Hasta La Ideas

It was only recently that smartphones stopped being geeky gadgets and fashionable accessories, and that paradigm shift hasn’t been lost on the fashion and design industry. Smartphones have, in a way, become status symbols, or at the very least expressions of one’s tastes, interests, and even aspirations. In other words, they can become perfect fashion statements, and there have indeed been a few phone designs that try to present themselves as such with mixed results. After all, not all manufacturers are expert fashion designers, so it sometimes pays to have a collab with an industry giant, like this Maison Margiela edition for one of Samsung’s most fashionable phones yet, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 foldable.

Designer: Samsung x Maison Margiela

Clamshell or flip phones have always had this air of style surrounding them even back in the day. They appeared in plenty of TV shows and movies, and they have retained this image throughout the years. It’s no surprise then that phone manufacturers have been trying to revive design but with a slight twist: a foldable screen. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 is the latest iteration of that design, and one that has a very clear focus and target audience. Thanks to its design and accessory ecosystem, the foldable phone is aimed at fashion-conscious owners who love to express their style through their phones and might even change their preferences from time to time.

It is thanks to that customizable design that this Galaxy Z Flip 5 Maison Margiela Edition was made possible. It’s actually the second time that the atelier lent its name to this class of smartphones, but this is perhaps the most comprehensive set so far. In addition to the specially-themed phone itself, there is a Flap Leather Case and a Flipsuit Case with interchangeable plates, a.k.a. “Cards,” to match. It doesn’t stop with the contents of the box either, because the packaging itself is designed like an archival sample storage for fabric samples and threads. Everything about it screams fashion, including the paper-based woven book cloth fabric that covers the box.

Of course, most people will be focusing on the Galaxy Z Flip 5 itself, which comes with a striking and unique exterior right out of the box. It shows Maison Margiela’s iconic jacket underneath a transparent glass, revealing the structure and details of the garment. The Flipsuit Cases, on the other hand, come with two cards, one with a minimalist silver plate and another with paint splatters. Attaching either of these cards automatically changes the phone’s theme taken from Maison Margiela’s artisanal collection to match. Last but definitely not least, the Flap Leather Case represents the marque’s craftsmanship, incorporating handwoven stitches into the black leather cover and woven fabrics. When the phone is unfolded, it reveals a pocket design that adds a touch of flair to the design.

The Galaxy Z Flip 5 Maison Margiela Edition is meant to showcase the fusion of technology and fashion in a way that’s not so different from how haute couture garments are made. It tries to push the boundaries of how smartphones are perceived, not just as productivity tools but also as tools of self-expression. The Galaxy Z Flip5 Maison Margiela edition will be available from November 30 in select markets.

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A new design trend prioritises the needs of bugs and animals above human beings. Rima Sabina Aouf finds out if “interspecies design” is the next step in creating more sustainable spaces and objects.

An exhibition designed to invite in animals, a garden optimised for the senses of pollinators rather than humans and architecture designed with nooks in which birds and insects can nestle form part of the novel approach.

“This is a subject that we have been more and more interested in,” the co-founder of London design practice Blast Studio Paola Garnousset told Dezeen.

Blast Studio started out by making 3D-printed structures from waste coffee cups where mycelium – the filamentous part of fungus that has applications as an architectural and design material – could grow.

But as the designers gradually optimised their designs with more folds and interstices that would meet the organism’s preference for darkness and humidity, they found themselves thinking about other species as well.

The studio is now working on an outdoor pavilion whose intricately structured columns will accommodate ladybirds, bees and birds.

“The 3D printing techniques that we use give us the possibility to create artefacts that are designed both at the micro scale of fungi and insects and the macro scale of human beings,” said Garnousset.

Interspecies design about “changing our level of respect” for other creatures

London’s Serpentine Gallery has hosted two projects that centred interspecies approaches in the last two years.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker is an artificial-intelligence-powered tool that designs gardens to be as appealing as possible for bees and other pollinators, while Tomas Saraceno’s Web(s) of Life exhibition involved making several changes to the building so it would be welcoming for the animals and insects of the surrounding park.

Ginsberg considers the interspecies approach to be an attempt to create with empathy for other lifeforms. She came to it after spending several years researching the idea of what it means to make life “better”.

“Exploring how other species experience the world and – in the case of Pollinator Pathmaker – how they experience the things that humans create, opens up a world filled with empathy,” said Ginsberg.

“We need to think beyond sustainability towards prioritising the natural world.”

MoMA’s senior design curator Paola Antonelli has also developed an interest in interspecies design. She suspects the approach has a “very long history” but that it is reemerging in the West in line with the recuperation of indigenous knowledge and the rise of the rights of nature movement, which involves granting legal personhood to entities like rivers and mountains.

