Design Reviewed #3 by Disegno

DESIGN REVIEWED

Felix Chabluk Smith took about 15 minutes to come up with this Lara Chapman thinks she should finish writing her story before writing this bio Jonna Dagliden Hunt is building a cottage with a ceiling height of 8m Evi Hall is trying to mend a raincoat Joe Lloyd has been searching for the perfect carciofo Joshua Segun-Lean knows where the best sourdough bread is Michael Snyder is in the kitchen and does not need a hand, thank you Oli Stratford could probably do without this bit if he’s honest Lily Wakeley is still hungry

INTRODUCTION In Praise of Faff

MASTHEAD The people behind Design Reviewed.

ECOLOGY Remnants of a Retreating Sea Michael Snyder assesses an aquatic institution’s acceptability for modernday Mazatlán.

SYSTEM The Modern Milkman Jonna Dagliden Hunt pours out domestic products with På( fyll), a container engineered to reduce plastic waste.

BODY To Speak Amongst Ourselves Joshua Segun-Lean sifts the influences interwoven in Lagos Space Programme’s fashion collections.

INTERFACE Stock Creep Lara Chapman scrolls through an alternative stock photography website that aims to court designers.

MEDIA The Attention of Passersby Joe Lloyd corrals the miscellaneous thoughts behind Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise crusade.

SPACE Good Road, Bad Road Evi Hall gets on her bike to forge a new relationship with London’s streets, with help from Beeline’s Velo 2.

POLICY Patching the Machine Felix Chabluk Smith considers getting his trousers taken up.

TECHNOLOGY The Corruptibility of Olive Oil Lily Wakeley questions whether equipping AI to analyse olive oil leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

OBJECT Rising, Dancing, Twisting Oli Stratford becomes lost in the relationship between lava lamps and respectability.

The next issue of Design Reviewed will be available in July 2024. Design Reviewed #2 was published in July 2023. Design Reviewed #1 was published in December 2022.

DESIGN REVIEWED

REMNANTS OF A RETREATING SEA Words Michael Snyder

Image courtesy of Juan Manuel McGrath (@jmphotography_mx).

ECOLOGY

Gran Acuario de Mazatlán

As an adolescent growing up in the Baltimore suburbs – in what devotees of The Wire might know as “the County” (pronounced “canny”) – I would make the 30-minute drive into the city maybe twice a month to go to dinner or museums with my family, to go to the symphony or the theatre or the arthouse cinema down on Charles Street. But as a child, I equated Baltimore with the National Aquarium. Baltimore’s aquarium is probably the closest thing the city has to a bona fide tourist attraction, alongside Fort McHenry, whose bombardment by the British in the War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and the Orioles Stadium at Camden Yards, where it is routinely butchered. Inaugurated in 1981 and expanded in 1990 after its staggering early success, the aquarium’s main buildings, as I knew them, jutted brightly into the harbour on a sequence of piers, their oblique pyramidal rooflines gliding out onto the mud-colored surface of the Patapsco River. (Another building, dedicated to the Australian Outback, opened in 2005.) Sea lions cavorted in a pool near the entrance. Inside, right by the ticket counter (and, if memory serves, the gift shop), a sequence of transparent pillars transported bubbles from the floor to the ceiling like a set of pneumatic tubes at a drive-through bank teller. The moment my parents and I entered, I would throw my arms around the columns and press my ear to the glass (or was it plexiglass?), listening to the guttural, gurgling rush of air through water. Tickets in hand, we moved from that transitional space into the high, ecclesiastical darkness of the building’s central atrium – a towering void traversed by concrete pathways that crossed the empty space at shallow angles. At ground level, manta rays glided through an open pool that sunk deep into the ground. Down there, below us, and up ahead, tucked into a labyrinth of dark halls and byzantine pathways, there were puffins and poison dart frogs, threshers and hammerheads; in the glass pyramid that surmounted the second building, lianas and bromeliads steamed in a balmy patch of misplaced rainforest – a composite fantasy, really, unlike any actual rainforest I’ve had the chance to visit since – with piranha tanks encased in artificial stones. There was also a famous dolphin show – since discontinued, thank god – complete with the usual, ethically abhorrent (though I didn’t know that at the time) tricks, and wave-shaped curtains that rose and fell on a staggering view over the harbour, where the Chesapeake Bay ends. There were also, somehow, traveling exhibitions, like a miraculous show

