Disegno #36 by Disegno

The Journal of Design #36 Autumn 2023

This issue includes: Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku deconstructing a Tokyo house; Hansgrohe and Lovehoney’s entry into bathroom pleasure; Philipp von Lintel’s industrial design for Ableton’s Push 3; a sugared memory courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah; the environmental legacy of the Apple iPhone; Studio Saar’s community centre for Udaipur; online sizegivers with Corinne Quin; humanitarian relief in Brda Foundation’s windows for Ukraine; and Formafantasma’s human-ovine research. UK £17

Contents 5

Introduction The Scourge of Perfection

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

Material As Big as A… The curious phenomenon of online sizegivers

Opinion Learning From Failure Adam Nathaniel Furman shines a light on intellectual property theft and cinematic vindication

Distribution The Necessity of Uncertainty Windows, Ukraine and architectural reuse

Objects in Review Never Static A game of bilboquet with Philippe Malouin

Feedback Control The environmental legacy of Apple’s iPhone

Opinion Seen on Screen Truth through furniture in Rye Lane

Construction Home, Work and Where Else? Studio Saar crafts a climatesensitive community space for Udaipur

Objects in Review Less Volume, More Meaning A slower than instant professional Polaroid

Opinion The Parthenon Rhymes with Cinderella Castle Greek classicism and the House of Mouse

Context Navigating Friction Yassine Ben Abdallah on letting objects die

Objects in Review Glassware is Like Onions Shrek-green glassware from Anna Jewsbury

Collaboration Regional Modernisms, Tropical Skins The forgotten art of Nigeria’s modernist architecture

Objects in Review Motley Leftover fabulousness in the bags of Ayzit Bostan Research Following Whom? Formafantasma removes the wool from your eyes

Objects in Review Notes of Mustard Luring back lapsed players with a coat of yellow

Philosophy Radically Unfinished Deconstruct, reconstruct, repeat: a new model for Tokyo’s housing

106 Objects in Review Lessons in a Flash(light) Ambessa and Pentagram’s torch for displaced children 107

Economies Keep it Clean Hansgrohe, Lovehoney, and the business case for pleasure

115

Development The Portable Orchestra Ableton pushes the industrial design of musical instruments

124

Objects in Review Lemon Aid Alexandra Hakim’s slice of relief for Lebanon

125

Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

128

End Note No Randomness Why the chocolate bar comes in equal pieces

DISCOVER SAIL, SLIDING PANELS. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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

As Big As A…. Words Corinne Quin

In 2016, a young woman holds a piece of A4 paper up to her belly. She has an “A4 waist”, which is trending on Chinese social media site Weibo. Two years later, one of my students tells me that the phenomenon has been copied by hundreds of women. As we discuss unhealthy beauty standards, we think, “An A4 waist is skinny, but precisely how skinny? Is it size zero, XXS or 24 inches?”

A4 paper and Yuan Shanshan’s waist (2016). Image via Weibo.

As many designers will know, A4 is precisely 210mmwide by 297mm-high, and is the most commonly used paper size in the world (except in North America and parts of Central and South America). It even carries its own international standard (ISO 216). However, it belongs in the world of printed matter, documents and letters – not of bodies or clothing sizes, where sizing is more commonly a numerical measure of circumference. By contrast, the A4 waist is not about digits – it’s about image. In particular, it’s about the front-on flat silhouette, an angle that leaves plenty of room for cheating perspective. But the A4 waist inventively misuses the standard as a visual measure, because it can be found everywhere and understood at a glance online. A couple of months later, browsing eBay, I eye up a lovely little turned wood vase. In the image it’s paired with a can of Coke. The description says that the Coke can is for “scale purposes ONLY, and not included in the sale”. There is something quite sweet and comical about this odd couple, with the Coke can boldly standing in to vouch for the height of its tiny companion. It’s there to avoid misunderstanding, and to ground the image amid the confusion of online space. After all, digital images are sort of elastic. If I can stretch, zoom and shrink an image with my fingertips, it feels like anything has the potential to be any size. I begin to wonder: what other objects are being used in this way, and who is correlating these images? As I search the internet for more examples, I realise how much I like looking for things, and how a preinternet adolescence spent scouring charity shops has led me here – to an endless digital pool of things to be screenshotted, liked, watched and hearted online. It’s addictive. And it’s not just Coke cans and A4 paper that I find. People are using coins, golf balls, pencils, hair grips, bottle caps, matchsticks and lighters – everyday objects that don’t change their standard size over time. I find communities reporting the depths of potholes using Coke cans to measure them. I find an office worker measuring the height of her pile of paperwork with a pencil. I find someone scaling their AK-47 with a ping-pong ball on a Reddit gun discussion thread. Hitting what seems to be the jackpot, I discover a category on Wikimedia Commons called “Images with objects to indicate scale”. It’s not the catchiest of names, but it contains many examples of what I’m looking for, classified alphabetically from AA batteries to shoes. The images range from the mundane to the fantastic,

