“Can public enterprises adopt the popular dynamics of private enterprises?”

Uber transport opinion Dan Hill

Opinion: in his latest column, Dan Hill examines what services like the Uber taxi app mean for cities and asks whether the designers of public services can learn something from them.


Uber Über Alles. In my previous column, I suggested that the big deal about self-driving cars was not that they could drive themselves but that they could be shared rather than owned. With that in mind, I’ve been following the apparently unstoppable rise of Uber, though this time with some concern.

With the Uber app, you choose a vehicle to match your need on-demand (SUV, Prius, limo — sadly no ute as yet) and then it finds a nearby driver of said vehicle for you. Payment is cashless and fares are calculated in advance. Maps, apps, credit cards and phones-as-sensors make everything smooth as silk. Thus, it is likely to tear apart the traditional taxi business.

This form of “radical disruption” is now hardly radical at all, but rather obvious. Simply apply the affordances and dynamics of twenty-first century networked business to an existing service. Applying Uber to the taxi business is just the same as applying Amazon to retail, Square to cash, Spotify to music, Taskrabbit to labour, and Foursquare to that most meaningful of all human pursuits, informing your friends that you are in a bar.

We’ve figured it all out. We know how to make signups, APIs, buttons, lists and responsive layouts. We know how to embed a video, a map, a typeface — it’s all done. We know the business models are free, premium and freemium. The name should be one word, short and easy to type (if it could possibly be less that one word, it would be).

Most importantly, the service should be inconceivable without The Network. It is thus globalised, localised and “user-centred” to the extent that, in the now infamous words of one of Twitter’s founders, it suggests that the internet is simply “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”

That solipsistic view of the world is baked into the dynamics of software like Uber. When you try to sign up as an Uber driver — I clicked through, just to see — the last stage involves ticking a box labelled “By signing up, I agree to the Privacy Policy and understand that Uber is a request tool, not a transportation carrier.”

With that one small tick-in-a-box, Uber is deploying what writer Douglas Adams called a Somebody Else’s Problem field over the entire regulatory “dark matter” of the taxi business. This means their service glides as smoothly as a Prius with the engine turned off over all that bureaucracy concerning safety, hygiene, insurance and so on. The drivers and their organisations have to deal with that lot, but not Uber. Yet Uber is where the value suddenly lies.

The primary example of such unchecked network logics is of course Amazon, and you only have to read Carole Cadwalladr’s recent Guardian article to infer the outcomes of Amazon becoming, as Brad Stone’s bestseller critique has it, “The Everything Store”. It’s a clear formula: deliver an attractive globalised service while sidestepping as much local regulation and tax as possible.

If, as entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has said, such “software is eating the world”, then apps like Uber are just the hors d’oeuvres. The next course contains the more interesting questions: what happens when we apply those affordances and dynamics to the core services of everyday life that are not just serving desires — as Spotify, Vine or Amazon do — but needs, like mobility, health, waste, energy, food, water and education?

Necessarily predicated on rampant growth models, Uber itself is bound to move beyond the high end of the private-hire business into mobility and logistics in general: the Everything Moving Store.

The Uber website is currently more Mr Porter than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an embarrassingly aspirational montage of white people in black cars. The styling oozes try-hard tastefulness, leaving a bad taste. It suggests a target market that might just about stretch to the outer orbits of The One Percent. But where next?

Well, Uber plans to add 200,000 vehicles to its fleet in the next two years and move beyond the 60 cities in which it already runs — that is not boutique levels of ambition. CEO and founder Travis Kalanick says “We need to stamp out an urban logistics fabric in every city in the world, then it’s figuring out other things we can do with that fabric.”

There’s the rub. So this, as with Amazon (and Starbucks, J Crew and the rest) is another cultural blitzkrieg, obliterating difference and leaving high-quality homogeneity in its wake. With clothes and coffee it’s a shame, but not that big a deal. However, when it ploughs into a core urban service like mobility I have, well, a few issues.

Although taxis are a form of privatised transport, they remain part of the city’s civic infrastructure, part of their character. As architect and teacher Robin Boyd wrote, “taxi-men teach the visitor a lot about their towns, intentionally and unintentionally.” Boyd was able to to demarcate Sydney culture from Adelaide culture based on whether the cabbie opens the door for you. I recall scribbling a drawing of a Stephen Holl building I wanted to visit in Beijing, as my only way of communicating my desired destination to the taxi driver. Uber makes transactions easier, but what we gain from a seamless UI, and the convenience of the global currency of apps, we lose from the possibility of understanding a place through a slightly bumpier “seamful” experience.

The broader issue is replacement of public services with private services. Kalanick describes Uber as “the cross between lifestyle and logistics” which, to be fair, is not exactly a “cross” many would have spotted. So Uber is now selling movement; or as they put it, “evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible…”

This is an egregious untruth. Uber is currently a premium car service, which is as far from accessible as one could imagine. It actually falls to the municipality to build a service that is genuinely accessible, that services “citizens” rather than “customers”. Delivering mobility across a city includes the dispersed areas of low or unpredictable demand, the off-peak as well as the predictable peak, with cost of the former offset by the latter. Uber, however, is beginning to nibble away at both ends, yet without the idea of true accessibility in mind.

Who’s to say that similarly shiny networked services won’t also begin to offer privatised coordination of your waste collection, energy and water provision and so on, to match the trends towards private education, private healthcare and private mail delivery to gated communities? Note also Barclays pulling its sponsorship of London’s bike-sharing scheme. Given that the Greater London Authority can hardly let the service lie fallow until market conditions become attractive for a sponsor again, it is left to them to pick up the tab.

Tony Judt’s book Ill Fares The Land is just about the most powerful retort to the ideologies that underpin this demise of public service. Coincidentally, mid-diatribe, Judt alights upon the aesthetic of London’s taxis:

“Visual representations of collective identity used to matter a lot. Think of the black London taxi, its distinctive monotone emerging by consensus between the wars and serving thereafter to distinguish not only the taxis themselves but something about the austere unity of the city they served. Buses and trains followed suit, their uniformity of colour and design emphasising the role they played as common transporters of a single people.”

Uber.com’s equally monochrome visual representation describes exclusive if guileless aspiration rather than common people. That’s Uber’s brand, and fair enough. Emerging amidst another age of austerity for most, though, the counterpoint with Judt’s admittedly nostalgic recall is a little hard to take. But more broadly, as the likes of Uber become more successful, are we inadvertently accelerating the process that has undermined the very ideas of public and civic?

This might seem a little hyperbolic, in a “first they came for the taxis, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a taxi driver” kind of way. I don’t mean it like that. I am a technologist as well as a designer and urbanist, and see immense potential in software to improve the urban condition.

But cities are not merely “giant machines for giving people what they want” any more than the internet is. They are more than that. They speak of a higher form of human organisation, of different people living together for mutual benefit rather than simply “individual utility maximisation”. That is something worth fighting for.

It may mean that public enterprise has to adopt the popular dynamics, patterns and systems of our age, yet bent into shape for public good. This seems possible, as the GOV.UK project from the UK’s Government Digital Service illustrates. Perhaps by marrying such supremely good interactive work with the ethos and long-term viability of the public sector, services like Uber will be left to play happily in the aspirant niches while high-quality networked public services will be available for all. It is just as viable for public transport systems to apply network logic as it is for Uber to do so, if not easier, as the public sector gets to shape the policy and regulatory environments, as well as the delivery.

