory in Heshan, China, whose director Gerhard Flatz had invited us to work directly with them. A lot of the design we’ve being doing for the last 10 years has been behind the scenes, so to speak – we’ve worked as consultants for brands, meaning that it wasn’t necessarily our final designs that were being realised.

So the invitation from KTC was an opportunity to create our own product, where we could realise some of our ideas and handwriting. But we still wanted to find a real reason to work together – a defined brief that could make it authentic. When we visited the factory in China, we had a conversation about material waste and leftover materials. We saw warehouses full of what is essentially dead stock, but which remain high-quality technical materials. That’s where the idea of using those materials came from, which then drove the concept – limited edition pieces that work with the finite nature of the materials.

Reet Aus Our brand initially came about through academic research. I was doing my doctoral studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where I focused on the environmental impact of fashion. I ended up working with waste materials and began mapping the industrial waste of the textile industry in Estonia.

I was trying to figure out some kind of system for how we could implement upcycling within production,

small in comparison to that, so they have a very well organised inventory. If they’re not using those leftover materials for prototypes or our project, then they have an arrangement with a local furniture factory to shred and use them for fillers. They also have guidelines on materials not ending up in landfill or being incinerated. But there are occasions, I’m sure, where climate conditions in some countries are not conducive to storing materials: the humidity and temperature in China or India, for instance.

Things would just rot. There are other problems too. We’ve talked to some big materials suppliers which have really high-quality, expensive materials,

“There is a business incentive to get rid of materials.” —Alexander Taylor but there’s a culture where they don’t want to store them because it costs money. There is actually a business incentive to get rid of materials.

Reet Everything leftover has to go somewhere – these places don’t necessarily have proper waste management systems, so leftovers end up on the black market; or they’re dumped in nature; or they’re burnt, which causes huge air pollution.

Alexander I’ve had smaller clients through which I’ve visited factories you just wouldn’t work with. You see the reality of what goes on there, where some of the products in the world comes from, and it’s pretty scary.

I’m fortunate only to have worked with high-quality factories, but no matter how high the standard is, you’re still seeing considerable waste because the quantities are so huge. Quality control is a big part of it, for example. If you’re losing 5-7 per cent of 3.5m pairs of shoes a month through quality control, that’s a lot of product. Where does it end up? Keeping governance on where products that fail quality control actually are, and not having them end up on the black market, is something that brands have to put a lot of time, energy and effort into.

Reet Even though a lot of brands say that they don’t have leftovers, you can immediately see it’s a problem when you visit the factories. With Beximco, our first step was to analyse its operations, and we figured out

“Everything leftover has to go somewhere.” —Reet Aus and was running a few projects working with postconsumer waste, pre-consumer waste, and industrial waste. But that industry is really small in Europe and it wasn’t until eight years ago that we were able to start an operation with Beximco, which is the biggest producer in Bangladesh. Beximco currently employs about 40,000 people and produces around 240m pieces a year, so we started to talk with its CEO about leftovers – it came out that they had no idea how much leftover material they actually had. Their factory is really huge, like a city, but they had no idea about what remained behind from production.

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Conversation

Images courtesy of ATID and Reet Aus.

Right: A detail shot from ATID’s product development Below: An image from Reet Aus’s work in Bangladesh.

that mass production factories end up with around 20 to 40 per cent of all production as leftovers. One very big type of leftover is overproduction, which accounts for 3 to 5 per cent of everything produced.

Unfortunately, those pieces are complicated and expensive to upcycle because they’re made from different materials that have been bonded together.

Leftovers from the cutting table are a second form.

You can more or less use those materials as is, but it takes a lot of effort to make something new out of them. The biggest source of leftovers, however, are actually the rolls themselves, because these factories have huge stocks of materials. Those rolls are easy to use and bring back into production because, bar the cutting pattern, the processes you’re putting them through are exactly the same as those in normal production. So it’s really just a matter of organising the factory and putting a system in place. The best way to do that is for the brand producing the original product to know what they will have left over and factor that in to the initial design. Reducing waste is something you have to consider in the design phase, it’s not something you only deal with when production is done.

Alexander It really is a huge responsibility, because the designer’s role reaches further than you might expect – you should be considering the whole life of a product, from the moment you make the first mark on a page, through to the design, development, production and afterlife of the product. It’s the designer’s responsibility to be involved with and understand the consequence of their decisions. You’re trying to be as efficient as possible and understand every aspect of any decision you make, because your responsibility is to have that kind of awareness. You can’t make decisions that are going have a huge impact on the other side of the world. You as the designer, and the brand as well, have a responsibility to have a clear design manifesto from the beginning.

Reet There’s a little bit of a business concept there too, because it represents a completely new model.

The numbers we found at Beximco were surprising to top management, for instance, because these factories try to produce as fast as possible and keep prices as low as possible.

Alexander The opportunity, from a business perspective, is huge. There’s not only a responsibility to get it right, but an opportunity to make money. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not all about the money, but it does provide an opportunity to create change which is the

most important thing. We’ve seen from working with bigger companies that any efficiency saving can become huge when scaled. You make something half a per cent better, quantify that by 200m t-shirts a year, and you have a vast difference. It’s about looking at every step because, from a business mechanics and economic perspective, there are huge gains that can be made. I think that brands are aware of this and they have a responsibility to not just leave these things up to the factories they’re outsourcing to. For a long time there was a culture in design that you would send off a set of drawings to a factory and then the product would be sent back after a round of development.

My experience of going to a lot of factories as a designer is that you’re just put in a room. You could be anywhere – you don’t see what’s on the other side of the fence, so to speak.

Reet My experience has always been that factories are happy when you provide some kind of solution for what to do with leftovers. They’re not waste management companies, so it’s a problem they face every day, especially when the management is not organised. In Europe you have to pay to get rid of leftovers, so it’s actually quite an expensive thing to do. That’s why we made the UPMADE certification, which is set of guidelines and a system to help manufacturers integrate upcycling and circular economic principles into their production. We go into a factory, certify it, and then start producing there. It gives the factory new possibilities – it helps them organise their leftovers and actually understand how they can use them.

Alexander But how much can you achieve as a designer?

There are a few things you can identify and propose a solution to, but in the case of the big brands it’s the business guys who are making the deals with the factories. They’re the ones who are actually responsible for production. The designer, by contrast, has to go to the developer, who may then have to go to a local team.

It’s that team who are responsible for looking after the factories for a brand, so the distance between the designer and the guys on the factory floor is huge.

They’re not in sync. There are moments where you kind of cross them in the factory, but if it has taken four or five years to set up a production line and use a particular assembly, the factory is not going to want to change that because it’s a huge investment. When we were working towards the first knitted shoes with Adidas, for instance, we visited factories making

Conversation

This page: Product development at ATID overseen by Alexander Taylor (left).

Next page: The KTC factory where ATID produces its garments in Heshan.

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millions of meters of warp knit. A supplier may be in South Korea and their product is being designed by a local team of two people who are essentially determining what sports apparel worldwide is going to look like for the next season. Then the designer, who is back with the brand, selects from that supplier’s books. Ultimately you’re just selecting textiles – you haven’t been involved in their creation.

Reet It’s important to understand who should deal with these issues. I had a very interesting roundtable a few weeks ago with some people from the industry and the European Commission, and the main question was, “Who should take responsibility for our waste?” Is it the producer’s responsibility or, when it’s post-consumer waste, should the government take care of it? That’s a good question, because if we’re not even able to decide who should deal with our waste, we can’t start solving the problem. France is a good case study, insofar as its Extended Producer Responsibility legislation makes it the producer’s responsibility to take back their post-consumer waste, while 2020 has seen further legislation that means producers can’t destroy returned or unsold goods.

Alexander But even if it is the brand’s responsibility, they’re mostly working with factories who they’ve essentially subcontracted to. Then that’s the grey area.

A brand is told they need to order X amount of textile, and they’ve suddenly got 20 per cent leftover. “Well, the factory said we needed to order that.” So whose responsibility is it then?

Reet Exactly. Usually the contracts are arranged so that everything that isn’t needed stays with the factories, which is something I’ve been trying to understand. Brands don’t care, so the factory has to deal with it. But at the same time, if there is a logotype or pattern on the material that is recognisable, they can’t sell it. From the factory side, interest in our UPMADE Certification is high. We could certify a lot of factories, but even with that certification, they still need clients who will buy upcycled products. This year, for instance, we’ve been in conversation about the certification with five or six very big brands who think it’s a good idea, but it really has to be implemented at the design stage to succeed. But it just becomes too complicated for the fast fashion model – they need to change their business model too. Really, businesses should be run differently and they need to implement circularity from the top down. At the moment, only the smaller brands are ordering UPMADE-certified

products for their collections. It’s very easy to convince factories, but it’s only with brands where these issues really become visible. So you have a situation where brands don’t take responsibility for leftovers, meaning that factories have to deal with them, but they can’t because they aren’t able to sell them. That’s the real problem.

