2MD Issue 01 - RELEASING ON THE 16TH JULY by rca-issuu

PANDEMIC 2

ISSUE 01 Too Many Designers is a publication by Design Products students at the Royal College of Art. We would like to give you a glimpse of what are thinking, not just making. Welcome to our Pandemic issue.

CONTRIBUTERS Aliki Siganou Andreas Kamolz Andrew Pierce Scott Anya Muangkote Batu Sozen Carolina RamirezFigueroa Chukwiji Nwakude Di zhu Elliot Lunn Eric Saldanha Erin Karlsson Eveline Tรณmasdรณttir

Felix Isidorsson Martina Taranto Gian Luca Amadei Max Hornaecker Georgia Cottington Mengtian Zhang Giovanni Dipilato Michael Marriot Grace Keeton Moe Asari Isabel Alonso Rashmi Bidasaria James Johnson Robeert Phillips James Shaw Roseanne Wakely Lea Randebrock Sam Sheckells Lise Vester Pedersen Sarah van Gameren Simone Schiefer Malika Khurana Maria Ramon Tomoko Azumi Vanice Cheung Marta Sternberg

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Letter Dear Readers, Two years ago, we were reveling in the final summer months before beginning our journey at the Royal College of Art. Globally, the #MeToo movement grew in power, encouraging survivors to come forward with their stories. Harry married Megan. Scientists release a disturbing report warning of the detrimental and impending path of Global Warming. The world mourned the loss of the oncein-a-generation genius, Stephen Hawking. One year ago, we were reveling in our burgeoning friendships and a successful show for the seniors. Globally, Boris Johnson came into power, promising to see Brexit through. The Extinction Rebellion movement continued to gain traction. There were national protests in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, and countless others. Notre Dame went up in flames and New Zealand saw their largest ever mass shooting. President Trump was impeached. Like everyone, we had plans and

expectations for the year 2020. We were going to graduate, as a class. We were prepared to spend countless hours at the studio as we sped to the finish line with hopes of producing a hire-worthy final project. In March, within a matter of hours, we watched as our classmates made last-minute purchases to fly home as Covid-19 continued to make way, inching closer, threatening the future we had already painted for ourselves. While this pandemic, by definition alone, has had a global effect, it has affected everyone personally. RCA class of 2020 has had to quickly transition to online learning while simultaneously coming to terms that our last days in the studio were already behind us. It has been difficult and uncomfortable; testing us both as humans and as designers. But it is through discomfort that paradigms are challenged. Historically, the most challenging moments of human history have brought on some of the greatest innovations and discoveries of the modern world: the third 5

CONTENTS

Night Carving Batu Sozen Page 20

In Conversation with James Shaw Page 24

The Grass is Always Greener Eric Saldahana Page 28

Visual Threats Have More Comedic Potential Simone Schiefer Page 31

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Grace Keeton Rashmi Bidasaria Georgia Cottington Elliot Lunn

Woodchips and Wildflowers Max Hornaecker Pages 18

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We hope you enjoy x.

#01 Vanice Cheung Pages 17

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We have since renamed our publication “2MD (Too Many Designers).” We have expanded our goal to not only show you the thinking of Design Products students, but of our tutors, alumni, and influential voices in the industry as we tackle the difficult and challenging implications of our current context. Welcome to ISSUE 01: Pandemic.

Being Home Erin Karlsson Page 8

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In our inaugural edition, ISSUE 00: Genesis, we aimed to show you a curated collection giving you a glimpse into the innerworkings of Design Products students.

The Arrival Gian Luca Amadei Page 6

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cholera pandemic and the field of Epidemiology, World War Two and the computer, the Cold War and the microchip.

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Google Trends Top Searches From UK & India - April 11 2020 To July 11 2020 - Google Shopping, Home & Decor | Data Analysis & Visualisation - Rashmi Bidasaria

Where Did My Money Go? Rashmi Bidasaria Page 44

Making in Isolation Andreas Kamolz Page 47 7

Making in Isolation Anya Muangkote Page 49

Breaking things Marta Sternberg Page 62

Making in Isolation Eveline Tómasdóttir Page 50

Making in Isolation Isabel Alonso Pages 51

Making in Isolation Lise Vester Pedersen Pages 52

186 Weeks Georgia Cottington Page 64

Design and the Pandemic Carolina RamirezFigueroa Page 70

Painting Aliki Siganou Page 68

Making in Isolation Max Hornaecker Page 53

Making in Isolation Malika Khurana Page 54

London During Lockdown Di Zhu Page 74

What Do We Loose When We Loose Touch? Rosie Wakely Page 80

Making in Isolation Gian Luca Amadei Page 55

Making in Isolation Lea Randebrock Page 56

The Design of Social and Sexual Interactions Felix Isidorsson Page 84

Making in Isolation Mengtian Zang Page 57

Making in Isolation Elliot Lunn Page 58

Quarantine Maria Ramon Vazquez Page 88

Panessetia Martina Taranto Page 86

Material as Engagement Robert Phillips Page 90

JJ Making in Isolation Grace Keeton Page 60

Making in Isolation Moe Asari Page 59 Making in Isolation Martina Taranto Page 61 8

A Conversation with James Johnson Page 94

I’ve Never Missed a Desk More Sam Sheckells Page 100

A Conversation with Tomoko Azumi Page 102

Tacile Traces Grace Keeton Page 107

The Arrival Take me over there, where the grass is soft And the light is shining through the trees. There, where those floating particles are shimmering like golden fairies. I want to walk barefoot over there, I want to bathe in that golden light I want to feel the bliss of nature I will stroke the grass and its caress in my palm, will feel like the fresh water in the stream, running through my fingers. My eyes will rest on the canopy of trees above. A green sheltering sky, with glimpses of blue stars. There, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll dissolve my soul in the mysteries of nature.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll become the whisper of the leaves and, the burble of the stream. Just leave me there.

Gian Luca Amadei 10

Being Home

Life back home isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t glamorous or exciting. But the familiar and the mundane has been a priceless comfort.

Vanice Cheung

#01 We made a pot of soy marinade With ginger, “ice sugar”, two kinds of soy, and water Garlic skins left on The first fruits are like this Licked with salt So you eat it salty pig’s tongue cut, split eggs, chicken legs Are you sure you can carry it? I nod Tuck the cucumber between my arms Pot pressed evenly between my two hands The fridge is wide And for no reason she slips And I think of the hours she boiled and sweat I scream They come worried about the shards And I think about how she’s supposed to be sweet the second time