on jellyfish that ran from 1996-1998, on loan from Boston’s New England Aquarium, that’s still imprinted on my memory almost 30 years after I first saw it. All those amorphous figures (clouds at sunset, liquid opals) gliding through empty space felt, still feel, like the closest I’ll ever get to outer space. I loved the aquarium. There is a very good chance that I will never go back. In May of this year, I traveled from my home in Mexico City to see an entirely different aquarium, the newly opened Gran Acuario de Mazatlán in the northern state of Sinaloa – the largest of its kind in Latin America – designed by Mexico City’s Tatiana Bilbao Studio. Mazatlán is a beachside city known, in no particular order, for its 21km-long seaside promenade, or malecón; its spectacular seafood (giant clams hoisted live out of plastic coolers, raw scallops so fresh they’re not even served cold, crab tostadas, oysters and glistening plates of aguachile); and the activities of the Sinaloa Cartel. Mazatlán’s economy is based largely in fishing and tourism, much of it local. (The Mexican navy also maintains an important presence in the city.) Recent years have seen a rash of real estate speculation, as well, particularly at the northern end of the malecón, where newly built apartment towers loom over the water in an urban landscape that is otherwise dominated by one- or twostorey houses and broad, pin-straight streets. Before working on the aquarium, Bilbao – who is the principal at her eponymous studio and one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary builders – had spent two years in Mazatlán developing and executing a massive urban design project for a new Central Park (the city’s name for it), built around a retention pond that previous administrations had failed to convert into a recreational space. “They’d tried to protect it in various ways,” Bilbao told me on the afternoon that we met at her Mexico City offices, a couple of days before my visit to Mazatlán. “They’d put in some basketball courts and moved a couple of trees and put in some plants, but they’d never succeeded in making it live up to its name.” When Bilbao’s office started working on the project in 2015, she says, “we wanted to understand the hydraulic issues of the city, the ecological issues, to understand the park not just as a hydraulic system, but also as an ecological system.” The office’s plans began with cleaning the pond (all those tall new buildings, which separate the park from the sea, had a bad habit of dumping their sewage there) and organising the 30.6-hectare area around permeable surfaces

THE MODERN MILKMAN Words Jonna Dagliden Hunt

Image courtesy of Form Us With Love.

SYSTEM På(fyll)

The grey container filled with detergent that stands atop my washing machine has a long story behind it. In a way, it started back in 2017, when a goose-beaked whale washed up in the bay of Sotra in Hordaland, on the west coast of Norway. The local emergency services tried to lead it back into deep waters but failed. When the whale’s condition deteriorated further, it was euthanised by the authorities. The story, however, did not end there. The whale was emaciated and when scientists performed an autopsy they found more than 30 plastic bags, including food packaging and sweet wrappers, inside its stomach. The large amount of plastics had created a plug, blocking its digestive tract. On some of these bags the branding was still visible, and the waste could be traced back to Norway, Sweden and the UK. The “Plastic Whale” quickly became world news, and triggered action. For Orkla, the leading Nordic conglomerate of consumer goods, it became the starting point for an entirely new company. På(fyll), which launched as a beta-version with 100 households in Norway during 2022, is a circular refill service for Orkla’s household products, aimed at helping consumers reduce plastic waste. This is no small task: every year, over 26m tonnes of plastic waste are produced within the EU, 70 per cent of which is sent to landfill. According to På(fyll), this leads to at least one garbage truck’s worth of plastic waste being dumped into the ocean for every minute of every day. “Even if everyone was [already] aware of plastic waste, the incident with the whale was very visual,” says Karin Blomberg, design manager at Swedish studio Form Us With Love (FUWL), which was commissioned to design a reusable plastic container that På(fyll)’s refill system could be built around. “The whale was one of many incidents, but it was a triggering factor for Orkla, which realised that it had a very significant responsibility.” So, how is a company that sells plastic containers aiming to change an entire industry by using more plastic containers? Because behind these containers is an entirely new system built on a very old one – the milkman.

Instead of milk, På(fyll) customers order shampoo, soap, detergents or cleaning products from brands such as Zalo, Lano, Omo and Klar via a QR code, and then leave their empty containers on their doorsteps for a pickup in the same box they arrived in. The reusable containers are then reconditioned, refilled, and sent back into circulation. This way, the containers can be used for at least ten different life cycles, or an average of three to five years, explains Rayson Ho, På(fyll)’s CEO. “That’s something that we’re testing, but we’re pretty sure it can last longer than that,” he tells me when we speak over Zoom. “So the durability of the container is, of course, critical.” The På(fyll) container on my washing machine has taken some getting used to. When I want laundry detergent, I now have to handle a big, flat, 2-litre container, as opposed to a bottle with a handle. It’s a change that makes the pouring movement slightly different. The first time around, for instance, I poured out too much detergent. The second time, I adapted to its weight and shape in my hands. I turned it around to get a different angle, and it worked better. FUWL and På(fyll) are currently working on a dispenser that promises to make things easier, but at present it’s still a learning curve. What I did like immediately, however, is the low-key design: no big logos or unnecessary bulk anywhere in sight. These containers don’t have to scream for my attention. At my local supermarket, the shelf with laundry detergents is packed with messages. The bigger the packaging, the better: “Mega pack”, “New generation technology” and “Scents of morning sun” are just some of the slogans that hit me. When it comes to my På(fyll) container at home, the message is completely different. The sleek design is visually pleasing, with branding restricted to a discrete sticker showing the product it contains. It is, first and foremost, designed to be functional. FUWL has had to strike a balance between promoting the Orkla brands involved and, at the same time, establishing På(fyll)’s own brand identity – leaving brand stickers out completely, for example, meant 23

