Financial Times

VISIONS OF THE POST-PANDEMIC HOME

As coronavirus pushes our living spaces to the limit, designers are under pressure to create solutions.

By Helen Barrett Financial Times, 14 August 2020

One February night in Stockholm, a group of critics gathered around two opaque glass rocks presented on separate plinths, each a little bigger than a human hand.

One of the group was told to choose a rock and place a palm over its smooth surface. As a hand came to rest, the rock pulsed with neon light, transforming it from a cold form into something like a human heart. Then, unbidden, so did the second rock.

The Tactus Lamps, designed by Swedish designer Alexander Lervik and unveiled at Stockholm Design Week, were meant to be a simple way to alleviate loneliness. He designed them as a way to stay close to his elderly mother, who lives in the same city but in a different house.

More intuitive and less mechanical than a telephone or video call, one rock sits in her house, one in his, though they work together via a 5G connection anywhere in the world. He touches the rock when he wishes to signal to her that she is in his thoughts, and hers is illuminated. “Sometimes I just want to say, I’m here and I’m thinking of you,” he says.

In February, Lervik’s rocks were diverting prototypes. Six months later, the Tactus Lamps look like an inspired work of design. The project is an example of intuitive homeware for people struggling with intermittent lockdowns. “Of course, Tactus Lamps suit the Covid-19 pandemic very well,” says Lervik.

He is now in talks with manufacturers about producing them at scale, and is also working on a furniture prototype with Finnish company Adea to help people work at home more comfortably, less awkwardly, from sofas and kitchen tables. He expects that to be on sale next year. “They asked me to start only a month after everything closed at the end of March,” he says.

In a matter of months, designers have been forced to rethink work conceived to tackle the problems of one era to solve the problems of another. The design industry is expected to improve lives, now more than ever.

“We are looking at questions like, how do we make a building healthy? How do we keep a person healthy?” says Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, the Seattle-based global practice.

But the design world was largely unprepared for the pandemic, says Ashley Hall, professor of design innovation at the Royal College of Art. That should not have been the case.

“We have known for a long time that pandemics were possible, but somehow it was unthinkable. And so design had not filled that gap. We are responding to a problem rather than forecasting one. We have shifted from waiting for things to go wrong to trying to get ahead and deal with people’s behaviour and expectations.”

This week, Vitra, the German manufacturing company, published a “set of hypotheses” on the future of the home, as living spaces are pushed to the limits.

It is an attempt to set out the problems designers must now solve, pointing out that many of us have spent all our waking hours in the same confined space doing more than it was built to do: full-time jobs, caring for and educating children, cooking and preparing everything we eat, cleaning to high standards, and recuperating.

We learnt that, with the right technology, we could do almost anything within our own four walls — in theory.

The Vitra report proposes a focus on improving homeworking, home-schooling equipment for children and what it calls “broken-plan living”, among other points of pressure. It also predicts that in an era of unsafe public spaces, consumers will demand new and higher standards of aesthetics.

“Crises spark human ingenuity,” says Nora Fehlbaum, Vitra’s chief executive. She points to the Chaise Tout Bois by Jean Prouvé, a wooden chair designed and built for mass production in 1941 in response to a wartime shortage of metal.

But the people who design the products that will solve corona-era problems face different constraints. Kundig says his staff are trying to concentrate on solving residential architecture problems thrown up by lockdown, but it is not easy.

“Design is suffering. It is a collective. We can’t do it digitally, it is not a singular endeavour,” he says. “We are more effective as a group than spread out across the world. You can’t design without experiencing a place, or seeing people use your product in real life.”

Aspects of building design such as free ventilation have suddenly become important to clients, he says. “People want control over windows and room temperature, so they don’t feel cornered. And they maybe want two or three doors to a room rather than just one, so they can adjust to others’ movements.

“These are the things we are thinking about, and we are figuring out. That’s our job now.”

Agility is crucial to design, says Will Howe, director of Map, a London-based studio. “The creative industries require so much collaboration, we use so many forms of physical models. We work in an agile way, we are not linear.”

Unlike in the 1940s, today’s designers have digital technology at their disposal, and it is that focus on agility that has led Howe’s agency to work on technological projects for people “who won’t go back to what they knew before, who have had a taste for a different kind of life”.

International design events, the marketplaces for new ideas, are also trying to adapt. Sanna Gebeyehu of Stockholm Design Week explains how, in 2021, exhibition rules will be altered to encourage small-scale designers to take part. All exhibitors are being asked to keep presentation spending to a minimum. “It’s solidarity — we need to do this together,” says Gebeyehu.

Fehlbaum says Vitra is working on new typologies in furniture and product design, to be unveiled in October. Products that improve domestic acoustics and “retreat options” — perhaps furniture to help people hide from their families — are among its priorities.

