In 1962, John Spinello was an Industrial Design student at the University of Illinois. One class assignment was to design a game that incorporated electronics, a pretty new-fangled task at the time.

Spinello came up with a game called “Death Valley,” and got an A. According to the Hasbro archives,

“[The game] was metal with holes and crooked lines drilled through the top and came with a metal rod. Players had to have a steady hand to get the rod in the openings without touching the sides. If the probe did touch, a circuit would be completed between two oppositely charged metal plates and would set off a loud bell.”

A family friend, Sam Cottone, was a modelmaker at Marvin Glass Associates. (MGA, founded by toy designer Marvin Glass, is credited with bringing “Lite-Brite,” “Mouse Trap,” “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots,” “Simon” and other popular games to the market.) Cottone set up a meeting, and Glass offered Spinello $500 for the design, along with the promise of a job at the company when he graduated.

$500 is roughly $5,100 in 2023 dollars, and Spinello took it—in exchange for signing away all rights. The job offer from Glass never materialized.

Glass sold “Death Valley” to the Milton Bradley Company, who redesigned the game into “Operation.”

Image: PaRappa 276, CC BY-SA 4.0

“It was designed with a buzzer and a light bulb instead of a bell. Tweezers replaced the metal probe and the holes were filled with plastic pieces, such as a pencil for Writer’s Cramp and a horse for Charley Horse. Players had to steadily place the metal tool inside the hole, while also removing the cause of the patient’s pain without hitting a nerve and causing him more grief.”

In the 1980s Milton Bradley was folded into Hasbro, who continued producing “Operation.” Here’s an ’80s commercial of the long-lived game:

In 2014, Spinello estimated the game had earned some $40 million. This was revealed in a HuffPost article with the depressing title, “John Spinello, Inventor Of ‘Operation’ Game, Can’t Afford Real-Life Operation.” Spinello’s health required surgery to the tune of $25,000, which he didn’t have.

For the record, Spinello stated he wasn’t bitter about not receiving royalties. “I prefer not to dwell on that aspect and focus more on the joy that the game has brought to so many over the years.”

Fellow toy designers Tim Walsh and Peggy Brown, learning of Spinello’s plight, started a GoFundMe for him. They managed to raise $32,422.

Furthermore Hasbro, who had nothing to do with the original 1962 Marvin Glass deal, stepped in with some welcome news.

“Today we informed Mr. Spinello,” the company said in a statement in October of 2014, “that Hasbro plans to purchase the [“Death Valley”] prototype with the hope that the funds will help to defray his medical costs. We plan to proudly display it at Hasbro’s global headquarters in Pawtucket, RI to honor his contribution to Hasbro’s gaming history.”

The amount paid was undisclosed.

Today John Spinello is alive and well.

Moral of the story, if you’re an ID student or design entrepreneur and you invent a promising game: Consider crowdfunding it and retaining the rights for yourself.

Dubbed La Rose Noire, the form is reminiscent of a vintage muscle car while the colors and materials are inspired by the French Black Baccara rose

La Rose Noire Droptail is the latest Rolls-Royce coachbuild car and the first in the series of four unique vehicles, which debuted publicly this past weekend at Monterey car week. We had the opportunity to see the car at Rolls’ headquarters in Goodwood last month and spend time with Anders Warming, the Director of Design, and Alex Innes, Head of Coachbuild Design, to learn more about the coachbuild process and see La Rose Noire in the very restricted-access studio where it was hand built.

Introducing the vision for Droptail, Warming says “In the dialogue with clients we realized there’s another (coachbuild) story to be told. And that’s why we called it The Tale of Tails. We had Sweptail. You also know… that Boat Tail is an important building block. We knew that there was another story that needed to be told. And when a client approached us with a similar idea we said there is a car that hasn’t been done before.” Sharing a photo of a 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II Henley Roadster by Brewster, he notes “It’s a very romantic approach—two people, just two, driving in a car… collar up, driving down the road… Just the two of us driving in this car hand in hand is the story of Droptail.”

