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The Journal of Design #35 Spring 2023

This issue includes: Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s study of Lagos’s unauthored design; the energy crisis’s impact on archives’ climate control systems; Fabien Cappello and Guadalajara’s hojalata industry; New York’s plan to design out rats; Claude Dutson’s method to turn tech’s surveillance tools against Silicon Valley architecture; the landscape of Makrana marble, as seen by Studio Raw Material; Carmody Groarke, Kenoteq and Local Works Studio’s designs for waste bricks; and Front’s collection of Sweden’s forests. UK £17

Contents 42

Opinion Learning From Failure Stephen Burks on what the design industry gets wrong

Objects in Review A Quiet Cut Monoware’s cutlery slices both ways

Distribution Terms of Address A pilot architecture scheme navigates the bureaucracy of homelessness

Collaboration Economies of Objects Guadalajara’s hojalata maestros shape Fabien Cappello’s tinplate creations for the home

Construction Aggregate: A Composite Account Converting construction waste into bricks

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Objects in Review Never Break the Chain International design iteration with Hall Haus

Opinion Gutenberg Press Rhymes with Smartphones Ink-based revolution meets technology’s fake news

Material Marble dust in the air Studio Raw Material roams the otherworldly landscape of Makrana marble

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Research Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley The methodological limits of proprietary architecture

Objects in Review Dedicated Musical Device The Sony Walkman grows up

Objects in Review Bowl of Shadows Danuta Kril preserves Ukraine’s smoked-ceramic craft

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Feedback A View from the Magpie’s Nest The Boijmans Depot feels the heat from the climate crisis

Development Copy Cow and Rocks of Foam Front sets out to collect and replicate the forest

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Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

Objects in Review Best Foot Forward Project 213A dips its toes into design

Disegno x ECAL (insert) U.F.O.G.O. Sixteen students propose new wind turbine designs for Fogo Island

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Seen on Screen Let’s Get Physical Buns of steel sit on Terje Ekstrøm’s wiggly chair

Introduction I Can Feel Your Anger

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

Philosophy Design is Happening Nifemi Marcus-Bello on the cultural context of unauthored West African design

Objects in Review A Light Basket Taf and Artek look to the egg

Context Rat Wars The bins on the front line of New York’s rat battle

MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193

Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, in which nmbello Studio has foregrounded design and manufacturing by anonymous makers in African cities, whose work will inform indigenous contemporary design solutions and products of the future. Additionally, the project explores the functionality, aesthetics and materials of a range of products, all of which have been broken down to allow each element to be analysed. For nmbello Studio, 21st-century design is a practice through which designers apply their focus to address the world’s major problems – poverty, conflict, environmental degradation, scarcity of resources, and access to decent housing and healthcare. In the future, nmbello Studio will create contemporary design objects that draw inspiration from already existing indigenous products. The kwali is one example, the meruwa another – a cart made from reclaimed wood and bicycle tyres, which is used to transport gallons of water. This manually operated vehicle circumnavigates traffic challenges in urban areas and, like the kwali, is cost-effective and efficient. An exhibition drawn from another project, Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge, recently opened at Marta, a gallery in Los Angeles, and showcases a series of bronze benches produced using the lost-wax technique in Benin City. The pieces bear the marks of their designer, makers, and the surrounding community’s fingerprints as an exploration of craft, belonging and identity. The show also features a soundscape of Marcus-Bello’s mother reading his oríkì, a form of spoken poetry praising the individual in the Yoruba language of West Africa which, according to Yoruba historian Samuel Johnson, expresses hopes for what a child will become. As Marcus-Bello’s work demonstrates, and the conversation to follow explores, embodied design offers an examination of the “thinking” of design as a process of experience. One way to consider design is to focus on the nature of the thinking it involves. What is a design? How does it work? What is it good for? nmbello Studio and its many collaborators show how design thinking, research and products can be strikingly effective in solving complex problems, especially those that require imagination, creativity and innovation.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, a Lagos-based designer, works in the sort of creative space described by Kaya and Yağiz. The result is an embodied approach to design in which ideas about practice become concrete and emerge from a blend of interactions within Lagos’s non-Western framework. Marcus-Bello continually looks to his home city and the everyday encounters