Hall and his students, meanwhile, are turning their attention to hygiene. “How do we work with different populations and different cultural preferences to change behaviour on washing hands or social distancing — in a way that is enabled, rather than mandatory? That is our challenge now,” he says.

Not every design effort is likely to work, or is even serious. Adam Nathaniel Furman, an independent London-based artist and designer known for his work in the public realm, including enormous thank-you flags for streets in Belgravia to mark London’s exit from lockdown, warns against “the random deluge of speculative designs” on renderings pumped out by agencies: Plexiglas dining shields for restaurants, self-sterilising bodysuits, social-distance “wearables” and the like.

Lervik, though, is serious. He is looking to the future, and the iterative challenge of making furniture fit for a new era of homeworking — tables, chairs and desks to function as we need them to. What is his biggest problem?

“There is no regulation at home,” he says. “Furniture for offices is subject to regulation so the human body is not destroyed, but at home most people sit at the kitchen table and use a regular chair. So, my problem is: how do I take things already developed and bring them into private homes?”

The idea of “dominetics” — working from home supported by technology — has been around for more than 50 years. Alan Kiron, a staff scientist at the US Patent Office, proposed the concept in an article for The Washington Post in 1969. In 2020, we often found that our homes were not ready. More intense use revealed their shortcomings.

Will Howe of Map design studio (pictured above) is interested in intuitive technology, and his team is working on ways to improve virtual work meetings conducted from home. These, he says, are awkward: stilted, disjointed and regarded as a barrier to random encounters that can lead to creative breakthroughs. It is hard to work closely with someone when you cannot make eye contact, for example.

Howe predicts an end to a reliance on the home laptop camera, saying “the fixed camera will be blown apart”.

“You may see more ambient technology, where we are able to read a situation by observing a series of subtle pointers. The answer may be multiple cameras focused on homeworkers to support their different needs in a more natural way.”

“Or maybe they have sensors analysing their gestures and body language, communicating to colleagues how they are feeling and what they are doing.” This may sound intrusive, but it is based on existing technology and improved versions of conference cameras have already entered the market.

Before the pandemic, Howe was working with a leading tech company on a project to enhance remote interaction where people could work from home without being tethered to a screen.

“Ambient technology to get people off the phone and communicate in more subtle signifiers; more playful, less painful.” Now that project is accelerated, he says, and has had to be adapted at speed. HB

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/6ec8b7bb-1525-4cf4-8e7f-5c2f0f776124

VISIONS OF THE POST-PANDEMIC HOME

As coronavirus pushes our living spaces to the limit, designers are under pressure to create solutions.

By Helen Barrett Financial Times, 14 August 2020

One February night in Stockholm, a group of critics gathered around two opaque glass rocks presented on separate plinths, each a little bigger than a human hand.

One of the group was told to choose a rock and place a palm over its smooth surface. As a hand came to rest, the rock pulsed with neon light, transforming it from a cold form into something like a human heart. Then, unbidden, so did the second rock.

The Tactus Lamps, designed by Swedish designer Alexander Lervik and unveiled at Stockholm Design Week, were meant to be a simple way to alleviate loneliness. He designed them as a way to stay close to his elderly mother, who lives in the same city but in a different house.

More intuitive and less mechanical than a telephone or video call, one rock sits in her house, one in his, though they work together via a 5G connection anywhere in the world. He touches the rock when he wishes to signal to her that she is in his thoughts, and hers is illuminated. “Sometimes I just want to say, I’m here and I’m thinking of you,” he says.

In February, Lervik’s rocks were diverting prototypes. Six months later, the Tactus Lamps look like an inspired work of design. The project is an example of intuitive homeware for people struggling with intermittent lockdowns. “Of course, Tactus Lamps suit the Covid-19 pandemic very well,” says Lervik.

He is now in talks with manufacturers about producing them at scale, and is also working on a furniture prototype with Finnish company Adea to help people work at home more comfortably, less awkwardly, from sofas and kitchen tables. He expects that to be on sale next year. “They asked me to start only a month after everything closed at the end of March,” he says.

In a matter of months, designers have been forced to rethink work conceived to tackle the problems of one era to solve the problems of another. The design industry is expected to improve lives, now more than ever.

“We are looking at questions like, how do we make a building healthy? How do we keep a person healthy?” says Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, the Seattle-based global practice.

But the design world was largely unprepared for the pandemic, says Ashley Hall, professor of design innovation at the Royal College of Art. That should not have been the case.

“We have known for a long time that pandemics were possible, but somehow it was unthinkable. And so design had not filled that gap. We are responding to a problem rather than forecasting one. We have shifted from waiting for things to go wrong to trying to get ahead and deal with people’s behaviour and expectations.”

This week, Vitra, the German manufacturing company, published a “set of hypotheses” on the future of the home, as living spaces are pushed to the limits.