“I think that we get closest to real interspecies design when we think like that,” Antonelli told Dezeen. “When we change our level of respect and communication and really try to position ourselves in a different way, not as colonisers but rather as partners in crime, so to say.”

A “process” towards the impossible

True interspecies design, as Antonelli sees it, may be impossible since human designers have a fundamentally human-centric view of the world.

But Antontelli considers the term a useful umbrella for a range of works that call for an “unlearning and learning process”, dismantling the hierarchy that humans uphold between ourselves and other species.

Her version of the canon includes earlier works that attempt to find “a common language” with animals, like Sputniko!’s Crowbot Jenny, for which the designer, scientist and polymath created an instrument in order to communicate with crows.

Then there is Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan project, for which the designer spent three days living as a goat.

While Thwaites told Dezeen he doesn’t consider GoatMan to be a true work of interspecies design – “the impetus of GoatMan was my desire to have a holiday from being a human, so pretty selfish” – he does see the connection.

“Goatman was definitely intended to contribute to a shift in how we think of non-human creatures,” he said. “Goats are just as highly evolved as humans – there’s no hierarchy.”

“I feel that interspecies design is a process,” said Antonelli. “That it goes from designing for animals to designing with animals to – what’s the next step? Enabling animals to design for themselves?

“That would be the real gesture, right? If we were able to actually let go of the tools of production. That’s what I would like to see at some point.”

The thorny status of biodesign

A practice of creating together with organisms as they conduct their natural processes, known as biodesign, is emerging. It includes making mycelium bricks or bacteria-produced textiles.

These objects are created by human and non-human actors together, but different projects treat their creature-collaborators in varying ways.

Antontelli considers Neri Oxman’s Silk Pavilions, a biodesign project created in collaboration with silkworms, as one of the closest examples yet to a true work of interspecies design.

Oxman studied silkworm behaviour in detail for the work and ended up finding a way to encourage the caterpillars to lay down their silk in sheets rather than cocoons, creating unusual structures.

In contrast to traditional silk harvesting, the silkworms are not killed during this process but instead caught safely as they metamorphose and left to carry on living.

This level of care and symbiosis make the Silk Pavilions stand out as works of interspecies design, even if, in fact, we can’t know for sure that the silkworms are happy with this arrangement.

Curator Lucia Pietroiusti, who is head of ecologies at the Serpentine Gallery where Saraceno and Ginsberg’s works were presented, thinks the area of biodesign distils a key tension in the budding practice of interspecies design.

“Many completely legitimate, genuine and compassionate attempts to design with more-than-humans at heart also exist within capitalist consumerism, within a chain of production,” she said.

“No matter how you slice it, making more of something new is always going to be making more of something.”

And what is ultimately good for other species is probably that we make as little as possible.

A new look for sustainability

While it can be tempting to conclude that the best design for other species is no design at all, that downplays the role that projects like these can play in changing the way we think about production.

Pietroiusti sees interspecies design as part of an evolution of the idea of sustainability towards something more like “thrivability”, where we design for the planet to thrive, not just survive.

“Sustainability as a notion has been in too close a contact with zero-sum principles – this is sustainable because I do it and then I do something else to offset it,” she said. “In the maths of the planet, that is very rarely the case.”

“Are there situations in which certain projects or initiatives can think more ambitiously than sustainability or than reducing harm, and into ‘can we leave things actually better than they were before?'”

Seven years on from GoatMan, Thwaites believes that while the real shifts to recognise and protect non-human creatures need to come at the legislative level, design can contribute commentary and explore how the change might materialise.

“I hope people will one day look back once the cultural shift has happened and wonder at how we didn’t have interspecies design,” he said. “Like smoking in pubs and all the more important social shifts that have taken place over the decades.”

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A university building by architecture studio PagePark, which is shortlisted for the RIAS Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award, is the focus of this video produced by Stephenson&.

It is the final film in a series published by Dezeen this month with the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS), spotlighting the award’s 2023 shortlist ahead of the winner announcement next week.

Stephenson& guides viewers in and around the building, named Campus Central, which marries a refurbished 1970s structure with a modern extension and a landscaped forecourt.

PagePark director Ana Teresa Cristobal, one of two interviewees in the film, explained that establishing the pedestrianised space outside was key to the project as this area was previously “a really busy roundabout” inaccessible to pedestrians.

“A part of the masterplan work that we did was, first up, to try to empty this of cars and bring this beautiful room in between these two very important buildings of the campus back into use,” Cristobal explained.

“This created an external living room, in which the university could do work and programme it like they would do any other room.”

Another university building on this year’s four-strong shortlist is the Laidlaw Music Centre at the University of St Andrews, which Flanagan Lawrence’s co-founder Jason Flanagan said is designed from “the point of view of the performer”.

The pair are vying against two houses, one by Ann Nisbet Studio that incorporates a ruin and another by Denizen Work that is intended to resemble an object “eroded by the weather”.