Indeed if they don’t, we sleepwalk into an urban future with parts of the city run on privatised globalised apps, parts run by cobbled-together hyperlocal community groups and huge gaping holes in-between, punctuating what remains of a faded and patchy shared public sensibility.

So the design question posed by Uber is: can public enterprises adopt the popular dynamics of private enterprises without also absorbing their underlying ideologies?


Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

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“We must examine the human cost of objects, not just their semiotic resonances”

Opinion column Kieran Long Katy Perry eyelashes

Opinion: Kieran Long argues that while it’s fun to be cynical about pop cultural artefacts like Katy Perry Lashes, a recent expose on the conditions in which they’re made proves that it’s vital for design criticism to move beyond semiotics.


I’ve always felt, in that completely unfair way we tend to judge big stars, that Katy Perry was the most cynical and dead inside of all the questionable female role models in the pop cultural landscape. The Popchips poster campaign she fronted earlier this year is burned into my retina. I saw her every morning at South Kensington Tube station, looking over the top of her sunglasses in a sarcastic gesture of astonishment at just how extraordinary a bag of crisps can be. Her fingernails were like talons and her steel grey eyes were framed in false eyelashes.

“All Katy Perry lashes by Eylure are handmade, 100% natural and each style is reusable,” reads the description on the box of fake eyelashes that sits on my desk as I write. This comes just before “Katy’s top tips”, the instructions, in the voice of the gazillion-selling pop star, about how to wear the lashes to their best effect.

There may be no more emblematic product of contemporary capitalism than Katy Perry Lashes, the false eyelashes endorsed by the megastar singer. They are made of real hair and the Cool Kitty style (one of three different designs available) of lash has an undulating profile, with longer and shorter hairs alternating and creating an effect that Katy Perry herself models in a photo on the front of the box.

Perry has a self-consciously plasticky, robot-from-the-1950s aesthetic that is always accessorised with false lashes, nail varnish and a comicbook hairdo. With this Stepford/Bladerunner thing, she seems to invite identification. Something about her plain, cybergirl-next-door look makes young women feel that they somehow should be her, or be like her. It’s no coincidence that most of her merchandise is products for the body: perfumes (a whole range of them), body lotion, makeup. By buying these objects, you are somehow transforming your physical substance into Perry’s. The lashes allow young people to get inside Perry’s body, to look out at the world through her eyes. This out-of-body experience is available for the reasonable price of £5.95 in high street pharmacies.

When her partnership with Covergirl cosmetics was announced, Perry was quoted as saying: “In addition to music, I’ve always considered makeup to be a powerful creative avenue of self-expression.” In Perry’s world, you have to design yourself, to draw a new you on your own skin: she’s the perfect articulation of how contemporary pop culture raises narcissism to an art form.

In the end, this is the psychological game for which the fake eyelashes are designed as a prop. In themselves they may not seem like interesting design objects: they derive their fascination for many of us from this pop cultural framing. The material things are simply two rows of hairs, each hair tied by hand and one-by-one onto a tiny piece of string. These are then trimmed and affixed to a small strip that can hold a latex-based glue. The glue fixes the row of hairs to the Perry wannabe’s own eyelid.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed these ephemeral bits of sub fashion design at all before I met Gethin Chamberlain, the journalist responsible for the remarkable expose of the manufacturing story behind the false lash industry, published in UK tabloid newspaper The Sun on Sunday 20 October. Chamberlain participated in a debate at the V&A museum about ethical manufacturing in the fashion industry, but just a few days before the event he published the story of the false eyelash industry. In it, Chamberlain traces Eylure’s production to small villages in Indonesia, where women weave the tiny lashes and earn as little as 20p per day for doing so. He describes how many workers in the lash industry (which is worth £110 million in Britain alone) do earn the legal minimum wage for that region (£50 per month) but that some factories outsource the work to homeworkers in more remote locations: many of these earn less than half that paltry wage.

As designers and critics, we can always enjoy being cynical about pop cultural artefacts like these lashes and idly patronise the industry around figures like Perry. I guess there’s a whole office devoted to selling Perry’s name, plastering it over merchandise from body lotion to perfume to iPhone covers to T-shirts. There’s even something reassuring for prospective businesspeople that it’s still possible to make money in this day and age selling fridge magnets with pictures of Katy Perry in the buff on them. If capitalism is that easy, I wonder why we aren’t all making more money.

But the story of these objects and their making is a sleight of hand, a trick that consumerism plays on us. So remote are we from manufacturing today that a company can celebrate the making of these objects as a positive marketing story (“handmade, 100% natural”), while indirectly employing workers in exploitative conditions. Thanks to journalists like Chamberlain we are all aware of this. If we are serious about design in the expanded field, we have to inquire after not just the semiotic resonances of these objects, but the human costs too.


Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

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“Christmas decorations are winter as skeuomorphism”

Sam Jacobs opinion

Opinion: Sam Jacob argues that as climate change pushes the reality of winter further from the idealised version that appears in Christmas decorations, they begin to represent “a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies.”


Picture the scene. Well, actually, it’s harder not to now that Christmas adverts have been “premiered” and are on the kind of constant rotation that bores into your mind’s eye like an augewurm. These scenes have been pre-pictured for you with the kind of luminous intensity that only million pound budgets and the most expensive of heartwarming celebrities provide. There are tables as big as airfields piled high with hams, cakes and turkeys, there are Disneyfied animals acting anthropomorphic sentiments, jumpers seen through Super 8 vision and snow falling over everything.

Out in the streets, council cherry pickers are draping trees in strings of lights, attaching stars to lamp posts and strapping pine trees to buildings. Shop windows have become landscapes of abstract wintriness: a silver birch forest has grown up in the window of Top Shop, there are drifts of cotton wool in Accessorize and glistering electric ice in La Senza.

Pubs spray a polystyrene porridge of fake snow into the corners of their windows: instant graffitied Dickensification. Strange fruits of platonic metallic spheres have sprouted on trees uprooted from their plantations.

There’s a flurry of white balls frozen above the grey morass of Oxford Street and giant frozen boughs arc across Regent Street, sparkling with electricity. Almost everywhere there are super-scaled outlines of snow crystals, laser cut from Day-Glo perspex or vinyled onto plate glass, shrinking us to microscopic size.

This trail of decoration is an alternate landscape, a continuous environment bleeding from our own decked-out-homes, through a city transformed with temporal forests and artificial constellations blinking above. It’s a 1:1 replica of a winter that never existed in all its synthetic, scenographic glory.

Piles of beautifully wrapped empty cardboard boxes are piled under corporate trees – a gesture of empty generosity as to fulfil our need to know that our contemporary Christmassy symbolism is entirely hollowed out.

All these decorative tools and devices have their roots in misty Pagan prehistory. The symbols and customs we use even now come from an ancient and superstitious relationship with nature. They were ritualistic acts ushering the sun back into ascent from the depths of the winter solstice, there to welcome the return of light and warmth. Evergreens, berries and fire were fertility rites concerned with renewal and rebirth. In even the most tawdry strings of tinsel are echoes of these long forgotten ancient magics. These symbols have been processed through thousands of years of culture so that their real roots are obscured, bent into countless other shapes by other belief systems, ideologies and practices.