Alexander As a designer, I’ve found that the best way to create change is to somehow have proof of a new, more efficient method of production and to keep going with

“You have to do your talking through the product.” —Alexander Taylor it. If a brand wants it, they’ll make it happen eventually, but you’ve got to jump through a lot of hoops first. Oftentimes you can come up with really efficient solutions developed on a particular machine, but if that’s not the machine the factory wants to buy, then suddenly it’s out of your hands because it’s a business decision. I wish that there was more of a conversation, but you can’t do everything.

You have to do your talking as a designer through the product and hope that eventually things will be updated down the line.

Reet My opinion is that legislation is the only thing that will change big industry and the big brands.

I think an environmental tax will come into play and what the EU is probably planning to do is introduce some kind of certification. One idea I have heard is that they would like to tax products differently, so that more transparent products cost less. If that happens, it’s a perfect system to help the industry move towards sustainability, but if you think about the global situation it remains tricky. If we set up rules in Europe, and are the only ones to do so, then it’s difficult for our companies. We need a global understanding if we’re talking about moving towards circularity.

Of course, in an ideal world there would be just one type of mono-material that we could recycle endlessly, and we wouldn’t have to use oil or grow cotton, et cetera. So looking forward, there are a lot of scenarios that would be sustainable, but the complication is actually arriving at them.

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Above: A material sample from the KTC factory.

Below: Bolts of material in storage, which Reet Aus upcylces through her UPMADE Certification.

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Alexander Legislation is important, but the challenge is

to be more careful. I think that’ll have more impact than legislation.

Reet I was more pessimistic before coronavirus. People are now not travelling so much, they’re not spending as much money, and I have the feeling that they are willing to buy better quality goods because they have that little bit more money. This is something I can see here in Estonia. It’s a small step, but people are really thinking about local production, what they consume, and how their actions can influence industry. In that respect, France will be interesting to watch this year in terms of its new legislation, because the situation as I understand it is really complicated. They have huge amounts of post-consumer waste, which they take back, but now because of coronavirus they also have huge stocks of unsold clothes because retail almost collapsed. They can’t resell those, because they’re not in season, so they have a vast amount of very high-quality clothes with no real possibility for recycling because they’re all mixed material.

The problem is just growing and growing, and we can’t landfill our textile waste anymore – we have to face it. Given that we don’t have solutions at present, I’m interested to see how we will tackle that. I think there will be many bankruptcies in this coming year, because it’s very, very difficult for big companies to adapt to the new rules.

Alexander I have a concern that while this year is bringing change, people will fall back into old habits.

Because it’s harder to go and make that extra effort at present, the quick or easy fix becomes attractive.

Then there is this issue that a lot of warehouses around the world were closed during lockdown, with nothing moving out or being distributed. All of those garments have become dead stock, not only through missing a season, but also by virtue of no one having been able to access them for that amount of time – it’s just a backlog of material to deal with. People shopped online, so you might think that a lot of product was still moving through the digital, but brands’ online and store inventories are totally different. A lot has been lost. E N D

in finding the continuity for something to run globally and without loopholes, because people will always find any loopholes.

Reet We’re sat here in Europe, but all the production is happening elsewhere and it’s not going to come back. We don’t even have the land or space to build it up again, and most of the innovation has already moved anyway. This has then created problems in European schools, because we’re educating designers without them ever seeing proper production during their studies. We simply don’t have it here for them to visit. They don’t have the understanding of how a big factory works, which puts them in a position where they don’t know what would make a better product or what it would be like for them to produce.

Alexander When we talked about sustainability at college, it was really just a material exercise and nothing more – at that time, everyone was suddenly wanting to make things out of whatever was to hand. We never looked into the huge opportunity there is now to approach that subject. My motivation was always to follow the less-is-more approach, in part because I was running my own studio and so saw that every penny counted.

I think that having that experience of actually making and selling your own product is a very good thing, because it enables you to understand every single aspect of the system – the highs and lows of it, everything that can possibly go wrong. You start to anticipate problems, which is a big part of being efficient.

Reet Very often when I speak to people about these issues, they say “Oh, but you’re all ultimately in the same industry, you’re kind of doing the same thing as any producer.” No, it’s not like that at all. If you need to buy a t-shirt, buy an upcycled one. Buy a sustainable product and then you can be part of the solution.

Money is not bad, you just have to put it towards the right things. That’s how you can actually make a change. Of course you should support ethical businesses and the right people with your money – I always think about whom I give my money to, because I work hard to get it.

Alexander I do think the consumer has a huge opportunity to bring change by not buying, and that’s something where I have hope that we will see change. Because of the pandemic’s economic impact, people are going to have

This conversation has been edited for length.

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Redesigning Globalisation A conversation about cultural exchange and changing attitudes towards the idea of the “global city”.

Panellists Charlie Koolhaas and Theodore Zeldin Photographs Charlie Koolhaas

The discussion was held over Skype in September 2020 between Charlie Koolhaas, an artist, photographer and writer whose 2020 book City Lust explores the economic and cultural impact of globalisation in the 21st century, as told through personal photography and texts from London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai and Houston; and Theodore Zeldin, a historian and expert on the history and value of conversation, whose books include An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) and The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future (2015). Zeldin also founded The Oxford Muse, a Foundation which researches and promotes the improvement of professional, personal and intercultural relations. Koolhaas and Zeldin are friends and collaborators, having previously worked together on The Oxford Muse.

Conversation

Theodore Zeldin It’s been fascinating reading and looking

that we already think we understand very clearly who the winners and losers of globalisation are, and we write that story in a very simplistic way.

We know there is an elite, or the one per cent as we’ve come to call it, which gains more than everyone else.

And their gain relies on the exploitation of global workers everywhere, and global migrants. That’s a well-known story. But what I also wanted to show was that there are all these different layers and nuances to that. So for instance, for African traders in China, I saw that they were actually beneficiaries. I saw the ways in which new relationships between different continents cut out or sidestepped the West, and that there were new forms of empowerment in those relationships – particularly when so much of our power can be measured through access to products and production. At the same time, in the Western mainstream press, there was this incredible focus on the new exploitation of African countries by China.

The story is that there’s a new form of colonialism, but I saw something that felt more interesting and more revolutionary happening too – a radical shift in the global power dynamics. So when we condemn globalisation and say that the relationship between China and Africa is only a new form of exploitation, we leave out and therefore disempower the people who are working hard to manoeuvre through that system to make it work for them.

Theodore You’re saying that there is a balance and it’s working?

Charlie Well, what is “working”?

Theodore The majority of people seldom feel that they are living a full life, let alone the life of their dreams, and this includes many of those who are prosperous.

Too many devote themselves to earning money in order to afford the kind of life they would like, but which they seldom have enough money for or free time to experience. And so we are imposing great limitations on the meaning of life.

Charlie Hasn’t that always been the case and isn’t globalisation, in some ways, for some people, a way towards further fulfilment?

Theodore But being let out of a factory at weekends to go shopping without enough money is no joke for people for whom work is drudgery. I can see and appreciate what globalisation and civilisation have achieved. But now that we’re confronted by a little virus knocking them to pieces, we are challenged to imagine how we can do better.

at your book. You finished it a year ago?

Charlie Koolhaas Yeah, but it actually took me 10 years

to make. It was released earlier this year, just before Corona hit.

Theodore It is an original exploration of multiculturalism, combining vivid narratives of your own adventures with very personal photographs. You are constantly trying to get out of a place to go somewhere else, and when you get there, you go to yet another place.

In London, you escape from Hampstead to explore Hackney. Lagos, Houston, Dubai, and Guangzhou also each have surprising stories to tell which repeatedly question inherited assumptions.

Charlie I guess there’s a restlessness that makes me always think that there’s somewhere else I need to go, or something that I haven’t understood yet. For the last 10 years, I’ve been in Holland, which has been very difficult, in a way. After living in China and Dubai – these places that were growing so quickly, and where you could feel like you were part of a future being built – in Holland I feel much more like I’m part of a past that is being preserved.

Theodore City Lust is a challenge to the idea of cities as the great achievement of civilisation – the idea that civilisation means living in a city and cultivating new urban values. The city was originally designed to liberate people from the need to devote themselves to growing their own food, and to bring all sorts

“We are imposing great limitations on the meaning of life.” —Theodore Zeldin of different occupations together to expand human ambitions, to converse and trade with strangers, to invent new arts and new relationships, and to aim for more than mere survival. But today, the inequalities in cities disappoint not only those living in crowded slums, but also those doing boring or mind-destroying jobs. You describe the snags of globalisation very well, and how there are many more losers than winners.

But now that 75 per cent of the world is soon going to be living in big cities, how should we think of them?

Charlie It’s funny that you say that, because I didn’t think that that was the message of my book. I feel

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All the photographs accompanying this conversation are from City Lust by Charlie Koolhaas, published by Scheidegger & Spiess.

They variously depict Koolhaas’s travels in London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai and Houston.

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Charlie But it’s knocking them into pieces in Western

democratic countries, particularly.

Theodore That is an interesting comment, because we have long claimed that everybody in the West, and everybody who has been subject of Western colonisation, are progressing towards parliamentary government. And once we’ve got that, we are free people. That’s not the same in China. And many countries are abandoning this notion of freedom – even those countries which claim to be free have elected very bizarre leaders who have a different idea of what freedom means.