Erin Klarsson 16

Woodchips and Wildflowers These times have left a mark in how we function as individuals and as a society. I had to leave London at the beginning of April, due to complications with my landlords, to come back to where I grew up, a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside. This disruption, from the closure of the RCA to being at home with my parents, made me reflect upon my practice. I realised how important it is for me to be immersed in a dense creativity “paste”, that a studio has to offer. All of its social aspects, the lunches and dinners, the elevator chats, the conversation with your desk neighbours, the countless pints in ArtBar- all this is gone for good now. Sure we’ll keep in contact after this is over, and of course we will meet afterwards to have pints and collaborations, but - as soon to be graduates - we will never be surrounded by this spirit again. I feel like I am not a good designer when I am all by-myself, I need a pool of people

to discuss my ideas and thoughts with, and yes, it is possible on zoom, but it is not the same. I am taking advantage of this situation, to teach myself new skills and practice crafts I’ve barely delved into before. Whilst in London, I realised how much nature plays a role in my practice and how I was starting to hate the concrete and asphalt London is drowning in. The first days back at home, I walked around the olive fields around my house and the woods, and subconsciously I mapped out landslides, fallen trees and wild asparagus plants. It took me some days to get used again to vegetation and fields abandoned to grass and wildflowers. While wandering around, I started collecting edible plants, such as dandelion leaves, asparagus, thyme and oregano, mint and elderflower. I took some small olive trunks here and there and started carving them. The results are a chunky spoon and a spatula. I wasn’t actively looking for the best shape the object could have or the best process to achieve it, rather than just being in the moment making. During the daily strolls, hand picking, and the sporadic and rather rudimental making, I felt for the first time calm and at ease with myself. Since the lockdown, I have put myself under a lot of pressure to produce work the same quality as before, and it took me a relocation to understand that this is perhaps not necessary at the moment, and that nobody is demanding that from me, if not myself. Even though I feel more like a human being again, and less of a machine, it still takes a lot of motivation to get up and to keep my hands busy. Sometimes it’s not about the spoon, rather than producing sawdust and wood chips.

Max Hornaecker 19

Night Carving

While we may have thought the pandemic takes all the resources away from makers, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s actually impossible to prevent a creative process even in these times because making is not about the resource itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about trying and dedicating yourself to the craft no matter what.

Batu Sozen 22

For issue 01, Too Many Designers conducted a series of interviews with some of our favourite designers and Design Products alumni. To understand the way they work and how the current times have changed their practices. A huge thank you to all the designers involved.

A Conversation with James Shaw 28th June 2020

Rashmi Bidasaria (RB): Given the current situation, have the priorities & design decisions in your practice been impacted? James Shaw (JS): So, it’s been interesting because I went to Paris just for a weekend.I packed for a two day weekend. Yeah, and took a very small bag with me with nothing in it.Then I ended up staying for two months in a small studio apartment with no tools only my small laptop and nothing really nothing to carry out a design practice or anything, barely any clothes! And so it was interesting to have these two months to just stop, essentially, to pause and reflect and reconsider things. My normal practice is very hands-on and very dependent on the workshop and Making things. And I guess I’ve become quite habitual in a way that you’re always busy during the next thing, and then busy doing the next thing and racing to catch up. So it was actually really amazing to have these two months to pause and not be able to do that! And then, to take that moment to reconsider actually what is important? What other things that I might want to work on and want to see? RB: Is there an interesting insight you’d like to share with us from this time that you’ve gotten?

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INTERVIEW 24

JS: (Chuckles) So I think for me, I feel like I ended up reconnecting in a way with what I thought were more important issues. So I mean, I’ll be honest, I watched a lot of YouTube. I spent a lot of lockdown watching YouTube which is amazing, you know, YouTube is such a fantastic resource and just an amazing place to learn about stuff . Issues around climate change, energy and waste are the things that I can feel very interested in and very engaged in. And there’s just all these fascinating corners of YouTube with people doing these crazy things. Then, of course, to understand that, when you are

watching a video of someone trying to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol for example, you actually need to get quite a lot of science to understand the math is their doing. So, this kept on sending me down all these wormholes of investigation. RB: Yeah, and then soon it’s like a whole web of things that you’ve jumped into it and then you’re sort of all over the place. JS: Exactly! Which was really interesting. But I guess business-wise (I can’t divulge into details because this is unconfirmed projects!) what I’ve actually been doing is to scale up. So, up until now the way I’ve been working since I finished at The Royal College, has been on a studio based level. So what I’ve been doing during lockdown is actually reaching out to various big companies and trying to look for ways that we can collaborate on a bigger scale. Essentially, looking at projects that would make a bigger difference than that of a studio output. RB: Was this initial decision of starting out as an artist/ studio practitioner, something that you felt strongly about after graduating from the RCA? JS: Yeah, it definitely was! The typical idea was that you would go and be an industrial designer. you’d work with big companies, design objects and get paid a royalty and the company will make thousands and thousands of whatever it is that you’ve made. And I had some early experiences that left me feeling not very good. You know, it was maybe the objects ended up not coming out quite how I wanted them to be or how I thought they should be, or the fact that some of these pieces were made 10 to 20,000 of. It’s scary. Just the idea of 10,000 of anything in the world! So I became very interested in the freedom that working in a more artistic way allows room for experimentation and to try and do things in a different way than the industry normally operates in. I think I always had this idea that this was prototyping. So either prototyping for myself or prototyping for other ways of working. So the idea that you can use the field of design art, as a playground to experiment with things that may later become mass produced objects, but also as a

chance to actually go out and touch and play with things and get this tacit understanding of what a material actually is. RB: I think that comes through so naturally in your practice. You can tell just how much you explore that material. You’ve also highlighted this in good detail in the ‘Material Matters’ podcast, you take us through your life after graduation where there wasn’t a scope for a job and how you used that to your advantage. I think that’s something that we find ourselves in today. What would your advice be for us, how do we take on the challenge that we face in this crisis? JS: we all need to create our own jobs. I actually think more and more, that it’s almost like there’s never really been a job scope, at least in my time. People are trained up for one situation and usually they’re trained up with what’s been learned from the past 10,15,20 years. But in reality, the situation they’re coming out to in 10 years is going to be completely different from that time that their training was based on. So I think we need to have this semi-entrepreneurial attitude and try and make the opportunities for ourselves. I’ve recently in the past few weeks become absolutely obsessed with this group of people who made Biosphere 2. I highly recommend that you go and watch a film that’s called Spaceship Earth. Afterwards, read a book called Designing Biosphere 2. It’s basically the idea that a small group of people who are committed to positive change can change the world and that’s the only way that changes ever happen but they have this amazing attitude to entrepreneurship and to creating your own opportunities, just going out and finding the thing that is both- what you want to do & the change you want to make in the world and also the thing that you can not only survive on, but to thrive and fund, whatever it is that you’re doing next.

This text is an edited interview with Rashmi Bidasaria and designer James Shaw

The Grass is Always Greener

chocolate muffin, I struggled to remember which day it was. But I

The following is a brief excerpt into the contrasting lives of two people, one housed and one experiencing homelessness. They are both living in the same world, facing the same pandemic, from two different perspectives. The human spirit is strong, yet it is our average days that often bring out our frustrations.

knew that if I left soon, I would be able to catch the free Saturday breakfast at St. John on Bethnal Green, one meal I would not want to miss. The morning rolled on, and I begrudgingly began the zoom calls for the day. Having no way

These excerpts are based on actual stories from real people, living in London. Every statement is followed by the alternate perspective. I overslept as usual, as my curtains were drawn, and my room was dark; time doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to mean anything anymore. Unable to

to contact anyone, I was unsure if I was allotted a hotel room to stay.

I thought I would brave the half-hour long queue, to pop into Tesco, to make something nice for dinner. Sometimes, it takes so long to get in, but with everything else shut, there was no other toilet available.

sleep any longer with the sun directly on my face, I tried to open my umbrella for some shade, to rest a little longer.