Twenty years ago BMW acquired the Rolls-Royce name for automobiles and the Spirit of Ecstasy, its well known emblem. Since then Rolls-Royce has been on a journey to recapture the innovation, engineering and excellence the brand was known for. First came its series production cars—
Spectre (our test drive impressions coming soon), Cullinen, Ghost, Phantom, Dawn and Wraith—many of which featured very customized expressions as limited editions by the brand or single customer commissions. In 2017 the company’s Coachbuild department launched Sweptail, a unique vehicle designed for a single client. Boat Tail, a series of three unique vehicles, launched in 2021. Droptail is a series of four unique two passenger cars, and La Rose Noir may be the only one that will be shared publicly. Sweptail and the Boat Tail series, while completely custom, leveraged existing platform architecture. Boat Tail, however, is the first coachbuild vehicle to have its own unique platform architecture.

Coachbuild at Rolls-Royce is like F1 to Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston-Martin, McLaren and Alfa Romeo—the halo and awareness those vehicles provide to their brands is immense, but it’s equally about the engineering and design innovation that eventually makes its way into their regular production vehicles—paid r+d essentially. Coachbuild projects provide a showpiece for the brand alongside innovation in design, materials and engineering that is leveraged into future production cars. Torsten Müller-Ötvös, who is on a first name basis with more customers than almost any other CEO, says “We work in close harmony with our clients to understand the nuances of their character and personalities and to carefully translate these qualities into the elements with which they wish to imbue their commission. Only the house of Rolls-Royce can offer its coachbuild clients the opportunity of commissioning a product of future historical significance that is as fundamentally unique as its owner. This is contemporary patronage in its truest form.”

The coachbuild process goes something like this. You’ve demonstrated that you have both an affinity for the brand as well as a commitment to it, and you have the type of personality that is compatible with the three to four year process required to create your coachbuild. It’s as much about who the brand wants to create the experience with as it is a customer desiring to have the opportunity, and it’s as much about the journey as it is the end result. Warming notes that “this is a process where normally no client of any brand is invited. Here is an opportunity for a client literally to put on protective shoe covers and… start shaping his or her body panels and tell us ‘what I’m looking for is something like this’ and we of course know what we have to do to make it happen.” Key moments of your experience and your car’s development are captured along the way, resulting in a very thorough book chronicling the process that is delivered along with your vehicle.

Innes shared that the brand’s storied past alongside its “vigor and confidence… today” permit the company “to explore the future in a very bold and progressive way.” He noted that the large chassis used in the 1920s were mostly fitted with limousine bodies in Europe, but when they were sent to America they noticed than many people, inspired in part by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby character, sought the freedom of driving themselves instead of being driven, and began outfitting the large chassis not with sedans and limousines but coupes. “It’s that sense of fun, that sense of conviviality that really is for us the spirit of this car,” he states. Untypical for a Rolls-Royce, the Droptail has a very short front overhang, generous body side and a very shallow windscreen proportion. Occupants are nestled deep down inside the car. Also very untypical for Rolls-Royce you see a more compact rear overhang together with a very expressive treatment to the overall surfacing.

“I always joke that on day one as a designer, the first thing you’re told that at Rolls-Royce is don’t touch the grille and don’t touch the Spirit of Ecstasy. This particular project was liberated by the significance of producing the only modern roadster body style, and we felt there was the permission to also experiment with the treatment of these elements,” Innes says. Grille veins are bent and rake backwards in their upper portion for the first time instead of being fully vertical, and are painted on one side to further their impact. Alongside its deep set headlamps it presents a balanced, focused, concentrated look. The low and tight seating area features a transom area that mimics a yacht’s design, which gets truncated across the rear, creating a very pure surface that’s atypical in the automotive space but adds a unique way of celebrating a drop tail. He adds, “Droptail is transformed from an open top roadster into a dramatic and formidable looking coupé” when its roof canopy is in place, creating a second personality and “unique statement, very much motivated by the wishes of the clients.”