Charlie Right. I think Trump shows how willing we are to give up our freedoms for some sense of, I guess, togetherness or belonging. We give up freedoms for the security of our previous identities, maybe.

Theodore In other words, going backwards.

Charlie That’s what I was investigating, really, in my book. There’s a kind of freedom that I discovered has very little to do with political systems. We’re constantly judging a country by the political system it’s being governed by, and the small group of men who are in charge. So for instance, the identity of China has become its government. When we talk about China, we think of the Chinese government. We don’t think of the Chinese culture – the thousands of years that happened before Xi’s government, which are actually very contradictory to its current history. I’m not condoning authoritarian regimes or saying that authoritarianism is a freeing condition, but I did find that in places like Guangzhou, Dubai, and Lagos, there was a vision of the future changing rapidly. By contrast, in London or in Houston, the development has already gone so far that any further development comes at the expense of the exciting or freeing aspects of urban life.

So the first part of my book is about growing up in Hampstead. I talk about the hippies and the punks, and how there was this rebelliousness and the newness to multiculturalism there. I learned so much from growing up in this multicultural context. There was a real engagement and, of course, a lot of tensions – but those tensions were explicit. The battles hadn’t been won yet, whereas 20 years later, when I got to Hackney, that togetherness was actually being dismantled through gentrification. So the areas that had been mixed racially were, once again, homogenous, white, and middle-class. That is something you see in London: that increasingly, the entire city is white and middle class. Further

development will, to a certain extent, create that form of homogenisation.

Theodore One of the things you mention in the book is the way Chinese society has developed an ideal of feminine beauty which is Western. And that more generally, people are dreaming of an idea of luxury which rich Westerners have developed.

Charlie Yeah, but among the young people that I worked with, it wasn’t a superficial idea. For instance, while I lived in China, I worked with a 20-year-old business student who was my assistant and translator. Her father had been incredibly poor and then become very rich as a factory owner. And because of that, she was able to do all these things that very few Chinese women had been allowed to do before. She went to Canada to study, worked for me, and was encouraged to have a career and not think about marriage too much. Of course, there was still this deep-rooted belief in family and marriage, but at the same time her ambitions were really to see the world and explore her options, because she knew there was so much she didn’t have access to yet. So I saw all these gender roles and racial divisions and structures being bent and changed. But of course, with possibilities and freedom comes new confusion.

Theodore You have rightly been encouraged by the possibilities for more interesting and more generous lives. But I regret that the vast majority of people are still compelled to have very limited ambitions. Well, what comes next? What are you going to do, having acquired all this information?

Charlie Right now is a strange time to be a white European liberal and I wanted to talk about being a white Westerner in places like China and Nigeria.

To avoid simply casting a Western-eye-view on the rest of the world, but also to show how the world viewed me as a Westerner, and then more broadly, how Western influence really manifests itself in “Non-Western” parts of the world. And in doing this I also hoped to show how the distinction between Western and non-Western is being, or has been, dissolved. The question of what we should “do” next is complicated by history.

How do you support empowerment without being missionaries, or their modern incarnation, “white saviours”? That’s an important question. I find that label – “white saviour” – very interesting because it’s also a critique of the Western left. We have held the belief that we should be responsible for “saving the world” but now we see that that’s not really very

Conversation

different from the way missionaries thought during colonialism – but with political convictions rather than religious ones.

Theodore Everybody who has ideas is inclined to think that they have the solution, although there is no such thing as a solution, because every solution – like all medicines – contains unexpected side effects. No-one thought that building a city would produce pollution.

No-one thought that cars would jam everything up.

Every solution has a snag.

Charlie In a sense, Corona is almost a dream-come-true for Extinction Rebellion. Flights have been grounded, so in one fell swoop they have been given what they wanted. We’ve felt trapped by our offices and our routines, and yet when those were instantly taken away, we are now confronted with what happens without them. What are the alternatives? They seem to lie in this virtual world, which gives us, again, a particular type of freedom. We no longer have to be somewhere at a specific time as we’re in this basically timeless, spaceless environment.

And yet, we’re incredibly worried about what that means for our privacy, and what that means for our ability to be outside of political control. What does it mean if we can no longer discuss things face to face and everything is potentially recorded?

Theodore Talking to you on Skype is not ideal.

Charlie Why do you think it makes a difference?

Theodore If we are in the same room, we get to know each other better – there are all sorts of signals and body language which add a lot to spoken words.

Suppose that our present civilisation is destroyed and all that future generations will have to remember us by is your book. Let’s say this is the only book that survives about these ancient people who lived in the 21st century. Would it be enough to look at the pictures?

Would you not then want to know more about the individuals in them, to penetrate their imaginations?

Globalisation is only a beginning. The next step, for me at least, is to discover more about people as individuals, each one unique and an almost impenetrable enigma.

Each person I encounter is a miscellaneous jumble of ideas, thoughts, experiences, habits, memories, fears, and emotions. Getting to know a person is a lifelong occupation, and an endless exploration.

Unlike with objects, our close relationships with other people are a vital and irreplaceable stimulus to our capacity for invention. Just as a woman and a man can procreate a child, so two minds that open

themselves up to each other can procreate ideas.

And sometimes ideas can change what people are, what the child will become and how it will behave.

Charlie In a sense, this idea that getting to know each other will take away the potential for conflict forms the basis of the multicultural ideal. If we live together, get to know each other, become friends, our differences will be dissolved or at least understood. Yet one of the things I show in the book is that the more we travel, the more we meet, the more we get to know each other,

“To battle about dress or to battle about lifestyle is fruitless.” —Charlie Koolhaas the more we’re also creating huge potential for conflict.

That is the thing that multiculturalism has failed to address. What happens if you get to know someone and realise you don’t agree with them, or you can’t, or you’re ideologically opposed? This is the kind of multiculturalism that I see happening in China and in Dubai, where there is this agreement that we are just going to live together – we’re not going to make understanding the basis for living together.

In Dubai, they do that very acceptingly. It’s an Islamic culture with a huge number of norms and rules that are constantly being defied by the foreigners who live there. So you see a lot of English people who go to English pubs and women who wear very revealing clothing. It’s completely contrary to the norms of the society in which they are, and yet there’s this understanding that to battle about dress or to battle about lifestyle is fruitless. The economic benefits of living together are greater, basically. That’s why I wanted to look at the economy of the world rather than political systems – it reveals more about real interactions and alliances, rather than theoretical or ideological ones.

Theodore I was very struck by the statement that getting to know each other produces conflict.

Charlie It can do.

Theodore That’s why I’m interested in another art, which I feel we need to develop: the art of disagreement.

Even anger, hatred, violence, or an obstinate inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood can be a stimulus for new ideas.

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“There’s endless discussion about right or wrong, which I find difficult as an artist because everything is framed as a moral question.”

—Charlie Koolhaas

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Charlie But what would the resolution to that type

of conflict be? The conflict, right now, also seems to be that everyone wants to be agreed with, or at least wants to be right. So there’s endless discussion about what’s right or wrong. I find it difficult as an artist because everything is always framed as a moral question of what’s right or wrong. We’re asked to present the ethical way forward as artists. Two things have happened at once: our sense of there being a moral authority has been reduced by the reality of multiculturalism, yet we seem stuck on discussions of morality. We are left each fighting for our own truth.

Theodore That happens when one is stuck with a particular, limited idea of truth. I see truth as being like a diamond. The diamond has more than 100 different sides and it shines in different directions.

Looking at it from one’s habitual perspective, one may see mainly what one’s mind is trained to see.

Each religion sees the world in a different way.

Each individual sees the world in a different way.

We need to benefit from this, not fight it.

Charlie My book is about economic connections where there are nevertheless those ideological disjuncts.

When I was in China in 2005, it was during a time when there was a massive influx of foreign traders.

I went there on a tourist visa which they allowed me to extend for six years – that’s not possible now.

Everyone was very suspicious of China, because the Chinese had been given this reputation of being fraudulent and untrustworthy. So traders came to China with that awareness, and yet they were forced to trust, or at least rely on, translators and factory managers – and vice versa.

Theodore The Chinese word “Guanxi” [ 系, ed.], is the idea that before you do business with someone, you’ve got to know them and their family. In other words, it is not economic trust that moves you, it is personal trust. Likewise, in Lagos there is the informal market, which is very much inspired by trust – by knowing who you are and, therefore, giving you a better deal because you’re a friend. Human relations are what economic activity tends to ignore. Private relationships based on intimate understanding of and curiosity about other people’s uniqueness are becoming more significant than the traditional search for public power.

Charlie In the end economic interests are paramount.

That’s why I don’t want people to think that my book

is about the harmony and the positive side of our current economic situation. It’s a situation that forces us into interactions outside of our comfort zones. I’ve attempted to look at these cultural exchanges, but also the cultural non-exchanges, or the cultural separations. What does cultural exchange actually create? It’s a kind of appropriation when we start to exchange and appropriate each other’s cultures. The book was very much an investigation of the idea of cultural appropriation.