I overturned the house, to look for my missing wallet yet again; it is a wonder how I keep losing things, when I barely leave these four walls. It goes to show you

I got up, freshened up, and sifted through my wardrobe, wondering if it was even worth it to change my clothes. I dusted off my pair of socks, which should last through the week, if the weather holds up. As I sat in my kitchen with my coffee, munching on my second

By evening, I was exhausted from talking to people through screens. It can drive you mad to be endlessly waiting in limbo, for a key

can never be too careful, I learnt that the hard way, when not even a week on the streets, I had my phone and blanket stolen from me.

worker to approach you with good news.

Probably the worst part about the lockdown though, is staying away from everyone. With no way to wash my hands every time I come in contact with someone or something, I must be hyper-vigilant and keep my distance.

with just a few hours of sleep before the first call in the morning. At least

Visual Threats Have More Comedic Potential

by then I had found an entrance to a shop that had not been boarded up, so I could have some semi-sheltered sleep before dawn.

I had never thought the day would come, that I would be bored of Netflix, Instagram and YouTube. But it

feels just like a ghost town, with no friendly faces to talk to, and nothing really to keep you occupied.

As the sun was setting, I started to miss going across town to catch up with friends, outside a pub, in the chilly night air. I was lucky

to ride the night bus â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not being a key worker, I am often refused â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but I always know that with a little money in my oyster, I could have a roof over my head.

Not realising it was already way past midnight, due to longer days, I was left

Eric Saldahana 30

Three definitive stamps from the Jederzeit Sicherheit (Safety at all times) series issued in West Germany from 1971 to 1974.

Simone Schiefer 32

A Conversation with Michael Marriott 21 May 2020

Elliot Lunn (EL): As a graduate, I’m aware that universities are still very discipline led, and yet the industry balance between discipline is much less clearly defined. How do you feel about it? Michael Marriott (MM): I have slightly mixed feelings. I feel like it’s really good when you’re training to stick to a discipline and just have one route. And those boundaries demand a certain amount of depth that you don’t get if you have a more scattergun training. I think it’s probably different for different people, but generally and to a large degree. I think a narrow bandwidth of training is a better thing because you go deeper and you’re sort of forced to go deeper and that’s the point of education. Through that depth, it gives you and your practice a richness that I think is often lacking in practices that are more scattergun. Certain people believe all the boundaries should be broken down in education because that’s the modern world or how people see the modern world or how they want to work or things like that. But, I’ve seen courses that had more open boundaries and I think the work that is produced is on the whole a bit flimsier, and lacks the depth, the integrity and the vitality even.

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INTERVIEW 34

I think focused discipline allows you to build up an approach which you can then throw out or try out on other disciplines and it’s, I think inevitably more successful because there’s a sort of core philosophy that then feeds into other things. And I think that’s difficult to achieve that core. Each and every subject has plenty of breadth for going deep.

EL: Your work ranges across a wide range of projects: materials, processes and objects - is this intentional or is it led by external demand?

EL:Tell us something you’re working on now or something you’re interested in now. And it was kind of what you’re working on now is

MM: It’s just kind of happened really? I mean, I’ve always since I was very young been interested in art and architecture as the two most obvious first points of contact, but also engineering, and building and making things in different ways.

MM: It is a long term ongoing project for a bent wood chair, which is very exciting. My first sort of real dealings with bent wood, particularly bent wood chairs. The first chair that I ever grew to love was the Thonet number 14, the first chair I ever bought in my life as a child from a jumble sale. At the time, I didn’t realise how important that chair was. But as a young man, I grew to realise it’s important and as an older man, I still think it’s possibly the best chair the world will ever see for a number of reasons, too much to go into for now. So working on this sort of holy grail of chair design is really exciting.

When I was about my son’s age, My mum managed to get a tour booked for my brother, me and a friend to go to the Ford factory in Dagenham. I often think about it because it feels like it was one of the key moments in my life when I thought wow, this is good shit. You know, this is really fascinating stuff, seeing pressing plants the size of a small two up two down house for smashing out body panels. It was inspiring for me as a nine or 10 year old kid. I think what makes me a designer is I was always intrigued to work out how other stuff was made I didn’t have access to. I’ve always had an interest in other stuff and all the edges of what informs furniture and products and design generally. Over the years I’ve been asked to do all sorts of odd things that aren’t quite furniture design, aren’t quite interior design, aren’t quite exhibition design. They always seem interesting to me. I tend to say yes to things loosely anyway. But also, things that are different, just provide some different new challenges, different ways of working, sometimes working with other different people. People from different disciplines. I really enjoy that, that dialogue. What I would say in terms of advice to graduate, don’t rush for it. Just look for projects that you believe in, follow your kind of gut instinct to think. EL: design is a slippery word. What do you think the next reincarnation will be? MM: Yeah, it is extremely slippery, isn’t it? It’s going much more towards a slightly abstract world of service design and stuff that’s rooted in more and more digital services and digital experiences. Like the world we’re in right now, talking through a laptop in different parts of the same city. I think there’s going to be more and more of that.

This text is an edited interview with Elliot Luun and designer Michael Marriott

SE17 Chair

In These Weird and Trying Times In these weird and trying times, I find myself changing my perspective on things, how I work, find my cool, engage with people and so on. Shifting and leveraging all the space and resources that I have at hand to build and develop in these challenging times. I recently purchased a bike and have been rediscovering the city, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great to see areas I can remember as a child that have made their transformation, London the ever growing city. Cycling down little roads, off the beaten path to explore and feed my curiosity; finding great comfort in the serendipity of it. Best of all, powering through the tough incline just to see the breathtaking skyline makes it all worth it, a different perspective just gets the mind thinking. I take these rides to reflect on myself and calm down during the pandemic. I never miss a day.

Andreas Kamolz and Andrew Pierce-Scott 42

Chukwuji Nwakude 43

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Google Trends Top Searches From UK & India - April 11 2020 To July 11 2020 - Google Shopping, Home & Decor | Data Analysis & Visualisation - Rashmi Bidasaria

Rashmi Bidasaria 44

Making in Isolation As designers we share the commonality of using making things and working with our hands as a coping mechanism. We asked DP students and tutors to send a photo of what â&#x20AC;&#x153;makingâ&#x20AC;? they have been doing to get through this time. Handful of Spoons Hand carved spoons made from maple and charred ash downed branches collected from the local park.

Andreas Kamolz 46

Baking Moons Natural Pigment from Spirulina These paints are derived from harvesting residue of Spirulina (blue-green algae) that have been cultivated for consumption. Further attempt would be to paint or incorporate bio-materials within this by-product.

This is an expedition into the land of imagination. Stranded at home, the meditative act of baking has become a vessel for daydreaming. Sending the mind with all its thoughts onto a journey far, far away. Maybe to the moon or maybe in the opposite direction, deep inside the universe of our own soul. An exploration of unknown territory in any case.