Christmas decorations are the ultimate floating signifiers dangling off the boughs of harvested evergreens. Cut loose from their original meanings and myths, they are a semiological ding dong where bells, angels wings, holly and snow are packed together into a fabric as dense as Christmas cake, covering everything like wrapping paper. Denuded of their original meaning, decorations become a simple statement of fact: signs that denote winter, erected slap bang in the middle of real winter.

Our modern selves might feel entirely sophisticated, shed of superstition and primitive ritual. We might feel far removed from the pagan roots of this decorative urge, but perhaps there is something within us that drives our fervour for winter decorations, something driving us to these extraordinary ends – especially a society otherwise so cynical and resistant to forced entertainment and group sentiment.

It was science that assuaged our ancient pagan fear of a sunless never-ending Narnia, but it’s science, too, that raises contemporary fears for the future of our environment. As study after study shows, winter itself is threatened.

Climate change studies see the growing season extending as though it were an ink blot bleeding across the calendar. Winter season in the arctic is almost two weeks shorter than it was a few decades ago. Measuring the growth of plants reveals British spring occurring ten days earlier than the 1970s. This season creep is estimated to have been advancing spring by two to three days and delaying autumn by 0.3–1.6 days per decade over the past 30 to 80 years.

These are our modern fears for the environment, as deeply troubling as any ancient superstition, perhaps even more so given their foundation in fact. They have consequences for just the same things that the Pagans feared: a total disruption of the Earth’s ecosystem causing loss of the northern permafrost, rises in sea levels, decoupling of breeding and feeding patterns, disruption of migration and so much more that we have yet to fully appreciate.

Climate change means the apparent natural pattern of winter, the one depicted with such certainty by all of our Christmassy imagery is (if it ever was) an imaginary scene. Perhaps it’s more: a ritual that unconsciously reverses our old Pagan desire and makes a superstitious plea for winter to stay. Perhaps it’s even worse than this: maybe it’s winter as skeuomorphism, a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies. Perhaps a trip down Oxford Street’s commercially manufactured, abstracted visions of winter is nothing less than a salve to our latent environmental nightmares.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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“Design is complicit in economic and political systems that are inherently violent”

Design and violence by Justin McGuirk

Opinion: as MoMA launches an online exhibition investigating design’s relationship with violence, Dezeen columnist Justin McGuirk looks beyond objects like 3D-printed guns and drones to ask “what do our weapons say about the systems they support?”


Blood gutter. I’ve often thought that this is one of the more evocative phrases in the English language. It synthesises the opposites of nature and culture: the spilling of the life force on one hand and its neat canalisation on the other – the macabre and the civilised. It sums up perfectly design’s relationship with violence.

A blood gutter, in case you’re not aware, is the groove along the blade of a hunting knife or bayonet. Also known as a blood groove, this channel is commonly understood to make the blade easier to withdraw from the body of the unfortunate human or beast you’ve just plunged it into. The theory goes that the groove creates a pocket of air between the blade and the blood-slick wound that prevents suction. As everyone knows, suction is a right pain when you’re trying to extract a blade from the body of your collapsing foe.

However, I was disappointed to learn that the suction theory is pure myth. The blood gutter – also known more technically as the fuller – is in fact designed to make the blade lighter and stiffer. Nevertheless, it’s a myth with a long and proud history, born in the days of bayonet fighting. Since US Marines in boot camp are still apparently taught that these grooves solve a chronic suction problem, let’s continue with our design analogy. The brunt of which is this: the blood gutter evinces an exquisitely explicit relationship to the mechanics of the violent act. It represents precisely the kind of close-up attention to detail required of the designer of weapons in general, whether we’re talking about designing the head of a dum-dum bullet (designed for maximum impact) or the reliable firing mechanism of an AK-47.

It goes without saying that such design requires a temporary suspension of morals. This kind of blinkered engagement in the minutiae by those who are just doing their job is how we’ve managed to post-rationalise the horrors of the Holocaust, which political theorist Hannah Arendt famously encapsulated in “the banality of evil”. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer faced a similar dilemma in creating the atomic bomb. In his case, however, he had designed a weapon so earth-shatteringly destructive that he thought it might even serve the interests of peace. As he wrote to the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, after Hiroshima: “We believe that the safety of this nation… cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.” This is like the designer trying to get the client to rethink their agenda, but in Oppenheimer’s case it was too late to rewrite the brief.

What triggered these thoughts was the New York Museum of Modern Art‘s new online curatorial project, Design and Violence. Initiated by MoMA’s Paola Antonelli and co-curated by Jamer Hunt of Parsons The New School for Design, it is a sort of exhibition as web platform, and it is intended to probe the notion of design as an inherently benign discipline – an approach that is certainly overdue from the design establishment.

While the site is too nascent to merit a review, it does raise some interesting questions. Chief among them, to my mind, is whether the curators of this project really have the stomach for it. Are they prepared to go into the gory details (one wonders if this, indeed, is why the exhibition is online and not in the museum itself) and are they willing to push their argument to its logical conclusion, which is that design is complicit in economic and political systems that are themselves inherently violent?

Thus far, the project is focused on objects. While that may be predictable, the objects themselves are less so. Social critic Camille Paglia has written about the stiletto heel, which she describes as “woman’s most lethal social weapon”, and which is at least suggestive of violence. Others have written about the box cutter, Cody Wilson’s 3D-printed pistol and the Guardian Angel handbags designed by Dutch accessory brand Vlieger and Vandam. These felt handbags are embossed with the shapes of knives and pistols, and as such they adopt the usual position of luxury consumer goods to violence: desperate for a frisson of edginess. It is the same shortcut to controversy taken by Philippe Starck some years back with his gun lamps, redolent with Carry On film camp – “Ooh er, missus, aren’t you naughty?”

By contrast, novelist William Gibson has a ditty here on the unofficial embroidered patches used by classified military units – internal “marketing tools” with Velcro. Such insignia are symbols of pride laced with the threat of violence. This feels like fertile territory, but why stick with the military? Gibson himself has a character (in Pattern Recognition, if I remember correctly) who is allergic to brand logos and has to cut them out of her clothing. That fictional leap suggests a rich vein of violence inherent in consumer society.

Ordinary objects can be horrifically violent. What springs immediately to mind is that staple of British pubs, the pint glass. Somehow only the casual violence of the drunken Brit could turn a noun into such a vivid verb: to “glass” someone, or to smash a pint in their face. None of your Tom and Jerry invulnerability there, nor, indeed, any of the designer’s meticulous method – just a harmless object swept up in an improvised attack. Glassing is apparently such a problem that a few years ago the Design Council commissioned a re-engineering of the pint glass so that it wouldn’t break on impact. Safely back in cartoon territory, you can imagine the mystified look on the aggressor’s face – like Tom staring down the barrel of the misfired gun – as he realises that he’s only bruised his opponent.

Such “invisible” weapons are represented in Design and Violence by the box cutter (known to British readers as the Stanley knife). It was just an ordinary household object until the terrorists in the hijacked planes on 9/11 turned it into a tool of asymmetrical warfare. But the upshot of that event is that it is no longer just the terrorists who use invisible weapons. In its War on Terror the US relies heavily on unmanned drones that deliver death out of nowhere. The question here is, what do our weapons say about the systems that they support? Ironically, drones are the Obama government’s response to the criticisms of his predecessor’s methods. Liberals kicked up such a fuss about extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping and torture of suspects) that the Pentagon decided it was easier just to assassinate targets from high altitude. At least three thousand people have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone, and yet the outcry has been less vociferous, perhaps because the means are more clinical.

