Issuu

Contents 5

Introduction Unfinished

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

Development Stories of Use Inge Sempé imagines the objects left behind when a man goes out and never returns

Objects in Review A Foldable Canvas Unosinotra’s riﬀ on Filipino street furniture

Research The Past is The Future A call for fuller font character sets to support Vietnamese

Opinion Learning from Failure Jenny Nordberg leans into glorious glitches

Objects in Review Fringe Benefits Sarah Brunnhuber advocates for more fringes, less waste

Opinion Rhymes With Under the surface of shipping containers matched with dazzle camouflage

Philosophy Für Edward One man’s pet is another brand’s $$$ Disegno × House of Switzerland Milano (insert) Voices: A Story of Swiss Design 33 perspectives on a country’s design scene

Opinion Seen on Screen A lingering fart, a song and a Sony television

Objects in Review A Non-light Light Behind Bocci’s glowing orb

Construction Soft Power Architecture An embassy that invites diplomacy into the pavilion

Feedback A Llama and a Legacy What would Ray and Charles Eames do?

Material Tangible Action Hamed Ouattara salvages oil drums and invests in community

Economies At All Scales Normal Phenomena of Life challenges the normal phenomena of design

Objects in Review From Image to Object Why it took Jasper Morrison Studio so long to design a barbecue

Collaboration Scraps on Show Extruding and designing with the world’s first 100 per cent recycled aluminium

104 Objects in Review Hanging by Many Threads Jacob Hashimoto’s journey from sculpture to textile 105

Distribution Dear Things Nitzan Cohen plots a revolution of the DIY kind

115

Objects in Review Just My Type When design studios BNAG and ABC Dinamo began to flirt across disciplinary boundaries

116

Objects in Review Holding a Dinner Party Mitre and Mondays gets a handle on handles

117

Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

120

End Note No Randomness A story of the London plane tree emerges from the shadows

DISCOVER MODULOR WALL PANELLING SYSTEM, COVER WALK–IN CLOSET, RADIUS DOOR. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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

What follows, however, are stories of a diﬀerent kind. In anticipation of La casa imperfetta’s display at the Triennale (16 April – 15 September 2024), Disegno asked Sempé to create a series of design fictions exploring her imagined home and its absent resident. They invite us to open the door and step into the casa imperfetta.

Museums on the other hand, tend to do the opposite. They take objects out of use, storing them for posterity and handling them with utmost care. When they are displayed, it’s often on plinths and behind glass, as rarefied artefacts, even when that object may be mass produced and available to buy in any store. “I don’t really appreciate exhibitions on contemporary design presented like medieval sculpture,” Sempé tells me. “I think it’s quite ridiculous, as you can easily buy them on Craigslist for a really good price.” Imagine Sempé’s conundrum, then, when Milan’s Triennale design museum made contact to discuss staging an exhibition of her work in spring 2024. On the one hand, a museum exhibition offers critical recognition of a kind different to everyday use, but it nevertheless condemns objects to be devoid of their original purpose. In considering an exhibition, therefore, Sempé (together with Marco Sammicheli, the Triennale’s director) conceived of a different way of interpreting her more than 20 years of work as a designer for companies such as Alessi, Hay, Mutina and Ligne Roset. Rather than an exhibition in the traditional sense of the word, they conceived La casa imperfetta (“The Imperfect House”), a display that would invite visitors into the home of a fictional character, a man of indefinite description. It’s a onebedroom apartment, designed with the help of Studio A/C, which contains traces of everyday life. “I wanted to create the feeling that the man who lives here has just left to buy some butter, but on his way back they were tragically hit by a tram,” she says. “So as you enter you could imagine it’s like the first visit of the police.” Sempé has spent time sourcing the right material to scatter around the house and significant time locating her own designs, including on various online forums. “The companies I worked with were not really interested in me it seems,” she says. “They haven’t kept any of the designs, so I’ve tried to gather them for the show in other ways. I bought the Tratti tiles I designed for Mutina from a builder outside of Paris that I found online, and yesterday I was on a kind of Italian Craigslist to put an offer in on one of my lamps for under the asking price.” There is poetry in the idea of a designer so invested in the use of objects that she is tracing the trajectories of her own designs via online shopping platforms. Then again, it also reaffirms the significance of museums as repositories of objects and platforms for stories that might otherwise go untold.