Anya Muangkote 48

Eveline Tรณmasdรณttir 49

When I was a kid, one of my favourite activities was browsing books about renowned painters and doing my own interpretation of their work. I especially liked Hundertwasserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings because of the vivid colours. Inspired by: 1. Si and No - Bernard Rudofsky 2. Icicle upholstery fabric - Unika-Vaev (Denmark) 3. Graphica - Lucienne Day for Healâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s London

Isabel Alonso 50

Ebbe An investigation of the stimulating, beautiful and natural sand structures created by ebb. The tide and the light always make the routine walk by the beach a new and unique experience.

Lise Vester Pedersen 51

Clay Pots

Weaving At Home I made two small looms out of things I had laying around my parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; apartment: odd parts from an IKEA cabinet and a lot of cardboard. Weaving requires a lot of patience (more than I have), and even more when your yarn is so thin. The shaggy little creature here is mostly made up of rya loops.

Max Hornaecker 52

Malika Khurana 53

Home, as a place of exploration.

Baking in isolation

Lea has been entered the world of 3-d printing clay and parametric design in isolation. Starting from an archetypical shape, parametric base shape can be transformed infinitely and gives endless possibilities in variation.

Gian Luca Amadei 54

Lea Randebrock 55

A Making Series In China, over 40 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks are used each year. Here are some experiments happening in the kitchen before these chopsticks get a second life. I bend and weave the chopsticks after they get boiled. Wine bottles and wires are used as moulds and tools for reshaping.

1. Quarantine Sketchbook 2. 50p screwdriver 3. Door stop 4. Studio lights 5. Furnace

Mengtian Zhang 56

Elliot Lunn 57

Fake Normality I thought that a personal way to escape from thousands of dramatic television news was, indeed, just continuing living a fake normality. This is what I have basically been doing. The designer stuck at home. I thought that it would have been interesting making prototypes with my father. Then I started using his experience in construction sites, making and materials in a totally different context. I made a new climbing solution, a panel made out of rubber (a material we need to recycle in large scale objects).

Mycelium

Moe Asari 58

Giovanni Dipilato 59

Sanitized In the urgency to respect the rules of the game I was born to play, I came up with Sanitized. Sanitized, is a creative platform that collects reactions to the pandemic. Creatives, using their favourite language, are producing food for thought and introspective exercises to share with the world during these times of solitude and isolation. So far, poetry, illustrations, novels, essays, and music have been produced and are being published on our website www.sanitizedworld.com and via our instagram profile https://www.instagram.com/_ sanitized_/ I believe in the strength of togetherness, which is not multitude, but a conscious allegiance of people that share a common feeling, that work to turn it into reality and stand together to defend it. This is the principle on which Sanitized was imagined and conceived.

Embroidery Isolated craft, sent to friends and family, globally.

Grace Keeton 60

Sanitized has a Manifesto that sets the basis and shapes the soul of the movement. It wishes to inspire and motivate the artists during the imaginative and creative process. It invites diving deep into all matters so as to unveil the importance of human complexity.

Martina Taranto 61

Marta Sternberg

i started breaking things in the house to keep my grandfather busy in this quarantine. it worked and it is still working. everyday something broken or damaged appears in the house. ‘’strange things’’, he says.

186 Weeks

I have been sending a postcard every sunday for 186 weeks (around 3 and a half years) to one of my favourite friends, also called Georgia. Throughout this time we have always lived in the same city. The whole thing started when Georgia went away for 2 months; it was a way for us to feel connected whilst rejecting the digital, but then it just never stopped. It is a weirdly very personal experience sitting down and writing someone a letter. You reveal and reflect on your week and how you feel in a way that you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t when you whatsapp someone. Over time we realised what we have actually created is a sort of archive of ourselves, as much as I am writing to Georgia I am also writing to myself. In 10 years time I 64

will be able to look back at everything Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve sent her and be able to see how I was feeling and what I did, like having a diary entry I post away each week for someone else to look after. This kind of strange and sometimes alarming self reflection feels very apt for the time we are living in. Where we have all had to spend more time with ourselves, and realise we need to hold ourselves more accountable for the way we move through the world. I would recommend it.

Georgia Cottington 65

A selection of my favourites Georgia has sent me.

A selection of Georgiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favourites I have sent her..

Aliki Siganou

I expressed my solitude-related frustration by drawing abstract figures. From left to right, top to bottom: Ms Melancholic Melany, Mr Squidspeare Einstein, Ms Michelle HeeHee Jakson, Ms Shameless Shavings, Mr Marlon Monroe

Design and the pandemic. On the unsettling and how to stay with the trouble In late 2019 I launched the brief of ‘Design for the Unsettling’, asking our Year 2 students to ‘examine the way design can respond and address conditions of transition, instability, opportunity, decay, and insecurity’ and to examine and challenge conditions of precariousness, climate turmoil and an ‘economic order crumbling under its own weight’. While I hoped that the Unit would encourage a rethink of the discipline in the face of uncertainty, it was impossible to foresee that the brief would become so eerily prescient a few months later when we are living through one of the most volatile situations in living memory. There are different strategies that we have invented to 70

deal with the unknown and the unsettling. One of them is fiction — using speculative thought to try and navigate through our fears and its possible consequences. One story that is particularly relevant to the current pandemic is Dean Koontz’ The Eyes of Darkness, a novel that imagines a deadly Wuhan 400, a virus with a ‘kill-rate’ of 100% that emerges in central China. Although originally published in 1981, the novel has acquired new meaning as it has been co-opted by conspiracy theorists keen to see Wuhan-400 as a precise prediction of the SARS-Cov-2 — in the novel, the virus was designed in laboratories outside the city as the ‘perfect biological weapon’. The danger with fictions that look into the future is that they often work more as escapism. As the Wuhan-400 example suggests, looking at the future (or past imaginations of the future) works well to diagnose our fears and creates selffulfilling prophecies. A more useful way of dealing with 71

the unsettling is formulated by Donna Haraway in her latest book Staying with the Trouble where she argues against the use of speculation as a way of escaping. Instead she invites us to get closer to the trouble: to look in detail and produce small, collaborative tactics to trace and delineate our increasingly complex reality and produce small, provisional solutions. As we learn more about the novel coronavirus, we realise that there are no quick and straight answers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; no silver bullet that might simply solve this crisis and bring back life as normal â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and design needs to adapt to these new conditions if it is to fulfil its social responsibility. There are of course specific solutions to which designers can give efficient answers: devising new, cheaper and easier ways to produce PPE for example, or distributing medical supplies in areas where the absence of roads make it more difficult to transport shipments efficiently. But responding to a pandemic, and the almost certain 72

post-lockdown reality of an altered reality, will require us designers to device our strategies to stay with the trouble.

Dr Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa 73

London During Lockdown During lockdown, I went on a road trip on 15th April, starting from Elephant & Castle. It took around four and a half hours to finish. There was barely anyone on the streets. When I was walking, it felt like a movie or a game; that London, one of the most busy cities in the world, had become empty.

Di Zhu 78

What Do We Loose When We Loose Touch?