The Droptail’s form was inspired by West coast hot rods in the 1930s—not a typical reference inside the design studio, chuckling as he shares, “We wanted to experiment here again, to pivot people’s understanding of what a modern Rolls-Royce can be.” As we walks us through all of these elements, each of which requires a painstaking amount of design, refinement, engineering and homologation, we start to understand why the process takes so long, how complex it is and how much it costs to achieve—and that’s just the car’s structural elements.

Moving to paint and the car’s multi-faceted interior, another new world emerges. Though more familiar—we’re quite used to elaborate leatherwork, marquetry and even integration of custom clocks and timepieces—the interior’s shape pushed the limits of even Rolls-Royce’s craftspeople. It features three key gestures: the line that comes off the grille envelopes the occupants and circles back towards the front, the floating central armrest, and the simplicity and clarity of the cabinetry-inspired facia—you are not deciphering a large computer screen while piloting this car. Innes notes “This is not a sports car per se, but it has to have that agility to it by way of how you sit and how the interior is appointed around you… This relationship between the precision of the eye and dexterity of the finger to create something extraordinary by way of its shape and this process—when you consider we are only producing these cars in highly limited numbers—to work on a clay model for over nine months seems almost ridiculous, but that level of precision and control to the surfaces is an incredibly important aspect of our development.”

The clients requested that the car celebrates their affinity for France, where they have multiple properties including “a sizable concern in Champagne.” The aforementioned Baccara rose features an iridescence and lack of uniformity to its color that become core to the car’s personality, from its paint to the surfaces texture, composition and way they look in different light. Its leather features that iridescent, the parquetry an abstraction of rose petals, and its multi-dimensional paint shifts between deep red and near black. “The client’s wish was to create the impression that rose petals have been thrown over the interior and exterior surfaces” in a very abstract way. This resulted in “the most complex parquetry in the history of Rolls-Royce,” shares Sina Eggl, the lead color and trim designer. “We put together some new techniques and understandings on how we could veneer across such complex geometry. The triangles have to be hand sculpted and hand shaped to match the geometry and fit perfectly within the pattern” when applied across the interior arches.

Blackwood is the main wood used, but the team sought out sheets with heavily varied figuring to avoid looking flat. This starts with the tree itself of course, but relies on the way you cut it into logs and then into the veneer sheets so they reflect the light differently depending on the amount of figure that appears within it. Triangles were cut from three intensities of coloration and “fig” and then applied in varied directions, providing a sense of different colors and shades simply through leveraging refraction. The base pattern is symmetrical but the petal pattern is asymmetrical, and each of the 1,603 triangles was hand sanded, adjusted and placed to make it look and feel random. Red “petals” are the same veneer that’s been painted. All in, the parquetry alone took nearly nine months to create. Honoring the client’s request to speak to their connection to France, a local tree was found and used for these elements. Innes notes “it’s not about over personalization, it’s about these choice details in the story that they will tell that wear the personality of the client.” It’s all in the details.

Rolls-Royce doesn’t have a single watch partner, instead allowing customers with a level of access parallel to their relationship with the auto maker to create an additional layer of exclusivity. This owner commissioned Audemars-Piguet to create a unique La Rose Noire watch featuring a quick-release band. The timepiece can then be inserted into its dashboard home; its band goes into a custom case in the driver’s door. The engineering and homologation required for this feature alone is likely similar in cost to at least one of the brand’s production cars.

For those that have the vision and the extravagant opportunity to collaborate with the coachbuild design team it offers an incredibly rare and extremely personal vehicle that truly is one of a kind. Coachbuild customers “love that their car is important, that it has value in the world of car design,” Warming says. There’s no doubt that decades from now at shows like the Concours d’Elegance at Pebble Beach and the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este we’ll see these coachbuild vehicles by Rolls-Royce.