The owner of casa imperfetta rushed out of his house to buy butter this morning and was hit by the No. 29 tram. The following notes, found on his desk, reveal what he loved about his home. Hallway Having a proper entrance hall, a real separate room, is a privilege – an intensely desirable thing. In the last flat, the coats hung around on the kitchen chairs; shopping bags and school bags lay on the diminutive table; the floor was littered with the hastily torn-open packaging of long-awaited parcels. And now I have this lovely, spacious hallway, a welcoming transition space for unloading and a place of organised passage. A real hall is a kind of giant wastepaper basket, filtering comings and goings; like ants, we deposit mounds of variable consistency. A hall is like a three-dimensional doormat, it keeps the house clean. It makes it calm. I’m waiting for another builder’s quote to move the partition. The hall is really far too big and the sitting room much too small. Sitting room When my mother finally changed the sofa of my childhood – a mattress with pillows that I dropped on the floor and never picked up – I was disappointed. After years of deliberation, of careful consideration of this long-postponed purchase, I suddenly found myself encased in a sort of rigid box – a receptacle for flabby rectangular cushions, covered in a fluﬀy herringbone that the rivets on my jeans caught on. And still the cushions needed picking up. I was less disappointed in the modern telly that arrived while I was at riding camp. With a remote control! I LOVED that remote control. Decades later, I saw the same one in a car-boot sale. That magical object looked so huge and unwieldy, like a specially oversized orthopaedic boot – Italian size 36, French 37. Another hi-tech gadget, another remote control: my father’s tweed jacket was deformed by a strange

Development

Soft Power Architecture Words Anniina Koivu Photographs Milo Keller

Architecture is a powerful tool. Explicitly so, when designed for those in positions of power. Its language serves to project authority. Political leaders build to seduce, to impress, and to intimidate. Hence, rather than as an art form, “architecture must be understood as an expression of power and propaganda,” argues critic Deyan Sudjic, who coined the term “power architecture” in his 2005 book The Edifice Complex (2005).

The Residence of the Swiss Ambassador in Algiers (2024), designed by Lütjens Padmanabhan Architektinnen.

Construction

of marketing. “We share our homes with cats and a lot of people are so proud of their cats, but they have the cat tree hidden somewhere in a corner because they don’t want people to see it,” Karageozian tells me. “Regular cat trees are everywhere – they’re a staple – but they all look exactly the same, which is kind of hideous.” I decide not to show him Edward’s. A similar motivation towards integrating human aesthetic standards into pet products is also present

“We make so many things for the home, and a dog bed is very visible in a space, so why not also come up with something for pets?’” —Mette Hay in a new collection of dog accessories from Danish design brand Hay. Overseen by Mette Hay, creative director of the company’s accessories line, the collection is thoroughly charming, oﬀering a range of colourful dog beds, toys and bowls, as well as leashes and collars. “Looking at a lot of the pet things that were around, we found that it was all being done in very grey, brown and neutral tones,” Hay tells me, “so it was easy for us to see that we could approach this in a way that would feel more Hay. I felt we could shake things up a bit.” The elements of the range that I’ve seen in person seem to be considerably higher quality than many equivalent products on the market, but Hay keeps our conversation surrounding its motivation light. “We just felt it could be fun, you know,” she tells me. “My driving passion throughout the years has been to search for something that our business is not already working on. We make so many things for the home, and a dog bed is very visible in a space, so why not also come up with something for pets?” If I were a dog, I think, I’d definitely want Hay’s bed. Except, I probably wouldn’t, because I’m mixing up my umwelten. Hay’s collection is beautiful, but its key design decisions are not ones that pets are likely to benefit from directly. That’s not to say that it’s not

an excellent product that dogs will like – it looks very comfortable and nicely squashy – just that the unique qualities of the design are principally attractive to humans, rather than dogs. Much of the collection’s pleasure comes from its colours, for instance, but a number of the shades used are not actually visible to dogs, who cannot perceive red. More generally, both Hay and Papuk’s pieces highlight the manner in which many design elements within pet products are almost entirely about human preference, rather than the needs of the other animals who will use them – which isn’t a criticism, but a reality of the way in which diﬀerent species engage with the world. “Dogs are not concerned by what a thing is but by what they can do with the thing, which will largely concern whether it can be sat on, lain on, chewed or eaten,” Svendsen explains. “A dog has only, to a small extent, a preference for things that have one form rather than another – what’s crucial is whether the thing fits in its mouth or not.” Karageozian makes this same point in relation to Papuk’s Connect tree, particularly given that his design exposes how pet products cater to two user classes simultaneously: meeting the needs of the animal, while also appealing to the human who wields the wallet. “[What we’ve done with Connect] is not for the cat itself, because there are already cat trees that function,” he says. “It’s about people investing in their own spaces.” Both Hay and Papuk seem to have accepted the existing functionality of pet products as largely suﬃcient;9 what can be worked on instead is the manner in which they are integrated within shared spaces. This duality within pet products matches the duality of pets themselves – a set of creatures whose existence as a distinct category of animal is dependent upon their relationship to humans and the spaces in which they are kept. It is a definition that is doubly awkward in terms of the power hierarchies it introduces (Hamlett and Strange note that within the idea of being “a pet” is the idea of being “subjugated to another’s power and [losing] one’s individual personhood”), as well as for the frequently unreasonable expectations it places onto non-human animals. Edward, for example, 9