One way to consider design is to focus on the thinking it involves. What is a design? How does it work? What is it good for? therein as inspiration for his practice, nmbello Studio, and its championing of research-led and site-responsive design products. Rather than adopt the role of passive observers in the city, Marcus-Bello and his team bear witness, probe, and engage in meaningful exchanges with a variety of collaborators. Often this process takes the form of daily encounters with individuals who may lack the formal title of “designer” but whose design solutions are found in many facets of the city’s life. These individuals are innovators whose creations solve everyday problems in Lagos, responding to societal needs. Amongst the indigenous products of this kind that have become a focus for Marcus-Bello is the kwali (which translates to “box” in English from the Hausa language), a portable shop of sorts that sells gum, painkillers, cigarettes and snacks. A familiar sight weaving through Lagos traffic, the kwali is a shelving unit made from discarded cardboard and assembled with tape (yellow and black) – material choices that are affordable, sustainable, and functional enough to allow vendors to move through the streets easily, as well as being cost-effective to replace after wear and tear. Though grounded in Lagos, Marcus-Bello’s investigation of the kwali and other designs of its ilk is now extending into learning from experiences he has had (or is soon to have) in three other cities across West Africa: Accra, Dakar and Abidjan. This approach is part of an ambitious ongoing research project,

Jareh Das When you sent me the brief for Africa –

A Designer’s Utopia, it mentioned specific cities you were responding to: Lagos, Accra, Abidjan and Dakar.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, photographed in his studio in Lagos. A kwali is shown propped up on a chair.

Philosophy

Development

Learning from Failure

Words Stephen Burks Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Stephen Burks is the founder of Stephen Burks Man Made, a New York-based studio that is known for its collaborative, workshop-based practice that integrates craft techniques from around the world into contemporary products and systems. Most designers have a false sense of what success is. Our industry revolves around celebrity and the celebration of a handful of designers and brands. We see the same names dominating year after year, and a distracting, superficial gloss is layered over the discipline. For many aspiring designers, success is defined by trying to achieve what these designers have achieved, with the same companies they achieved it with, all the while seeking the social and press attention that leads to more of the same. This cycle of “fame begets fortune” leaves people with the wrong idea of what design is. Stephen Burks Man Made has been fortunate to gain a certain level of renown, but even today, after working 20 years in

the industry, we’re still struggling to make inroads into the world’s top design brands. By traditional metrics this suggests failure, but the lack of acceptance we’ve faced has forced us to examine other ways of working. The difficulties we have experienced have led us to think about craft production and take a broader worldview with regard to people and cultures designing and making outside the dominant European context. We’ve turned to other models of production to find alternative paths of acceptance. However, it’s not enough to be an exception. I read our success as an indicator of the failure of the industry to welcome diversity, with statistically only a handful of “other” voices present at any one time. Why do we still fail to realise that difference adds depth and complexity, creating a more resilient system for all? We, as an industry focused on luxury, often fail to acknowledge that design problems are much bigger than new tables and chairs. If you manage to make a commercial product with any brand, it’s easy to feel you’ve succeeded. I don’t mean to belittle that – because

it’s not easy to make a product – but design needs to be about more than this. What are you making? Who is it for? And who benefits from it? These are some of the questions that need to be answered. In this age of global crises, we should be striving to get products out there with meaning. A traditional design brief does not begin to address the everyday issues people are facing. How do we design for cynicism, nihilism, or fatalism? How do we consider gross inequality, injustice and grief? If we only engage with the commercial value of what we create, we miss the opportunity to imagine how design can also add meaning to people’s lives. Rather than reflecting on personal failure, maybe our story of collective failure as an industry is worth exploring. Perhaps we can begin to measure success by how much space is created for other voices to participate and be heard. If design is a form of communication, then what do we as a society want to say, and how is design a vehicle for more people to say it?