During this time of pandemic and isolation most of us have experienced a severe decline in touch. I experience the world through vinyl gloves, familiar faces through zoom, and people on the street at a distance of two metres. Touch has always been an overlooked but vital sense. Now that it’s gone, maybe our appreciation of touch has increased. There’s plenty of research showing that touch lowers cortisol and increases dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Lack of touch has a fundamental effect on human development and has been shown to stunt emotional, physical, and mental growth in children. Do you remember the old story about King Midas in Greek mythology? Everything he touched turned to gold. Christopher G. Wetzel and April H. Crusco conducted a study which found evidence for a real life ‘Midas Touch’ – customers were shown to tip more if waiting staff even briefly brushed their forearm. Of our senses, sight is valued most highly in western culture. This is reflected in our most used inventions – television, computers, and most recently, smartphones – which are designed to be a feast for the eyes. I remember reading about embedded technology making its way into the home in 2006. The author suggested that if aliens came and backwards engineered humans from looking at a computer they would imagine humans were a brain, an eye and a couple of fingers. The idea that humans have a sense of touch could be totally overlooked, and this highlights just how little we value it. I’ve been looking at alternative intelligence and different ways of ‘knowing’. I discovered a popular belief that the correct metric of intelligence is quite narrow and fixed, favouring speed, efficiency, and memory. It seemed to exclude the richness of neurodiversity and 81

people with radically different abilities. I suggest that intelligence is ‘ability’ contextualised, so if the sense of touch is an ability, it can be best understood as ‘tactile intelligence’. I found the idea of kinaesthetic or tactile intelligence to be most interesting. This is the sense of touch and physicality which is often undervalued. How developed is our sense of tactility? Is it possible to enhance it? If there was a test for kinaesthetic intelligence we would likely find that cephalopods exhibit the highest level. Not only does each of their arms have its own brain, but it can also taste, feel, and sense light. On top of this, they’re incredibly curious and reflect their discoveries in changing skin patterns and textures. Intelligence tests examine visual reasoning and spatial awareness, but can we measure kinaesthetic intelligence with more precision? There is no doubt that dancers, makers and the visually impaired have greater tactile knowing, but as with spatial awareness, there must be several forms and intensities of tactile intelligence. Now, while we’re denied tactile interactions with others, will we notice a decline in kinaesthetic intelligence?

Rosie Wakely 82

The design of social and sexual interactions and how it has been affected by the global pandemic The way that we interact with one another is ever changing and dinners with friends, dates and clubs are things of the past. Now we interact daily on a global level, from video calls between friends and family, to zoom meetings. Those interactions are facilitated by technology that has been around for almost two decades. Nothing has impacted how we socialise as much as the current pandemic, but little has changed in how online interactions are designed since the dawn of webcams. Today we are quite literally bound to our homes, with little to no physical contact with the people we hold most dearly. We don’t go out to restaurants with friends, and we are certainly not meeting up with people for intimate encounters, at least that we are outspoken about. We are physical beings, yet our physical interactions are dramatically compromised. The United Kingdom’s prime minister Boris Johnson recently let it be known that ‘support bubbles’ between adults living alone would now be seen as something acceptable, to deal with the growth of ‘loneliness’ in the country. Although that loneliness certainly is a rising problem, it’s also a clear example of ‘practice-follows-principle’. People are fed up with following orders and in the individualist society of today, we feel entitled to at least decide with whom we have sex with, and how often. People do as they want, and with the lack of whipping,

the government’s directives follow with carrots to keep people happy and in line. Apple’s video call service Facetime was released 10 years ago and the latest editions consist of a whirlpool of moving squares in a group call and turning your face into a poop emoji. On a business level, group meetings on laptops and computers have evolved into something somewhat more sophisticated in recent times. Services designed for business meetings found its way into the private realm in the wake of Covid-19. Zoom was one of the runner-ups that made it past the giants like Skype and Google Hangouts. How it is designed differs little from what was already out there. A tiny lit up frame around the person who speaks and rows and rows of thumbnails of faces and voices on top of each other often does little in comparison to the anatomy of physical interactions. It is what is available, so we settle. But the fact that it does little justice to how we as social beings naturally socialise is something worth noting. The service offers meetings with 100 people and up to 500 people as a maximum. This has been adapted by both clubs, as well as after work with the team, with live streamed music and dance parties. But how would it be possible to mingle when you are bound to involuntarily eavesdrop on hundreds of other people? The bottom line is that we like socialising and we like sex and the design industry of online interactions have a long way to go. Maybe this is the time that VR headsets go from the existing gimmicky applications to actually being something of value? Felix Isidorsson

PANESSETIA

1989. The year I was born. I don’t know if it’s something everyone does; to associate the year of their birth with the closest thing to a biblical event that took place the same year... Probably not, thank goodness not every year in Berlin there’s a wall to destroy. I’ve always done it, though, to the question: “When were you born?” I answer “1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell”. I don’t do it on purpose, it just comes out like this, as a reflex. I’ve always noticed it, but only recently I’ve interrogated myself on the reason why I do it. It’s truly irrelevant information to those who just want to know how old I am, thing is, if I don’t mention it, those who ask point it out for me: “The year the Berlin Wall fell, eh?!”, “Yep.”. I don’t know how it started, If I was conditioned in my family or at school, certain thing is, I’m not the only one, 80% of my friends born in 1989 go through the same hypnotic experience. In a way it defines me;

it’s the same feeling that makes me more inclined to say “I am Martina” than “My name is Martina”. My name is not a word I respond to, it shapes my identity: “Martina”, from Mars, the name of the Roman god of war, it means “she who fights” nothing could ever be more true... An appendix to my name: “Martina Taranto Born the Year the Berlin Wall Fell”, a child of her time, not just who I am, also when. When I was a child I was indiscriminately proud of it: “1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell”, everyone would crack a smile, through their eyes I would catch the light of a long awaited happiness, and in their sighs a reinvigorating sense of relief I’d never needed to long for. Those smiles made me proud of something I didn’t have to fight for, not something I was conscious of, but that, somehow, beyond my intentions, I embodied. I would say the words, for an instant, through the wrinkles of their smiles, a world I’d never seen would flash back, almost imperceptible: sadness,

division, conflict, fear, the matter that world was made of, I can tell from the pause that always precedes the smile. My life started in a time of passage, a historic threshold, while a new ground was prepared for a new game. Fight for freedom Rebel to divisions No more walls Stand together Embrace diversity Love and pride Live in peace These, the new rules of this new game. I grew up playing my game by these rules. Thirty-one years later, I often have the feeling I’m playing a different one.

privilege to represent the future the entire world had dreamt of, and the responsibility to build it by the tacit rules, imposed by the need of a renewed humanity and brotherhood. Going through these days of discomfort, loneliness and deep sadness, I hope, tireless, that we will understand how important it is to set soon the rules for a brand-new game, to pass on with pride the dream of a future that those born this year will be honoured to build. “When were you born?” “2020, the year Corona was defeated.” A pause and a smile.