The Liberator, Wilson’s 3D-printed pistol, is another case of a design that is sinister not because it is deadly but precisely because it looks harmless. It’s as though we’ve entered an era of uncanny weapons. Plastic guns, like toys that kill. Windowless planes, like eyeless faces, that can see where they’re going. Freud defined the uncanny as an ambiguity as to whether something is really alive, and the new generation of weapons elicit uncertainty as to whether they are really real: they’re like simulacra, or literally like models.

The designs of these weapons represent two opposing theories of violence. The first is that violence is simply a force of nature, and is only wrong if it is used to the wrong ends. In other words – and this is how eighteenth-century lawyer and politician Maximilien de Robespierre justified the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution – the ends justify the means. That is more or less the US government’s attitude to extra-legal drone strikes: the War on Terror justifies assassinations on foreign soil and any civilian collateral damage, however unfortunate. The design of drones reflects precisely that attitude: unmanned and thus anonymous, operated by joy-stick wielding technicians thousands of miles away, they exude moral detachment.

The other theory of violence inverts that logic: here, the means justify the ends. This is epitomised by the 3D printed gun. It is clearly important to Wilson that guns be readily available, hence making his design available under a creative commons license, but the design is the product of a rather childish libertarianism. In protecting his Second Amendment right to bear arms, it’s all me, me, me, and damn the interfering government or any sense of the collective good. By this logic, not only does the law uphold his right to have a gun and to use it in self-defence, but the design method – open source, creative commons, available for distributed production – lends the object an air of righteousness. The generous language of the “sharing economy” is being used to justify the potential use of violence.

In that sense, both the drone and the 3D printed gun display a sense of impunity. Their designs perfectly reflect the moral positions – in my opinion, both illegitimate – of those who wield them. Far more potent, then, than the weapons themselves are the systems that give rise to them. In fact, we could forget about weapons altogether and talk only about systemic violence. We could talk about the social violence caused by neoliberal capitalism, or the environmental violence caused by disposable consumer goods. This is a whole other argument, for another day, but one that I hope Design and Violence – or @desviolenz, as its Twitter handle goes – will not balk at.

Drone image is from Shutterstock.


Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

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systems that are inherently violent”
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“It’s time to refigure the design problem of the London street”

Sam Jacob Opinion roads and transport

Opinion: as a sixth cyclist dies in London in two weeks, Sam Jacob argues that roads should be designed “in a way that incorporates intelligence as well as brute engineering” and asks:” “Who is the city for?”


Roads are super complex landscapes. All those speed bumps, arrows, double yellows, zig zags, kerbs, red men, green men, zebra, pelican, puffin and pegasus crossings are both the surface over which we travel and codes that modify and instruct how we travel. They are simultaneously map and territory, abstract markings on the surface of the city that become the city.

They may often be imperfect and in a constant state of revision but roads are the fundamental product of civilisation. Roads even, it might be argued, civilise us, as infrastructure that connects both places and us one to another into a collective society. Roads are where all our multi-faceted desires and demands (literally) intersect, where they are negotiated in real time, turn by turn. Of course, sometimes these negotiations tragically fail.

After six cyclist deaths in London over the last 13 days, there is understandably a sense of panic on the streets – certainly amongst the cycling community. A friend late back to the office after cycling back from a meeting found her phone flashing with a series of panicked messages checking that she hadn’t become another cyclist casualty. Over the top, for sure, but also indicative of the heightened tensions surrounding the capital’s carriageways – a tension revealed in the aggression that often characterises our behaviour on the road too.

After this spate of accidents there are, understandably, calls to do something. I don’t doubt either that there is a real desire on behalf of the authorities to do something too, but what that thing might be is much harder to identify.

The problem is first practical. How can the variety of road users – pedestrians, bikes, cars, trucks – co-exist in a safe and civilised way? But it’s also a philosophical and political issue: who the is city for?

Though we might think of them as natural, streets and roads are as much concepts as things. In Britain, pre-Roman roads formed as tracks across a landscape between settlements. More desire lines than infrastructure, we could think of these as routes worn into the surface of the earth by habit, formed by the subjective behaviour of travellers. Roads here are produced by the act of travelling itself. As such they are less defined, their edges blurred. Roman roads on the other hand brought a very different conception – an abstract, as-the-crow-flies, objective inscription of intent. The Roman road organised and controlled how we crossed the landscape.

After the fall of the empire, Roman roads fell back into disrepair, their engineered surfaces collapsing back into the soil. By 1555 the country’s roads were so poor that an act of parliament was passed requiring parishes to maintain their roads. Men of the parish were required to work for six days each year to maintain and repair the roads, but unpaid and under-resourced, little improved. As the industrial revolution gathered pace, parliament passed what was known as the Turnpike Act, which allowed the creation of private toll roads. Given the potential for profit, investment in the provision and maintenance of roads accelerated the quality and network of roads.

Roads are now (on the whole) public in the sense that they are owned by public bodies, but the ownership, management and maintenance of roads is shared between local authorities, Transport for London, and the Highways Agency. Perhaps this fragmented ownership is reflected in the confusions and conflicts on the roads.

The point of this historical diversion is to underline the point that roads are not static entities – they evolve in relation to the society that creates them – and that roads then alter the society they ostensibly serve. Turnpikes, for example, benefited those who invested (often members of parliament themselves), were often unpopular (the defensive pikes added to as protection and penalty of execution for anyone destroying a toll booth). The increased costs associated with transporting livestock into the city pushed up the price of meat and inevitably affected the urban poor most directly.

Back to the present moment; back to the issue of cycling in London. The problem of traffic and highways is usually thought of as an engineering project rather than a function of holistic urban design. Which is, I’d argue, itself part of the problem.

The engineering-first approach to cycle infrastructure produces a range of solutions:

First there’s the half-hearted standard bike paths. These might demarcate a route that seems sensible for a cyclist to follow, but be forewarned: you’re as likely to find one leading you into a dead-end, straight into a lamppost, or into a pile of bin bags dumped in its track. More often than not, they seem like elaborate devices dreamt up by Wile E. Coyote. They would be funny if they weren’t so laughable.

Next up there’s the Barclays Cycle Superhighway. These are semi-infrastructural licks of paint whose gestural wide strips of blue attempt to form zones within the road surface dedicated to cyclists.

They represent a particularly abstract form of planning as though the fluorescent highlighter, beloved of planning officers as they mark out zones and routes on the black and white expanses of OS plans, had reached down out of the sky and simply started sketching its intention directly onto the surface of the city. This is infrastructure as intention rather than reality. Cycle Superhighways might assume the appearance of infrastructural authority but the reality is that they are often little more than a trompe-l’œil. They have an indistinct status: a name that suggests real hard wired traffic infrastructure but a reality that is little more than wayfinding. In spite of their good intentions, you can’t paint the city you want into existence.

