Opinion: a pizza crust stuffed with a hot dog could be the ultimate expression of contemporary design culture, suggests Sam Jacob in this week's opinion column.

If this is all that's left for design to do on this earth then maybe we are finally fulfilling that quaint Victorian statement that everything that can be invented has been invented.

That's the second thought I had after seeing the latest product out of the gate from Domino's secret diabolical research facility: the Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza. The first thought was where I was going to vomit.

Think of it for a second. Turn the idea over in your mind slowly: a pizza whose crust contains a hot dog. Yes, a sausage that loops around a pizza's circumference like a mechanically-recovered meat Large Hadron Collider.

Crusts, of course, have troubled pizza makers for years. To the volume pizza industry crusts are dead air, the unfortunate bready by-product of the pizza-making process. Barren, boring margins to the infinite possibilities of a pizza's surface daubed with cheese, tomato, pepperoni, chicken tikka and so on.

Previous attempts to transform these tasteless terrains have included stuffing them with cheese (acceptable in my book, at least in principle, because it's just a rejigging of certifiable pizza ingredients) and so-called "crust-less" pizzas (weird, like a spineless book or a hairless cat). Other tactics have included transforming the pizza base into a sandwich of discs glued together with a garlic flavour emulsion (frankly revolting and a thankfully short-lived experiment).

But this ring of meat takes the biscuit. The Hot Dog Stuffed Crust is a fast food crossing of the streams, a hybridised foodstuff too far. But don't blame Domino's. It was apparently Pizza Hut who first introduced it. Domino's version just ups the ante with mustard already lining the orbital sausage cavity. Pizza Hut has fought back with more innovation: the Hot Dog Pizza Bites Pizza: "pull-apart crust with 28 succulent mini hot dog bites, packed with delicious flavour" (in case you needed further explanation).

We might be appalled by the fact that this ever got off the drawing board and onto the back of a delivery moped driving around the very same streets that you and I walk. But I think I'm not alone in also secretly applauding the sheer ingenuity of this foul invention.

Let's suspend judgement for a moment. For, as revolting as it may be, the Hot Dog Stuffed Pizza Crust represents a form of design thinking. That is to say, it isn't a one-off incident but a product of the zeitgeist. It's something that could simply not have happened say, 30 years ago. The HDSCP emerges out of a culture that we are all part of, that we all participate in, that we all contribute to. Frightening as it may be, all of us are responsible for the existence of the Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza.

Here are some of the things that I would argue enable humanity to conceive of the HDSCP; its cultural ingredients, in other words. Third Way politics that suggested you could be both left and right at the same time without being either. Hacking culture. Surrealism. Postmodernism (which might problematise the very idea of "pizza" and "hot dog" in the first place).

Robert Venturi (a better example of "both/and" you’d be hard pushed to find). Advertising. Pornography. Swiss Army knives. Photoshop. The convergence of uses that electronics has delivered since the digital watch first gave us a clock that was also a calculator (i.e. there's not much ground to travel between the idea of a phone + camera to a pizza + hot dog).

All these phenomena (and many more) change the way in which we think. They alter our expectation of things, what we want them to do and to be. Design is something animated by forces outside of itself, shaped by the broad culture within which it practises. Objects, much as we'd like them to, can no longer be simple, natural or authentic because of the sheer complexity of contemporary production and consumption.

Much like food itself, the sensations of simplicity, naturalness and authenticity can only be created with spectacular and concentrated effort. The cult of the natural – so understandable a yearning in the face of things like the HDSCP – is as synthetic as everything else.

The Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza might be a revolting thought, but it is also an object that crystallises a trope of contemporary design culture. Its appallingness has a purity to it, a clarity that reveals tendencies that often lurk below the surface of design, hidden by good taste and convincing rhetoric.

If I were helping build the Design Museum's new collection and wanted the object ne plus ultra of 2013, it would be this. An object so completely of its moment that if it was all that was left of civilisation, future archeologists could decode the entire socioeconomic structure of our society.

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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is a product of the zeitgeist" appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: as the Bank of England unveils the design of its new £5 note, Sam Jacob ponders the historic and cultural symbolism of money in this week's opinion column.