including an evocative picture of a cigarette being used to scale a rare Japanese berry branch, by user Namazu-tron, which I save to my archive. Describing my growing collection to a friend at work, we come up with a name – sizegiver. Over the next year, I notice just how much of everyday life is now navigated through images. From online grocery shopping, lockdown home-schooling, social platforms, and doing everyday work and business, we consume thousands of images daily. As photographers, however amateur, we constantly create and post images to social networks and forums, so it’s hardly surprising that people are making new kinds of images, trying to give a sense of reality and truth to an image by adding a tangible everyday object – a sizegiver. In his 2003 book Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, Leonard Koren explains that an arrangement of objects is a visual language that communicates meaning. “Communication systems,” he says, “like natural languages, grow and develop through perpetual use and experimentation. In the process, the communication possibilities are extended.” Twenty years later, this context of perpetual use and experimentation has deepened. Visual communication feels like our primary mode of interaction. From my collection, I see that sizegiving is becoming an informal practice without particular rules, existing simply to explain something practical – sizegivers often replace the metric/imperial systems of measurement (rulers and tape measures) for speed of understanding. But there is also artistry and creativity in some of the photographs that I find. For example, eBay sellers develop inventive ways to capture the best image of their wares from atop their garage or kitchen table. I notice different stylistic choices through their use of angles, choice of sizegiver, and scale of object – sometimes bizarre, sometimes striking and poetic. A tennis ball in the middle of a plate (for scale, not for dinner); a Rubik’s Cube beside a white leather handbag; a riding crop lying on a domestic carpet, set alongside a US $1 bill. The practice of object arrangement and visual description is unique to each person. I talk with some of these people on online message boards to understand more about how and why they do this. Gardener Leo Smit uses a golf ball on a stick to measure the rare peonies he grows in his nursery

Material

Coin and dolls’ heads (2018). Image via @thehauntedlamp, Instagram.

Coin and hair donation (2015). Image via @eleniswong, Instagram.

Pen and emu egg (2015). Image via Vaikoovery, Wikimedia Commons.

Pencil and sperm whale tooth (2019). Image via Akrasia25, Wikimedia Commons.

Golf ball and ribbon reel (2023). Image via at242, Reddit.

Material

Warsaw

is simple and efficient, and given that the design is not patented, it has been widely replicated – an accessible and recognisable yet humble piece of design, epitomising ideas that stand at the core of Brda’s mission. “At the beginning, we wanted to ship everything,” says Vladimirov, referring to the multiple building materials that the group had originally considered sending to Ukraine. After speaking to Vladimirov’s friends who were still in Ukraine, however, as well as local organisations rebuilding homes and towns, Brda decided to focus on windows. Glass is first to go in the event of an explosion and, if windows are old or poor quality, even distant blasts can shatter them, leaving the inhabitants exposed to the elements and with no means of locking up and securing their homes. Temporary solutions, such as cling film or chipboard, have poor thermal qualities and do not allow proper access to daylight and ventilation. It quickly became apparent that reused PVC windows with frames, ones that can open or tilt, were the architectural element most needed by Brda’s Ukrainian partners. They were also low-cost, easy to source, and the project provided a meaningful way to reuse building components that might otherwise end up in landfill. This is where the Okno project fits into broader narratives around the environmental impact of architecture and construction, and the untapped potential of material reuse. Where it differs, however, is in its interest in cheap, commonplace materials – such as PVC – which are not normally seen as sustainable choices. Most material salvage projects focus on noble and natural materials including stone or wood, but PVC windows are long-lasting and often discarded during demolition of buildings, even in the case of those built as recently as the 1990s. In her 2022 book Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse, architect and researcher Ruth Lang writes about the short lifespan of buildings, with warranties that anticipate 30 years of use, despite the actual durability of materials potentially lasting for 50, 100 years or longer. “Yet fashion and changing patterns of use curtail this lifespan,” she explains, “which sometimes barely stretches to a decade, at huge environmental and economic cost.” When I first meet Jaworowska at the press launch of the biennale, it seems her mind is already set on the next project and further goals. “We don’t want to do too many exhibitions; we prefer to focus on the aid