At the most extreme end, Transport For London is testing out Dutch-style roundabouts. Frankly though, in most of London there’s no way that the crooked, winding streets could be tamed into anything bearing more logic. London, born out of a singular lack of planning, seems to have a resistance to any logical planning set within its grain. Which is, of course, part of its charm: a city that’s evolved out of the lives lived within it rather than been envisioned by the mind of a Haussmann. That’s not to say that hard-wired segregated solutions aren’t either possible or desirable, but that the possibilities of their implementation are limited.

The problem of our roads seems a problem that we can’t build our way out of. That is to say, it’s not a problem of things but of space. Or rather, of things in space in motion.

Nowhere is this more visible than watching a giant hinged articulated lorry swinging itself expansively out at a junction, only to switch back round as though it were a particularly languorous, overweight uncle attempting a drunken hokey cokey. Even a large van has trouble making it around the corner without riding up over a curb.

The view from my saddle is this: it’s the incompatible co-existence of the biggest and the smallest, the heaviest and the lightest, the most armour-plated and the softest flesh between lorry and cyclist that’s the issue. There’s nothing you can engineer to mitigate this situation.

The cyclist/lorry conflict is the most extreme of examples. In extremis, it exemplifies a crisis in the nature of our city’s streets. Currently we imagine roads as a universal resource, a system that makes little differentiation between its users, or the nature of their use. Those interests, I’d argue, are not all public. Commercial deliveries might put food on the shelves of our supermarkets, materials on construction sites that we may one day work or live in, or deliver tourists to historic landmarks, but the form of these deliveries are mainly unrestricted and in volumes that suit logistics managers.

Surely in an age of smart city rhetoric, big data, and the impending possibilities that GPS and digital mapping bring to transportation (as Dan Hill discussed in his last Dezeen column) it’s time to refigure the design problem of the London street. That is to say, to conceive of transport design in a way that incorporates intelligence as well as brute engineering. The kinds of data available on even consumer-end apps like City Mapper show how joining up available datasets provides new ways of configuring movement through the city.

What if, for example, deliveries were timed not to coincide with rush hours. What if large loads were the exception and goods were distributed from out-of-town depots in smaller electric vehicles. Indeed, wouldn’t Heathrow, vacated after the construction of the Boris Island Airport, provide a suitable interchange of this sort?

We focus tremendous amounts of time, money and expertise on the design of so many other forms of transport, but roads seem to be far less of a design question. Perhaps they seem too ordinary, lacking the glamour associated with cars or airports. Yet we should recognise the necessity of roads as a design project – and the huge significance that roads represent.

Just as ancient Rome could conceive of the kinds of networks that supported its imperial ambitions, we need to find ways to imagine the kind of streets that our public, accessible city of the twenty-first century demands.

The design of London’s roads is not just about the tragic deaths of cyclists. It’s about how we make sure our city becomes public and how roads continue to force us to negotiate a contemporary urban civility.


Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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“The history of human culture is written not in text but in objects”

Sam Jacob Opinion on prehistoric design Stonehenge image from Shutterstock

Opinion: in his latest Opinion column, Sam Jacob argues that objects tell us more about ourselves than literature or imagery and sets out his manifesto for “a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology”.


My last column talked about new stuff, about how digital culture is changing our relationship to objects. Now, I’d like to think about old stuff. I’d like to do this as a way of forming a kind of manifesto for understanding objects, whether they might be new or old. A manifesto, in other words, for our relationship with objects – a relationship of very long standing that goes back to the very origins of humanity.

We have a longer relationship with objects than any other cultural form. Things emerged before language and before image making. This fact – along with their propensity to survive in the archaeological record – means we could convincingly argue that the history of human culture is written not in text but in objects.

That objects are themselves a form of language is suggested by the idea that language developed out of the kind of complex, sequential, abstract thinking that object-making required. Design, in other words, preceded and enabled the development of language. We could – and should – think of the record of things as a central plank of the library of human experience that only later includes images and writing. Things, in other words, are a form of literature too.

Like literature, objects are containers of human experience. They are embodiments of thought and knowledge made into material form. We might not know, for example, what Stonehenge was used for, but we can trace the outlines of the intelligence that brought it into the world. Its substance and arrangement are a record of the technologies necessary to build it, the organisation of a society necessary to implement it and the imaginative capability needed to conceive it.

Objects occur at the intersection of spheres of knowledge: at the overlap between science, technology, culture and desire. Even the most mundane of objects acts as a roll call of forms of knowledge and intelligence necessary for it to come into the world – even (or especially) the novelty section of the Argos catalogue talks of mining, processing, transportation, engineering and economics, as well as desire and imagination. Each contributes to the possibility of that particular thing being in the world.

It was this kind of imaginative and intellectual capability emerging in early human culture that brought objects into the world for the very first time. The stuff formed by cosmology, geology and biology became, in the hands of someone, somewhere, the first primitive thing. As this first object came into existence so did a new kind of humanity.

When, say, a lump of stone was struck by another to create a sharper edge, it was also an act that projected our imagination into the world. The newly formed edge was an abstract idea materially formed. Things, in other words, are also concepts.

Once formed, that very same stone tool amplified the ways in which we could act. Even in its most primitive form, design gave us the ability to extend our own body’s reach into the world by allowing us to cut in ways our own hands couldn’t. At the other end of the technological spectrum, philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan described electronic communications as extending our nervous systems around the globe (and now, even beyond the edge of the solar system). Design produces things that act as bridges and interfaces between our human state and the environment around us.

Once born into the world, objects helped us transform our natural environment. They began a process that shaped nature into synthetic human habitats. Cutting stone, wood or flesh was the first step that eventually created the synthetic worlds of Tokyo, London, Munich, Paris and so on (and, of course, the equally synthetic places that are preserved as a form of nature: Yosemite, the Lake District, Antarctica even: places that are now just as defined by ideology, law and politics as any city).

The world after objects was no longer a given quantity but something constructed. Design – even the design of the smallest of things – is the act of constructing new worlds.

Our relationship with objects might be even more profoundly linked. Just as we make things, things also make us. A human with a stone tool is an entirely different creature to one without – or rather the human capable of conceiving of an object is an entirely different proposition. The act of designing and making is a two-way street. Intention might shape the way we make something, but once made the made-thing acts on us too. The moment the first transformation of rock to object occurred, the possibilities of being human also changed. If design precipitated language, perhaps it brought something else into the world too. Perhaps objects make us human.

The history of humans and things, intertwined as completely as it is, suggests definitions of design which I’ll set out here:

We’ve come a long way since the first object. The sheer quantity of stuff that now surrounds us is overwhelming. Contemporary material culture seems often to be shallow, marked by excessive consumption, over-infused by marketing, inauthentic and exploitative.

Yet these objects and the design cultures that create them are still part of a continuous culture that spirals back into pre history. Judgements of value – monetary, aesthetic, taste or whatever – are only one way of viewing design. In many ways, these kinds of judgements only serve to narrow the definition of design as a fundamental human activity.

Instead we should argue for a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology, one that recognises its embedded intelligence, its philosophical and radically propositional nature. Even – or perhaps especially – when it’s something as seemingly debased as a Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza.


Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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“We need to place ideas, not gender, front and centre”

Mimi Zeiger portrait Opinion

Opinion: journalist and critic Mimi Zeiger argues that trying to rewrite design history with all-female shows like MoMA’s Designing Modern Women does nothing to “shake up the dominant masculine ethos” that still plagues the industry.