Obey the law Defend what is yours Build walls Protect borders Make your country great again Mine is better than yours Fight and posses The ghost of a dark world already defeated, coming back through the horcrouxes of its soul hidden and left behind to hunt us. Understandable the pauses before all those smiles, now. 1989 must have been a powerful moment, of change and rebirth – we, born in 1989, felt it in all of us, a human shield, born with the

Martina Taranto 86

Quarantine As much as I want this to end, as much as I miss my friends and family more than I could ever imagine, and I want to go back to where we were, I know I’m going to somehow miss this because it has had some good things to appreciate. Waking up to my dogs kisses, making delicious breakfast and enjoying my mums company, having conversations with my sister who’s working on the room next door, having my dad as my new private technician showing off of how good of a teacher he is, playing board games and cards every evening... just being more human I guess. We’re constantly complaining about time, that we don’t spend enough time with family, doing what we enjoy, that we spend too much time at work, that we don’t have enough to do this or that… well, we’ve been given this time. Every day, as I wake up, I try to use this time as best as I can and I don’t mean to be as productive as possible. I think of it as time for myself, to work out, draw, do that thing

that I had on the list for ages, to rest, lay down in the sun, go for walks, cook for hours, run around with my dog, play videogames, all these things that I enjoy doing but I never give myself the time to do. I know when things go back to normal nothing will be the same, and that used to freak me out, but now I’ve realized that that’s a good thing. We change, we evolve, and this absolute weird, crazy, terrifying experience is one of those things in life that leaves a mark. To me, who I considered myself someone that did everything that I wanted to, this has shown me that it’s not true. I’m not expecting to go out and suddenly be a different person, but this is a good starting point. This is not for everyone to do the same. This is my experience, this is what I go from this, this for me, to come back to this in 6 months, reflect and ask myself, what am I doing with my time?

Maria Ramon Vazquez 88

Engagement as material…

Informed by ‘research into wildlife’.

The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE, publicengagement. ac.uk), defines public engagement, to ‘encompass activities that cultural institutions produce to engage outside establishments’. In Design as Politics, Fry presents a rigorous review of transition beyond dichotomies of sustainable practice, to “sustainment”, in its entirety (Fry, 2010). Currently, we are in an age of transition, where activities can evolve our cultures, through designed engagement(s). Citizen ‘active engagements’ are common practice in museology, creating lasting impacts on visitors, taking experiences outside cultural institutions, into their homes and lives. These design elements combine driving new opportunities that reform traditional ‘passive’ public engagement. The My Naturewatch project enabled people to actively engage, informing community agency within the context of their surrounding gardens, public greenspace and wildlife. The project developed (through practice) how to co-

ordinate, include, listen, design and deploy Active Engagement(s). Authors believe ‘active engagements’; are a trans-disciplinary ‘material’ that can provide agency to communities. The My Naturewatch (NW) project achieved embedded buy-in from participants, creating Empowered Citizens. It also informed new methodological approaches and digital/physical design properties, worthy of future exploration, within design and interaction practice. The NW project uses a research through design approach creating DIY devices supporting new ways to engage with nature through technology. The Naturewatch (NW) camera is a wildlife camera using computer vision, taking pictures when it sees movement (Figure 1.). The NW website publishes everything to make the devices, in easyto-follow ‘recipes’, with retail links for parts and downloadable software. NW is a collaboration between Goldsmiths Interaction Research Studio and The Royal College of Art 90

(RCA), Design Products programme. The Goldsmiths team, took the lead in engaging the BBC, designed the cameras and instructional materials, and focused on recruiting thousands of people. The RCA team focused on using the camera in a large series of open workshops, engaging: wildlife charities, schools and cultural institutions including a training programme for communities. The deployable designs featured on BBC SpringWatch in 2018, and (to date) 2,500+ have been made by UK residents and international climates, with varying technical expertise, wildlife knowledge and demographic characteristics. Some participants directly engaged in workshop activities from either; The National Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wildlife Trusts etc.

Design, the project has been designed to nurture relationships with communities through opensource technologies, without relying solely on researchers, the toolkit can be accessed by schools to experts and parts purchased economically online. This led to a training scheme where project staff imparted knowledge to leading organisations so they could in turn train others. The demographics of people that the project has impacted on range from 6 – 83 with a vast array of backgrounds, technophobes to techno geeks, wildlife activists to people who are just buying bird feeders. The bigger picture of the project is about creating engagement with the outdoor world, through technologies that people can construct on their kitchen table without specialist tools or knowledge. The key organisations (mentioned above) have been The Design Museum, The Durrell Trust and The My Naturewatch The Wildlife Trusts. A project has instigated: participant was drawn participants landscaping to My Naturewatch their gardens, cameras because he felt encouraging wildlife, strongly that a change realising there is no in perspective could wildlife on their housing reveal things we ignored, estate, Conservation or things we take for broadcasters sharing granted, and the natural new content, responses world was at risk of this from leading experts, as much as the built people sharing content environment: from live wildlife festivals, participant content being “People don’t use their used internationally etc. eyes. They tend to look Engagement Project either horizontally or 91

down, but never look up. […] That, I think, was the interesting aspect. That, in fact, by doing the photography, one might well see things that, with the normal naked eye, just sitting at your window [you would not]” (Workshop participant). A retired woman in her seventies with little pre-existing knowledge of either the natural world or the technology involved, considered making the camera to be integral to the purpose of her involvement: Interviewer: What is it, do you think, about the fact that you did a workshop making one that’s different to, say, going and buying one? Participant: “Oh, gosh, the world. Absolutely the world. […] To make a thing, that was amazing” (Workshop participant). The project is still live and more information can be found at www. mynaturewatch.net The project is accessible and if you are willing to share what you capture, we would love to see the outputs on our @ mynaturewatch twitter account or hastag #mynaturewatch.

Dr Robert Phillips 92

A Conversation with James Johnson May 20th 2020

Grace Keeton (GK): James, thank you again so much for joining me in this chat. As you know, I am one of the co-founders and editors of the Design Products publication. And we started it this year, me and three of my peers, because we really wanted to capture all of the other work that we, as designers, do and think about beyond just the final project. So for the second issue, we always imagined bringing in the voices of creatives in the fields. So like I said, thank you for being one of those voices and for joining today. To start, I’ve read that you are an advocate of multidisciplinary teams. What perspective have you gained from working in this way? And what other fields are you keen on including in future projects?

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INTERVIEW 94

James Johnson (JJ): I suppose for me, what I like about working in interdisciplinary teams is... or the projects I’ve always found interesting, are the things in life, in the world, that are in between disciplines. So it’s the cracks between things, where you’ve got two expertise and it’s that zone between where ‘no one’s got full responsibility’. I think, these are the patches which are often overlooked. Also, when you’re working with experts in a different fields, your languages are different, when you’re communicating you pick up, or you misunderstand what people are saying, and then when you say it back your misunderstanding creates a kind of shift, where they say, “Ah, yes, I’ve never thought of that before”. It’s a good way of skewing presumptions. Also, I think when you’re dealing with people outside of your field it makes you explain yourself and your thoughts clearer and what you’re thinking, it challenges all your preconceptions and your assumptions. So you have to be very clear with what you think. So, it’s really the three, three reasons. Yeah, One because it’s where the interesting stuff happens. Two, you get this