projects,” she tells me. She is impatient and driven – the traits of an effective activist – and it is clear that Jaworowska and her team know how to utilise this sense of urgency. On the foundation’s social media channels, I often see calls for volunteers asking people to spend the afternoon packaging and loading windows onto trucks in their Warsaw storage yard. They call it “window crossfit” or “window bikram”. Jaworowska, Vladimirov and Adam Przywara – another member of Brda and an architectural historian – are hands-on in the early stages of the project, driving around Poland, collecting and loading windows. For the logistics to come together, they work with the support of Ukrainian partners such as Unity and Strength in Kharkiv, Our People in Kherson, and Vdoma and District #1 Foundation in Kyiv. These organisations receive and distribute windows shipped by Brda. As to what happens next, we don’t exactly know. The mode of operation pursued by Brda requires the relinquishing of control, something architects and designers infamously like to keep for themselves. Within this kind of initiative, things happen fast – windows are in huge demand in Ukraine and need to find a way to their new homes quickly. As Jaworowska explains: “If you are an NGO and you are gifting something, it has to be with no strings or expectations attached.” Brda has, however, developed a set of tools to help those who receive their windows fit them. Firstly, the windows come with a description sticker (similar to the one used at the biennale) that includes dimensions, type

“We don’t want to do too many exhibitions; we prefer to focus on the aid projects.” —Zofia Jaworowska

and donor name. A list cataloguing these descriptions usually accompanies every shipment to support the organisation’s Ukrainian partners in their distribution efforts. The challenge with using reclaimed windows as elements with which to repair existing buildings is that the glazing may not necessarily fit the opening – which is where the catalogue comes in. Developed during workshops with students at DoFA architecture festival in Poland’s Lower Silesia region, the

Distribution

devices to Apple, but customers in India (where iPhones accounted for 11 per cent of all secondary smartphone sales in 2022) are redirected to the websites of thirdparty recyclers, those in Argentina are offered an email address, and Apple users in La Réunion are simply advised to head to local municipal collection points. The company’s trade-in scheme is clearly laudable and valuable, but achieving its smooth rollout worldwide is not without its challenges, particularly given that Apple often sells its older devices on the secondary market to countries in which coverage for their eventual recovery may be less extensive, or less intuitive, than those nations in which its phones are more frequently purchased new. Yet if Daisy is to have a meaningful impact, it requires clear pathways for all iPhones to return to Apple and enter into its recycling system. “Which I think speaks to this wider delusion Apple has around controlling the whole value chain,” says Gunter. “There is a notion that they can put hundreds and millions of devices into the world, and that they can have full control over them from the beginning to the end of their lives.” In its efforts around recycling, Apple appears to go further than many of its rivals (at least in terms of what it presents publicly), but its initiatives frequently attract high-profile critique. In 2019, for instance, iFixit deemed Daisy “a stunt” and “a recycling PR move”, while Greenpeace argued that “[rather] than another recycling robot, what is most needed from Apple is an indication that the company is embracing one of its greatest opportunities to reduce its environmental impact: repairable and upgradeable product design”. Critique in this area is always important, particularly given widespread suspicions of greenwashing, but the criticism that Apple receives also seems to flow from the flipside of the company’s success in positioning itself as being more attuned to “design” than its rivals: if your success has been built upon a perception of high design standards, then those same standards generate expectation. Apple is aware of this and frequently utilises its prominent position to present itself as a trailblazer – “we do the work and we show our work, because we want to be the ripple in the pond that creates a broader change,” says Jackson – but the company is clearly vulnerable to the fact that critical perceptions around what contemporary design should be have changed drastically in the years since the iPhone’s launch. Descriptions of Ive’s and Apple’s designs vary dramatically – within the pages of

from launch, the two existing Daisies are still not at capacity, which means that despite producing more than 200m iPhones a year, the company is annually processing fewer than 2.4m devices via its robots. Even if other older phones are being resold or repaired, the ratio still seems askew. While the move towards more circular modes of manufacturing and recycling clearly takes time, the current figures suggest a utopianism at the heart of the idea that is difficult to translate into reality: Daisy is only an effective above-ground mine if it actually has things to mine, and this is before even getting into the issue of Apple’s other products requiring their own versions of Daisy if they’re also to be effectively dismantled. In response, Apple says it is aware of the statistical mismatch, but argues that it needs to drive awareness among consumers of the Daisies’ existence, with the iPhones processed by the machines predominantly arriving with Apple through the consumer trade-in process that the company offers both online and in its stores. “Our customers play an important role in continuing the growth of these programs,” the company writes, “and we encourage them to engage in these programs by returning devices after use.” Daisy is not the only strand of the company’s recycling work – it also seeks to “maximize the potential of the recycling materials stream” by “[working] with best-in-class recyclers”, to whom it provides recycling guides for specific models of its products. All the same, its efforts remain dependent on being able to successfully collect end-of-life iPhones. It is a process in which the company is at the mercy of its customers’ actions: it does not have full control. For consumers in countries such as the United States, Apple’s trade-in process works relatively well, particularly if they live in cities and have easy access to an Apple store: phones are easy to trade-in, with customers receiving store credit if the device is new enough to be reused.16 Yet even on Apple’s websites, the process becomes more challenging as you move away from nations in the global north. The majority of European nations, for instance, can click through to dedicated webpages to arrange the return of their 16