How many women? That’s the question I routinely ask when faced with a lineup of panelists, a competition jury, an exhibition checklist, or a table of contents. Then I will count, picking out female names and remembering which offices are partnerships.

I’m not alone in my inventory. For (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Poster Project, Micol Hebron asked fellow artists to contribute posters depicting the numbers of male and female artists represented by top galleries in Los Angeles.

In the autumn of 2012, Women in Architecture, a group founded by Nina Freedman and Lori Brown, surveyed 73 architecture school public lecture series and found that a shocking 62 percent had either no women or one woman invited as a public lecturer. The following spring their data revealed that one third of schools failed to invite women.

My own statistic comes from the Sci-Fi issue of Clog, a journal rapidly gaining attention and one that speaks to and for an emerging generation of architects. Of the 76 contributors listed in the back of the most recent issue, 11 are women. What would Ursula K. Le Guin say? The author’s works routinely tackle gender and race through speculative fiction and her place in the male-dominated genre was hard earned.

Eleven out of 76 calculates out to 14.4 percent, not too far off from the roughly 17 percent of licensed female architects in the United States or 21 percent in the UK, but nowhere near the figures that suggest near parity between the sexes in school.

We know these numbers well. In fact, we know these grim numbers so well that they’ve reached a point of abstraction, a slice of pie on a chart. But let’s reconfigure the statistics into a scenario: a panel discussion — a programme that happens every day within design culture. I see water bottles lined up, microphones on alert and a screen ready to accept PowerPoint slides.

Enter the panelists: four men and one woman. That’s 20 percent.

It would seem that the long fight for gender equality in architecture and design, including the recent and painfully failed attempt to convince the Pritzker jury to rectify a past oversight, has succeeded in reproducing in culture at large the very unevenness found within the profession. This kind of tokenism encourages the kind of go-big or go-home exceptionalism epitomised by Zaha Hadid (I once had a mainstream magazine editor ask me to write a story on why Hadid is the Lady Gaga of architecture) and it also forces, by singular presence, any one female designer to speak for all. As such, Denise Scott Brown is a mouthpiece for a movement outside herself, in addition to a partner of Robert Venturi, a designer and a theorist.

Citing statistics doesn’t get us any closer to rectifying the inequity. Numbers overshadow what female architects and designers, and what all architects and designers, offer: willingness for discourse, insight into a body of work, ideas for debate.

It might seem that the optimum flip side of the “twenty percent scenario” is an all-gal event or exhibition. But is grouping women together really a corrective or does it reinforce existing stereotypes and marginalisation?

Consider the titles: Come In! Les Femmes at the Architecture and Design Museum and California’s Designing Women, 1896-1986 at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, or Designing Modern Women 1890–1990 currently on view at MoMA in New York.

The MoMA show, curated by Juliet Kinchin with assistant Luke Baker, sets out to rewrite twentieth-century design history. In this new narrative women are “…muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators”. Their creativity gives the hard edges of modernism a softer touch and the cannon expands to embrace Aino Aalto, Charlotte Perriand and Margaret McDonald with their male counterparts Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Yet even as MoMA’s cannon loosens, the collection still represents these designers within the domestic sphere: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the kitchen from the Unité d’Habitation, cookware, children’s toys and textiles.

What is at work is something far more societally insidious than deliberately sexist. Exhibitions and events that market themselves around “women in design” or something equally banal, although well meaning in their curatorial ambition, fail precisely because they present a thematic that unifies based on gender not on ideas. They classify and control the conversation, narrowing it until chromosomes, XX or XY, define the discourse. As a result, these events risk operating outside dominant design culture and inadvertently excuse men from participating.

The strongest part of Designing Modern Women is a section entitled Punk to Postmodernism: 1970-1990. The wall text here reads: “By the 1970s, the legacy of modernism was being questioned by new designers who rejected its dominantly masculine ethos and ideal of collective progress toward a singular goal.” More than four decades later, while the discipline has progressed, fostering a multitude of end goals, the fight to shake up the dominant masculine ethos continues.

Recently I was struck by a Guardian interview with author Eleanor Catton, her novel The Luminaries having just won the The Man Booker Prize 2013 for fiction. In the article she parses how differently men and women are treated by the press and by the public. Her comments are applicable as much to architecture and design as to literature. “I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel. In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them,” she says. “The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”

Catton’s last observation resonates without statistics. To sustain women for a lifetime in architecture and design, we need to place ideas, not gender, front and centre. This means truly diverse – gender, race, sexuality – juries, panels, lecture series and exhibitions. It means digging deeper for themes, topics and platforms that support all participants. While we are still a long way off from being post-gender, our cultural programming needs to reflect the aspirations of, not mirror the inequality, within the discipline.


Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.

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“The future is a small, ugly town in the south of Holland”

Marcus Fairs' Opinion column about Eindhoven following Dutch Design Week

Opinion: on his return from Dutch Design Week, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs argues that “something special is happening” in Eindhoven, a dowdy post-industrial sprawl that was recently named “the most inventive city in the world”.


I’ve seen the future and it’s a small, ugly town in the south of Holland.

I’ve been in Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week for the past few days and the energy, creativity and imagination I’ve come across has been a revelation. Not only designers but entrepreneurs, civic leaders, restauranteurs and musicians are buzzing with an excitement and optimism that is both rare and genuine. They feel something special is happening in their city.

The trip is part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour and even though this is the smallest and least attractive of the cities we’ve visited this year – other stops have included New York, Singapore and London – it’s been by far the most interesting.

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out,” says designer Miriam van der Lubbe in our first MINI World Tour report from the city. “And there’s so much more that can happen here”.

I’m by no means the first person to notice that there’s something going on in Eindhoven. In 2011 the city was named the world’s most Intelligent Community of the Year by the Intelligent Community Forum. In July this year, Forbes magazine named Eindhoven as “hands-down the most inventive city in the world”.

That accolade was based on research by the OECD, which found that the area leads the world in “patent intensity” – the number of patent applications per capita – a recognised way of measuring innovation. Eindhoven files 22.6 patents for every 10,000 people. San Diego, which is second on the list, files only 8.9.

It’s an incredible turnaround for a city that, in the eighties, feared it was staring into the abyss when Philips, the electronics giant that was the dominant economic and social force in Eindhoven, as good as abandoned the city with the loss of 30,000 jobs (out of a total population of around 200,000). Things were so bad the city seriously considered changing its name – “eind” is Dutch for “end” – lest people take it too literally.

Fearing the fate of Manchester, where the loss of heavy industry blighted the city centre for years, Eindhoven moved quickly to reinvent itself, giving abandoned Philips buildings to creative people who, true to the local spirit of hard work and cooperation, self organised and got on with building their own future.

Local authorities and developers around the world now commonly use such “creative seeding” to add buzz to an area to aid gentrification (and ultimately sell real estate) but in Eindhoven there appears to be a more equitable social construct to the way this is carried out.

Annemoon Geurts, the founder of Kazerne, a new creative industries hub in a former barracks in the city centre, told me that the city had offered her non-profit organisation an “erfpacht”, or social lease, on the building, meaning it would benefit from the value they added during their tenure. And with a 40-year lease, something that would be unheard of in short-term, money-grubbing London, they have an incentive to make long-term improvements.