It’s true that at this moment, cultural appropriation has meant that native people from all around the world have had their culture excavated and consumed in the form of mass-producible products. If we look at industries such as fashion or music we can say that they rely on this process: to some extent it takes ideas from the marginalised and markets those ideas back to them. At the same time, what I saw happening, and what I documented in my book, were the forms of cultural appropriation that allowed collaboration to happen between cultures. So, for instance, in African districts of Guangzhou, Chinese appropriations of African culture had created a totally new type of Afro-Asian urban culture that hadn’t existed before.

So cultural appropriation can also be an authentic form of fusion. It is simply the way in which the market adapts to trends. Those moments of cultural exchange seemed to be where the impacts of globalisation actually appeared.

Theodore Adopting a new idea or custom very often transforms it in the act of appropriation.

Charlie Right. I went to a rap show in China and there was a young woman rapping in Cantonese. It was very rebellious, like, “Screw this, screw that, screw everybody.” She was expressing values that were, to a certain extent, alien values: a sense of teenage rebellion that Western culture has promoted. We’ve very much exported those values to the rest of the world. For instance, in the book, I talk about the prominence of hip hop culture as this unifying urban culture that appears everywhere. And though that influence originates in America, it is also in some way anti-American. Hip hop itself is a kind of product of the influence of Western culture, though it was a reaction to the dominance of white America.

The paradox is that what started as a critique has gone on to become one of the main aesthetics, sounds and cultures produced by globalisation.

It is an artform that was based on sampling that

Conversation

with controlling the development of culture. And then I ran into a German woman in Europe who said to me, “Yeah, I went to Dubai, wasn’t it awful the way that women were treated?” She had gone somewhere, had a stereotypical idea of what it was going to be like, and then her experience just confirmed what she was expecting. People don’t find surprises.

Theodore I spent a year with four assistants studying tourism. We went into hotels and spoke to the managers, staff and customers. And we saw exactly what you’re saying – that tourism is not doing what it could be doing. Most tourists see the sights, but seldom talk with the locals or discover their infinite variety and contradictions. They visit museums in silence. Human contact is limited. You pay a guide who may tell you only part of the story. We’ve got to invent a new kind of tourism.

Charlie Exactly. It was the biggest industry, because it comes from our desire to know others. It comes from our exoticisation of the world, I guess. But also pure curiosity. Yet it has resulted in a kind of devastation of the world.

Theodore Where are you going next?

Charlie After City Lust comes the story of my return to Rotterdam. After living in these places that were racing towards a future, I came back to Rotterdam and was confronted with my own identity again.

Not just my own identity, but all of the values and the beliefs that I had to undo in order to understand the rest of the world. And I saw that the ideals of the multicultural left were being called into question.

No-one really knows how to live together. The left doesn’t either – it doesn’t know how to make the argument for multiculturalism or for globalism anymore. So I guess the argument we have to make now is exactly what you’ve been talking about, Theodore: to say, no actually, just living together and knowing each other is not enough.

We either have to go deeper into understanding, and that means abandoning completely an idea of right or wrong, or we have to eliminate, like in China and Dubai, the need for understanding as a foundation for living together. E N D

has been appropriated and reimagined in almost every country in the world – as I show in my book.

But as it has become commodified, it has also become the means by which African-Americans have their own culture commodified and sold back to them by mainstream America. It has been both a means of empowerment and also a reiteration of a lack of power. That is the paradox of rebellion in the age of the global market economy. So mainstream hip hop, in itself, is an example of the way Western culture is already an appropriation of other cultures.

Basically, the progress of civilisation is dependent on forms of appropriations.

Theodore I don’t know about progress. Ideals constantly change. And when you use the word “culture”, I find it too broad a word. Within each culture, there are so many variations, there are so many ingredients.

Western culture? What is Western culture? Equally, I’ve had Chinese people come to me and say, “We are trying to reinvent our Confucian origins.”

And Confucius, of course, represented only one part of Chinese civilisation. And he was modified by his successors. In China, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism have coexisted within an empire which combined all these things into an infinitely complex culture. What is “Chinese culture”?

Charlie The reason I named the book City Lust was because “City Lust” was an interpretation of Western culture by a Chinese product designer who was making a rip-off version of the Sex and the City perfume.

So City Lust the perfume and City Lust the book are both about interpretations of Western culture.

And that’s also how I talk about myself: as a Westerner, because I am part of this spread and interpretation of Western culture, and I’m embedded in it. But I also create a mirror. I represent it everywhere I go, so I encounter, constantly, a reaction towards it, towards the idea of what Western culture is. At the same time, whenever I went back to Europe, I was always confronted with people’s expectations and stereotypes of China. People had a sense that they understood China without ever having been there. But I also noticed that people who had travelled and actually experienced the place didn’t necessarily have a different perspective. That was what was so surprising for me. Tourism doesn’t create exchange or elements of surprise, really. When I was in Dubai, I encountered incredibly empowered, highly educated, verbal, and expressive women in the art world who were charged

This conversation has been edited for length.

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A More Plastic Design A conversation about design’s failings with plastic, and the need to reframe the way in which society engages with and understands the material.

Panellists Seetal Solanki and Kajsa Willner

The discussion was held over Zoom in August 2020 between Seetal Solanki, the founder and director of materials research studio Ma-tt-er, whose work examines people’s relationship to materials, and considers how changes to their treatment in industry and education may have positive social, cultural and economic impacts; and Kajsa Willner, a crossdisciplinary designer whose MalmÜ-based practice recently exhibted Materiality & Aggregation at Form/Design Center, a display communicating academic research around plastic created by the Sustainable Plastics and Transition Pathways research programme at Lund University.

Conversation

Seetal Solanki Language

is really the beginning of every process. It is about relationality – how we relate to materials and each other – and is often the first way we engage with materials. We can understand a material through categories – such as plastic, wood, and metal – which is the standard system you would see in a materials library, but that’s actually very

really understood plastic itself because of the human behaviours around the material and how we’ve misused and mistreated it. It’s not plastic’s fault that we’re in this position – it’s human error.

Plastic is misunderstood and demonised, but it’s such an intelligent material. Humans have abused it to the point where it has become single-use, whereas it’s actually one of the most durable materials we’ve created.

Kajsa We need a big jump in public understanding.

Seetal We see plastic as a synthetic material, but it’s made from oil which is a natural material – it has just been synthesized into something humanmade.

So when we classify a material, how do we do that in terms of natural and synthetic? There is actually a term – “synthetic organic” – which describes how natural materials are chemically synthesised to create a composite. Is that something we should be talking about? What kind of effect does that have on society, or the planet’s health? Then you find further complexity when you consider biodegradable plastics or bioplastic alternatives. The language around those is confusing, because once you put “bio–” in front of plastic, the assumption is that it can degrade naturally within the earth – which is not the case. A biodegradable plastic can be composted, and that can take place over a number of days or several months, but a bioplastic still has fossil fuels as part of its molecular structure, so composting isn’t as easy as one might think. You’d need a composter specifically designed for that particular material, otherwise you would have the same problems as with conventional plastics.

I don’t think there’s as much knowledge around that being shared as there could be, but that’s something that I’m working on. My second book, which I’m about to start writing, is about the language of materials – what various terms mean within the material world, and also making this information accessible and relatable for the majority of people.

I am now describing myself as a translator rather than a designer.

Kajsa For me, the contemporary designer should be able to inform themselves about multiple topics, ask a lot of questions, and be able to solve both small and big problems from a design perspective.

In Sweden, however, where I’m based, the view of the designer is still very conservative. I’ve lived in Italy and the Netherlands, and it was a bit of a shock to me that, coming back here, my role

“Plastics have come to be seen as a universal solution based on human consumption and convenience.”

—Seetal Solanki

limiting. A plastic, for instance, can be a fabric, solid, translucent, opaque, incredibly durable, biodegradable – it can be so many different things. Materials also differ across climates, countries and cultures. A category such as “plastic” doesn’t allow us to understand all of those functional qualities. Unless you’re deemed an expert in the field, you don’t understand the different capabilities of plastics. And that’s because the language is too limited. As designers, we design objects, spaces and experiences based on how something should function and feel. So why can’t we understand materials in the same way?

Kajsa Willner Most members of the public tend to know the difference between types of metal. They know the differences between copper, steel or aluminium. That’s not the case with plastics, where everything is grouped under a collective name, even though there are tons of different plastics with different combinations of additives and so on.

Seetal I think that’s to do with the fact that there are visible differences between the metals, whereas plastics can, for a lot of people, look the same. PET and HDPE, for example, can have aesthetic similarities, so the visible differences aren’t quite there as they are with metals. But a huge part of the issue is that plastics have come to be seen as a universal solution.

Based on human consumption and convenience, we’ve arrived at this idea of a universal material. We haven’t 116

Above and right: Images from Seetal Solanki’s exhibition and book launch for Why Materials Matter: Responsible

Design for a Better World.

Below: Kajsa Willner’s Polarized

Photographs by Kennet Ruona, Freya McOmish and Dilesh Solanki.

installation for Designmuseum Danmark.

Conversation

is viewed as if I were a designer in the 1950s, or as if my work is something for only the privileged to enjoy.