Which is a good move, and one that could provide an effective incentive to donate phones, although critics have noted that old iPhones are typically worth more on the used market than the material cost or Apple’s trade-in value. It is nevertheless worth noting that older devices (those that will go to Daisy) are not paid for, even if “you can still recycle it with Apple for free”. If Daisy is aiming to procure materials that can be reused in future products, there is an argument that this policy should change.

María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas.

Feedback

In 2022, then a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven’s Geo-Design MA, Ben Abdallah presented The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation at the school’s graduation show during Dutch Design Week. Set up to resemble a museum archive, the project saw Ben Abdallah place a series of machetes he had cast from sugar upon metal shelves, where they melted away into sticky pools over the course of the exhibition. The piece was a reflection on the colonial history of La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that is governed as an overseas départment of France, having previously been a French colony. La Réunion’s official language is French, but Réunion Creole is more widely spoken, with its mixture of French, Malagasy, Gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, and Tamil revealing the multiethnic makeup of the island’s inhabitants. Ben Abdallah grew up on La Réunion, where his family had moved in exile from Tunisia, and become interested in its history of sugar plantations, and the enslaved and indentured labourers forced to work on these sites. La Réunion’s history has been shaped by sugarcane, but Ben Abdallah discovered that few material traces from the historic plantations had been conserved – bar for objects that had once belonged to the island’s white masters. Ben Abdallah’s machetes, tools of the plantations, were designed to question what is, and is not, preserved from contested histories. The project re-formed elements from La Réunion’s past that have hitherto been absent, but allowed them, in turn, to perish and slip away. Ben Abdallah received Design Academy Eindhoven’s 2022 Gijs Bakker Award, a prize given to an MA student whose final project “[demonstrates] outstanding skill and imagination, tenacity and originality, personality, and relevance to the profession and the outside world”, and was selected in 2023 as part of France’s prestigious Design Parade Hyères competition for young designers – a competition in which The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation won the overall Grand Prix du Jury. Off the back of this success, Ben Abdallah is due to spend much of the coming year participating in residencies with ethnographic institutions and manufacturing centres across France and the Netherlands. His work will come to occupy the same institutional spaces whose colonial legacies it criticises. To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories. It was

a delight to have an unfiltered, critical and joyous conversation, one that navigates the challenges posed by the hegemonic, colonial and Eurocentric value system, and its attempts to erase marginalised people, their realities, knowledge systems, and lifeworlds. Within his research and practice, Ben Abdallah delves into the essence of what the writer Saidiya Hartman has termed “the afterlife of slavery” and colonialism, working and thinking through how societies define and preserve their stories, and how objects both

To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories. embody and transcend the passage of time and space. Preservation and archiving come to the forefront, echoing the sentiments of Hartman in Patricia J. Saunders’s 2008 essay ‘Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman’, published in Anthurium. “I try to make a statement about the cost of not imagining,” Hartman tells Saunders, “and I ask: can critique just be another way of remaining faithful to the limits of the archive.” To what extent can designers and makers critically and unapologetically reflect and engage with archives and histories, without fetishising or commodifying the violence of these histories and archives? Can we be less faithful to “the limits of preservation” in the Western sense, remembering that in caring for these histories and material cultures, the oppressed often still elude tangible representation? And where can imagination find pockets of space for artists, designers, activists, writers or hustlers to dream out loud or breathe freely? These are the questions that I am concerned with. The art, design, and heritage worlds are intertwined with a hyper-individual and neoliberal capitalist market and politics. It is this tension between dreaming, realities, and histories where imagination goes to work – where some of us dismantle our conditioned design sensibilities, while engaging with the vivid colours of our migrant heritage. We open up a reservoir of aesthetic value that might not be easily digestible or graspable. In our conversation, Ben Abdallah

Context

Regional Modernisms; Tropical Skins Words Olorunfemi Adewuyi Photographs Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni

From Islamic influences to Portuguese-cum-Afro-Brazilian imports and the arrival of modernism, Nigeria has seen more than its fair share of architectural styles. Each of these additions to the nation’s built environment has been laden with its own nuances and forerunners, but perhaps the most-discussed has been the tropical style – an offshoot of the international style propagated by European figures such as Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. 72

Collaboration

Lagos’s Independence House (1961), designed by Augustine Egbor.