Last week the Bank of England announced its new £5 note. In 2016 Elizabeth Fry (don't worry, I had to look her up too) will be replaced by a new design with Winston Churchill's jowly boat race plastered all over the great British Pam Shriver.

Of course, we need new notes. Money gets worn out. It gets handled, dragged out of pockets, shoved in purses, rolled up, folded, scrawled on and so on. And as forgery gets smarter, the anti-forgery devices incorporated into currency need to evolve. But the changing cast of characters that play across our national currency also provide a portrait of the nation at any given moment.

The design of currency is then a technical, cultural and conceptual project. Money first is a representation of value, a kind of floating signifier of the value it represents. It's both the value and the representation of that value simultaneously and locks value into its representation through the steps it takes to be unforgeable.

While performing these complex sleights of hand and technical feats, money also acts as a piece of national pageantry. It sits amongst the accoutrements of state that include the symbols and bureaucratic paraphernalia of a state, somewhere between a flag and a driving licence.

We know that money – as in coins and notes – isn't really real. It's just a physical manifestation of an abstract value. It is, in the great phrasing of a US customs form, a 'monetary instrument'. Monetary value itself is an invisible entity that can leap from one state to another with ease. It slips in and out of substances as though it were a restless supernatural spirit.

We know the story of how money developed this supernatural power: how coins began as the thing of value itself, as lumps of value, actual pieces of gold for example, unitised. We know that this equivalence of substance to value shifted so that the coin referred to a value that was now held elsewhere. We know too how notes became a way of referring to value by acting as a promise that the actual material would one day change hands. And we know that this act of referred value came to mean something so significant that it gained a life of its own – the sign became a thing in itself. Money flipped. It changed from being the substance that contained the value to a symbol of that value, from the thing to a sign.

As objects, coins and notes are pitted by the residues of this history and scored by the presence of value. Their design is a record of the ways in which value is manufactured and protected.

Its surfaces construct the idea of value. They are embellished with symbols of nationhood, state, monarchy and culture that derive from the arcania of heraldic design, a language that links it to the sovereignty and government, symbolically tied to economic mechanisms that underpin the idea of money. Equally they protect value through the intricate lacings of so many security systems: inks and colours, holograms and watermarks, foil strips and paper, the fritted edges that once foiled those who would have shaved off slivers of gold.

Filigree lines loop back on themselves with almost psychotic intensity, so fine that you can zoom in and in. Images break down into patterns like fingerprints as though money wasn't something you could actually draw with a line, only suggestively sketch. Its tentative quality is a matter of anti-counterfeiting but also perhaps an expression of the immateriality of value, graphically on the verge of immateriality, a point cloud that can only approximate the thing it is trying to represent.

Money is covered with historical reference. Maybe it's the same kind of validation that banks once used when they were built in the form of Classical temples: historical reference somehow conferring significance. Churchill's image on a bank note then transfers his significance, his personality and historical narrative not only onto money, but into it too. It works as a form of cultural guarantee. Euro notes too seem to have the whole history of Europe backing them. They have images of bridges, arches and gateways that look quintessentially European. Except, look closer: that's not actually a Rialto or Pont de Neuilly! The landmarks depicted are not real things or places, they are things designed to evoke the sensation of European history and culture. They are imaginary renditions of Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Modern. It's the story of Europe told through an imaginary architecture.

One can imagine the extreme lengths designers and their Eurocrat clients went to avoid national favouritism, to tell an inclusive story that all of the EU could feel part of. But one wonders if they also considered the narrative they were writing through this imaginary, non-existent Europa-heritage. For example, did they think of the implications of using essentially faked-up historical images as the face of money? As a thing that spends so much of its effort - so much of its surface and material quality - being authentic and non-fake?

As an aside: oh how I'd love to build full-size replicas of these imaginary historical sites - a version of fake Europe so real that it would be indistinguishable from actual Europe as precipitated by, y'know, real events and people (aka, history).