Increasing use of AI could have major copyright implications for designers and architects, warn experts as part of our AItopia series.

In recent months, lawsuits have been filed against leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Google and Stable Diffusion by authors, artists and stock-image suppliers who claim theft of their intellectual property.

Noam Shemtov, a professor of intellectual property and technology law at Queen Mary University’s Centre for Commercial Law Studies, told Dezeen that similar concerns could soon start to affect designers and architects.

“Potential infringement risks”

“Most people are not in the business of producing an industrial design for fun, so I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.

“But as a matter of technology and law, I don’t see much of a difference.”

Intellectual-property lawyer Erik Rõuk also warned that designers and architects using AI need to be wary about copyright breaches.

“I would say if anyone wanted to take their AI projects further and they wanted to start producing actual products or real-world items, be that either a matchbox or a building, there could be a potential infringement risk there that the user should always be aware of,” he told Dezeen.

The emergence since 2021 of powerful generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and text-to-image tools including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney promises a potential revolution in creativity.

But their rise in popularity has been accompanied by mounting anger from some creatives about the fact that these systems are trained on vast quantities of human-authored work, often collected without permission.

Ryan Abbott, an academic and lawyer who specialises in intellectual property and the law around AI, expects the disputes to rumble on as industry and governments get to grips with the technology.

“There’s going to be a lot of litigation and a lot of uncertainty for businesses that are trying to figure out how to navigate AI for the next few years,” he told Dezeen.

“Every week we have a new tool and people are very excited, but I think it’s important that we have regulations and clear industry standards,” added Angelica Ponzio of the architecture faculty at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organiser of architecture education platform DigitalFutures.

“Generative AI may render output unprotectable”

Some studios, notably Zaha Hadid Architects, are already using AI image generators to help come up with ideas as part of the design process.

But designers and architects need to be aware of potential copyright issues associated with leaning too heavily on AI.

There are questions over whether designs created using these AI models are protectable by copyright – meaning they could be copied with impunity by someone else.

In a case in the US, for example, the Copyright Office revoked a graphic novel’s copyright after discovering that its illustrations were produced using Midjourney.

“This depends on specific roles being played by a person and an AI, but the Copyright Office’s position right now is that the use of generative AI may render output unprotectable,” said Abbott.

“So, an architect using generative AI may not be able to claim they have any intellectual property rights in AI output.”

“In order for a design to be validly registerable and protectable it needs to be novel, and it needs to possess some individual character,” explained Rõuk, an associate at law firm Marks & Clerk who specialises in industrial designs.

“The AI models are effectively not capable, for the most part, of creating something truly new and substantially different.”

There is also a small chance that designs created using AI could infringe on someone else’s intellectual property, particularly if the user’s inputs reference specific designers by name.

So-called diffusion models like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney draw on a vast database of images to stitch together an image that matches the user’s prompt.

But they have also been known to simply copy images. Stable Diffusion, for example, has a tendency to even display the Getty Images watermark in its outputs.

Other cases might not be so obvious. And unlike a human designer, an AI model makes no judgement over how much borrowing from existing work is appropriate.

“A lot of the platforms have specific disclaimers saying that they do not claim copyright in whatever is produced,” said Rõuk.

“The message to the user is: you may have the copyright in whatever you produce, but we don’t give you any guarantees as to whether or not that might infringe someone else’s copyright, or someone else’s intellectual property rights.”

“The importance of clearing whatever you’re doing before you launch becomes even more important than it used to be, because it’s so much easier for the user to generate designs for products and for the models to come up with something that’s already been done,” he added.

In the absence of existing case law, this remains an area of legal uncertainty – and Abbott points out that different countries will take different approaches.

But for Ponzio, who was an early tester of DALL-E 2 and teaches an architecture masters module involving the use of generative AI, the potential legal risks are a reminder about taking a critical approach to designing with the technology.

