Streaming and the Entertainment Industry, Part II : Subscriptions vs. Cinema
In 1997, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph launched Netflix. For just a few dollars a month, users could get access to a range of TV and films all without leaving the comfort of their own home. The idea was to update the model of the video rental store for the 21stcentury, allowing users to order online and have DVDs posted to them in direct competition with Blockbuster. With the launch of their streaming service in 2007, the business took off and is now available in 190 different territories with revenue of $15.8bn in 2018. With Amazon and NowTV running similarly successful subscription models and Disney and Apple joining the party in the coming months, what makes the subscription model so popular? And can it stretch beyond digital media?
If something is too good to be true, then it probably isn’t. Such was the case in the early days of Netflix. Like all good California start-ups, Netflix began bleeding money straight out of the gate. Users were few and overhead costs such as licensing agreements were many and expensive. They simply weren’t bringing in enough money to pay for the service they were providing, but that was partly the point and Netflix are by no means the first to do this.
Moviepass is a company that offers unlimited cinema tickets to US moviegoers for $10 per month. Given the average cost of a ticket is around $9, it’s not hard to see how this is a great deal for the consumer. Moviepass are taking a huge gamble that by burning through cash reserves of their investors to provide a service as cheaply as possible, they will eliminate any competitors and can then ramp up their prices once they have a big enough market share, start selling user data and eventually turn a profit. This might seem like a high-risk strategy (and it is) but sometimes it works. Spotify has done the same thing and, after 13 years of operation, announced their first profitable quarter at the end of 2018.
Now that Netflix is a profitable business, it’s begun to expand its role within the entertainment industry. Where before it was a platform for allowing customers to watch a selection of movies, it now produces and distributes it’s own content in the same way a Hollywood studio would. Netflix has expanded so much that it’s beginning to threaten other areas of the entertainment industry and Hollywood in particular is very unhappy. Steven Spielberg is leading a campaign to ban Netflix films from the Oscars (2019 saw Roma nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, the first Netflix-produced film to do so) and Dame Helen Mirren told crowds at CinemaCon “I Love Netflix, but fuck Netflix”, seeing the streaming platform as a threat to the magic of cinema. The argument is that Netflix is drawing crowds away from the cinema and the experience of going to the movies, instead preferring to stay at home. However, there have been concerns about the future of Hollywood for every change in the way we watch films at home, so why should Netflix be any different? In fact, the average Netflix viewer will still go to the cinema to watch new releases that aren’t available on the platform. Personally I think the problem comes out in the actual content of films that are produced by Hollywood. In order to ensure that cinemas get people in the doors, Hollywood studios are not prepared to take any risks anymore; the majority of new films, particularly big-budget blockbusters, are sequels, remakes, or franchises. There is less and less room for low- to mid-budget films at the cinema and, as a result, the filmmakers who can’t get their work distributed the traditional way are starting to turn to streaming services instead of cinemas.
With the obvious success of the subscription model in this instance, is this transferrable to other industries? From an economic point of view it certainly makes sense for the consumer; you pay less money and only get what you need. While this works fine for digital media, moving into the physical world may present more difficulties with availability of products. And with the lack of individual ownership, will the products in question be as well looked after? All are things to consider, however car share services have been running successfully for a number of years without any major issues. Bringing the subscription model into the physical world would have environmental benefits as well. For car share services, a subscription gives you access to a car when you need it. Cars can be shared so fewer cars are needed and we use fewer resources by not making cars we don’t need. Obviously there are limits to this; some products are cheap and ubiquitous enough for us to just buy outright but subscription services are likely to become more and more common in the future.
Streaming and the Entertainment Industry, Part I : Spotify vs. the Value of Objects
In my parents house we have 633 books, 359 DVDs, 236 CDs, 138 Vinyl LPs and a couple of boxes of 12” singles my Dad has stashed in the attic. Books are stacked and slotted where there’s room and shelves are sagging under the weight of their culturally rich contents. We willingly sacrifice a neat and tidy home for one scattered with interesting possessions and decorated with treasured ones. Sometimes my Dad fetches his 12” singles from the attic and sits on the floor next to the record player. He flicks though, picking out his favourites, finding forgotten songs and telling me about the people, places and things they remind him of. This doesn’t happen so much anymore, but I miss the ritual.
For my Dad his record collection is a huge source of pride, something he has built up over decades, but for me, someone who doesn’t really buy music anymore, I often wonder what I could share with my family in the same way. Sure, I have a handful of CDs I bought when I was younger but I’ve been using Spotify to listen to music since 2012. Even before then, I was downloading music on iTunes to put on my iPod. And since I could put music onto my phone, that iPod has sat broken at the back of a drawer. For about 4 years it was a physical manifestation of my (admittedly questionable) taste in music, something I shared with my friends and carried with me on the bus and on long car journeys and on holidays. After about 16 years of building a taste in music, I have almost nothing physical to show for it.