That’s tough for me, because I do what I do because I feel design could be a key to many problems, big and small. I wish you could see designers in more positions in society. For example, in the context of a city you always have an architect, but why isn’t the designer there also? Architects don’t have the same connection with the material in their hands as the designer does. The designer works on a level that is closer to the person walking down the pavement. Why isn’t a designer there to choose materials? I suppose it’s getting better, but we’re still very far from having the role of designers actually reflect the kind of problems we have to address today.

One positive that I have noticed, however, is that over the past five years a number of projects have been pushed through to try to make the designer’s role visible to industries in Skåne, the region of Sweden where I am based. Those have been supported not only by the region itself, but also by local initiatives and organisations such as the Form/Design Center and Jenny Nordberg’s SPOK production platform.

Seetal I completely agree. There’s a misunderstanding around what design has the ability to do, but that is also because a designer’s role isn’t just one thing.

Some designers make life more comfortable by designing particular products, for example. For me, however, design is about the wider system, much like an architect’s role is about systems. We need to begin addressing the end-of-life at the very start of the design process – that is our role as designers and translators. Within architecture there’s clear infrastructure. There are RIBA standards in the UK, for example, and legal entities supporting the architectural profession, because architects design buildings that are occupied by people. In design, no system exists in the same way.

Kajsa That’s true of other sectors as well, such as energy and transport – you have clear guidance and surrounding government agencies. But with materials, and especially plastics, we don’t have that. No global direction or coordination, no local direction. And that becomes a huge problem, as we’re seeing around us now. We know that plastic is in our drinking water, for example – it’s everywhere.

Seetal There are certain methodologies in place within the design world, such as “human-centred design”,

but many of these still treat materials as something which just gets added on towards the end of the design process. This is why plastics have ended up in the position they’re in. We’re designing for humans and not considering non-humans, which is a really, really big problem. If we begin with the material, we understand the systems around it. A materialdriven, material-first approach is crucial to eliminating the negative impacts we’re having on the planet, and also to advocating for human and non-human health.

Understanding the life and death of materials is so important, but we haven’t gotten there yet with plastics because the conversation has been framed around human consumption – again, a human-centred design approach.

“With materials and especially plastics, there is no global direction or coordination, no local direction. That’s a huge problem.”

—Kajsa Willner

Kajsa I’ve

recently been working on Materiality & Aggregation, an exhibition to display the academic research of the STEPS (Sustainable Plastics and Transition Pathways) at Lund University. What made me interested in this project was that it addressed the challenges of using plastics, but also possible solutions to those as well as the advantages of these materials. We need to adopt a holistic point of view to tackle the situation with plastics, and so we ended up dividing it into five points: ‘Reduce’, ‘Recycle’, ‘Fewer Types’, ‘Bio-Based’ and ‘Biodegradable’. Reducing is the biggest thing and then, of course, there’s recycling.

We’ve produced 8.3bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s and we haven’t recycled it – 79 per cent of that plastic has ended up in the natural environment indefinitely. Now we are beginning to recycle, but policymakers still need to agree about what to do, have a shared vision, and use both mechanical recycling and innovative forms of chemical recycling.

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Everything is still on the drawing board, you could say. Maybe we need to ban certain types of plastic, but how should we agree on what to ban? You need to look at all of these pathways at the same time to know what to do, and that’s the complexity of a plastic system. But there is still the possibility of using plastic in a good way. If we, as designers or architects, know how to treat the material, we can start by pushing manufacturers and saying, “OK, in this case, I won’t work with plastic, I’d rather work with glass. But for this part here, I would like to use plastic, because I know this company that will take it back at the end of its life.” You always need to dig a little bit deeper to understand when you should use plastic and in which way. It’s not really the material in itself that is the problem, it’s how we use it.

Seetal So you’ve got reduce and recycle, but you’ve also got to look at composting and this idea of nonmechanical recycling. The circular economy is one method, or one system, that we can buy into for dealing with this, but I don’t think it’s the only one.

We have to remind ourselves that there’s not just one system that can be adopted for all the materials, because all materials have different behaviours and different ways of dying healthily. Recycling and reducing are definitely a part of this, but designing for durability, versatility, and easy disassembly is also key – and more complex. A designer’s role is not only to understand that kind of complexity, but also to be able to communicate it and help people relate to materials, objects, and spaces; to relate to the non-human world by considering systems built on care and respect.

Kajsa The whole idea for me when I started out was to try to nuance the view on plastic. In the design world, it sometimes seems like you’re either for or against plastic, which is so basic.

Seetal Exactly.

Kajsa It doesn’t make sense because you need to look a little bit deeper. To just dismiss a whole material as “bad” means you haven’t really taken in what it’s about. The reason plastic is everywhere is because it’s an intelligent material – otherwise it wouldn’t be so popular. But we haven’t been intelligent in terms of how we take care of it, or designed with it from the start to be reused and recycled within our existing systems.

Seetal This is quite a grand, sweeping statement, but I would say materials are more intelligent than human

beings. We don’t really have a healthy relationship towards materials because we tend to consider them only for human consumption and simply forget the wider impacts they have across other ecologies.

It’s not just the material itself we need to understand better, it’s supply chains, production methods, and manufacturing systems.

Kajsa But we need global guidelines for handling those systems. There are local initiatives with bio-based plastics – where scientists, engineers, and designers

“The whole idea is to nuance the view on plastic.

In design, it sometimes seems like you’re either for or against plastic, which is so basic.”

—Kajsa Willner

have sat together and looked at these systems – but you need a shared vision to know what to do.

Seetal It’s about accountability. Who’s accountable for this waste? Plastic is something that migrates around the world: it is initially created in one place; the resources have actually come from another place; then it’s designed somewhere else; manufactured somewhere else again; and then it gets bought, used, and dumped somewhere else entirely. Plastic designed in Europe is often manufactured in the far East, but then gets dumped in countries such as Malaysia. China banned plastic waste imports in 2017 – it’s not taking our waste anymore – so now Malaysia and some of the African nations are being dumped with all our waste plastic from the UK. So who is accountable for that?

Plastic migrates in the waters of the Earth as well, passing through our washing machines, our taps, our bodies. It’s both so micro and so macro all at the same time. That confluence means that we cannot ignore the interconnectedness of the material world.

Kajsa It’s partly to do with our consumer habits.

Maybe we should view it as more of a luxury material that should only be used where it makes sense.

Seetal Could you explain what you mean by luxury?

Kajsa “Precious”, perhaps.

Conversation

Seetal It’s

quite complex to change that perception, because plastics are very inexpensive to make, although they won’t be affordable for much longer as we’re running out of oil. But we do need to understand the preciousness of materials, and that they won’t continue to be as abundant as we think.

Just consider the way we talk about “resources” – a word I don’t like because it speaks of extractivism.

Plastic is a shining example of colonialism, in a way.

Our consumption and production habits around plastic have created a tsunami of issues across the globe and have had all sorts of damaging, actually quite traumatic, effects on ecosystems and human health.

We have to start healing somehow, but the trauma has such deep wounds that we don’t even know where to begin. We need to start with healing ourselves, which can then extend towards our communities and the planet. So much of how we relate to plastic has to do with the capitalist model, which considers newness as a means to drive productivity, and which encourages constant economic growth. We’re having to reframe that model entirely, and think about what we have, because we’ve already got an abundance of plastic that we could harness to its full potential.

Kajsa The great challenge with plastic recycling is how to get post-consumer and post-industrial plastic back in the quality that is needed for recycling. What I think is interesting is that this discussion has gone under the radar for such a long time.

through decisions. Constantly checking in and asking, “What am I doing here? Should I buy this? Should I not?

What’s the impact?” Making those sorts of decisions with care and respect in mind is exhausting and most human beings are very time poor. That’s where brands and organisations offer to do that thinking for us by promising that their products are, say, “zero carbon” – which doesn’t actually exist, by the way.

Kajsa You can have low-carbon, but you can’t have zero carbon.

Seetal Within my practice, a particular project that speaks to a lot of this is something we did in Bali with an independent hotel brand called Potato Head.

There’s no centrally organised recycling on the island, but they have an influx of plastic waste washing up on their beautiful beaches. Residents continuously do beach cleans and all sorts of activities that combat plastic pollution, and which encourage the community to gather and potentially build something together.

Potato Head is a brand which was founded by an Indonesian man, Ronald Akili. The particular hotel we worked on is called Desa Potato Head. For the project, we mapped the Island of Bali in terms of its materials – exploring the island’s native and waste materials.

Plastic turned out to be a really big one, which we translated into the hotel as woven mesh ceilings, and outdoor furniture like hammocks – all of it was recycled and repurposed. In a lot of hotels in Bali, you could be anywhere in the world, but we really made an effort to make sure the guests had the experience of being in Bali, simply by working with the island’s materials. It was really an exchange with the island – with the materials it’s made of, as well as the communities working with those materials.

A project like this actually has the capacity to make other local economies thrive because of the island’s material and immaterial wealth. Crafts in Bali are slowly diminishing, because the younger generation does not necessarily see them as having value. But if you can reframe that through the use of materials found within a particular place, it feels more relatable and engaging – not only for the younger generation, but for the majority of people, as well as non-humans. I think that’s what design can do – build bridges between worlds that are about creating access and relationality.

