Design, ideas and other flotsam
Transmission #2
Hello. Welcome.
This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Designer at Craig Walker and lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
This is the second in what I hope will be an ongoing newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way. My intention was to make this fortnightly, but here we are, a week later! Be careful what you wish for, that’s all I can say.
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Design
Solarpunk: a radical optimism
Jennifer Hamilton, The Conversation
We’re generally much less keen on Utopian visions these days. But I finally found one that I can get behind. It’s been dubbed ‘Solarpunk’, and it envisions a world of urban metropolises brimming with foliage, solar panels, wind turbines and all kinds of eco-futurist lifestyle accoutrements. It’s hard to imagine a world where we’ve actually solved some of the climate challenges we face. But perhaps that’s where art can shine a path?
See also: Ollie Cotsaftis’s rousing call to re-define our relationships with nature, and what I thought was an awe-inspiring piece of work at the NGV Triennial, filmmaker/architect Liam Young’s Planet City.
Will Ikea’s recycling scheme really make it greener?
Guardian
IKEA cops a lot of flack. Some people see its extreme focus on low-cost and construction efficiency as kind of fast-food furniture: cheap, easy and unhealthy in the long run. Having work with IKEA on several occasions over the years, I take a different view. IKEA has a deeply humanistic philosophy to the democratisation of design, and are now turning their substantial operational and R&D heft towards tackling the overall sustainability of their furniture. They’re setting ambitious targets for net-positive emissions by 2030, and are making real steps towards a system that supports more circular economy. Let’s hope that others follow their lead.
There’s also an inspiring and fairly detailed chat with Jesper Brodin, their CEO, on Azeem Azaar’s Exponential View podcast if you’re curious as to how they’re managing it.
Ideas
2021 Predictions: The Great Unbundling & The Great Dispersion
Benedict Evans and Scott Galloway
When two commentators with extremely contrasting styles both are saying the same thing, it’s perhaps worth sitting up and listening.
What the mild-mannered, always insightful Benedict Evans and the bombastic, iconoclastic Prof G (Scott Galloway, to his friends) have identified is that COVID has sped up a range of trends that have to do with the way we access our goods and services, and, now that we all a) have smartphones and b) are pretty much on the internet all the time, that a lot of established business models are fraying as customers go straight to the source.
If you like your analysis with charts and a clipped British accent, watch Ben Evans’ Tech in 2021 presentation.
Or, if you like your sugar with coffee and cream, maybe Prof G’s podcast 2021 Predictions: The Great Dispersion is more to your taste.
Either way, they’re both great. If you really like charts (and Ben Evans), check out this podcast where he talks about how he makes his charts tell great stories.
Quotes
The recent Australia/Invasion Day debate prompted me to seek out 1835 by James Boyce, a history of the founding of Melbourne, Australia. There is a grim inevitability to reading what happens when the indigenous inhabitants face an influx of European land-grabbers, but this paragraph really brought it home just how quickly their world changed, irretrievably, and for ever: “…the Aborigines were largely dispossessed of a territory bigger than England in just five years.”
Other
Man makes his own covid vaccine out of stuff he orders over the internet, mainly from Amazon (Cost = <$1000). Once it gets this easy, folks, you know that bio-design is the next big design paradigm.
A great post from shit-stirrer par-excellence, Tom Goodwin, arguing that companies need to stop hiding behind the visage of ‘digital transformation’ and actually get real about innovating.
Unmasking music industry myths: squabbling about the distribution of streaming royalties. (TLDR: Artists are still getting screwed)
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