Terms of Address Words George Kafka1Photographs London Photo Project

What is an address? An address is a place. The location of your front door and the rooms behind it. Markers of addresses are visible on the surfaces of a city or town: signs declare the names of streets in graphic identities that distinguish between local authorities and local identities. Front doors frame the numbers they display as public declarations of fact. This is number 62; here is 16b; you are on Knatchbull Road. I’m fond of the crystallising moment when an address becomes a place – the result of a search on Google Maps, stepping off a bus or turning a corner to come face-to-face with, hopefully, the right location. Yes, this is the place: the Xi’an Impression restaurant or the Italian embassy or Jenny’s new flat.

Large Stick by Allisa Christie (2018).

Marble Dust in the Air

Words Evi Hall Photographs Eshwarya Grover

ZZZ

“Makrana marble is so particular to India. A friend asked us once: ‘How do you differentiate two marbles that might look very similar, but one is from the region and one is not?’”

“We thought, maybe it’s about the grain or size of the crystals or the shine—”

Priyanka Sharma and Dushyant Bansal are lively conversationalists, one often starting the next part of their story as the other is finishing. The origins of their work, however, are clear. They set up their design practice Studio Raw Material in 2016 in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, India, to facilitate “an ongoing exploration of geology in terms of material and processes”. The pair are particularly interested in extraction, value and waste, with the genesis of their investigation centring on a particular vein of reverberant marble. Makrana, in central Rajasthan, is home to a marble deposit noted for its bright, white, pristine stone – a material that is internationally recognised as a Global Heritage Stone Resource, alongside materials such as Cambrian Welsh slate

and Carrara marble. Makrana’s quarries are historic and their marble has been used in India (and further afield) for temple building, flooring, and, most famously, the luminous domes and pillars of the Taj Mahal. While lookalike marbles are available, these are less compact and, when tapped, produce a more hollow sound. Even working with Makrana marble is different. The craftspeople who deal with the stone daily “do a lot of very local techniques, such as testing the sound or putting it in water to understand what the density and purity levels are like,” says Eshwarya Grover, a visual artist and friend of Studio Raw Material, who has been helping Sharma and Bansal document their work. Makrana is inseparable from its marble. The city and surrounding tehsil

Material

“—but we went to Kamal, our studio manager, and he said, ‘It’s the sound. The marble sounds like glass.’”

– a small administrative region – are made of it. “There’s this really barren, stark desert without much vegetation,” explains Bansal, “but there is also the micro-landscape of marble – the industry with its heavy machinery, which is further shaping it. It’s natural but with this microcosm of landscape cut by man.” Bansal, who comes from a marbleindustry family, knows the area well and understands how quarrying has shaped Makrana. “Because there is so much [industrial] waste, there are these yards, which over the years have become a landscape of dumped marble,” he says. “The moment you enter the vicinity of Makrana, you can see little heaps of marble and people tinkering and carving statues.” In this sense, Studio Raw Material oscillates between seeing the landscape as poetic and commercial.

ones that shape them and the ones they shape – as he is in objects themselves. Hojalata caught his attention, in part, he says, because of its specificity – “those precise limitations on what you can do are the best frame to work within,” he says. At least as important, though, was the neighbourhood-based infrastructure that the objects preserved. In its most quotidian expression, hojalata resists the romantic associations of earthenware, textiles, wood-carving and masonry – Mexican crafts of extraordinary beauty and refinement that have, over the last century, become fetish objects for foreigners and local elites alike. Hojalata is, instead, an essential part of Mexico’s palimpsestic urban landscapes, situated at the boundary of artisanship and industry, a modest oficio – the term for a skilled trade or vocation – slipped uncomfortably into the ever-narrowing gap between a globalised economic order and local systems of production built on circularity and family ties. Where much of the global north has long since either eradicated artisanal processes or relegated them to the realm of luxury – as in the case of British tailors or Florentine leatherworkers – here, cottage industries continue to support neighbourhoods as singular and specific as the handmade objects that circulate within them. “In Mexico, the process of homogenisation through globalisation has certainly begun,” Cappello says, “but it isn’t finished yet.”