Kajsa We can take on projects like this, be more conscious of how we design, and it will make a little bit of a difference. But the things that really need to be in place are a shared approach and system,

“Plastic is a shining example of colonialism.

Our consumption and production habits have created a tsunami of issues.”

—Seetal Solanki

Seetal Human

beings love to ignore things. We’re ignorant beings, I think. Care and respect is the way to combat that though. That’s sustainability – care and respect. To care is exhausting, as is thinking 120

Left and below: Material samples and displays created by Willner for Materiality & Aggregation.

Bottom left: James Shaw’s Plastic Baroque project, exhibited by Solanki for Why Materials Matter.

Conversation

and that’s down to politicians and policymakers.

So it’s a little bit higher up than me, the designer, and if those things are not in place, I can’t feel too optimistic. But I think you do need to take an optimistic point of view to be able to change the things you can affect.

it’s just a byproduct. That is also why I believe that designers need to do multidisciplinary collaborations.

If you only stick in your field, you will only have your own perspective. Which will be very small.

Seetal We need to rethink our relationship to plastics, but my issue with the design language of “problems” and “solutions” is that these words can be considered colonial terms. They imply that humans have the solutions to the world’s problems and this is not the case. Nature has all the answers, and while we are of course part of nature, we tend to distinguish ourselves from it and view ourselves as superior to it.

That’s a colonial attitude, so I find it difficult to speak of design in terms of “problem-solving”. I prefer to think of design as something that provides alternatives and translations. There’s a great quote by Lou Downe, who has written a book called Good Services: Decoding the Mystery of What Makes a Good Service (2020): “Nouns are for experts and verbs are for everyone”.

I think verbs and adjectives allow for difference, whereas nouns are very branded somehow.

Buckminster Fuller spoke to this even more deeply when he said: “I live on earth at present and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category, I am not a thing, a noun. I seem to be about an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe.” That’s what we are. That’s who we are. E N D

“I find it difficult to think of design in terms of ‘problem-solving’. I prefer to think of design as providing alternatives and translations.”

—Seetal Solanki

Seetal I

think the issue is that plastic is still seen as a universal solution for human convenience; something that can be entirely mass-produced.

But not all materials can be produced at that scale, and there needs to be more nuance around scalability. Fundamentally, I don’t think that we can design for universalism and there needs to be more cultural nuance as well. For example, a lot of bioplastics use agar, corn, or potato starch and these sorts of binding agents. A lot of the time we don’t know where those materials come from. Where are they traveling from in the world? How are they being processed? I have a few unanswered questions around that in itself, but it’s also about figuring out what we have locally, as well as what we have globally, that is available in the places that bio-plastics are being produced. We need to give back at least as much as we take.

Kajsa As humans, we tend to forget that, historically, we were more connected to nature. We had knowledge on how to use and not abuse the things around us, and had a respect and care for materials. I’m working on another project with a paper manufacturer, and I discovered that they have lots of ash, a byproduct from paper production. That drove me to research how the ancient Greeks and Romans actually made things from volcano ash, and that it could maybe even play a role in replacing modern concrete – but for now

This conversation has been edited for length.

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Don’t Make it Permanent, Don’t Make it Beautiful A roundtable about how wayfinding may improve the safety of transport infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Panellists Tim Fendley, Kate Jeffery, Sarah Manning and Jada Stevens

The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020.

Present on the call were Tim Fendley, the founder and creative director of Applied, a wayfinding agency that has worked on projects for transport infrastructure and pedestrian schemes in London, Toronto, Madrid, Dublin and Rio de Janeiro, as well as recently launching the Covid-19 Design Toolkit; Kate Jeffery, founder of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London, whose research centres on how the brain assembles sensory information into cognitive representations of the world; Sarah Manning, a founding director of SpaceAgency, which has recently redesiged all wayfinding and signage guidance for Network Rail’s managed train stations in the UK; and Jada Stevens, an experiential graphic designer and wayfinding planner for TransLink, the transit network for Metro Vancouver.

Roundtable

Tim Fendley I’m

the founder and creative director of Applied, a studio that works on wayfinding projects with transport organisations, campuses, cities, and buildings all around the world. My background is as an information designer and, when Covid hit, we had a number of clients ask us, “What do we do?”

We realised that a lot of what we were doing in one

Rail’s managed stations, and put that into guidelines which will now be rolled out across the UK’s railway stations. Personally, I came into wayfinding through a company called Space Syntax, which looks at pedestrian behaviour, primarily in urban spaces.

So my route into it was through urban design, and I had studied architecture and urbanism.

Within our practice at SpaceAgency, we have information designers, graphic designers, product designers, as well as urban planners and architects.

We’ve had clients approach us about wayfinding projects in relation to Coronavirus, but it hasn’t been a particular focus. The projects are so long-term that many clients are hoping that, in the two or three years it takes to design and construct, we’ll be beyond this period and won’t need social distancing measures.

It’s a gamble that I think some developers and property owners are taking.

Jada Stevens I’m based in Vancouver where I work for TransLink, which is the transit network here. We cover bus, sea-bus, and various forms of rail, as well as managing the cycling network, major road network, and a number of bridges in the area. My position with TransLink is as a wayfinding planner where I work with a small team of four – two designers and two planners.

Right now, TransLink is a growing transportation network and we’re currently in the design phase for 11 new stations for SkyTrain, which is our aboveand below-ground rapid transit. Pre-Covid, our bus network was also expanding. So from a wayfinding standpoint, there’s a lot going on right now. When we’re upgrading a facility, our team has to manage changes in the customers’ environment – how customers experience a facility that they may already be familiar with, but which is changing because we’re adding a new escalator or closing an entrance for some time. My job is to understand what the customer is experiencing and anticipate what they will need to get from point A to point B during those changing conditions. I plan that and then work with the designers to implement it.

Then with any new station, we’re also working with architecture teams and ensuring that the wayfinding strategy is correct.

Kate Jeffery I’m the outlier of this group because I’m a neuroscientist and most of my day is spent studying rats in mazes. It’s not fully different from what you guys do, actually. I’m interested in how the brain makes a map of space, and how that shapes people’s way

“One of the big issues is a lack of coordination.

Everybody is doing things differently, which creates confusion.”

—Tim Fendley

environment was very similar to another, because people and the virus were the common factors.

We also realised that we were going to have to create guidelines for our clients, because we couldn’t travel to them and do the work ourselves. We’ve done a lot of different types of guidelines in the past, so thought, “Well, maybe we can share these methods we’ve learnt to allow people to do it better.” The observation we made was that suddenly the whole world had become amateur wayfinding experts – all businesses and organisations suddenly had to do it, but no-one had access to many of the books or guides to help them. So we came up with a toolkit to fill that gap.

I’ll be honest with you: originally we were going to try to cover our costs by getting clients to buy the toolkit, but we realised that one of the big issues is actually a lack of coordination. Everybody is doing things differently, which creates confusion. So we published it for free to allow people to coordinate.

It’s getting used and abused, I’m sure, and we’re doing new versions now. But we thought it was the right thing to do.

Sarah Manning I’m the founder of SpaceAgency and we’re also a wayfinding firm. We’ve been going about 10 years and work in different sectors from transport to retail, sports to masterplans – all of the different types of spaces that people use. We’ve recently redesigned the wayfinding that you see at Network 124

Images courtesy of Applied, SpaceAgency and TransLink.

Signs taken from the Covid-19 Design Toolkit, developed by Applied.

Roundtable

Above: Physical distancing measures and signage used by TransLink in Vancouver.

Right: SpaceAgency recently resdesigned all wayfinding and signage guidance for Network Rail’s managed train stations in the UK.

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of using space – the way that they plan their way through it, and the way they experience and understand it. In neuroscience, we’ve been mapping out this circuit in the brain for a few years now. It’s quite complex, but it’s also very logical in a way: there’s a part of the brain that has a map, another part that has a compass, and so on. That’s linked to the emotional centres of the brain, and all of it is also linked to memory. So it turns out that the spatial map in the brain is the foundation for our memory of the things that happen in spaces. Recently, I’ve become interested in trying to take that really basic neuroscience and link it to real-world problems, like how to design large complex spaces that people can navigate – train stations and cities, for instance.

How do you accommodate the different ways that different people process information? And how do you integrate that with the emotional aspects of spaces?

Tim From what we’ve studied, there’s a difference in how the virus is being transmitted in different types of environment. Outdoors, in a park with the wind, is reasonably low risk. Indoors, in a tube carriage, is about as high risk as you can get. A bus with windows open is maybe medium to high. So transport is a very difficult environment and the other problem is that transportation networks funnel people into channels, bunching them up and creating bottle necks. Those are really good conditions for the virus to spread.

So how can we have a functioning transport system while trying to stay safe? Solving that is the one of the biggest challenges.