Like many other aspects of media consumption, music is tending towards a subscription model that famously neglects its content providers (a conversation for another time). Streaming has changed our relationship with the commercial side of the music industry. We no longer pay for albums by artists we know we like and we don’t have to choose what we spend money on anymore. We pay less and somehow get more. Somewhere there must be consequences. Downloads and streaming have decimated physical music sales to the point where HMV, the biggest highstreet retailer in this sector, has been forced into liquidation. Apple’s iPod is all but extinct, replaced by an app on your mobile phone. iTunes even state in their terms that when you download a song you don’t actually own a copy of it, you’re just borrowing it somehow (I’m not sure how it works either). The result? Fewer and fewer people will have a physical collection of the music that they love.
But why are physical copies of things so important to us, especially when we’re constantly told that materialism is so unhealthy. Physical objects allow us to extend ourselves into our immediate environment, to express ourselves and to share our interests wordlessly. Perhaps it’s the sense of ownership you get. We take pride in ownership of and satisfaction in caring for our possessions. We can alter them to make them our own and we tend to form closer emotional attachments with physical objects than their digital equivalents. Studies have found we are willing to pay more for them as well. It’s easier to remember something if you have a visual or tactile trigger so perhaps it’s easier to preserve memories and experiences in a physical object rather than just by listening to a song. In terms of listening to music, the physical routine and experience is definitely different and I find there’s something evocative and romantic about the experience of a record player rather than just using Spotify. But then I enjoy massive nostalgia trips so maybe that’s just me.
I know that whole ‘but listening on vinyl is such an incredible experience’ thing is a painfully fashionable cliché at the minute but regardless of your personal taste, it’s hard to deny to that the way we experience music now has shifted dramatically. The object itself is becoming less important compared to the content. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell if this is inherently a good or a bad thing. Physical music won’t die out. People still buy CDs and vinyl. People still go to see live music. Orchestras didn’t stop playing concerts when recorded music was invented but it’s still hard to tell what the future may bring. I can’t see a return to physical music but the technology that will drive the next change in the music industry probably hasn’t been invented yet. I don’t think physical objects have lost their value to us; we just prioritise them below cost and convenience now.
Of Machines and Metaphors – Alistair MacDonald – 14/03/19
This was a two part talk where the first instalment was a 1990’s sci-fi road trip whirlwind of a film. Wim Wenders’ 1991 epic ‘Until the End of the Earth’ provided the backdrop for the discussion that followed. The film itself is bizarre. There’s a loose plot that it clings to until the last hour, the pacing is very stop start with beautifully shot montages spliced into some strange winding narrative that spans the globe. The final hour transformed into a swirling and visually hypnotic descent into technology fuelled obsession. I still can’t tell if I liked it too much but it did drag up some really interesting points surrounding the future of technology and how we as humans interact with it.
This was the premise of Alistair’s talk. He began by asking us three questions to think about:
Does technology define our humanity?
Does what we make define what/how we think?
What’s the gap between technological promise and technological reality?
So with a bit of time (2 weeks or so now) to think about it, I think I’ll have a crack at answering them.
Does technology define our humanity?
Without trying to avoid answering, it’s important to understand what humanity might mean here; either the human race as a collective whole or the individual experience of being human. In either case I think technology has a large part to play in how we define ourselves. On a more superficial level, technology and in particular consumer technology is marketed as, and to an extent sold as, aspirational, a status symbol to mark you as successful. So to an individual, technology is used to measure, if not define, the human experience whether you want it to or not. In parallel to this, the worth or value of any society, a village, city or country, is measured by it’s technological advancement. The most advanced become the most powerful and prosperous and are able to push for further technological advancement. The continual advancement of technology is, and has long been, a collective goal of humanity. The success of humanity is measured with technological milestones; the wheel, the industrial revolution, the moon landing and so it has come to be that technology is the way in which we measure how great we are. But who are we proving ourselves to? These are all undoubtedly impressive achievements but I can’t the see the logic behind progress for progress’s sake, especially if there are other, more pressing issues that humanity could try taking a look at. In fact there are so many problems caused as a direct result of the drive for technological advancement that you could start to wonder if it is such a good idea. What’s the point of having self-driving cars if we’re going to run out fuel for them? Do we want slick new gadgets if people on the other side of the world die as a result of their manufacture? We don’t need Hyperloops we need functioning and well-funded local authorities. We don’t need architectural vanity projects we need affordable housing. We don’t need commercial space travel we need water security. We don’t need a constant tether to our online world we need to respect and care for our planet, now more than ever. We define our successes with technology but the same ‘successes’ seem crude, indulgent and embarrassing when placed next to out failures.