in poorer Catholic missions, as is still the case in some parts of Mexico. Then, beginning around 1870, as tinplate factories in the United States supplanted English fabricators, easing access to the material in Mexico, hojalata started to creep into households throughout the country in the form of candlesticks and picture frames, as well as plates, cups, spoons and sieves. From its earliest use in Mexico, Giffords writes, “tinplate was regarded as a poor man’s silver.” Throughout the colonial period, powerful guilds controlled the production of precious metals in Mexico, restricting their use to Spanish-born artisans. Hojalata, as far as the best scholarship has shown, had no such infrastructure. Still, as an imported material, hojalata was largely associated with mestizo populations in urban centres. In the initial centuries of Spanish domination, says Octavio Murillo, director of archives at Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, “forms dominated by women, like pottery and backstraploom textiles, were left in the hands of indigenous people, but guilds were associated with ‘masculine’ work.’” Such trades “were the industries of their time,” says Murillo, “and they might have been important as antecedents to oficios.” Even today, cities like Guanajuato, Mexico City and Oaxaca (throughout its history the most important centre for the mestizo population in an otherwise indigenous-majority state) tend to dominate production of hojalata, though, as Vega points out, “each place has its speciality.” Many of Oaxaca’s hojalateros work in an ornamental language of repoussage picture frames that they sell to tourists; they also make Sacred Hearts and crosses for indigenous communities who have no hojalateros of their own. (Vega and Gil, for their part, sell to vendors in the industrial boomtown of Monterrey, which produces galvanised steel in its mammoth factories, but is also, Vega says, home to relatively few hojalateros.) The city of Guanajuato’s hojalateros tend to specialise in the manufacture of toys, many of them die-cut and pressed with moulds. In San Miguel de Allende, a popular destination for American retirees in the state of Guanajuato, craftspeople use hojalata to make perforated, Moroccan-style lanterns, a technique introduced by movie idol José Mojica in the 1920s, as Martha Egan writes in her essay ‘Tenacity of a Trade’, also from Artes de México. The craftsman that Mojica worked with, Egan writes, had “until then limited himself to producing milk cans and other utilitarian

It is, on some level, ironic to think of hojalata in terms of the local economy it supports when its origins in Mexico are fundamentally global. Prior to the 16thcentury Spanish invasion, the great civilisations of Mesoamerica used lost-wax casting to fashion gold, silver and copper into ornamental and ritual objects like chest plates, earrings and ankle rattles. Tin, the essential element for the production of hojalata, was also known by pre-Hispanic metallurgists and was used for bronze alloys shaped into axes, chisels, needles and fishhooks. But tinplate, which consists of covering iron or steel in a thin layer of tin, was a colonial product, imported from England, France and Germany, sometimes crossing the Atlantic as ballast on ships. Even as late as the 18th century, as historian and conservator Gloria Fraser Giffords notes in her 1999 essay ‘A Noble Metal’, published in Artes de México, “tinplate objects were either of such scarcity or such aesthetic insignificance that they escaped notice by authors concentrating in the ‘high arts.’” Well into the 19th century, hojalata was probably used principally for religious paraphernalia 100

A maceta, or flowerpot.

Collaboration

A View from the Magpie’s Nest Words Tiiu Meiner Illustrations Hollie Fuller

“Is the silver an aesthetic choice?” I ask. “Not in here, but in the general area with the visitors it’s grey and that is an aesthetic choice,” replies Tim van der Spoel, head of facilities at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. We are standing next to the temperature system in the museum’s climate-control room. Installed in 2019, the equipment fills the concrete space with silver piping and monochrome machinery the size of three large trucks.

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