Design: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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DriveDesign

Isotype is a way of showing social and economic data with rows of small repeated pictures, so that people can understand it across languages and levels of schooling. It was developed in 1920s Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz.

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath developed it in 1920s Vienna at the Social and Economic Museum, aiming to let ordinary readers, including people with little schooling, compare social and economic data at a glance. Its central rule was to never resize a single icon to show a bigger quantity; instead, a larger number was shown by repeating the same small icon more times, so a reader could count as well as compare. After Austria's political turmoil forced Neurath to flee in 1934, he continued the project first in the Netherlands and later in England. The approach's descendants are visible today in transport maps, road signs and the small repeated icons used in modern infographics.

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WonderArchaeology

The Pazyryk carpet, made some 2,300 to 2,500 years ago and preserved in a frozen tomb in Siberia's Altai Mountains, is the oldest known carpet with a knotted pile, the soft surface of a rug.

The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found it in 1949 in barrow 5 at Pazyryk, a burial mound of the horse-riding nomads of the Altai. Robbers had broken into the tomb in ancient times; water seeped in through their tunnel and froze, and the ice kept felt, wood, textiles and the carpet intact. Rudenko dated the burials to the fifth century BC; later work places this group of barrows in the fourth to third centuries BC. The carpet is about two metres square and holds around 1.25 million knots, with borders of horsemen and deer around a central field. Scholars still argue over where it was woven, with Persia, Armenia and Central Asia all proposed. It is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

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WonderArchaeology

Roman dodecahedra are small, hollow bronze objects with twelve five-sided faces, a round hole in each face and a knob at every corner. About 130 are known, yet no ancient text says what they were for.

The first was recorded in England in 1739. Since then about 130 have turned up in Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, but none in Italy, the heart of the empire. They measure 4 to 11 centimetres across, were cast mostly in Gaul between the second and fourth centuries AD, and the holes in one object usually differ in size. Few show signs of wear, and none carries letters or numbers. More than fifty explanations have been published: a surveying instrument, a tool for knitting gloves, a gauge for checking coins, a fortune-telling device, a metalworker's showpiece. In 2023 amateur archaeologists at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire found an unusually well-preserved example, but it did not settle the question.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lewis chessmen, carved mostly from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and found on a Scottish island in 1831, turn chess into a cast of kings, worried-looking queens, bishops, knights and warriors biting their shields.

The pieces were found in 1831 in the parish of Uig on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, together with plain discs for another board game and a belt buckle. They were probably carved between about 1150 and 1200, most often thought to be in Trondheim, Norway, when the Hebrides were under Norwegian rule, and they seem to come from several incomplete sets, perhaps a merchant's stock. The warriors biting their shields are berserkers, fighters of Norse legend who worked themselves into a battle frenzy. The queens resting a hand on their cheek probably meant calm and wisdom, not worry. The British Museum holds 82 objects and the National Museum of Scotland 11. In 2019 a warder (the equivalent of a rook), unrecognised for decades in an Edinburgh family's home, sold at auction for £735,000.

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WonderArchitecture

Shibam, a walled town in Yemen, is packed with about 500 mud-brick tower houses, some eleven storeys and over 30 metres tall. Built mostly in the 16th century, it is one of the oldest examples of a city planned to grow upwards.

People have lived at Shibam, in the long desert valley of Wadi Hadramawt, for about 1,700 years. A great flood in 1532–33 destroyed much of the earlier town, which was rebuilt on a rocky rise above the valley floor. Enclosed by a single defensive wall, it had little room to spread, so houses went up instead, with one or two rooms on each floor. Thick walls of sun-dried mud brick keep interiors cool in the desert heat, but they need constant upkeep: floods from a tropical storm in 2008 brought down several buildings. Shibam is often called the Manhattan of the Desert, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1982.

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WonderArchitecture

Fujian tulou are huge round or square houses in south-east China with walls of pounded earth, built by Hakka and Minnan communities. One fortified ring could house a whole clan, sometimes several hundred people, around a shared courtyard.

Most tulou were built between the 12th and 20th centuries in the hills of south-western Fujian, where bandits and feuds between clans made a house that could be shut like a fortress worth the effort. Walls three to five storeys high were made by pounding earth between wooden boards, layer upon layer. The outside has a single gate and few windows; inside, timber galleries run round every floor. Each family had its own rooms from the ground to the top floor, while the courtyard held the well and the ancestral hall, where the clan honoured its forebears. The largest tulou could house up to 800 people. UNESCO listed 46 of them as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

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StillnessArchitecture

A mashrabiya is a projecting window enclosed by a carved wooden lattice, common in old Arab towns. The screen breaks up glare, lets breezes through and allows people inside to watch the street without being seen.

