The Design Issue

In the Architecture School at Milan Polytechnic in the late 1980s, to lecture halls packed to the gills like a Milan A.C. championship final, the great Achille Castiglioni would extol redesign as an indispensable duty of any professional designer. In his view, anything — designed by anybody, in any part of the world, at any time, no matter how brilliant its initial conception — was fair game in a process of progressive update and refinement carried out for the benefit of the entire society. Castiglioni’s own work teemed with examples: the makeover of the traditional three-legged iron French cafe table, into a foldable enameled-steel number that could be hung on a wall to save space; the upgrade of his own Mezzadro stool, to accommodate the release of new tractor seats; the complete reinvention of the light switch for the Italian market.

There was — and is — always room for improvement. The litmus test is urgency: Is a redesign really necessary? Is there such a thing as a perfect thing? The original Gem paper clip, for example, a paragon of design virtue, is still safely beyond reach. We can count copies and variations in the hundreds — from the spiral to the owl’s head and the inverted triangle — but no matter how compelling these formal riffs are, they cannot be called redesigns. I’ll bet you the paper clip will not last forever, however. In the design cycle of creative destruction, it, too, will one day meet a new maker.

Design experts or not, we can all think of a long list of objects that are calling out for review. Chances are that at least one of the six objects reimagined in the pages that follow — the cell tower, the hospital gown, the toilet, the airport baggage-delivery system, the bike lock and the prescription-medicine label — have led you to howl in despair more than once.

The six designers and teams we approached all rose to the occasion, each displaying different design muscles — from the mastery of complex systems (Raffaello D’Andrea) and self-assembly (Skylar Tibbits) to a passion for clothing differently-abled bodies (Lucy Jones); from a knack for making information clear and engaging (Periscopic) to a metaphysical appreciation of bodily functions (Mathieu Lehanneur) and the ability to infuse objects with elegance and intelligence (Rinat Aruh).

Redesign is a positive and constructive act, one of adaptation (to new technologies, to changing mores, to new legislation, and so on). It can bestow blessings not only of form but also of function and even meaning. The best sort of redesign is a substantial and welcome addition to the world. ⧫

Paola Antonelli is a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Bicycle Lock

Redesign by: Rinat Aruh

Text by: Daniel Duane

Riding a beautiful bike is an act of idealism, a vote for simplicity and fun over the speed and stress of a car. Bike locks, on the other hand, are all about realism in the face of life’s ugliness. Conventional lock designs reflect the emotion that drives sales: fear, with notes of resentment. Too ugly to mount on a pretty bike frame, too heavy to carry comfortably in a shoulder bag, the standard U-lock is a dumb metal arc that aspires only to resist dumb metal tools like the cordless angle grinders that now allow thieves to cut hardened steel in minutes.

“You can’t solve for everything,” says the designer Rinat Aruh, a co-founder of the firm Aruliden. “If a thief wants to steal a bike, they’re going to find a way. So we decided to make it annoying.” Aruh did more than that. She borrowed the elongated-oval shape of a classic link of chain to create a timeless form that feels inevitable, as if bike locks were always meant to look this way. The rack, fixed to the seat post, floats her lock over the rear wheel, making it look less like an anti-theft device than a natural design extension of a well-made frame.

Anyone who has ever locked a bike outside a restaurant or a bar and then jockeyed for a window seat to keep a watchful eye will appreciate the additional deterrents hidden inside: tamper-sensitive accelerometers that trigger a sonic alarm and a smartphone alert at the instant a thief gets to work. And even if a thief manages to get away with your bike, a GPS chip embedded in that lock’s rack means the cops will know where to find him.

“The idea is that if I’ve got five bikes in front of me, I’ll steal this one last,” says Aruh, who may be underestimating the good taste of the average bike thief. ⧫

Aruliden is a New York-based brand strategy and design agency.

Daniel Duane is a regular contributor to The New York Times.

Cell Tower

Redesign by: Skylar Tibbits

Text by: Jon Gertner

At the moment, the cellular networks in the United States rely on roughly 300,000 transmission sites. And judging by Americans’ increasing thirst for mobile data, we’re assuredly going to need even more in the years to come. Cell towers aren’t handsome things, and so their builders have made an earnest effort in recent years to camouflage them. Alongside highways, big towers are sometimes disguised as freakish-looking conifer trees; in the Southwest, they pose as saguaros; others are tucked inside church steeples or massive flagpoles, or secreted behind the cornices of tall buildings.