Does what we make define how/what we think?
Absolutely I think it does. Our minds and thought processes are shaped by the things we interact with from a young age all the way through our lives. There are countless times where I have subtly changed my behaviour due to the things I interact with on a daily basis. For a painfully middle class example, the ‘@’ key is in a different place on my Mac keyboard than it is on the computers at the library. I’ve relearned where that key is so that I don’t put a question mark in every email address I write. While these aren’t always things that I have made myself, we spend so much of our time in contact with designed objects that it would be impossible for them not to have some impact on us. As for defining what we think, that has a less universal answer. Our own reactions to what we encounter are entirely individual and are not (I hope) something that can be so easily swayed by a single product. Films like Bladerunner and to a certain extent, Until the End of the Earth, depict a future where advertising products and brand identities extend as propaganda in an almost grotesque exaggeration of a corporate capitalist state. Obviously that’s a bit extreme and shows what might be rather than what is. I like to think that we have more freedom of thought than that at the minute. But the warning is still there. I’ve been talking about this question under the assumption that the ‘we’ is referring to humanity as a whole rather than the individual. Only a small proportion of the population, particularly in the UK, actually make anything anymore and we have become greater consumers as a result. So since we individually don’t make the things we interact with, I’ve answered a slightly different question; ‘Does what we use define how/what we think?’ I don’t think what we use defines what we think but it changes our perceptions enough to alter how we think about it.
What’s the gap between technological promise and technological reality?
This is an interesting one, particularly relating to films. Often cinema is used as a way of imagining new technology, whether it’s a key feature of the film such as ‘Her’ or just a fleeting object to evoke a certain place in time, like in ‘Bladerunner’. Some sci-fi films are actually pretty good at predicting the future of technology (I’ve written about this before) in certain cases, but usually only in logical steps. This could be a landline phone turning into a videophone or a computer turning into a portable screen. The more left field jumps come from an idea rather than from existing things. The dream machine from ‘Until the end of the Earth’ falls into this category; a piece of technology that has no current grounding in science but feels plausible, even tangible, but is in reality unlikely to exist, at least in the near future. Perhaps the biggest example of this, both in films and in real life, is artificial intelligence. Alistair touched upon the fact that this is next logical step; after using machines as surrogate muscle, we use them as surrogate brains. Isaac Asimov’s book iRobot (ignore the film version, it’s terrible) explores some of the ideas around human interaction with artificial intelligence and the point at which AI becomes more advanced than humans. I would highly recommend reading the book if you’re interested however, I don’t think AI can outthink humans, at least in it’s current state. Current ‘intelligent’ robots are often task specific, for example, robot that can beat a person at chess would have no idea how to play monopoly. The only reason it can beat a human at chess in the first place is because it’s been taught the parameters of the game (by a human) and is able to think through all possible outcomes of a move much faster than a human could. Machines that learn still have to be given human input to be able to start the process. They might come up with new and interesting ways of achieving a task, but these tasks are incredibly basic and, again, very specific. Current AI would never be able to outthink a human (whatever that means) because it is, at best, a very complex mimic of human thought and has been designed within the limits of a human mind. A true artificial mind like those Asimov describes in iRobot are way off in terms of time. The gap between promise and reality is often blurred and almost always larger than we think.
It’s been quite a busy and stressful week so I might have got a bit carried away here but I had a lot of fun exploring these ideas both on my own and in discussion with other people. I don’t by any means think I’ve provided any definitive answers, I don’t think there are any but Alistair has definitely given me a lot to think about.
What Design Practice Means To Me – Rachael Sleight – 07/03/19
Having spent some time listening to Rachael’s advice on a couple of projects this year, it was really interesting to hear more about her background. After a number of years of designing products for house and home for a number of different designs firms and high street stores (I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk into somewhere and see someone using products you’ve designed), she has moved towards freelance design consultancy for Stylus to allow more time to focus on her own leatherwork business, Burnbank. Rachael touched on a number of key ideas that she tries to bring to her design practice, wherever or whatever that may be. Sustainability is a key concern as well as honesty both with your own design principles and with the characteristics of the material.