The earliest evidence of the mashrabiya in its present form comes from 12th-century Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs. It spread to Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, Arabia and beyond, reached its peak under the Ottomans, and goes by other names: shanashil in Iraq, rawashin in Jeddah. The lattice is usually finer at the bottom and more open at the top, so air moves fast above head height and gently lower down, and jars of water placed in the window cooled the breeze by evaporation as it passed over them. Privacy mattered too: the household could follow life in the street while staying out of sight. Mashrabiyas fell out of use in the 20th century, but architects now study them again as a way to cool buildings without machines.

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WonderArchitecture

Muqarnas is a form of Islamic architectural decoration made of tiers of small niches, stacked like a honeycomb. It bridges the corners where a square room meets a round dome, and crowns doorways and vaults.

Western writers have often called muqarnas 'stalactite' or 'honeycomb' vaulting. The earliest surviving examples are simple three-part corner niches beneath domes, such as those in the Arab-Ata Mausoleum at Tim in Uzbekistan (977–978) and the Gonbad-e Qabus tower in Iran (1006–1007). The oldest complete muqarnas dome known to modern scholars crowned the Imam Dur Mausoleum at Samarra in Iraq, finished in 1090. Historians still debate whether the technique began in north-eastern Iran or in Abbasid Iraq. Built of brick and plaster, carved stone or wood, it spread across the Islamic world: Seljuk builders in Anatolia set it over great stone gateways, and in Spain it fills the ceilings of the Alhambra.

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WonderDesign

Girih tiles are a set of five shapes that medieval Islamic craftsmen used to plan the interlaced star-and-line patterns on walls and domes. Some of their 15th-century patterns come close to a kind of order mathematicians only described in the 1970s.

Girih is Persian for 'knot'. Each of the five tiles, a decagon, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon, a bowtie and a rhombus, carries decorative lines. Laid edge to edge, the lines join into continuous bands, so a maker could build a vast design from a few pieces. In 2007 the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt showed that some patterns, notably on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan (1453), come close to quasicrystalline order: an arrangement that is highly regular yet never repeats itself exactly, like the Penrose tilings that mathematicians described in the 1970s. The craftsmen reached it through geometry and practice, centuries before anyone had the mathematics to describe it.

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WonderEngineering

Float glass, the flat glass in almost every modern window, is made by pouring molten glass onto a bath of molten tin. The glass spreads into an even sheet with smooth faces that need no grinding or polishing.

Before float glass, large clear sheets were made as plate glass: cast or rolled, then ground and polished on both sides, a slow and costly job. Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff of Pilkington Brothers developed the new method at the firm's works in St Helens, Lancashire, between 1953 and 1957. It works because glass is lighter than tin and does not mix with it: floating on the molten metal, the glass flattens under gravity and surface tension, then cools slowly as a continuous ribbon. The company announced the process in 1959, reached profitable full-scale sales in 1960 and licensed it around the world during the 1960s, when it replaced the older methods.

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DriveEngineering

Prestressed concrete has steel cables stretched tight inside it, so the concrete is already squeezed before any load arrives. Concrete cracks easily when pulled but is very strong when squeezed, so this lets beams and bridges span farther.

In ordinary reinforced concrete, loose steel bars carry the pulling forces, but the concrete around them still cracks as it bends. Prestressing goes further. In pre-tensioning, steel strands are stretched before the concrete is poured and released once it has hardened; in post-tensioning, cables run through ducts in hardened concrete and are then pulled tight and anchored. Either way, when traffic or weight later tries to stretch the underside of a beam, it first has to cancel that built-in squeeze. The French engineer Eugène Freyssinet patented a practical method in 1928, using high-strength steel so that the squeeze would not fade over time. From the mid-20th century prestressing became standard for bridges, car parks and floor slabs, allowing longer spans and thinner sections.

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WonderTechnology

Bakelite, invented by the chemist Leo Baekeland in 1907, was the first fully synthetic plastic. Heated in a mould, it set hard for good, and because it resisted heat and did not conduct electricity it was ideal for plugs, switches, radios and telephones.

Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-born chemist living near New York, was looking for a synthetic replacement for shellac, a natural resin made by lac insects and used to coat and insulate electrical wiring. He found a way to control the reaction between two chemicals, phenol and formaldehyde, using heat and pressure. Earlier plastics such as celluloid were made from plant cellulose; Bakelite was built entirely from laboratory chemicals. It is also a thermoset: once cured, its molecules lock into a rigid network, so it cannot be melted and reshaped. On its own the resin was brittle, so makers mixed in fillers such as wood flour. By the 1920s and 1930s it was everywhere, from telephones and radio cases to jewellery and pan handles.