But rather than continue the strategy of concealment and disguise, Skylar Tibbits, at M.I.T.’s Self-Assembly Lab, wants to rethink the tower’s essential infrastructure. Tibbits’s work focuses on programming building materials — wood, textiles, synthetic fibers — to respond automatically to external stimuli like heat, cold, light, wind or water. Tibbits asks of the next-gen cell tower: “How can we make it change shape, bend, twist, twirl, expand, so the cell tower can adjust to the weather, time of use, time of day — or if there’s a big event nearby?”

The answer, he argues, could involve a composite material, like carbon fiber or fiberglass, which in combination with the structure’s shape and weave would enable a new range of motion. Small forces at the base of the structure — heat, wind, even an electronic signal — could effect large transformations up above, he says, making the tower move “like a large puppet.” And to what end? By reconfiguring itself, he says, a next-gen cell tower might gain in flexibility, strength and perhaps even functionality. In addition, the tower can dance; the tower can perform. No longer an eyesore, Tibbits says, “it has personality and an aesthetic of movement.” ⧫

Skylar Tibbits is an assistant professor of design research at M.I.T.

Jon Gertner is a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library.

Rx Handout

Redesign by: Periscopic

Text by: Thomas Goetz

The rule sounds reasonable enough: All prescription drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration are required to be dispensed with a “label” that includes directions for use and spells out possible side effects or risks to patients. But in practice, once all the required content and cautions are put into print, these documents can run to thousands of words. For a popular drug like Metformin (used to treat diabetes), the roughly 10,000-word label is twice as long as a typical Times Magazine article (and not nearly as entertaining). It takes the form of that tightly folded, tiny-print insert that is bundled with the drug — and it’s almost guaranteed to go unread. An unfortunate result is that many people don’t take their drug properly or quit taking it altogether.



So what do patients starting a new medication need to know? Just a few things, really. What they are taking. How to take it. What to expect. And what to do if something seems wrong. This information can be summarized in just a few words and images. The best interface for this information, it turns out, isn’t the pill bottle itself but the bag that the bottle goes in. Here, I worked with the team at Periscopic to turn the bag into something useful. (All the information is drawn from the data available at Iodine.com, the health-information website I co-founded in 2013.)

The most useful information here is probably the “What you can expect” timeline, which shows how typical side effects usually go away over time, as the body gets used to a drug. This is common knowledge to pharmacists, but it’s rarely communicated to patients. In the future, because the pharmacy most likely knows the age and sex of the patient, it could be possible to tailor the information to display the actual experience of people like them, as well as to identify any possible interactions between drugs that might arise based on their other prescriptions. The beauty of this label is that it doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list. It’s suited to a quick glance, which is all that most people would afford it anyway. With all respect to the F.D.A., sometime a lot less is a lot more. ⧫

Periscopic is a data-visualization firm based in Portland, Ore.

Thomas Goetz is a founder of Iodine, a digital medical resource.

Baggage Claim

Redesign by: Raffaello D’Andrea

Text by: Kyle Chayka

It’s hard to think of a place with more design flaws than an airport. It’s an experience made up of nonexperience, a gantlet of waiting: first to check your bag, then in the security line, then in the jetway, then to get off the plane and finally for your luggage to emerge on a carousel at the other end. This last step has its own set of problems. “There’s hardly any security, someone can take your luggage, sometimes luggage gets lost,” says the designer and engineer Raffaello D’Andrea. “We want to remove all of that.”

D’Andrea is the founder of Verity Studios, but before that he had another robotics company, Kiva Systems. That company was acquired by Amazon in 2012 to supply its warehouses with turntable-like mobile robots that can carry more than 750 pounds. D’Andrea’s solution for baggage claim is not just to fix the carousel, he says, but also to redesign “the experience of having luggage at the airport.” While his vision is not quite possible with current technology, he proposes replacing the whole system with a swarm of autonomous robots within the next five years.

It works like this: When you arrive, you head straight to an array of check-in stations, where a horseshoe-crab-like robot arrives for each bag. The robots carry them to an inspection area, where they are scanned, and if necessary, examined by T.S.A. agents. This would substantially simplify airport entry halls. “Complexity is thus shifted from physical infrastructure to algorithms,” D’Andrea says. The swarm then brings the checked luggage to the tarmac, to be loaded into the plane by humans.