Words Lara Chapman

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Lessons in a Flash(light)-Flashlights come in many shapes and sizes: slick cylindrical metal tubes that can be stowed in backpacks or drawers for emergencies; moulded chunks of heavy-duty yellow plastic with built-in handles suited to camping; head-torches mounted on elasticated straps for nighttime adventurers; or smartphone torches that double as camera lighting. Flashlights, in all their guises, are a classic example of the oftrepeated design mantra “form follows function”. But what form might a torch take if its function extends beyond solely providing light? The DIY Flashlight, produced by social enterprise Ambessa Play, acts as both an educational kit to teach children STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and a tool for displaced children living in refugee camps. Branching into these new uses, Ambessa’s founder, Sara Berkai, knew that her ambition needed to be embodied in a suitable form. As such, she approached Jon Marshall of Pentagram, asking him to help develop a design for a torch that could be built from scratch by anyone aged eight and upwards, to be distributed through a one-for-one business model in which, for each flashlight sold, another would go to a displaced child. To find the final form of the DIY Flashlight, Ambessa and Pentagram undertook a process of co-designing with input from children in refugee camps in Calais, France, alongside weekly sessions with children seeking asylum in the UK. Sessions were facilitated by charities that advised on donations and recompense, and Ambessa followed the International Bureau for Children’s Rights principles for child participation. “In the initial stages we had so many cool, different shapes,” explains Berkai, recalling the presentation of the first prototypes to the children. “There were some shapes where I thought, ‘This is amazing,’” she says. “But then the kids hated it!” Instead of choosing triangular, cylindrical or more playful shapes that

resembled lighthouses or dumbbells, the children leaned towards rectangular models and made pragmatic suggestions. The flashlight must be wide enough to stand up by itself for ease of reading or doing homework without electricity; it needs to be compact enough to be transported in a childsized pocket and protected during the frequent police raids on refugee camps. A lanyard, they advised, would help users navigate nighttime bathroom trips hands-free. “And obviously,” says Berkai, “they’re the experts, so we go with what they say.” That children are experts in how to design for such a hostile environment is heartbreaking. “Their notion of how they use a flashlight was different from our preconceptions,” says Marshall. Testing prototypes with children revealed other unexpected design challenges, too. Off-the-shelf connectors, for example, were too springy for little digits. “So we had to invent our own type of connecter that is easier for children to use,” explains Marshall. Other more tactile and graphic elements such as satisfying-to-clip clips, the bright orange winding mechanism, the layout of the internal cabling (which needed to be both intuitive and challenging), and the pictorial instructional manual designed to be legible to speakers of any language, similarly went through many rounds of testing and refining with the children before getting their thumbs-up. Packed into this little flashlight’s playful yet instructive body are many lessons and many functions. Beyond in-built lessons about kinetic energy and electrical components, and the emotional lessons of self-efficacy and empowerment, there is a more subtle and broader lesson for the design community – form can (and often should) follow function, but function must first follow advice from future users.

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Keep It Clean Words India Block Illustration Claudia Chanhoi

This is an unusual product launch for a design object. Held in a five-star hotel suite overlooking the Thames, there are manicures on tap, free-flowing prosecco, and sexual health educator Sarah Mulindwa, host of Channel 4’s The Sex Clinic, is giving us a PowerPoint presentation on the finer points of masturbating in the shower. A hand-picked crowd of sex-positive influencers are filming content, taking turns in the bathroom to pose with the product in question: the Womanizer X Hansgrohe Wave Clitoral Stimulation Shower Head. Featuring “unique PleasureJet technology”, the ergonomic shower head includes three different jet settings, an intensity slider, and Hansgrohe’s signature EcoSmart setting that claims to use 60 per cent less water than your average shower. You can hog the bathroom without wasting the Earth’s precious resources, but the influencers are far more interested in sharing rave reviews with their fans. “Imagine turning on the Weather Channel and it’s saying light showers with a 100 per cent chance of orgasm,” former The X Factor contestant Ash Holme tells her front-facing camera. There’s a discount code in her TikTok caption for 20 per cent off the retail price of £99.99. Economies