The one thing I want to focus on though is the purpose of Stylus in the design industry. Rachael is a contributor for the firm, which provides insights and predictions across a range of industries into future design trends. Their reports are incredibly detailed insights into specific areas of emerging practices. While I don’t doubt the relevance of and huge amount of research that goes into producing the information and services the company provides, something about the presence of a group such as Stylus troubles me a little. To me, Stylus represents a monetisation of the need for big brands remain ‘relevant’ and relate to their customers. When this research is outsourced, it indicates just how much big brands (Starbucks are one example that use Stylus’ services but are by no means the only one) are disconnected from their customers. I enjoy personal relationships with the businesses I use (or try to use); I feel more trust in that sort of scenario. I get that Starbucks are a huge multinational corporation so that kind of one-on-one relationship is unable to happen. I think there’s a danger with this disconnect from customers that rather than companies designing and offering what people want to buy, we are buying what they think we want, which might not be the case. Even personally, I’m not sure if I am excited about new trends because it’s what I want to see in new products and designs or if it’s just I’m being told what I want and believing in it. Are these my own opinions or am I just listening to a big name is telling me I should like something? Is this making sense?
Allowing brands to drive trends means smaller independent businesses are on the back foot. As a result, they have to rely on their own merits, the quality of the product, the customer service, the relationship with the customer. It’s a curious position for Rachel to be in, having access to both sides of this scale through Stylus and her own business, Burnbank, but one that can bring benefits to both sides of the coin.
So far this post has just been me thinking out loud so I’m not sure I have a coherent point yet. Perhaps I just haven’t been exposed to the commercial side of the design industry just yet, and that’s jarring a little with my insulated and conflict-free experience at art school and maybe I don’t really understand how these things actually work in real life. I’ll get there one day.
What is great design? – Nicholas Oddy – 21/02/19
Nicholas Oddy has been a ceramicist, glassmaker, design historian, author, educator, collector, and public speaker. He has been a consultant for Bonhams, a lecturer for GSA and a founder of several public interest groups. He has likely forgotten more about the art, design and the design world than I will ever know and it is rumoured he has been a contestant on the hit Chanel 4 show ‘Come Dine With Me’ (although I’ve been unable to confirm this). He currently lectures in Design History at GSA and spent an hour or two discussing with us how we measure and merit design, through a number of different examples.
We rarely talk about great design without talking about the great designer behind it, and rightly so. I believe the provenance and context behind a product are as much part of the design as the physical object produced at the end of the process. So does this mean great design is a statement made by a designer? If the design and the designer are intimately linked then the finished product will naturally assert the values of the designer. It follows then that great design evolves and changes over time in parallel with the values the designer; for example ‘great design’ today must be environmentally conscious or risk being dismissed as irresponsible or wasteful.
So if ‘great design’ is an ever-changing concept, why do we talk so much about ‘timelessness’ as a quality of great design? Perhaps truly great design is able to transcend the fashion of its time to become relevant no matter the context. Timelessness is inherently linked to aesthetics since this is how all objects are judged in terms of age. If this is the case then can we rule out ‘style’ as a quality of ‘great design’? Or does this risk sanitising the statement of the designer and depreciating the value of the story behind the design? It all depends which factor is more important in a ‘great design’. A tricky dilemma for sure, and one I don’t intend to solve here (sorry).
Maybe we can sidestep this particular question by saying that ‘great design’ doesn’t have to be a physical object at all. Maybe it doesn’t have any aesthetic qualities to age it. In many cases, objects that are considered ‘great design’ are considered so because of what they represent rather than of any outstanding quality or value the product might possess. Is the Model-T Ford great or is the process that allowed it to become the icon that it is great? Is planned obsolescence a great economic design or are the products that exploit it great? Great design doesn’t have to be a product; it can just as easily be a process or concept that allows well-designed objects to become more accessible.
So we’re no closer to figuring out what ‘great design’ might be. The definition of ‘great design’ remains (unsurprisingly) as fickle and mercurial as it did at the start of this blog post. I haven’t got any closer to pinning down a concrete definition or set of criteria, and I don’t think I’m going to. What Nicholas has done is to give me a few more tools on how to think about whether a design might be great or not. And that’s probably as good as I’ll get.
“It doesn’t have a title” – Ben Craven – 14/02/19
This one was a bit different. On the sliding scale of Product Design to Engineering, Ben sits more towards engineering but useful, practical engineering that you might use in any project. He got us thinking about how we use maths and approximations in projects as a measure of feasibility. It can be easy to lose our grounding in the practical world when working on certain projects and Ben reminded us of the use that rough calculations can provide. Aside from that, he also showed us that maths is quite fun. Before this, I didn’t know the energy required to fly a person from Glasgow to Singapore measured in cups of tea (it’s about 400).