wonderful sort of misunderstanding which creates and pushes ideas often in a completely unexpected direction, and Three, it does make you challenge what you think because you have to communicate it in a different way. And in terms of the last question: I’m fascinated, at the moment, by choreography, and by that I mean the movement of people and also the movement just for joy, and different emotions you can get through physical movement. It’s something I know very little about, but something we all do. It’s something that we take a lot for granted, or don’t even notice that it’s there until we think about it. So that’s something I’d like to bring into more of my work. But, I’ll explain later. GK: I actually did a project having to do with choreography. I was a dancer for most of my life, so I did a project about this. I kind of came in from the space of dance and choreography and performance, and ended up creating a lighting structure that was all about enhancing a person’s proprioception. Using physiotherapy techniques and also ballet techniques. So yeah, that’s, I love that space. So hearing that, I’m super excited to see what you come up with. But it’s such an interesting space. JJ: A lot of my projects, the last 10-15 years, have been very involved in spaces and moving people through landscapes, and I find that fascinating, but it’s always been about ceremony, procession, the logistics of moving people. But now, (there’s a couple of projects where I’m working on it) it’s more the actual feeling you get when you think about the way you move. I blunder through life, my movements are just a means to an end, but when you start thinking about where your hands are in space, it’s just incredible. I think, quickly after school, when you’re young you un learn that, you can forget that wonderful, ‘just throwing your arms in the air’ joy. GK: I live right in front of a schoolyard and these kids, it’s so funny to see them during their like outdoor time because they have no regard for what they’re doing. They just have a freedom that you kind of lose as you grow, I guess.

JJ: I don’t have a preference. What I’m involved in is often creating some sort of an atmosphere, or trying to create an emotion, and the scale, if you’ve got something large or something small, the amount of attention to detail you’ve got to put into it is the same. It’s really a lot to do with the viewpoint of your user or audience, rather than the actual scale of the physical thing, or the performance, or whatever you’re creating. So possibly its less about the scale of the thing you’re designing, but more about the position in space from where the person is perceiving it; regardless of whether ‘it’ is a product or a performance space. It’s interesting, I think small things require more detail, but bigger things are like an onion: there’s layers of detail. So I don’t think scale has huge effect on it. GK: Did you start in smaller scale projects or larger scale projects? JJ: I suppose that, originally, it was an area ‘in between.’ When I left the RCA, I worked for a number of architects like [Santiago] Calatrava and [Norman] Foster, and the projects, the bits we got involved in were the components or the objects which sat in a bigger space. So rather than designing the ‘stage or the space’ of the architecture, we were designing the props. So probably that middle ground. Now my work, is the two extremes. It’s both: ‘what is the big thing?’ but then also, ‘how do you actually make that big thing do what you want it to do?’. So you’re then down to the detail design of how it’s physically going to work or be made. Originally my work was furniture-sized; it was furniture, lighting, and now it’s either an environment, whether it’s a stage set, or it’s designing a smallish component or an object that sits within. Then again, the big extreme could be working in a huge landscape, a lot of work I do is performance and art in the landscape, even if you’re doing something on a mountain, the scale question comes back to “what’s that person seeing and feeling through exactly the same set of eyes?” GK: Scale seems like a great space to play in.

Okay, so let’s move on to number two. You’ve worked both in small and large-scale contexts. Which do you enjoy most? How does your method change or stay the same depending on the scale of the outcome?

Okay, so number three. Design is a very slippery word. What do you think it’s next reincarnation will be?

JJ: Well, I hope that it becomes increasingly more centred on how people feel and perceive things and

less about designing objects or systems (although those are tools, a secondary thing to create a feeling or perception). At the moment, I think objects and systems are still too much the focus of attention, designers are designing systems and objects, rather than asking, “what is the fundamental perception or emotion that I’m trying to create?” and that can increasingly, I hope, become ‘designing things away’ rather than ‘creating’. I think we have to go in that direction for many, many reasons, ecologically, and also to be true to what it is you’re trying to achieve. A vacuum cleaner is not a device for sucking; it’s so that you have a nice, clean house that you feel good in. That’s what you’re designing: a clean house. GK: Would you say it’s about reframing the brief for designers. JJ: Yes. Or designers reframing the brief, for themselves. GK: Has your work always surrounded emotion? JJ: No... I started, well it’s interesting, my first job after my first degree was designing special effects - I ended up making models, exploding sofas, and small spaceships, you could say, I suppose everything’s to do with emotions. So whether you’re designing small exploding sofas or a chair, ultimately it’s about ‘can I connect with that?’ - and that goes back to my previous answer in its pure form, the idea of performance, or that sort of thing is one where the object or the design is purely to create or convey a feeling or story or emotion. I’m increasingly going in that direction. It comes back to all the things you can’t explain, especially through the written word; like the reason we dance is because I want to dance, and you can’t explain it in any other way other than dancing. You can’t write an essay on how you feel when you dance, it doesn’t capture it.

the global workshop, where you can get anything made anywhere, what we’re doing is we’ve set a ring around a small geographical location. We’re seeing what type of objects can be designed, or be informed by the limitations or the opportunities brought through the materials, skills, and manufacturing capabilities within that zone - that small geographical location. So it’s going back to a model that was used 150-200 years ago, but it’s not a regressive thing, it’s looking at what opportunities those constraints can give. The other project is the one with the choreography. It’s with a director and a choreographer with whom I’ve worked with before, and it’s a project about repetition. This is more of a performance piece, and it’s called “On and On and On and On and On”. At the moment, it’s stalled due of the Pandemic, but it’s looking at design and lighting and how we can manifest in some sort of performance the idea of repetition; and it’s working with a great choreographer, and director. So there’s examples of the two extremes: one is about nuts and bolts and material. The other one is about purely trying to get across the idea of feeling. GK: Amazing. Well James, this has been so excellent. Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

GK: Onto our final question. So tell us about something you are working on right now, especially if it’s a secret. JJ: They’re both sort of semi-secrets. I think I’ll give you two because they’re very different, and that explains the two extremes of work. The first one, I’m working on with an old colleague I used to work with at Foster + Partners, this fantastic guy called John Small. It’s called “The Island Project”. And what we’re doing is we’re creating a series of objects, but rather than using global design,

This text is an edited interview with Grace Keeton and designer James Johnson

I’ve Never Missed a Desk More A place to come to A place to drop your bags in the morning and see who else is around A place to sit down and hope for a productive day

A place for postlunch laughs and silly conversations A place for making jokes with friends a few desks away A place for getting to know your peers

A place to have coffee to get the brain working (or spill it everywhere) A place for making lifelong friends A place where you’re in control A place for resisting that “one pint” from ArtBar A place to do work that’s never “one pint” A place to brainstorm

A place for turning the lights off at night and going home in pitch dark

A place to collaborate A place to make

A place that was stripped and emptied in a hurry

A place to make personal

Now it’s just an object right next to my bed

A place to dump the results of a two-hour workshop session, sawdust and all

Or my kitchen table, hardly the right place at all

A place full of nervous energy A place for stressing in desperation A place for sharing frustrations A place to organize your thoughts A place for pulling yourself together and getting to work

100

Sam Sheckells 101

A Conversation with Tomoko Azumi 21 May 2020

Georgia Cottington (GC): Where do you draw inspiration from apart from design disciplines? Tomoko Azumi (TA): I am always looking at everyday life, tiny details or rules in nature. I think for me, inspiration is everywhere. But for my design practice, when we start a project, it’s always by understanding a client, their background, the materials they use, their strengths and their methods, such as manufacturing methods. They are the great inspirations for me. And then I always try to find out what is the overlapping area between the clients work and then my aesthetics, my way of thinking, and then what I can connect this client to the users. So those sorts of elements are the inspiration that really kick off a project and then I start to think about real products. GC: Do you think people come to your work already knowing about your aesthetic, so is it easy to find those overlaps? TA: If I have 20 clients and then there are 20 different ways of working. Many of them I think have reason to work with me. I sometimes struggle to find the aesthetics but often I find it straight away; some sort of overlapping, which is why I am wanted for this particular project. Some people specifically say what kind of aesthetics they want and some people just throw every decision to me. So it’s very up to the nature of the project or the type of client. Normally it’s not difficult to find the overlaps and a good balance.