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WonderEngineering

Weathering steel, often known by the trade name Cor-Ten, is an alloy that forms a tight, stable layer of rust when it is left out in the weather. That layer slows further corrosion, so the steel needs no paint.

Ordinary rust flakes off and exposes fresh metal, so corrosion keeps eating inward. Weathering steels contain small amounts of copper, chromium, nickel and phosphorus, which help the rust form a dense layer, called a patina, that sticks to the surface and keeps out much of the oxygen and moisture. Its colour darkens from orange to deep brown over a few years. US Steel introduced the alloy in 1933 for railway wagons carrying coal and ore. It only works where the surface can dry out between wettings; constant damp, sea salt or water trapped in joints defeats it. The first building to leave it bare was the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1964.

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WonderEngineering

A Fresnel lens replaces the thick curved glass of an ordinary lens with thin concentric rings, each shaped to bend light at the right angle. Invented for lighthouses in the 1820s, it focuses light just as strongly with far less glass and weight.

In 1819 the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, working for France's lighthouse commission, proposed a stepped lens to replace the metal reflectors then in use, which returned only about half of a lamp's light. A full-size lens was tested in Paris in 1822, and on 25 July 1823 the first lighthouse Fresnel lens was lit at Cordouan, at the mouth of the Gironde; its light could be seen more than 32 kilometres out to sea. A solid lens of the same power would have been impossibly thick and heavy. Later improved with glass prisms that also sent stray light towards the horizon, the design spread to lighthouses around the world, and it has been called the invention that saved a million ships.

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WonderDesign

Cut an A4 sheet in half across its length and you get two A5 sheets with exactly the same proportions. This works because the international paper standard ISO 216 sets the sides in a ratio of 1 to the square root of 2, about 1 to 1.414.

The idea is old. The German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg pointed out the advantages of the square-root-of-two ratio in a letter in 1786, and revolutionary France listed similar formats in a tax law of 1798. The modern system came from the German engineer Walter Porstmann, whose proposal became the German standard DIN 476 in the early 1920s and later the international standard ISO 216. The largest size, A0, has an area of one square metre; A1 is half of it, A2 half again, and so on down to A4 and beyond. Because every size has the same shape, a page can be enlarged or reduced on a photocopier without cropping. The main countries that still mostly use other sizes, such as Letter, are the United States and Canada.

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WonderDesign

The Valentine was a portable typewriter launched by the Italian firm Olivetti in 1969. Its glossy red plastic body slid into a matching case with a handle. Designed by Ettore Sottsass with Perry King, it turned a piece of office equipment into a colourful personal object.

Olivetti presented the Valentine on Valentine's Day 1969. Inside was the proven mechanism of the company's Lettera 32 portable; what was new was the body of tough, coloured ABS plastic and a case that became part of the design rather than just a box. At a time when most typewriters were black, grey or beige, it was meant to feel like a personal belonging, not office furniture. Olivetti hoped to sell millions, but sales reached only a few tens of thousands. Even so, it became a design classic, held today by MoMA in New York and the V&A and Design Museum in London. Sottsass, who later founded the Memphis group of designers, came to resent being remembered mainly for this one red machine.

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WonderDesign

The Anglepoise desk lamp, designed in 1932 by the British engineer George Carwardine, stays at whatever angle you set it. Springs balance the weight of its jointed arms, so the shade moves with a light touch and then holds still.

Carwardine was a car designer and consultant who specialised in vehicle suspension, so he knew how springs could hold a load steady. He worked out a balance of springs and arms that let a lamp keep its position at almost any angle, and applied for a patent in July 1932. In 1934 he licensed the design to Herbert Terry and Sons, a spring maker in Redditch, and their four-spring model 1227, released in 1935 for use at home, proved very popular. In 1937 a Norwegian company, Luxo, began making its own version. A Luxo lamp later starred in Pixar's first short film, Luxo Jr. (1986), which is why a desk lamp still hops across the studio's logo.

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WonderDesign

Thonet's No. 14, launched in 1859, is the classic bentwood café chair. It was built from six pieces of steam-bent beech, ten screws and two nuts, with a cane seat, so it could be mass-produced, shipped in pieces and assembled where it was sold.

Michael Thonet, a German-born cabinetmaker who settled in Vienna, spent years learning to bend solid wood with steam into strong curves that could be repeated exactly. That removed most of the carving and joints that made chairs slow to build, and let his company, Gebrüder Thonet, make identical parts in large numbers in factories in Moravia, in today's Czech Republic. The chair was cheap, light and tough enough for busy cafés, and Thonet's firm sold about 50 million of them between 1859 and 1930, making it the best-selling chair of its time. Because the parts could be packed tightly, chairs travelled by rail and ship to customers around the world. Versions of it are still made today.