Eindhoven’s design credentials are well known. Dutch Design Week (unofficial slogan: “What you see here today is what you’ll see in Milan in two years”) is one of the best curated and most vibrant design weeks. Design Academy Eindhoven is a serious contender for the title of world’s best design school and an increasing number of its stellar alumni (Piet Hein Eek, Kiki van Eijk, Joost van Bleiswijk and Formafantasma to name just a few) have remained in the city, running thriving studios.

But designers on their own can’t achieve much; if they aspire to more than just being another wannabe on the design-fair circuit they need an infrastructure of industry, R&D and other creative disciplines around them with whom they can make bigger ripples.

And Eindhoven has these in abundance. ASML, the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, is based in Eindhoven. A drive through even the dullest industrial estate in the city reveals companies specialising in cryogenics, photovoltaics and biotechnology. RPI Paro, the advanced print-on-demand printing facility that produced our Print Shift magazine, is based in Eindhoven. So is Shapeways, one of the leading 3D printing companies, who we interviewed for the Print Shift project.

In fact many of the world’s leading 3D-printing companies are clustered in what is known as the high-tech Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen-Triangle (ELAt), as we discovered when we visited the region earlier this year. Here, high-tech, knowledge-based industries account for 20% of GDP.

These complimentary sectors tend to open their doors to creative minds, rather than turning them away, ripping them off or viewing them with suspicion, as is the common experience other cities including London. Designers in the city talk of an openness towards new ideas and a willingness to experiment that permeates industry, academia and the city government itself.

The procurement of Eindhoven’s new corporate identity expresses this collaborative spirit: rather than go to a safe-pair-of-hands graphic designer, the city assembled a “Virtual Design Studio” of ten different creative businesses to figure it out.

Interdisciplinary collaboration – so often an empty cliche – appears to be an everyday reality in Eindhoven and they even have a special term for it. Proeftuin, which literally means “experimental garden” or “test bed”, is a form of collaborative working between people of different disciplines that has been adopted by the city. Proeftuin was used to generate the city’s (alas, unsuccessful) bid strategy for European City of Culture 2018 and would also have formed a key part of cultural activity in 2018, had it won.

It almost seems to be a precondition for designers exhibiting at Dutch Design Week that their projects display meaningful (rather than PR-driven) collaboration with a university research department, an online platform or even a multinational brand.

The attitude is most perfectly encapsulated by Dutch Design Week ambassador Daan Roosegaarde’s concept for removing smog from urban skies using an “electronic vacuum cleaner”, which he revealed in Eindhoven this week. Here a designer, researchers and politicians came together to address a real problem and found that between them they had the ingredients to do something about it.

In this case Eindhoven cannot claim these elements as its own: Roosegaarde is based near Rotterdam; the university is in Delft and the politicians are in Beijing. But Eindhoven can stake a convincing claim to the spirit, and that spirit offers a bright future.

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“Design education needs space to explore”

Dan Hill's Opinion column about design education

Opinion: the internet is about to disrupt education and kill the lecture, which brings together “bored lecturers with hungover students”. But, asks Dan Hill, would design students be better off learning in the “gloriously generative cyberpunk favelas” of current institutions?


“‘Because,’ said Morris Zapp, reluctantly following, ‘information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine.'” (From “Small World”, by David Lodge, 1984)

So says Morris Zapp, the errant American academic in David Lodge’s novel “Small World”, the meat in the sandwich of Lodge’s campus trilogy. Written three decades ago, “Small World” revels in the campus politics, sexual politics and, well, plain old politics of the time. But in this tirade from the reliably forthright Zapp (think Walter Matthau) we hear a kind of pre-echo of an increasingly vocal meme about educational tech.

We might need a bit more perspective – apologies, Morris – in order to understand what might be going on in design and architecture education, and by extension design and architecture, over the next few years.

For Morris Zapp we can now read Sebastian Thrun. Unlike Zapp, Thrun is real; via Stanford and Google X (the lab that created Google Glass and their self-driving cars) Thrun now runs Udacity, one of several start-ups looking to “radically disrupt” education. (Radical disruption is the obligatory starting point these days.)

These start-ups develop and host MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. In simple terms, they are putting videos of lectures online, within a flexible course structure, adorned with a few loose-fitting social media tropes to enable student discussion and automated in-lecture prompts and quizzes. People sign up to take courses at their own pace, more or less, over the internet.

But those simple terms don’t suggest the impact that MOOCs could have on traditional higher education, including design education. Udacity is joined by Coursera (also ex-Stanford), Khan Academy, edX (MIT/Harvard) and many others. They claim millions of users; already more than attend traditional universities in the USA, in fact. (Coursera alone has over four million enrolled on courses.) Bill Gates has called Khan Academy the future of education. Thrun believes that within 50 years there will only be 10 institutions in the world providing higher education (he hopes including Udacity).

(Ah these names. “Coursera.” “Udacity.” They sound like recently-privatised former state assets. I next expect a slew of social media oriented services, with monickers like Smugly and Learnr, Swotly and Examinr, Cramly and Testr.)

Yet what MOOCs essentially do is replace the lowest of the low-hanging-fruits of education – the common or garden lecture. It represents what we call the “jug and mug” approach to learning: the lecturer is the jug, pouring their knowledge into the mug, aka the student. In fact, we know that most lectures bring together bored lecturers with hungover students. (Or indeed vice versa.) You don’t need to watch a Ken Robinson lecture – although you should – to know that this is not what education should be about.

Yet so many education systems are still oriented around the lecture. It is the foundation of timetables, and the lecture theatre still represents the foundations of most contemporary college buildings, spatially. One is probably being constructed right now, somewhere in the world, as you read this.

And that’s a waste, as MOOCs may do lectures much better. This is the component of higher education that the internet will easily swallow. MOOCs are the mp3 of education: the easiest thing to distribute, will be. Just as the mp3 has indeed disrupted the music industry, but not really music, so the MOOCs will remove much of the lecture, but possibly not broader education.

Design helps us understand this. Perhaps there is a reason that the curricula of these services does not feature much design so far. Perhaps predictably, there is a lot of code, and a lot of traditional humanities and science, but little design.

Udacity will shortly start its first ever design course: “The Design Of Everyday Things“, led by Don Norman, the ex-Apple legend, and Coursera’s few design-related courses tend to be at the more analytical end of the scale. In the UK, the Open University, which has been doing this sort of thing since Morris Zapp was just achieving tenure, has a new venture called FutureLearn. It has made some smart acquisitions in terms of team and university partners, but again, there is little or no design there so far.

So, could MOOCs have a role to play here? Is design education just late to this new game? Or does design education simply not fit the MOOC model?

Stefano Mirti’s “Design 101” course, for Iversity via Accademia di Belle Arti in Catania, indicates some of the promise for design education in this medium. Irresistibly Italian in presentation, Design 101 is based around regularly providing challenging briefs of things to make, with Mirti supplying context and inspiration.

And yet despite attempts to fold in collaboration and sharing, it will tend to a solitary pursuit of those exercises. At least currently. The whole point of MOOCs – one of their core values – is that they are *not* social and collaborative. Their dematerialised and dislocated state means they fit into your schedule, but in doing so, it cannot – by definition – bring you together with people at the same time and in the same space.