The aesthetic of money remains distinct even as it intersects with more contemporary design sensibilities like the recent British coins that fragmented the Royal Shield head over varied denomination coins if you arranged them in the right way, or Hong Kong dollars with their see-through plastic.

Maybe the future of money is Bitcoin, the digital currency based on open source cryptographic protocols that has recently been in the headlines for the volatile fluctuations in its value. Bitcoin has internalised the visual and material security systems of physical currency into the complexity of its algorithmic generation - the so called 'mining' of Bitcoins. Its value is (if I understand it correctly) related to the computational labour of manufacturing it. Which seems far more appropriate, far more accurate a description of what contemporary money actually is than being linked to gold reserves.

Right now Bitcoin is really only useful for buying sandwiches in Kreuzberg or illegal substances online. But perhaps it provides a far better, far more realistic depiction of value than those anachronistic notes and coins.

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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of national pageantry" appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports from Milan design week, where he finds a city seemingly determined to make life unbearable for visitors.

Grey skies over grey buildings make for a grey mood. I’m in Milan for the annual design fair and it’s impossible not to be affected by the miserable weather. But the unseasonal chill that has descended on this dour northern Italian city seems to be a metaphor for the fortunes of the world’s biggest design gathering.

The Fuori Salone events around town feel much less busy than in recent years. You can walk down Via Tortona without running the risk of being crushed to death. Exhibition spaces are unfilled. Taxis are plentiful. I’ve met people who’ve found hotel rooms at the last minute - and not been ripped off. All these things would have been unthinkable in previous years.

There’s also little sense of the excitement of past years when Twitter, SMS and Bar Basso would be buzzing with hot tips and must-see recommendations. As one designer said to me the other night: “It must be a bad year – Alice Rawsthorn has hardly tweeted anything”.

It’s not surprising, since Europe – and Italy in particular – is mired in a seemingly endless economic crisis and the Milanese design brands that form the fair’s backbone are suffering. None will admit it openly but I’ve heard talk of four-day weeks, extended summer shut-downs and mothballed research and development centres.

The Milanese are masters of surface confidence – whenever I’ve asked senior figures about their company’s fortunes, the answer has always been a variation of the conspiratorial stock reply: “We’re doing well, but our competitors are finding things very difficult.”

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile (the official fair held in a vast Fiera Milano exhibition centre on the edge of the city) has dealt with the tough conditions by pretending they don’t exist, hilariously plastering Milan in 2009 with banners declaring “Crisis? What crisis? Salone is here!”

But the arrogance and swagger of previous years has finally ebbed, and more than one local has nervously mentioned last September’s article by Julie Lasky in the New York Times, which declared that London had usurped Milan as the world’s design capital.

I don’t (yet) agree with Lasky on this point and nor do any of the senior designers I’ve spoken to in Milan this week. For them, it’s still the paramount get-together of the year and the place where the key product launches take place. They love the city and desperately want it to thrive. Milan’s sheer size and heritage remain unparalleled. The Salone itself gets over 300,000 visitors and citywide an estimated half a million people are involved in the week in one way or another.

Milan practically invented the contemporary furniture industry in the second half of the last century and the Salone, established in 1961, has long been the definitive fair. This dominance stems from the network of family-run companies, prodigious home-grown design talents and highly skilled artisans who collaboratively turned Milan into the furniture design and production capital of the world in the post-war era.

Yet towards the end of the twentieth century the city’s stock of great designers mysteriously began to peter out – Sottsass, Castiglioni and their ilk left few protégés of note – and Milanese companies instead turned to foreign designers to design their products and give them marketing cachet. This has led to the curious situation today where rival Milanese furniture companies work with the same promiscuous pool of international names, resulting in product portfolios that are often indistinguishable. It’s hard to think of another industry where brands would allow their identities to be blurred in this way.

Now the companies themselves seem to be under threat from more adventurous overseas operations that are making the running on their home turf. The most impressive individual show this year is the vast, lavish, recession-defying installation by Dutch brand Moooi. The most innovative new players over the past few years have been the Dutch-run Ventura Lambrate district and the MOST exhibition at the city’s science museum instigated by British designer Tom Dixon (and this year sponsored by US online retailer Fab.com). Unlike his Italian counterparts, Dixon understands the digital forces that are changing the way design is manufactured, marketed and sold.