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INTERVIEW 102

GC: Do you get to go with your gut and your instincts quite a lot in your work? TA: I think so, yes. The first meeting, after we decide to do a project together, is a factory visit. And during those encounters I start to think a lot.

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Or, the first meeting with my dedicated user, for example, you mentioned that you liked my project for AHEC last year’s London design festival, working with the Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of the Young Vic. For that project I received the material first so I knew I wanted to use this steam bend principle from the beginning. And then when I met Kwame, I started to have images from his great stories about journeys. So that was a very natural landing between what methods I wanted to use and how he wanted to have his Legacy object made with this hardwood. GC: I wanted to ask because you’re a leading woman in design, do you think the design field is becoming more inclusive? TA: In many ways, I think so. People in the design field have already started to realise many years ago, that there was a lack of minorities. To be reflected in design, such as design awards at the beginning, it was fundamentally a manufacturer’s world. But now the boundary of design is expanding a lot, to different methods, different issues so it’s not manufacturing, only anymore. And so as an expanded design world, you need lots of different opinions and diverse ways of looking at things. GC: Design seems to be a slippery word, always reinventing its definition. What do you think the next phase of design will be? TA: I think for many people who are not involved in design at all, still, the word design is slippery, I guess. And in many fields design can be used to have some common fate to sync things together. So if there was a reincarnation of design, it would be the way of thinking that is the design. If we are good at drawing for example, then we can help people to understand and then share ideas together. We are using our abilities, our unique abilities to connect people and make some sort of field to think together. GC: That relates to what you were talking about before when you work with clients, that it is all about communication. Design is so important at helping people understand each other, even if they work in very different worlds.

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TA: I think we all as designers are doing that everyday. To understand the context and the background, and then give a future view a few steps ahead. That is what my mission is. The reason why I’m involved in a project is not to just repeat something with a change of aesthetics. But I want to propose something which is looking slightly ahead. GC: My final question to you is, tell us about something you’re working on right now, especially if it’s the secret? TA: There aren’t many secrets, but right now my studio is working on a series of eye-wear for a Japanese brand. They will be launched this autumn, then we are working on how to assist our clients with the communication of the concepts and the craftsmanship of the glasses. Which will be a catalogue website and we are working with a team of graphic designers. So we are also producing and selling a paper DIY kit of polyhedra, which is called The Geometrist. GC: Were you making that before and or was it a response to the COVID-19 situation? TA: No, the project of The Geometrist started 1.5 years ago, our products are sold at museum shops and design retailers. What I’m working on now is to translate this method for the educational sector, so for teachers and mainly secondary school students to explore and make three dimensional objects to learn about mathematics. I was preparing a workshop to present at the association of teachers for a mathematics conference before lock-down, but the conference was cancelled, so I am seeking alternative ways. GC: Have you worked in that field before? TA: No, this is very challenging for me now. I’m bringing my designer’s way of making things into education because I was found by accident by a maths teacher who thought the project was excellent! The reason I started doing these platonic solids and the paper kit is that I’m kind of going back to the basics of what I like. Researching the history of what three dimensional objects were for and to the ancient philosophers and things like that. So my interest is in two fields; history and the transformation of flat paper to three dimensional.

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So for this project I actually didn’t have a client. It was a theory and inspirational project for me. Now I am trying to design a system for a large number of users to encourage them to think about the fundamentals of mathematics, which is a very new world for me. GC: It is so interesting when you start something that’s just for yourself but it ends up opening up a whole new part of your practice. What made you want to go back to basics and what you love? TA: I always wanted to do with paper, that is one thing. And in any of my normal projects, I use some sort of paper models, when I’m designing a shop the model is 1:25 and if I’m designing a chair, the model is 1:5, so a lot of paper is involved. Then also, one day I wanted to make those platonic solids and regular polyhedra and have them in my hands. So I started with some experimentation and had so much fun that I thought I can share this with other people. Yeah, Also my design field has expanded a lot; furniture, interiors, vision design and product design. So I probably want to work on something that is very close to my heart at the same time. GC: Do you think that has emerged from your love for the model making process, and this is a way of celebrating that? TA: I think so and also, more and more I see people don’t use their own hands, and just create almost everything with tablets and phones which I think is a big pity because every time I use my hands, I’m also thinking with my hands. So I wanted to reintroduce that process of thinking with your hands. And if you want to make a beautiful object that triggers one’s desire, I hope that’s what I said.

This text is an edited interview with Georgia Cottington and designer Tomoko Azumi

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Tacile Traces I A current truth: we are in the middle of a global pandemic. As of July 14, 2020, nearly 600,000 lives have been claimed by the Coronavirus, worldwide. Contact tracing is said to be one of the most promising ways to control the novel Covid-19 virus until a vaccine is developed. Tracing is a way by which authorities attempt to record the patterns of contact between humans that might be infected with the virus. However, leaving traces is of no novelty to us. We, of the homo sapiens species, are desperate to prove our existence; to leave a mark and to be remembered by generations to come. Since the time of the early drawings in the Chauvet Cave in France, to the carvings of Lewis and Clark as they traveled West in North America, to the modern tags left by graffiti artists worldwide, we are constantly attempting to etch our way into history. Even without trying, we leave traces of life lived; 107

finger prints have been used in court since 1902. More recently, scientists are working to develop a method by which human presence in a crime scene might be detected using our unique microbiomes as indicators. Not to mention the astronomical environmental impact we leave on our planet through our endless thirst for consumption of all things: food, media, travelâ&#x20AC;Ś the list goes on. We attempt to prove that we are living our lives, not only to others, but to ourselves. Life, itself, is an unsolvable puzzle - a book of riddles with the answer page ripped out. So we try to concretize our existence any way we know how. Beyond our physical traces, we often depend on acts of service and emotional connections to leave traces that will carry our existence beyond our life. But this is carried by memory, by the words of generations, passed on. Are words, never written, enough to transcend time? When you graduate, physical evidence is presented to commemorate the milestone.

A graduation gown, a ceremonial procession, a photograph, and above all a diploma. I have always valued the idea of closure - of finding peace with something, putting it aside, and moving forward. But the reality is, we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always get the opportunity to find closure. The unimaginable is always possible. Even a massive global pandemic. So how can we begin to mark traces, of not just the certificate of achievement, but of the experiences, moments, and relationships that took us to this precarious moment of closure? Must we still rely on physical traces, just as our ancestors have before us? In this fully digital world, is it still physicality that grounds us?

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Grace Keeton