Design and architecture education however is, I believe, more than ever about collaboration, on working through holistic projects together, face to face, in transdisciplinary teams, learning through doing on real projects with real clients. While digital tools can support this, affording some new patterns of activity, the pull back to the physical, embodied and genuinely social is profound, particularly as systems and outcomes become more complex, more entwined, more hybridised. Schools and research centres like Strelka, CIID, Sandberg Instituut or the work we’re doing at Fabrica, are exploring exactly this, as post-institutional learning environments.

It’s difficult to see how MOOCs will really shift that aspect of design education.

The great graphic designer and typographer Erik Spiekermann once said: “You can teach yourself everything there is to be learned by observing, asking, taking things apart and putting them back together again. Teachers can help with that process as long as they stay credible. The only way to achieve that is to keep on learning themselves.”

MOOCs will not force teachers to keep learning; rather, they may encourage lecturers to constantly refine their delivery, their execution, to obsessively watch their pay-per-view ‘lecture stats’ just as most animators now lie awake at night dreaming of a Vimeo Staff Pick.

Yet if MOOCs enable us to select the very best of “jug and mug” mode education, it means only a few have to do it, after all. We could collate a “watch-list” of classic lectures – Philip Johnson on Le Corbusier, Richard Sennett on the city, Paola Antonelli on Italian design – and distribute that. There are thousands of possibilities, as TED, in its own yawningly banal way, has illustrated so far.

Much of the theory of design might be conveyed via MOOCs, and then reinforced in practice. MOOCs might free up teachers – and space – for crits, tutorials, studios and the other high value physical exchanges that cannot be distributed so easily.

Morris Zapp: “‘It’s huge, heavy, monolithic. It weighs about a billion tons. You can feel the weight of those buildings, pressing down the earth. Look at the Library – built like a huge warehouse. The whole place says, ‘We have learning stored here; if you want it, you’ve got to come inside and get it.’ Well, that doesn’t apply any more.” (Lodge, 1984)

That may be so, but the thing is, Morris, that space is important for other reasons. Design education in particular needs space to explore, to pin up and tear down, to drill holes in, to knock about.

I recently visited RMIT’s new Design Hub building in Melbourne, designed by Sean Godsell Architects, and came away impressed and dismayed in equal measure. It’s a beautiful jewel-box that is, at this early stage, not working. Over-designed and over-finished as it is, it will do little to encourage the interdisciplinary research work it supposed to afford. It too needs knocking about a bit.

For me, the ideal design education space – showing my prejudices, here – looks more like the wonderfully messy SCI-Arc in Los Angeles or Royal College of Art in London. The RCA, especially in Tony Dunne’s Design Interactions space, can sometimes feel like some kind of gloriously generative cyberpunk favela.

How will MOOCs fit alongside this? Or put it another way, what do you think the student bar at Coursera is like?

The huge opportunity behind non-certified, transdisciplinary learning is that it can be tuned to the 21st century’s needs, rather than the last century’s. Collaborative project-based learning ought to be intrinsically holistic in nature, with tangible outcomes. This is how design is practiced, and this is how design ought to be practiced in the context of learning. Putting lectures online is really just putting 20th century education on the internet, and there must be more to 21st century education than that.

Morris Zapp: “As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters – the global campus.” (Lodge, 1984)

Sidetracked by skirt and semiotics, Morris Zapp was too lazy to ask the big questions, even as he stumbled into the “global campus”. But MOOCs do give us that opportunity to ask those big questions. The fact that design education is so far largely untouched by MOOCs et al does not mean it won’t be. The internet transforms almost everything; there is no reason it won’t reorient design education. The question is how.


Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

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“Product design should do so much more than encourage consumption”

"Product design should do so much more than encourage consumption"

Opinion: in his latest column, Kieran Long argues that product designers should learn from architects and tackle civic issues like surveillance and security rather than “hide in their studios making something lovely.”


When was the last time you met a designer whose work is about justice or love, or truth? Universal values, ones that bear on the meaning of our lives, seem to be beyond the creative register of most designers of objects and things. In product design, I’m struck by how small the concerns of its practitioners tend to be.

I began thinking about this while teaching at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department in 2011/12 with the designer Sofia Lagerkvist from Front Design. Our students were great and we loved working there, but when we set a brief that asked our students to work in north-east London libraries after the riots, there was noticeable resistance. There was a sense of some (not all) students imagining that this was not what they came to the RCA to do, and that it was not what they wanted their careers to be.

The conflict was certainly my fault. I found it difficult to have this conversation with them, because I’d never encountered this line of thinking in many years of teaching in architecture schools. It seemed self evident to me that such a brief was valuable. Architects do actually spend time thinking about a higher meaning for their work beyond the commercial and outside the simple “I like/I don’t” like paradigm of individual taste.

For architects, their education (ideally) gives students a sense of certain (yet often very vague) responsibility to the city itself and therefore that the citizen is important.

Architects will almost always speak about their higher role if given the chance: about their responsibility to provide a setting for civic life, to make a place meaningful for people and so on. Our cities might not be better because of it, but the conversation is there.

I’m not saying architects are uniquely civic minded in their work, either. We can think of plenty of works of digital design (games, websites, even interfaces) that take as their themes issues of access, citizenship, or even life or death. Graphic design does, too, through political posters and publications and many practitioners’ interest in the graphic culture of the streets.

In product design, however, sometimes it feels that its most important practitioners just want to be left alone to whittle away in their studios making something lovely, periodically being wheeled out to tell the story of their whittling.

The obvious retort to this is probably that product design is indeed the field most in bed with fast-moving consumer capitalism. The Ron Arads and so on of this world give salesmen new, beautiful and desirable things to sell, and that machine is necessary. Also, the media around design – with its systems of awards and juries and the institutions (like mine) that honour the good and great – are not all that interested in the world of design beyond the decorative. Honourable exceptions include the work of people like Justin McGuirk in the Domus of recent years. In the main, the role models we promote are those engaged with consumer products.

I know many designers whose work articulates our everyday experience in ways that are meaningful, that help us to understand and enjoy our daily lives. It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities. I mean, I hate the yellow plastic pad that I have to slide my Oyster Card up against when I get on the tube in the morning, and the ugly yellow system of handles and railings on London buses. I hate the incompetent way that cathedrals integrate gift shops into their lobbies and the excessive bulk of the common-or-garden wheelie bin.

More important, though, is whether there are any Dezeen readers whose work involves designing bits of the Ring of Steel terrorist defences around the City of London, or truckproof bollards, crowd-management barriers, riot-police shields, the casings for CCTV cameras, or the plastic spikes that they stick on top of the CCTV cameras to stop birds shitting on them.

The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens.

Architects are often thought of as terrible snobs, but loads of them spend their days thanklessly trying to redesign low-cost housing for grasping, couldn’t-care-less developers or vainly trying to improve the standard of big-shed retail. Perhaps product designers dislike getting their hands dirty.

If the best we can say of a designed object is that they people can either buy it or not buy it, then the piece is nothing. It is worse than nothing, it just exists to make the wheels of a corporation turn, to encourage consumption and so on. Let’s be honest about that. I know that we all depend on this system working, it pays most of our wages etc etc, but let’s not pretend it’s why we get out of bed in the morning. Design could be so much more important than that. I just wonder if designers have the passion and desire to go out and design the things that define our lives as citizens and human beings.


Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

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than encourage consumption”
appeared first on Dezeen.