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DriveDesign

The Ulm School of Design in West Germany, open from 1953 to 1968, taught design alongside science, sociology and industrial production rather than as decoration. Its teachers and students helped shape Braun's clean-lined products and Lufthansa's visual identity.

The school was founded by Inge Scholl, the designer Otl Aicher and the Swiss artist and architect Max Bill. Scholl's brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, had been executed in 1943 for resisting the Nazis, and the school was set up partly in their memory, to educate responsible citizens after the war. Bill designed its building and was its first head. Teaching became increasingly methodical, drawing on mathematics, psychology and the study of how signs communicate. The teacher Hans Gugelot worked with Braun on its 1950s radios and record players, and Aicher's team designed Lufthansa's complete corporate identity in the early 1960s; Aicher later created the pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The school closed in 1968 after losing its public funding.

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DriveDesign

A plug that fits only one way cannot be put in wrongly. Designing products and processes so that mistakes are impossible, or noticed at once, is called poka-yoke, Japanese for “mistake-proofing”.

The Japanese engineer Shigeo Shingo, who advised Toyota, developed the idea in the 1960s. In one factory, workers assembling a small switch sometimes forgot to fit one of its two springs. Shingo had them first put both springs in a small dish, then fit them from the dish; if a spring was left over, the mistake was obvious at once. He first called the method baka-yoke, “fool-proofing”, but changed it to poka-yoke, from poka, an inadvertent mistake, and yokeru, to avoid, because the old word seemed insulting to workers. Everyday examples include a memory card that goes in only one way and a microwave that stops when its door opens. Shingo argued that preventing a defect costs far less than finding it later.

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WonderDesign

Cat's eyes, the small reflectors set into the middle of many roads, were invented by Percy Shaw of Halifax, England, and patented in 1934. They send headlight beams back towards the driver, and when a wheel rolls over them a rubber wiper cleans the glass.

Shaw said he had found his way home on dark nights by the shine of tram rails; once they were removed, he needed something else to follow. The name comes from the way a cat's eyes glow in headlights. Each stud holds glass lenses in a rubber dome set in a cast-iron base. A passing wheel pushes the dome down, a fixed rubber wiper cleans the lenses as they sink, and rainwater collecting in the base helps rinse them. Shaw set up his company in Halifax in 1935. During the Second World War blackouts, when street lights were off and headlights were partly covered, their value became obvious, and after the war a Ministry of Transport committee backed their use across Britain's roads. Similar studs are now used around the world.

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WonderEngineering

The Plimsoll line, a circle with a line through it painted on a ship's hull, marks how deep a loaded ship may safely sit in the water. Extra lines beside it allow for fresh water, tropical water and winter seas, where the safe limit is different.

The mark is named after Samuel Plimsoll, a British member of parliament who campaigned in the 1870s against “coffin ships”: vessels sent to sea overloaded and often over-insured, so that owners could profit even if the ship sank and its crew drowned. His 1873 book Our Seamen stirred public anger, and the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 made the load-line mark compulsory on British ships. International conventions in 1930 and 1966 extended load lines to ships worldwide. The letters beside the mark stand for tropical fresh water (TF), fresh water (F), tropical (T), summer (S), winter (W) and winter North Atlantic (WNA). Canvas plimsoll shoes are said to take their name from the band where the upper meets the sole, which recalls the line.

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WonderTrade

Medieval England's royal treasury kept accounts on tally sticks: notches cut into a piece of wood recorded a sum, then the stick was split lengthwise. Each side kept one half, and because only the true pair fitted perfectly, the two halves proved the debt.

The larger the notch, the larger the sum. Because wood never splits the same way twice, a forged half would not match, so the stick served as both receipt and proof. The English royal treasury, the Exchequer, used tallies from the twelfth century until they were abolished in 1826. In October 1834 workers burned the old sticks in the stoves beneath the House of Lords; the flues overheated and the fire that followed destroyed most of the medieval Palace of Westminster. The building that stands there today, with the clock tower that holds Big Ben, was built to replace it. Notched sticks for keeping count were also used in many other places, from village shops to farms.

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DriveBusiness

Double-entry bookkeeping records every transaction in two accounts at once: as a debit in one and a credit in the other. Because the two sides must always add up to the same total, a mismatch shows that something was recorded wrongly.

Say a shop buys stock for 100 florins in cash: the stock account goes up by 100 and the cash account goes down by 100, and the books still balance. The method grew out of the practice of Italian merchants in the late Middle Ages; the earliest surviving complete example is the 1299–1300 ledger kept by Amatino Manucci for a Florentine firm. In 1494 the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli, a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, described it in detail in a printed textbook published in Venice. That is why he is often called the father of accounting, although he did not invent it. Balanced books do not prove honesty, but they make many errors easy to spot, and the same logic still underlies company accounts today.

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