The RIAS Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award is held annually to celebrate the works of Scottish architects. This year’s winner will be revealed on 30 November and receive a £10,000 cash prize.

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Teenage Engineering is best known for audio equipment with unique aesthetics, though it does sometimes put out unrelated products, such as a desktop PC tower, wooden “choir” mini figurines, and a toy car. That last one was its prelude to the real product launch it had planned, a product that seemed to straddle the line between a full-fledged tool and a sophisticated toy. Given its size, design, and pedigree, Teenage Engineering’s shiny new EP-133 K.O. II is something you might find hard to take seriously at first glance. Fortunately, it seems to have just the right knobs and buttons, literally, to make it a real tool for music makers, at least those that will be able to shoulder its price.

Designer: teenage engineering

This new sampler, sequencer, and composer takes its inspiration from the brand’s Pocket Operator PO-33 K.O. I back in 2015. This device’s small, calculator-like design and accessible price point really made it look and feel more like some fun gadget for some whimsical music mixing. In contrast, the EP-133 K.O. II, or just KO II, for short, is way too large to fit in your pocket, which is the price you’ll have to pay for significantly more functionality that makes this portable synthesizer worth its weight in gold.

The aesthetics are also worlds apart as well. While the Pocket Operators really looked more like black Pocket Calculators, the KO II more than doubles the size and injects a mix of grays, whites, and oranges all over the place. The large buttons, tall knobs, and industrial aesthetic might remind some of the props from sci-fi shows during the 60s, specifically those from Star Trek. The rectangular screen’s choice of colors and shapes to display the user interface is also reminiscent of the show’s LCARS user interface. It might even be able to play those tricorder sound effects because, after all, it is a portable synth anyway.

It actually has quite a lot of features for that purpose, including 999 sample slots and a built-in speaker. There’s also a built-in mic to let you record your own samples right then and there, as well as a selection of drums, bass, and keys to help you get started. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack in case you want to extend the sampler’s features, but do note it only has 64MB of memory, which is probably the biggest deal-breaker for this product. Apparently, the limitation is there to encourage musicians to finish their creations in one go rather than delaying them forever.

Teenage Engineering is slapping a $299 price tag on the EP-133 K.O. II, amusingly just $50 more than its toy Grip Car. It’s still considerably lower than its other synths, enough to entice music makers of all skill levels, but still quite a hefty investment. Then again, it’s a fully functional portable groove box that has quite a distinctive design you can flaunt around, giving you an image of a retro-futuristic music genius controlling the beat with your hi-tech tool.

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A brick, steel and timber structure is left exposed in this office interior in Sydney, which local firm Cox Architecture has revamped to house its own studio.

Cox Architecture removed previous alterations to the structure, which occupies five floors of the heritage-listed Metcalfe Bond Stores warehouse in Tallawoladah, to highlight its original features and complement them with pared-back, flexible workspaces.

“Our objective was to do more with less, balancing the poetic with the pragmatic,” explained the studio.

“Restrained interventions allow the heritage to be the hero and minimise the project’s embodied energy,” it continued. “Our starting point was a process of reduction, removing non-heritage elements to create clarity.”

The interior is defined by the original steel and timber structure’s columns and beams that have been painted white, and the brickwork of the outer walls that are left exposed.

New elements such as glass doors and walls, room dividers, curtains and furniture were chosen to touch the existing structure “as lightly as possible”, and feature alongside dark-wood carpentry and gallery-style lighting tracks.

The workspaces themselves are designed to be flexible and “hackable”, allowing areas to be reconfigured and subdivided easily by staff.

This includes a forum space on the fifth level of the building, which has a wall lined with magnetic whiteboards and can be used as anything from a collaborative workshop space to a presentation area for 200 people.

Alongside it is a kitchen with a backdrop of exposed brickwork and two long counters topped with unsealed brass that will patinate over time.

A black-steel stair leads up to a mezzanine level above containing further desk spaces. This sits at the top of the building, lit by skylights in the apex of the pitched roof.

“Anchored by a generous kitchen, a flexible forum space is a magnet for serendipitous exchange between Cox’s own people and the wider design community,” said the studio.

“The majority of elements within the space are movable, creating an experimental, nimble workspace allowing teams the autonomy to control their space and future-proofing the studio as the workplace evolves,” it continued.

Facing the street, Cox Architecture created a “shopfront window”, giving staff the opportunity to populate vitrines with the studio’s work.

Cox Sydney Studio has recently been shortlisted in the large workplace interior category of Dezeen Awards 2023. Another office interior completed by the studio is the Midtown Workplace in Brisbane, which features a large, plant-filled atrium with by a weathered-steel staircase.

The photography is by Nicole England and Cameron Hallam.

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