But the thing that most threatens Milan is Milan itself. The city treats fair visitors with contempt, allowing hotels to more than double their rates during the week, fleecing exhibitors with permits, bamboozling them with red tape (such as the Byzantine impossibility of getting a licence to sell products direct to the public) and doing nothing to help baffled foreigners negotiate the arcane taxi-booking system or the complex public transport network.

There is little evidence of curation across the city, with good shows mixed up with dreadful ones. Cosmit, the company that owns and operates the Salone, has appeared to lose touch with reality in recent years, commissioning lavish cultural spectacles in the city or organising sprawling press trips that had no relevance to the business of selling chairs and lights.

Through greed and mismanagement, the Tortona district managed to turn the most vibrant core of the fair into an overpriced, over-branded and overcrowded hell. The other districts and the Salone itself seemingly refuse to communicate with each other. There is no overarching organisation linking everything together, no decent free guidebook (the ubiquitous Interni guide is a navigational disaster) or map  (although our digital one is pretty darned good) and – astonishingly - no agreed brand name for the week. Is it Milan Design Week? Milan Furniture Fair? I Saloni? The Fiera? Nobody knows.

Milan’s hotels and exhibition venues appear to treat the internet as a nuisance, making it as difficult as possible for visitors to get online. Its design brands don't seem to be capable of printing enough press packs to last beyond the first day or setting up a functional and up-to-date online presence. "How can they produce such beautiful furniture yet do everything else so badly?" exclaimed an exasperated American architect over dinner earlier this week.

Most incredibly of all, the Salone doesn’t even have a website, but rather piggybacks on the domain of its Cosmit parent, which provides little useful information beyond the dates of the fair. How can the world’s biggest design fair not have its own website?

In short, to visit Milan during the Salone is to experience the antithesis of design. Given the sheer hassle and expense of attending, it’s little wonder people are staying away. Compare that to London, which has brought all its sprawling September design events under the London Design Festival banner with a clear identity, website, guide and purpose. London is ten times the size of Milan but the London Design Festival is ten times easier to comprehend. If I were a rookie foreign design journalist trying to choose between the two cities, I know which I’d go for.

Another fair that understands the importance of the visitor experience is Kortrijk's Interieur design biennale, which last year made huge strides towards treating that experience as a design task. "I sometimes get a bit frustrated coming back from Milan and feeling that even though I travelled a lot, I missed a lot," its curator Lowie Vermeersch told me, pointing out the paradox that as a design fair, it "is not designed." But Milan doesn't seem to be listening.

The one glimmer of light in Milan this year seems to be the Salone itself, which has been packed with visitors after several years in which it felt like an increasingly optional sideshow to the events in the city. Besides being under a roof and therefore offering one of the few warm and dry experiences in town, this was surely helped by the common-sense decision to at last present a high-profile and relevant design-related exhibition – Jean Nouvel’s Project: Office for Living show – at the fair itself, rather than in a remote palazzo.

Last December, Cosmit appointed Claudio Luti - the savvy chairman and owner of thriving Milanese design brand Kartell - as its president and the word is that further long-overdue changes are afoot. Perhaps the next thing Luti should do is put together a high-powered Milanese design delegation, and visit London.

Top: photograph by Nicole Marnati at Ventura Lambrate 2013

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the antithesis of design" appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in his latest Opinion column, Sam Jacob argues that the UK government's plans to extend the copyright term for design "protect existing interests instead of promoting innovation".

Later this year the UK government plans to change copyright law for design, extending the period of protection for designs deemed “artistic” until 70 years after the death of the creator. In essence, that means the entire oeuvre of canonical twentieth century design. Wrapped up in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill is legislation that will have a profound effect on design culture.

Currently, design for artistic works, which may well include prototype models of design icons, has copyright protection in the UK from “the end of the period of 25 years from the end of the calendar year in which such articles are first marketed”. That means that a designer of an artistic work has a 25-year monopoly to exploit the design before it passes into the public domain.