“It all depends on what you want to do with AI,” she said. “If it is just for ideation, I think it’s very similar to what we already do “when looking at references in the architectural design process.”

“AI can help boost your imagination, but, as with references, I don’t believe you should just copy and paste from it.”

Lawsuits by designers and architects unlikely

But what about the AI companies themselves – could we see designers and architects suing as artists and authors are already doing? In theory yes, says Rõuk, though it depends on whether the existing claims are ultimately successful.

“There’s certainly going to be some interest in trying to find some degree of liability in what these AI companies do,” he said.

These cases will likely hinge, explains Shemtov, around one issue in particular that has not yet been clearly established.

“The question is: what happened when I trained my AI with your design? Was a copy made in the process of the training?”

For now any action by designers or architects is unlikely, partly because only a small handful of studios have styles widely recognisable enough for AI copycats to be a concern – and even then, style is not generally protected by law.

But that could change once the technology develops enough that generative AI models capable of producing 3D designs become commonplace – widely considered the point at which architects and designers’ work could be affected.

“The issue is if your work is being used for somebody else to earn something out of it without your authorisation, that is when we can have a real problem,” said Ponzio.

“Lawsuits are basically about money – it costs money to bring a lawsuit and to run a lawsuit,” added Shemtov.

“It’s a very expensive business, and you do not do that on principle but usually because you seek to address a financial injury that you believe has taken place,” he continued.

“So I think once we get there, you will start seeing that. I don’t know how soon that is going to happen – I don’t think we are there yet.”

Concern over “exploitative” training

How these issues progress will also depend on whether governments begin passing legislation that attempts to restrict the use of human-authored work to train generative AI. The EU is furthest ahead in regulating the technology.

The bloc’s AI Act is still being finalised, but is expected to require AI companies to be transparent over training data, with rights holders also having the option to “opt out” of their work being mined.

Some creatives are already arguing that an “opt-in” system would be fairer, while Abbot is doubtful over whether either would make much difference to copyright infringement.

He also predicts discrepancies between how different jurisdictions attempt to tackle the problem.

“The law is evolving in this area, and it will likely be the case that the law allows people to train AI differently in the US versus the EU, and this is going to have some challenging implications,” he said.

Industry may also look for a solution. Tools, such as Glaze, are emerging which prevent copyrighted work from being scraped into AI-training data sets.

Meanwhile, Shemtov envisages something similar to existing collecting societies, which enable, for instance, musicians to be paid for their songs being played in public venues.

In this case, an architect could receive a fee from AI companies for drawings used as training data or from the users of resulting generative systems.

But that also feeds into a potentially existential risk for creatives, Shemtov argues: whether AI models trained on their work eventually become capable enough that clients are less likely to bother commissioning human designers.

These fears are the crux of recent strikes by Hollywood writers and actors.

“I personally can completely see why creators are concerned,” said Shemtov. “I can see why some people would look at this type of training as exploitative.”

“You’re using my work, in a way, to make me at a certain point down the line – and maybe not that far – redundant.”

The images were produced using DALL-E 2.

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AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen’s AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Somaliland- and London-based Rashid Ali Architects has created a chequered timber garden pavilion that can be illuminated as a “glowing lantern” in Hargeisa.

Set within the paved garden of a house in the capital of Somaliland, the simple pavilion is constructed from a timber frame to create a chequered appearance.

“The idea of the chequered facade was to express the structural pattern of the timber as the aesthetic language of the pavilion,” Ali told Dezeen.

“The infill use of plywood, tinted glass and polycarbonate defuses the intense daylight, and at night turns it into a glowing lantern within the garden.”

The pavilion is designed to contrast the surrounding structures in a dense residential area of the city.

“The project is part of a current preoccupation with introducing and experimenting with materials and construction techniques that are locally unfamiliar,” said Ali.

“With the exception of limited areas of planting, the pavilion is surrounded by hard surfaces and volumes made of rendered concrete,” he continued.