more representation of indigenous groups – all of which have slightly grown in number since I began looking at Stills over a month ago. Perhaps the addition of more gender-inclusive tags is just a suggestion away. Stills does seem to be adaptable, the website has developed and changed as I’ve written this piece, and McCarthy seemed receptive and engaged with my questions. In the end, it again comes back to the need that Stills was founded on – what does the designer, as the user, need? A seemingly simple question, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when you are designing tools for designers, it is not really simple at all. For one thing, it relies on a huge amount of intuition, foresight, user testing, analysis, design development and iterative work. For another, a designer’s needs are not isolated. No designer is an island, because they are asking similar questions to the ones that Stills itself is asking: ‘What do my clients need?’ And then those clients are asking, ‘What do our customers need?’ or ‘What do our users need?’. Stock images tend to be licensed for designers to create publicfacing works – advertisements, websites, posters, banners, social media campaigns and the likes. As such, we are all users of stock image websites by proxy, consuming their photographs whether we choose to or not. Whether we are designers are not. My hope is that if designers have access to better images through more considerately curated platforms like Stills, then, as a result, we (the public) will have a better visual culture and our lives will shift to be slightly richer too – more creative, more beautiful, less generic. But what the users as a public need is a complex question that traverses many terrains. While Stills perpetuates some of the less palatable aspects of the stock licensing industry, it remains early days. It has a chance to address this and, I believe, the willingness to do so. I like to think that Stills will not become just another stock creep on the stock image market. Lara Chapman is the assistant editor of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

THE ATTENTION OF PASSERSBY Words Joe Lloyd

Image courtesy of Raquel Diniz and Penguin Random House.

MEDIA

Humanise

Colive harvested fruit from both the GreekCypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, mixing the two to create oils that it bills as a “taste of peace” in an island marked by civil unrest, war, and displacement. While Colive positions olives as a symbol of peace and resolution, there are other regions in which the fruit is actively entangled in war.

value of products, excluding some, but aiding the inclusion of others? A machine may be able to detect the the smoke of scorched earth in an oil, but would it tell us to care? Even outside of these explicitly political contexts, the value of an olive oil is directly impacted by the storytelling it is entangled in. Cord, for instance, believes that the quality of olive oil has increased enormously in the last

Graza is a new olive oil brand that has become popular, in part, through the design of its squeezy platic bottles (image courtesy of Graza).

Olives are believed to make up 25 per cent of the agricultural income of Palestinians, for example, but this has often been weaponised in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Long before the recent escalation in violence, there has been extensive documentation to show Palestinian olive groves in the West Bank being burnt by Israeli occupiers – one part of a series of illegal land grabs that have also resulted in the deaths of Palestinian farmers and the displacement of communities. In both of these contexts, olive oil is not simply a foodstuff, but also a marker of national identity – questions of food and agriculture are, among other things, always political in character. Sat within the context of market fluctuations and geopolitical impacts on the availability of crops, smelling machines will no doubt come to play a part in politics, even if their roles are invisible. Will these machines change our perception of the 80

10 to 15 years because producers have had to find ways of increasing value: “People don’t get into olive oil to get rich because, unfortunately, it’s treated as a commodity. Supermarkets have traditionally used it as a ‘loss leader’, so we’ve come to expect it to be cheap when good oil [actually] can’t be.” He goes on to explain that “producers have found that if they make a high quality product, they can distinguish their brand on the marketplace, whether it’s by participating in international competitions like [the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition] or getting good press about their products.” Adulteration and manipulation are so easy, the crudest markers of difference are in fact heritage and status. If we don’t maintain these ideals, production will be a continual race to the bottom. The free-market breeds competition in addition to innovation: it simultaneously pushes us to define the

boundaries of both ends of the spectrum. AI machines, however, have the potential to illuminate the quality and authenticity of products to consumers, which in turn might stabilise their value. But in this move towards market stasis, we run the risk of homogenising taste into easy categorisation. Homogeneity, however, is not always seen as negative; in some product categories, it is actively sought after. Marks, for instance, tells me that she has met one of the head blenders for PG Tips tea, a person whose job is to ensure that every teabag produced tastes reassuringly identical, expertly blending Assam crops in order to reach universally appreciated uniformity. “At first we use basic language to describe things, like ‘this is bitter’, and then you start to learn information for what flavour to look for,” Marks tells me. “As we build an understanding and matching vocabulary, you begin to appreciate these things. It’s an interesting correlation between effort and appreciation.” Yet if the knowledge of PG

Tips’s master blenders is, in future, inherited by machines, would this link between effort and appreciation be broken? In trying Carman’s oils, I do not detect a whiff of ice cream scum or taste Play-Doh. But whilst writing this piece, imagining the thrum of a machine with an intelligence beyond my comprehension, I’ve asked myself: if I had detected any of these supposed faults in the oils whilst the father and son shared stories of foraging wild herbs on their olive grove, would I have voiced my concern? Would I have trusted this inkling? Would I even have cared? I’ve come to the conclusion that even in my most self-aggrandising moments of identifying as a food writer, I would not – a good story is a good story after all. An olive oil being sold out of the back of an electric fittings shop by nice people makes for a damn good formula, perhaps even the best one. Lily Wakeley is an editor at a charity, as well as an independent writer.