That means there is nothing legally wrong with you or I knocking up our own version of a Le Corbusier lounger or an Eames chair and there are, of course, many replicas on the market now - though you should get them while you can before the ERRB becomes law. There’s nothing wrong (legally) with a company producing exact replicas and selling them far cheaper than Knoll, Vitra or Herman Miller’s “authentic” replicas.

Thinking about the issue of copyright in other industries is illuminating. For example, the big pharmaceutical companies rely on the protection of intellectual property to give them a period of monopoly in which they can recoup (and obviously exceed, sometimes many times over) the vast sums they invest in research and testing.

Here, intellectual property acts as a motivator for development, offering a reward for the risk and experimentation that the companies take on up-front. Even then, the period of protection is short – 20 years from the date of application for the patent. Most of those 20 years will be lost on proving to regulators that it is safe and it works.

But in design, do the big companies invest in research to anything like the same extent? Do the likes of Knoll, Vitra and Herman Miller really support innovation? Or do they mainly exploit the back-catalogue of their intellectual property portfolio by churning out more and more products by Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, and George Nelson? It’s certainly easier: no expensive designers to pay, no re-tooling of production lines, no real risk. It is an enviable situation - a market that they essentially control with consumers caught in an endless love affair with mid-century furniture.

I’d argue that they don’t even have to create this demand: the desirable, canonical status of the named designers is not bestowed by the marketing initiatives of the design companies themselves. It’s a function of academic scholarship, art history, museums and other institutions, whose commitment (and, often, whose funding) is public - serving culture and knowledge rather than private interest.

Extending copyright for design to 70 years from the author’s death suddenly pushes the whole of modernism back into private ownership. It means, one can estimate, protection of around 100 years for the design of, say, a chair. It essentially fixes the field of design for the foreseeable future and condemns us to mid-century modernism until the middle of the next century.

Copyright’s expiration period creates dynamism in creative activity. Twenty-five years seems long enough for a company to recoup the costs of design development and it also means that they have to develop new designs of equal merit to replenish their stock of design rights. The extension will mean there is less incentive to invest, to experiment and to develop new designs.

There are shades of the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” at work here, the phrase used to describe the 1998 extension of US copyright terms that was heavily lobbied by Disney. Equally, it echoes the UK’s "Cliff's law", named after singer Cliff Richard, which extended the copyright term of music recordings from 50 years to 70 years.

Both are pieces of legislation that protect existing interests instead of promoting innovation. It’s interesting to note that there has been significant lobbying with regard to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill on behalf of “well known furniture designers and manufacturers.” It has also been welcomed by the Design Council.

At heart this is more than a legal matter, more than an argument over knock-off Barcelona chairs. Wrapped up in this proposed legislation is a disciplinary definition of what design actually is.

Is design, to quote Mies van der Rohe himself, “the will of an epoch transformed into space”? This, of course, is the spirit of innovation and radical experiment that brought these design classics into existence in the first place. Or is design, as the ERRB seems to propose, the will of a previous epoch transformed into private interest?

I’d argue for the former, for ramping up design research and development, and for greater investment in design by those private interests to create the design classics of the future.

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.

Top image of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair courtesy of Shuttershock

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Opinion: in this week's column, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs discusses how wearable technology will "transform our understanding of ourselves".

I’m being watched. My steps are being counted; my location is being tracked. My sleep is being monitored and my calories logged.

The person who’s watching me is… me. I’ve put myself under auto-surveillance and I’m having a data-driven out-of-body experience. I don’t keep a diary; instead, I have a graph.

I’ve been wearing a Nike+ FuelBand on my right wrist since last summer. This device measures my footsteps, estimates my calorific burn-rate and rewards me with “Nike Fuel” – an arbitrary and essentially useless currency that I can’t spend or trade.

Yet Fuel is addictively motivational. I go out of my way to achieve my daily goal of 3,000 Fuel points. I walk, run, cycle and exercise a lot more than I used to (and swim less, since the band isn’t waterproof) and actively seek manual chores that will earn me Fuel. I take pathetic pleasure in the lightshow on the band that marks the reaching of my day’s target and enjoy checking how my own “little data” fares against the accumulated “big data” of all the other FuelBand wearers on the Nike+ website.