“With the use of timber, the idea was to create a soft, sculptural volume that stands out strikingly within its setting.”

The main structure of the pavilion is made from a timber frame filled with a series of plywood and tinted glass panels.

It is topped with a roof structure that cantilevers above both the pavilion’s entrances and was infilled with polycarbonate panels.

The pavilion will be used as a sheltered tea room for the home’s owners as well as a space for workshops for the local community.

“Primarily, it functions as a space for the owner to read, enjoy the garden and for socialising with friends,” explained Ali.

“In addition, it is intended to be used for educational workshops on business literacy for women in the neighbourhood, and as a general outdoor classroom and play space owner’s children.”

Rashid Ali Architects was founded by Ali in Somaliland and London in 2011. Previously the studio created a pink-concrete pavilion in Hargeisa and refurbished a house owned by fashion designer Roksanda Ilincic in London.

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Industrial design student Avia Revivi has designed a biodegradable toilet paper named O-SOW, which integrates seeds to encourage plant growth.

Revivi first devised the product to be used by people going to the toilet outdoors during a hiking trip in an Israeli desert.

“There were days when I didn’t encounter any other travellers, but I did come across toilet paper,” the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design student told Dezeen. “That’s when I realised that I wanted to solve this problem.”

O-SOW was made from orange, aloe vera and plant seeds for hikers who “prefer to sow and fertilise the earth, rather than leave human waste behind”. She incorporated orange for is flexibility properties and aloe vera due to its softness.

She explained that the quick decomposition of citrus combined with active E.coli bacteria, which can be found in human faeces, allows the toilet paper to biodegrade quickly when left in the wild.

“Since we are talking about an orange slice, it can easily dissolve in moisture and liquids,” said the designer.

“Animals eat it, it decomposes in the ground and even on a sidewalk on the street.”

Each packet of toilet paper has different seeds woven into it that travellers can choose based on the vegetation in their travel area.

“Seeds of different plants are woven into O-SOW and with the help of the nutrient-rich human waste, natural seeding occurs simply through its use,” said Revivi.

“The seeds I used are mint, peony, rose, parsley and cress, but I aim to map popular trekking areas and assign each a number of seeds suitable for growing.”

In ideal conditions, the seeds in the O-SOW toilet paper can nourish the soil and grow plants when dispersed.

O-SOW is wrapped in single-use packaging made from biodegradable paper, has a tear thread for opening, and a label which highlights the seed type and the number of sheets in the package.

Revivi also designed a case made from leftover parachute fabric which can be used to carry the remaining sheets, once the package is open.

To keep the sheets moist the case also has an inner coating and, for easy opening, it has a layer of polyex which creates high friction allowing the sheets to be taken out individually.

After researching the most adequate and suitable wiping method, Revivi chose a rounded shape as she found its length and width would be suitable for different hand sizes and would allow dual wiping. Each sheet has a smooth side and another side which is slightly dotted to increase users’ grip.

“When choosing the shape, it was important for me that there would be a double response option that would be product-oriented and look pleasant and promising but renewable and supporting the product values,” she said.

“It is a little thicker than toilet paper, very flexible and strong. It can break like ordinary paper, but only if you try.”

To come up with the most efficient and convenient wiping design, Revivi conducted a study with four participants who used the sheet at different points during a two month trip.

She asked them questions about the material and shape before giving them new products to try based on their feedback.

“It seems that the conventional square-shaped toilet paper we are familiar with doesn’t serve its purpose during the act of toileting,” she explained. “However, manufacturing square-shaped sheets is easier and more convenient for factories, even though the corners remain clean when used.”

“This prompted me to explore and discover a new and innovative way for effective toileting,” she continued.

Other sustainable product design stories recently published on Dezeen include a rewilding trainer which enables the dispersion of plant seeds by Central Saint Martins graduate Kiki Grammatopoulos and a biodegradable juice bottle made from a potato starch-based material.

Photography is by Amit Martin Mansharof and Nadav Goren.

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