There are, however, debates to be had around sustainability given the quality of both companies’ products. “It’s the last cat tree you’ll ever buy,” Karageozian tells me, contrasting this to the fact that many pet products are low-quality and disposable. “The elephant in the room with the pet industry is that it creates a lot of waste,” agrees Hubert.

Philosophy

“which does mean a narrower audience – we very consciously want to go the other way with this and make it as accessible as possible.” The product may, therefore, have been incidental, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t commercially beneficial. “We sold out the first batch almost immediately, so it has been successful,” Arbel says. “14 has always been my lucky number.” Yet despite fitting a broader industry trend for portable lighting, there are ways in which the 14p breaks the mould. Whereas most portable designs are purposefully lightweight, the 14p is unashamedly heavy. “It’s like carrying a bowling ball,” says Arbel. “It’s solid glass, which is the reason it doesn’t break when you knock it about or drop it – there’s just a lot of mass there.” A glowing crystal ball, the 14p has, Arbel notes, a certain theatricality that sets it apart from competitors, becoming almost prop-like in its glazed inscrutability. “A lot of portable lights can be quite techy, whereas this is like you’re holding a magical orb,” he says, “and there’s really no correspondence between its mass and function, so it’s almost quite counterintuitive.” It is, in this regard, a classic Bocci product – a design that disregards conventional wisdom in favour of following wherever the material takes it. “It’s a light that kind of weighs you down,” says Arbel, “which is definitely a strange thing to have around. But for that reason, I like it.” Words Oli Stratford

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

A Non-Light Light-Founded in 2005 in Vancouver, Bocci has become widely known for its experimentalism in design, creating commercial lighting and objects that are decidedly noncommercial in character. Instead of slick, precise industrial production, the studio’s creative director Omer Arbel delights in manufacturing methods that incorporate improvised implosions, mismatched expansion coeﬃcients, and blended melting points, subjecting glass and metal to laboratory-style applications of heat, fire and electricity. The result are designs that are eccentric in both form and materiality: pendant lights where white glass has bubbled through an internal copper mesh, or brass coat hooks that extend in frills and loops like sea dragons. “In our factory, everything breaks,” Arbel tells me. “But the 14 never breaks.” The 14 is the product that Bocci launched with 19 years ago: pendant lights that took form as near-solid balls of cast glass. Created through the purposefully imperfect pouring of two molten glass hemispheres – a process that leaves a distinctive horizontal seam across the middle of the pendant – 14 diﬀused its internal light through the dimpled surface of its material, as well as through the air bubbles trapped within the glass during the casting process. At roughly the size of a grapefruit, the 14 was typically sold and displayed in clusters to form lighting installations, but in 2023 Arbel decided to reconfigure the design to function as a portable, chargeable lamp: the 14p. “We have the 14 all over the place in our factory, as well as hardware like batteries,” he says, “so we thought we might as well try it. This was an incidental thing that happened as opposed to a more deliberate action.” Nevertheless, portable lamps have become increasingly common additions to lighting brands’ portfolios, providing flexible lighting at a price point that is more accessible to younger consumers than purchasing multiple fixed lamps – the 14p, for instance, retails at $250. “As our ambitions have grown from an exploratory perspective, so have production costs,” Arbel acknowledges,

A Llama and a Legacy Words Lara Chapman Photographs Nicholas Calcott

When I went to California on a press trip hosted by the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity to immerse myself in all things Eameses, I did not expect to meet a llama named Lulu who enjoys spitting on visitors.

The Eames Ranch, designed by William Turnball in the 1990s.

Feedback

Collaboration

Disegno #37