Jada In Vancouver, we have a unique situation in that pre-Covid, public transit was widely used. The report for last year was that over 52 per cent of all trips in our city were taken by modes other than car, with transit widely used for day-to-day commuting by people of all demographics. With Covid that has dropped right off, although our province did still designate transit as an essential service. We were required to stay open but we experienced a huge loss of ridership – over the last six months, I believe we’re at about 43 per cent of our pre-Covid levels. Prior to Covid, we’d had the highest ridership growth for any transit agency in North America, so now our main focus is trying to increase our ridership, for which we’ve had to do a number of things. At first, we ensured social distancing on buses. So we blocked off every second seat with a sign saying, “You cannot sit here”, and we built plexiglass barriers around all our drivers. As ridership

increases, we can no longer ensure that social distancing on buses, but wearing masks on transit is mandatory and so that is making it much safer too.

Throughout our other facilities, we also have to ensure social distancing. On platforms, in elevators and on stairways, we are ensuring that people stay 2m apart and that they are sticking to the right side of the platform, or the right side of any entrance or exit.

We have a number of wayfinding strategies throughout our stations to ensure that. All of this, once again, is to increase ridership – to let our customers know that we’re available. We don’t want to see everybody buying cars and getting back on the highway. We really have to rebuild that trust with users and get them back on the network, which takes a lot of communication.

“We don’t want to see everybody buying cars and getting back on the highway. We have to rebuild that trust with users.”

—Jada Stevens

There are many different outlets to help do that – our public relations department; the social media team; the marketing team – and we’ve developed a Covid wayfinding toolkit of our own, as well as having teams going to stations to hand out masks and pass out safety information about the measures we’re taking. It really comes down to ensuring that the information is in the right place, where customers need it. We’re going to have different communications on the platform than we will on a bus or in an elevator, for instance, and a lot of the focus has been on trying to normalise the idea of wearing masks, trying to normalise social distancing – just reinforcing that message over and over again.

Kate Are people generally wearing masks in Canada?

Have they taken that on board positively?

Jada In Canada, yeah. It has been common over the years to see people wearing masks in Vancouver, and now with Covid everybody is wearing them.

We have been doing some observational studies

Roundtable

and found that 95 per cent of transit riders are wearing masks, which is really good. From my personal observation when I’m out on the street, I think maybe 50 or 60 per cent of people are wearing masks. In many of our public facilities and shopping malls, masks are now mandatory. You have to carry one around with you at all times.

Kate I was in New Zealand for the beginning of the pandemic for four months. It turns out that the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has a degree

Is it “You must” or “Do not”? That kind of messaging puts people at attention. I actually think that in visual terms, yellow and black does that on its own, because in nature it’s a combination that’s a warning signal.

It’s on bumblebees and poisonous spiders, and so on.

It’s a hazard type of colour combination, and we see it on both construction sites and roads. We see it in situations where it essentially means, “Stop. Pay attention”. In visual terms, it has a prohibitive and authoritative tone of voice. There are other ways, of course, and it’s really a carrot and stick thing.

There’s a whole spectrum there, down to the most welcoming, inviting and caring tone of voice. For example, when we work in hospitals, they’re often trying to move from a clinical and sterile tone to a caring one. That, in visual terms, would have different colours than yellow and black. I’m very curious actually, Tim, what your thoughts are on this, in terms of this toolkit you’ve created. What is the right tone of voice for Covid? People are already scared, and you don’t want to scare them further. But at the same time, you don’t want to make it seem like everything is really easy-going, because you want people to change their behaviour, which is difficult when so much behaviour is unconscious or ingrained. There’s a balance that needs to be struck between making people feel safe and comfortable, but also remembering that it’s important to take these measures and follow these rules.

Tim You’re right in terms of people’s habits – we often don’t even know we’ve got them. Shaking hands, walking closely with people, crowding to an exit – it’s all habit, and trying to change that is not easy. You’re right about the black and yellow – we used that register in our toolkit too, with another element at the bottom to provide a softer message – so it was trying to do two things at the same time.

We went around and took photographs of lots of information that people had put up, which was working really hard to say, “We’re here to look after you”. Our problem with that was that it wasn’t telling people what to do and it’s not necessarily going to change my habits. We thought it was better to make things look temporary. Make it look as plastic-laminated-card-taped-to-the-wall as possible, so it looks like it’s going to go. Don’t make it permanent, don’t make it beautiful. Make it look like, “Oh, we’re going to rip this off in six months.”

“You want people to change their behaviour, which is difficult when so much behaviour is unconscious.”

—Sarah Manning

in communications, which maybe explains the way that New Zealand handled the response to Covid. But their messaging was really very good. One of the things they did was to brand all Covid communications yellow and black. Wherever you looked, if you saw a yellow and black sign, you knew that was telling you something about Covid. It really stood apart from any of the other stuff that competes for attention. The yellow and black scheme was on everything: signs, leaflets that came through the door, and so on. But the other thing that really struck me was the emotional component. When they started putting up strictures, the very first thing they said was, “Be kind, stay safe. We’re in this together.” I was really struck by their attention to the emotional aspect of being out and about because people were, and continue to be, quite frightened.

Because we’re all sitting at home for months on end, I think a lot of people are getting a bit agoraphobic, to the point that when they do go out into the transit system, there’s a very high level of anxiety, as well as your usual stress of commuting. I wondered whether, in the messaging, you think about how can you make it friendlier.

Sarah There’s an area called tone of voice, which has to do with how you present the message. Is it authoritative?

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Images taken from Applied’s Covid-19 Design Toolkit, showing its wayfinding guidance in action.

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That actually tells me what to do. In terms of habits, Daniel Kahneman has written about thinking fast and thinking slow [in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, ed.], and the way Covid was first communicated there was a lot of thinking slow going on. “Let me explain Covid, let me explain how we want to behave.” But it’s different thinking about Covid before you travel as compared to when you are travelling. When you’re in it, you actually need a sign on the sink right in front of you to say to wash your hands for 20 seconds, even though you’re already aware of that. When the information is in the right place at the right time, it connects. It’s communicating in a way that allows people to change their habits. The inconsistency is a big problem, however – you go into a different environment and it’s different again. Jada, you’ve got a benefit at TransLink in that you’re managing a lot of the transit systems, so you can do things in a similar way across all of them. That’s not always possible with complex different transport systems.

Jada Yeah, I agree. With wayfinding, consistency is always key, and we have a defined look and feel for our entire transit network. It’s an integrated brand. But with Covid it’s about bringing in a change of behaviour, which people don’t like to do. They also don’t like to think too hard. So we are adding another layer of communications to our wayfinding that we have to get out to the customer in the blink of an eye.

It mustn’t be confused with the other wayfinding that’s already out there. As we’ve all discussed, yellow has been a good colour, and we’re using it for our Covid signage. Fortunately, yellow is not within our typical wayfinding standard, so the Covid signage has a new look and feel. Visually, I would say it’s very friendly.

The tone of voice is also friendly and reassuring.

We use words like “please”, but always in very short sentences so it’s still directive. It’s been quite effective.

During the height of lockdown, we were able to put the Covid messaging in one station and then analyse the change of behaviour there. We were able to determine that this is working, and that people are paying attention. We could then roll it out at all of our stations. But of course, it’s an ongoing process that’s always being updated.

Kate How big a difference does wording make?

For example, if you had a sign that said you “must” wear a mask, versus one that says everyone “needs” to wear a mask. Does that type of thing affect people on a subconscious level?

Jada It

absolutely does. There are a lot of people who don’t like being told to put on a mask. But because masks are mandatory, you must put one on, although we do allow people not to wear them if they have an exemption. But it is important, if masks are mandatory, that we don’t make it sound so friendly that people think, “Meh, I’ll make that choice myself.”

Kate But “Everyone needs to wear a mask” might shift the focus from the individual to the collective, and appeal to people’s instincts to cooperate with the collective. It takes an effort to stand out from the crowd and say, “I, alone, am not going to wear my mask.” I was just wondering how much people have tried twiddling the knobs on things like the social framing of messaging.

Tim If you say, “Everyone should be wearing a mask”, you’re basically giving the reason why, which is logical.

But if you want somebody to wear a mask, you need to give a clear instruction. If you start to add the reason, they’re going to have to think about it.

You may agree with it, but you’re still going to see that this is something you’ve got to think about.

We tend to suggest wording such as, “This is a maskwearing area.” It’s simple: this is the rule here.

Kate My point is about the social framing though.

Saying “you” means you’re being singled out for special treatment. Saying “everyone” means, “This is what we do here”, which means that somebody has to make a particular effort to do something different.

Jada At TransLink, masks are mandatory on vehicles and in the station, so the language we use is “Masks are mandatory”. It’s a simple, short phrase. It’s also directive – it doesn’t complicate the language at all.

Now, what’s also important is where you put that communication, because masks are mandatory as you get onto the train, so that is where we enforce that language strongly. But in other scenarios, we can be friendlier about it. We’ll have more opportunity to put up a poster that has a friendly explanation as to why it’s mandatory. But by the time you’re stepping on the train, you have no choice, and you’ll have already passed by many levels of communications about that mask-wearing. We can use other colours, as well as some fun, friendly little graphics.

Sarah Something that’s quite interesting about signage is the way it essentially de-personalises whomever is telling you that you must wear a mask. Who is the authority? Who is making the law or the rule? Is it

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of sight are important for spatial orientation.