My FuelBand was recently joined by a Jawbone UP wristband, which captures even more data about my lifestyle, including my sleep patterns and the food types I’ve consumed (although I have to enter that information manually). The accompanying smartphone app displays my life as a series of infographics and bar graphs of a sophistication that, until recently, was only available to elite athletes.

Jawbone says I’m not alone in performing better under surveillance: the firm cites research conducted at Stanford University that found people are 26% more active when they’re being monitored. Big Brother is good for you.

Having all this information at my fingertips changes the way I perceive myself. I’m forced to correlate my internal emotional narrative with the irrefutable datastream, and the former is often exposed as an unreliable fantasist. Days where I think I’ve been impressively active turn out to be days when I’ve been abnormally lazy; nights when I feel I’ve hardly slept turn out to have been more than adequate.

In his fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains that human beings are hopeless intuitive statisticians; we are unable to accurately interpret experience as data. Instead, we rely on heuristic assumptions, prejudices and intuition, all of which have a high chance of being wrong.

So, for example, if you wake up feeling exceptionally tired, you will assume you didn’t get enough sleep, whereas it may instead be that you woke up during a period of deep sleep, which leaves you feeling groggy. The UP band offers a function to overcome this, with an alarm feature that wakes you only during light sleep. Even if this means waking you earlier, you’ll feel more rested for it.

Thus devices like FuelBand and UP, plus other wearable activity-tracking gadgets like Fitbit, serve as a relentless reality check for your unreliable brain. The next generation of technology that sits directly on the body – like digital tattoos - or inside it – such as implants or pills - will burrow deeper into us to extract further “quantified self” datasets, which will provide more evidence of the irrationality of human experience.

Take a visit to the doctor: an everyday interaction that involves multiple potential failure points. You may misinterpret the symptoms you are experiencing; you may miscommunicate these to the doctor; the doctor may misunderstand you; the doctor may misdiagnose your illness. The chances that the consultation is a waste of time - or worse - are high.

Wearable technology that detects illness could remove this potential for error. I recently had a conversation with a senior healthcare designer who told me that medical services could soon be made far more efficient by fitting people with monitors that would alert hospitals at the first sign of congenital illness.

“Then the hospital would contact you and ask you to come for an appointment?” I asked naively. “No,” he replied; as a human you couldn’t be trusted to respond in the correct way. “You would most likely ignore the message or put off the appointment. Instead the hospital would contact your partner or your mother.”

For designers working in the area of wearable computing, the quest is to make both device and user interface “disappear”. "I think the general idea is that the phone as an object kind of disappears," said Google’s John Hanke in an interview with Dezeen last year, in which he talked about Google’s Glass project, which features a computer embedded in a pair of spectacles.

Speaking at the Design Indaba conference at Cape Town earlier this month, Alex Chen of Google Creative Lab echoed Hanke, saying: “From my personal need I hope technology disappears more and more from my life so you forget you’re using it all the time, instead of feeling that you’re burdened and conscious of it.”

Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at Jawbone, told me the objective was to make the UP band “as small as possible, something that gets out the way and disappears.”

In my case, the UP band disappeared so successfully that I forgot I was wearing it, neglected to charge it and have consequently accumulated zero data over the past week.

As for my FuelBand, I’ve figured out how to cheat it. It uses an accelerometer to track my movement but has no idea of the effort involved. Waving my arms around while sitting on the sofa earns almost as many fuel points as jogging; drying my hands vigorously and cleaning my teeth with exaggerated movements are as effective as a workout. Simply jiggling the band in my hand earns Fuel, as does giving it to the kids to run around with.

Wearable technology promises to transform our understanding of ourselves and consequently our sense of who we really are. It has the possibility to help us compensate for our inherent flaws and make us better, healthier people. The challenge for the designers of these devices is to figure out how to account for human stupidity and deviousness.

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a relentless reality check" appeared first on Dezeen.