It is an attempt to set out the problems designers must now solve, pointing out that many of us have spent all our waking hours in the same confined space doing more than it was built to do: full-time jobs, caring for and educating children, cooking and preparing everything we eat, cleaning to high standards, and recuperating.

We learnt that, with the right technology, we could do almost anything within our own four walls — in theory.

The Vitra report proposes a focus on improving homeworking, home-schooling equipment for children and what it calls “broken-plan living”, among other points of pressure. It also predicts that in an era of unsafe public spaces, consumers will demand new and higher standards of aesthetics.

“Crises spark human ingenuity,” says Nora Fehlbaum, Vitra’s chief executive. She points to the Chaise Tout Bois by Jean Prouvé, a wooden chair designed and built for mass production in 1941 in response to a wartime shortage of metal.

But the people who design the products that will solve corona-era problems face different constraints. Kundig says his staff are trying to concentrate on solving residential architecture problems thrown up by lockdown, but it is not easy.

“Design is suffering. It is a collective. We can’t do it digitally, it is not a singular endeavour,” he says. “We are more effective as a group than spread out across the world. You can’t design without experiencing a place, or seeing people use your product in real life.”

Aspects of building design such as free ventilation have suddenly become important to clients, he says. “People want control over windows and room temperature, so they don’t feel cornered. And they maybe want two or three doors to a room rather than just one, so they can adjust to others’ movements.

“These are the things we are thinking about, and we are figuring out. That’s our job now.”

Agility is crucial to design, says Will Howe, director of Map, a London-based studio. “The creative industries require so much collaboration, we use so many forms of physical models. We work in an agile way, we are not linear.”

Unlike in the 1940s, today’s designers have digital technology at their disposal, and it is that focus on agility that has led Howe’s agency to work on technological projects for people “who won’t go back to what they knew before, who have had a taste for a different kind of life”.

International design events, the marketplaces for new ideas, are also trying to adapt. Sanna Gebeyehu of Stockholm Design Week explains how, in 2021, exhibition rules will be altered to encourage small-scale designers to take part. All exhibitors are being asked to keep presentation spending to a minimum. “It’s solidarity — we need to do this together,” says Gebeyehu.

Fehlbaum says Vitra is working on new typologies in furniture and product design, to be unveiled in October. Products that improve domestic acoustics and “retreat options” — perhaps furniture to help people hide from their families — are among its priorities.

Hall and his students, meanwhile, are turning their attention to hygiene. “How do we work with different populations and different cultural preferences to change behaviour on washing hands or social distancing — in a way that is enabled, rather than mandatory? That is our challenge now,” he says.

Not every design effort is likely to work, or is even serious. Adam Nathaniel Furman, an independent London-based artist and designer known for his work in the public realm, including enormous thank-you flags for streets in Belgravia to mark London’s exit from lockdown, warns against “the random deluge of speculative designs” on renderings pumped out by agencies: Plexiglas dining shields for restaurants, self-sterilising bodysuits, social-distance “wearables” and the like.

Lervik, though, is serious. He is looking to the future, and the iterative challenge of making furniture fit for a new era of homeworking — tables, chairs and desks to function as we need them to. What is his biggest problem?

“There is no regulation at home,” he says. “Furniture for offices is subject to regulation so the human body is not destroyed, but at home most people sit at the kitchen table and use a regular chair. So, my problem is: how do I take things already developed and bring them into private homes?”

The idea of “dominetics” — working from home supported by technology — has been around for more than 50 years. Alan Kiron, a staff scientist at the US Patent Office, proposed the concept in an article for The Washington Post in 1969. In 2020, we often found that our homes were not ready. More intense use revealed their shortcomings.

Will Howe of Map design studio (pictured above) is interested in intuitive technology, and his team is working on ways to improve virtual work meetings conducted from home. These, he says, are awkward: stilted, disjointed and regarded as a barrier to random encounters that can lead to creative breakthroughs. It is hard to work closely with someone when you cannot make eye contact, for example.

Howe predicts an end to a reliance on the home laptop camera, saying “the fixed camera will be blown apart”.

“You may see more ambient technology, where we are able to read a situation by observing a series of subtle pointers. The answer may be multiple cameras focused on homeworkers to support their different needs in a more natural way.”

“Or maybe they have sensors analysing their gestures and body language, communicating to colleagues how they are feeling and what they are doing.” This may sound intrusive, but it is based on existing technology and improved versions of conference cameras have already entered the market.

Before the pandemic, Howe was working with a leading tech company on a project to enhance remote interaction where people could work from home without being tethered to a screen.

“Ambient technology to get people off the phone and communicate in more subtle signifiers; more playful, less painful.” Now that project is accelerated, he says, and has had to be adapted at speed. HB

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/6ec8b7bb-1525-4cf4-8e7f-5c2f0f776124