{"id":1306,"date":"2015-04-15T09:38:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T09:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2019-10-29T14:22:29","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T14:22:29","slug":"1306","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1306","title":{"rendered":"Designs with the world on their shoulders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PITCHAfrica's<\/a><\/p>\n

For New Scientist<\/em>, 18 April 2015<\/a>: a review of the 2015\u00a0Designs of the Year competition at London’s Design Museum.<\/p>\n

In friendly competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Horace Smith once wrote a poem entitled\u00a0Ozymandias<\/i>. Shelley\u2019s version is the one we remember, but Smith\u2019s is compelling for another reason. He imagines a hunter traipsing through the ruins of a future London. Lighting upon a fragment of a monument, he \u201cstops to guess\/What powerful but unrecorded race\/Once dwelt in that annihilated place\u201d.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Designs of the Year competition<\/a>\u00a0has its monumental entries, but even the most grandiloquent of the 76 nominations at least tips its hat to the idea that the world will not sustain another great ruin, or may end up our next great ruin, unless we respond more cleverly to our environment.<\/p>\n

Jean Nouvel\u2019s One Central Park in Sydney<\/a>, Australia, towers above its architectural competitors, literally. Clad in climbing plants by\u00a0Patrick Blanc<\/a>, the leading designer of vertical gardens, One Central\u2019s overriding purpose seems to be to apologise for its very existence.<\/p>\n

There is even a motorised heliostat mounted on a cantilever near the roof, to erase the building\u2019s shadow. The arrangement looks terrifying in photographs, suggesting the\u00a050-metre-high moon towers<\/a>\u00a0of the 19th century when towns experimented with civic lighting.<\/p>\n

In Ho Chi Minh City, a project called\u00a0House for Trees<\/a>\u00a0eschews apology for action, albeit of a most eccentric sort. Here, high-density living units double as gigantic containers for tropical trees. Come the rains, a sufficient number of these properties could reduce the risk of urban flooding. At least, so claim architects Vo Trong Nghia, although it sounds like special pleading to me \u2013 an alibi for the strange green dream they\u2019re weaving, of wandering lost among giant plant pots.<\/p>\n

Where rains are few, a more down to earth aesthetic holds sway.\u00a0PITCHAfrica\u2019s Waterbank Campus<\/a>\u00a0is a 10-acre school site in Laikipia, Kenya, where 4 acres of irrigated conservation agriculture are fed by 7 low-cost buildings, designed to collect and store what little precipitation there is.<\/p>\n

PITCHAfrica\u2019s vision extends beyond unassuming architecture to provide resources like clean water, food and sanitation on-site for its students, in the hope they will spread the word about how to manage scarce resources at home.<\/p>\n

This vision, of an artificial \u201cecosystem capable of empowering and transforming communities\u201d, is shared by a great many of the show\u2019s \u201ctechnical fix\u201d entries. Take the Blue Diversion toilet. This project, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is an all-in-one sanitation, fertiliser, drinking-water and biogas solution. In this cheap, ugly, blue plastic toilet, nothing is wasted \u2013 not even sunlight; there\u2019s a small solar panel on its roof.<\/p>\n

Other ideas plug in to the smog and mess of cities, and try to make daily life a little more bearable. At the University of Engineering and Technology, Lima, Peru, researchers have invented a billboard that purifies the air in a five-block radius, scrubbing it clean of construction dust and 99 per cent of airborne bacteria \u2013 it would take 1200 trees to do the equivalent work, says the team.<\/p>\n

Another entry,\u00a0The Ocean Cleanup<\/a>, designed by Erwin Zwart with Boyan Slat and Jan de Sonneville, tackles the plastic garbage circulating the world\u2019s oceans. Why not string barriers over the waves to catch the plastic as it moves around? Having raised over U$2 million through crowdfunding, the organisation plans to construct and test large-scale pilot projects.<\/p>\n

This is technical fixery at its purest. It doesn\u2019t prevent the oceans being littered: it is an environmental sticking plaster, permitting us to pursue business as usual. But why should designers have to carry the whole world on their shoulders? Designs like these could be part of a broader, political solution. The Ocean Cleanup\u2019s barriers would be a fitting monument for our descendants to puzzle over.<\/p>\n

Better, of course, to avoid collapse entirely, but it won\u2019t be simple. It is easier for designers to ameliorate or even disguise problems, rather than to address them head on. Two projects built around the food supply demonstrate this neatly.<\/p>\n

Disclosed<\/a>, by Marion Ferrec at the Royal College of Art, in collaboration with Kate Wakely, is a web-based consumer service that allows you to choose products according to your health needs and ethical preferences. Lacking vast wealth, leisure and self-absorption, I won\u2019t be using it.<\/p>\n

But neither am I entirely persuaded by\u00a0Marcel\u2019s humorous campaign<\/a>\u00a0for the French supermarket giant Intermarch\u00e9 \u2013 a series of beautifully photographed imperfect fruits and vegetables. The idea is to shift ridiculous-looking potatoes, hideous oranges and failed lemons onto the consumer, and thereby reduce food waste. But the campaign preserves and reinforces (by price offers) the very distinction between perfect and imperfect produce that caused the problem in the first place.<\/p>\n

It is, frankly, next to impossible to imagine how we get from a wasteful here to a sustainable there \u2013 and for that reason alone, I think Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg\u2019s design fiction\u00a0Designing for the Sixth Extinction<\/a>\u00a0is the poster-child of this year\u2019s competition. Ginsberg has anatomised the ultimate disruptive enterprise, in which \u201cnature is totally industrialized for the benefit of society\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although her fictional synthetic creatures are deliciously creepy (especially the \u201cbiologically-powered mobile soil bioremediation device\u201d) it is her business model of saving our civilisation at the expense of the natural world, while replacing it with something better, that fascinates.<\/p>\n

If Ginsberg\u2019s vision comes to pass, our descendants won\u2019t be able to puzzle at our monuments. Our monuments will be everywhere, all around them, and inside them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For New Scientist, 18 April 2015: a review of the 2015\u00a0Designs of the Year competition at London’s Design Museum. In friendly competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Horace Smith once wrote a poem entitled\u00a0Ozymandias. Shelley\u2019s version is the one … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618,78],"tags":[332,164,165,333,184,232],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-architecture","tag-design","tag-design-fiction","tag-design-museum","tag-futurology","tag-new-scientist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2934,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/2934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}