One of the really central systems in the brain is what is called the head direction system – the compass in the brain, basically. There’s been extensive study of this in animals, because it underpins the brain’s ability to make a map of space and to enable you to navigate. The first thing you need to do is to know which way round you’re facing. When you walk out of a room, go along a corridor, round a staircase, and into another room, have you managed to maintain your sense of orientation? Do you still know which way you’re facing? We now know some of the conditions under which you can maintain orientation, and it seems that we should be using that information to inform the design of spaces. That’s the link that I’d really like to see made. Helping people remain oriented is important because, if they are, they’re more comfortable in the space and less stressed, and they move more efficiently. Maybe they will even attend more to other aspects of the space.

Tim We’ve seen that in effect through our work.

We can see what happens when there are strong sight lines – people travel down them. On Oxford Street, 87 per cent of people go up and down and never leave it, because they don’t have to think about it. They can see where they’re going. We’re visual creatures, so that’s why these sight lines are so important, and that’s why, with wayfinding, you’re trying to tell people there is something round the corner. “Go down these stairs to find the platform.”

That’s why you need a big sign saying the platform’s down here, because you can’t see it. The best station would be completely transparent and you could just see all the platforms. You wouldn’t need signs.

Kate I do think that signs are a kind of failure in a way, although I feel bad saying that to people who design signs for a living! Obviously, you have to have signs, but I’m only semi-joking. I think if you’ve got a really well-designed building you need fewer signs because the building does a lot of the work for you. We need to think about how we provide compass information to people. My bugbear is symmetric spaces that you get popped out into. For example, you come up an escalator into a round space like Piccadilly Circus tube, and you’ve no idea which way is which because it looks the same in every direction. We could be helping and making it easier for people by not building round buildings or spaces. The brain’s spatial system is really efficient, whereas our verbal system is very

a law, is it a rule, is it protocol, is it etiquette?

By saying masks are mandatory, you’ve removed who made it mandatory, because there are always going to be people who just want to rebel. “Masks are mandatory” – there’s nobody behind that.

You don’t sense the people who have made the law or rule, and I think it’s interesting that signage can replace the person or body trying to influence your behaviour. With signage, we’re talking about something that’s text-based. But you can also influence people just by putting in a barrier and arrows, for example. You can design a one-way system through symbols where you don’t even need to have a tone of voice. Space Syntax is a wayfinding theory and methodology that came out of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, following studies into social housing design from the 1960s in the UK. What came out of that were extensive studies and the Space Syntax methodology basically looked at how spaces are linked together through people’s sight lines – what they can see. One of the concepts has to do with passive surveillance, what the American urbanist Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street” – how people are influenced by who sees them and who is around. When I started working on this, one of the things they had newbies do was go out and take so-called gate counts. This meant standing on a certain location on a street, and counting the number of people who passed at 9am on a Monday, at 12pm, and at 5pm. And the same thing on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and weekends. The thing that was really shocking was that I could take those gate counts for an hour, and there was about a 1 per cent variation in the number of people who would pass at 9am on a weekday. It really made me start. On a given day, even if somebody usually walks to work this way, they might have a dentist appointment, or they might have stayed home – so how come the same number of people pass this point? How is it that, in the aggregate, people behave the same way? I don’t have an answer, except to say that what was found through all of these years of studying people’s movement in public spaces, is that people reliably move in consistent patterns.

Kate We’ve found out things in the neurobiological study of spatial cognition that could influence the design of buildings, or the design of wayfinding aids of various sorts. For example, sight lines are an area where there’s been a convergent evolution in both architecture and neuroscience. Obviously, lines 132

Icons from the Covid-19 Design Toolkit.

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Examples of how the Covid-19 Design Toolkit might be utilised.

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inefficient – we evolved it very late and it takes a lot of cognitive effort to process words. If you could find a pictorial way of showing the same information, you would save a lot of mental effort.

Sarah We get asked this question a lot: “When you work in different countries, does wayfinding change?

Do people respond to different things in different countries? Is wayfinding universal or is it cultural?”

I think it’s partly instinctive. We’re visual animals.

There’s something in our brains which is very, very instinctive and old, which means that we’re navigating visually and using sight lines in a universal way as humans. When you’re working in China, it’s exactly the same as the UK. People use the exact same structures to navigate, but there’s also what you can’t see – what’s around the corner, and the one after that? As designers, we’re passing on that information to people, and it’s almost like passing information around a campfire. There’s a human effort to try to give people information and help them along their way. That’s what we do through things like graphics and text, and it’s text that’s most culturally specific – depending on the country, the language and sometimes even the reading direction changes. Even people’s response to colours differs, as do responses to numbers.

Some are unlucky or lucky in certain cultures, for instance. All of this is to say that it takes a lot of rational effort to think through text and numbers.

Those things are very culturally specific, while sight lines and instinctual movement patterns are universal.

Kate A way of tapping into that could be to have a standard across the industry that said, “We shade our buildings, or spaces within buildings, dark to the north and light to the south.” If everybody knows that that’s the rule, then they immediately know which way they’re facing. Once they know which way they’re facing, everything else falls into place.

Sarah The urban planner Kevin Lynch carried out studies of people’s mental maps, and he noted the importance of of urban elements such as edges and landmarks. I wonder if it goes back to the fact that humans are innately visual animals, so when you’re navigating a building or a city, you’re looking for difference. You don’t want to be in a round building, or an endlessly repetitive building. But once you’re beyond what you can immediately see – and you’re into the information systems and all the text-based information that people process more rationally –

that’s where consistency becomes quite important.

Using the same message over and over, and the same colour, is how it becomes a recognisable system.

Jada Often, contemporary transportation architects are having to design spaces that are accessible to a large number of people, and so they have to consider the rider’s journey through space in the design process. So architects are also looking at wayfinding. They’re not necessarily looking at signage, but they are considering how people move through a space from the very beginning. At TransLink, my team comes on board early, at the design development phase, which is fortunate because our wayfinding components require a specific amount of space. We require 1.5m of clearance space in front of our maps, for instance. Our ticket vending machines require a specific amount of space around them, and the same thing with any elevator waiting area. We’re brought in for that discussion, and to determine where we’re putting our amenities.

We look at signage and customer flow at that point as well.

Tim An example that we weren’t involved with as a company, but which one member of my team had worked on, was Heathrow Terminal 2. The customer experience there was put really quite high up early on, but because of the billions involved, and the complexity of the project, the customer journey got lost. If you look, the lifts are structured incorrectly.

Some of the pathways just don’t work. I’ve gotten lost there, and I’m an orienteer – I don’t get lost in places.

It’s poor building design – a modern, really expensive maze of a building, which hasn’t understood how to do the lifts properly. That happens when there’s a melee of architects, engineers and planners, and the project takes so many years that everyone forgets the original idea. But that journey is actually what you’re building for – the whole purpose of that building was for people to move through it smoothly. If that could be held onto better, I think we’d have better-designed buildings and places.

Sarah Of course, architects are tasked to look at circulation systems, and how people move through their buildings, but they have so many different parameters they’re juggling at the same time – organisation of spaces, areas, and budgets – that they tend to look at things from a top-down point of view. They’re looking at it from the model: a whole organisational system, along with all the

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aesthetics of it. Therefore, sometimes architects aren’t looking from the user’s point of view at the whole user journey, and that’s why I think it’s important to have wayfinding designers at the table from an early stage.

Kate I would add that it’d be good to have a cognitive neuroscientist as well!

Sarah Absolutely.

Tim Whenever we’ve worked on projects related to the Olympics, there’s a really healthy focus on these millions of visitors who are coming to the city for the first time. We worked in Vancouver ahead of the Winter Olympics, and it was suddenly obvious to the powers that be that they really had to help people navigate the city. It’s that awareness in management circles that helps. I wonder if Covid has had a similar effect – everybody’s got to work harder to make their place more accessible, and easier and safer to navigate.

Everybody’s suddenly getting it.

Kate One of the things that’s been interesting to me about Covid is the way we’ve changed our attitude to outdoor space in quite a short period of time.

Normally in the UK, we tend to avoid the outdoors because it’s either too hot or too wet or too cold.

We like to be indoors. But now, so many businesses have had to shift their stuff outdoors and people are spending more time walking. It’s really transformed how we use the outdoors, and that has interesting possibilities for buildings and architecture. I don’t think Covid’s going to go away any time soon and I think it’s going to shape how we interact with buildings for a few years at least. Although it’s a pain and we’d be better if we didn’t have a pandemic, it is making us rethink how we interact with the natural world.

Jada Until Covid, our regional planning has worked under the assumption that people were going to be taking transit more and driving less. But if people are not using transit as much, how are they getting about?

Are they driving? We’re now seeing an increase of car purchases, both new and used, by people of all ages.

That’s a concern because it means we have to plan for a reduction in transit users, and for more congestion on the roads. Public transit was meant to be the solution to congestion. But how can we convince people to come back and use transit safely? It seems like people might be more willing to sit on a congested highway than use a safe transit network. E N D This roundtable has been edited for length.

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