Once you arrive at your destination, your smartphone tells you which pickup station your bag is being delivered to, as well as when it will show up. A vertical locker system, taking advantage of often-unused space in cavernous airports, dispenses luggage one at a time while the robots circle back for more. That means no waiting at the carousel, but you’ll still have time to kill. There’s always Cinnabon. ⧫

Raffaello D’Andrea is a professor at E.T.H. Zurich.

Kyle Chayka is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Toilet

Redesign by: Mathieu Lehanneur

Text by: Jamie Lauren Keiles

The call of nature, with all its splendid routine, offers the contemporary human not just the excretion of waste but a guaranteed respite from the chaos of the world. Provided you have a commitment to green vegetables and water, the rhythms of digestion enforce a routine meditation practice. And in recent years, this moment for reflection or for quiet reading has seen an upgrade with the advent of smartphones.

It seems odd, with this in mind, that the standard Western toilet has evolved so little beyond just water down a hole. The designer Mathieu Lehanneur says, “It’s treated as a functional room, not a place for pleasure or thinking.” Lehanneur endeavored, in his toilet redesign, to connect the fixture to its metaphysical function. His free-standing commode — less outhouse, more chapel — forges quiet space for us to come and meet ourselves. “It’s a philosophical room,” he says, “a factory for ideas.”

Beneath an LED skylight and fan, Lehanneur calls us to claim our place in the scheme of things. A wall-mounted glass tank, reminiscent of a cloud, suggests the integration of body and environment, as rain in the ecosystem turns into water, then turns into urine, then turns back to rain. “We are still highly primitive,” he explains. “Even in this highly connected world.”

If technology distracts in the space outside the bathroom, then Lehanneur’s new toilet would channel it toward focus by cutting the glare with natural materials. A green onyx monolith with a digital display tells the results of on-the-spot urinalysis — less for the purpose of data-harvesting or diagnosis and more as a reminder that we, too, contain ecosystems. When the moment of reflection (and defecation) has passed, the user need not reach for an aerosol air freshener. A ceramic rock, offsetting the toilet, serves as a natural diffuser of scents.

If it all seems extravagant, then it’s only because Lehanneur’s new toilet is suggesting a church where we’ve long since made peace with praying in squalor. “Even in the most beautiful residences, all over the world,” he says, “you will never be able to get a photo of the toilet.” ⧫

Mathieu Lehanneur is a designer whose work aims to promote human well-being.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

Hospital Gown

Redesign by: Lucy Jones

Text by: Jaime Lowe

A revealing hospital gown may seem like an insignificant problem compared to the actual reasons someone might end up wearing one, but its impact on patients is greater than you might suspect. Thanks to the garments — the breezy open-backed, apron-style gowns that leave a great deal of derrière in the air — patients routinely complain of lack of privacy, physical discomfort and a feeling of vulnerability. A paper published two years ago in JAMA even found that the garments could contribute to “post-hospital syndrome,” a condition caused by environmental stressors that can make a patient more susceptible to illness. To reduce the trauma of hospitalization, the paper’s authors suggest, patients should be encouraged to wear their own clothing. “This would help patients maintain their self-esteem and orientation and would also remind their care professionals to recognize them as people.”

Here, Lucy Jones, who was named Parsons Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2015, reimagined the hospital gown with a comfort-based approach and an emphasis on modesty. “It is all about patient dignity,” Jones says. “You’re already having your environmental space interrupted, your body prodded. The hospital gown is a contributor to that treatment.” You should feel warm and safe, she says, not exposed. Jones replaced the traditional open-backed, tie-fastened garment with snap-closure flaps at the chest, sides and back to provide access to areas examined most frequently by nurses and doctors. The flaps also prevent accidental exposure, which is an especially humiliating situation — so much so that many patients wear two gowns, one in the front and one to cover the back.

Part of Jones’s redesign is an attempt to make the gown feel more like a T-shirt. Her gown would incorporate Tencel, a sustainable, stretchy jersey material, made partly from recycled wood pulp. Because of its superior moisture management, the fabric has a built-in antibacterial element. “There were certain expectations for how the patients should be dressed,” Jones says. “Hospitals don’t feel like they should be spending more on gowns, but people don’t understand the importance of dress on the personal psyche.” ⧫

Lucy Jones is a New York-based fashion designer from Wales.

Jaime Lowe is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote for the magazine about how to busk.