It’s all very well working entirely mathematically but this renders numbers entirely abstract, unless you have an understanding of what 330,000 litres of aviation fuel looks like. Presenting numbers in a way that people can relate to is a powerful tool when trying to explain any calculations or data. One of my favourite ways of doing this is using infographics; displaying data visually in a way that makes it easy to understand. Infographics can be incredibly dense in the amount of information they can display. Different combinations of form and colour can display a huge range of data in a visually rich and entirely intuitive way. Maths and calculations aren’t just a means to an end; they can also be worth pursuing for their own sake. If you want to see what some infographics, I’d recommend Information is Beautiful (they have a couple of books as well) as a start. Thanks to Ben for reminding everyone that maths isn’t boring.
Blood in the Mobile – Frank Poulsen – 07/02/19
You could try neatly describing Frank Poulsen’s exploration of the supply chain of modern electronics as being about wealth or greed, exploitation or power, war or immorality but at it’s heart this film is a human story. Yes it’s about all those other things as well, but we uncover the story, as Poulsen does, through the people it affects and the people who affect it.
Frank begins with Nokia, a then technological giant of the 21stcentury. They describe themselves as a ‘Human Corporation’ although after some gentle probing and questioning, Poulsen is unable to get a satisfactory answer as to whether or not the materials they use are ethically sourced and the trail runs cold. Not content to simply give up, he embarks on the most immersive journey I’ve seen on film, literally into the depths of the Earth, to uncover the truth about our phones.
The central issue the film explores is the use of ‘conflict minerals’ that are used to manufacture consumer electronics around the world. Minerals such as coltan, cassiterite and gold are commonplace in mass manufacture although not commonplace in the natural world; 80% of the worlds coltan supply is found in The Democratic Republic of the Congo. A history of political instability coupled with poor infrastructure and the fact that the DRC is the 11thlargest country by land area means that mining territories are almost impossible for the government to control. As such, territorial militia groups have sprung up to seek to control mines for their mineral wealth and the resulting conflict has killed 5.4 million people in the last 20 years. That’s the same as the population of Scotland.
I don’t really want to dwell on the specifics of the continuing conflict, but to not acknowledge it would be a huge failing that would contribute to the on-going ignorance surrounding this issue. War draws out the absolute worst of humanity, not just the militia groups initiating the conflict. Poulsen meets corrupt officials sitting on both sides of the legislative table, giving with one hand, taking with the other and pocketing the difference. He meets foreign, white mining ‘experts’ gleefully reliving colonial era exploitation under corporate protection, and on the other side of the world, he meets corporate spokespeople feigning concern and responsibility. And the one thing that underpins them all is money.
As Poulsen journeys further and further into the conflict, we find that the mining of these minerals is funding a modern form of slavery. In a truly appalling sequence, Poulsen goes into the mines slowly uncovering conditions that are difficult to describe (This is where my writing ability and vocabulary let me down, I would recommend watching the film instead). All the while, Poulsen never lets us forget that this is a human story. Handheld cameras close in on faces, hands and feet. Interviews are shot honestly in natural environments and the camera becomes a character, spending the film at eye level and subsequently immersing you in the narrative.
As an onlooker sitting thousands of kilometres away, it’s hard not to blame those closest; the local-level officials, the exporters transporting the raw minerals, the national government bodies and it’s easy to forget why this industry has developed as it has. That reason is us. The demand for cheap and often disposable electronics from the developed world is constant and ever growing. Marketing teams from big phone companies (you know who I mean, the fruit-based one from California) encourage a stunningly short lifespan of their products, a model that exhibits an irresponsible use of raw materials. When Poulsen attempts to confront Nokia about this, he encounters rejection after rejection. He is bounced from person to person, never seeming to reach anyone who is willing to talk about their use of conflict minerals, let alone confirm the company’s position. I found this level of blatant avoidance and selfishness from tech companies sickening, perhaps as much as the mining conditions in DRC.
What’s worse is that Poulsen never gets an answer. The phrase ‘we’re doing all we can’ is repeated like a mantra and 10-year plans, social responsibility reps and recycling initiatives are touted as an excuse for current behaviour. It’s clear than nobody is ready to make the first move to clean up their supply chain.
Since the film was released, legislation has been passed in the UK and US requiring companies to publish details of where they source their raw materials. While some companies state outright their ban on conflict materials, there is still a frustrating amount of vague and rhetoric, promising ‘commitment to improving’ or ‘minimising risk’ or else elusive phrases allowing blame to be passed to somebody further down the supply chain.
It’s frustrating how slow progress has been. A page on a website doesn’t feel like enough, active steps are required rather than passive reassurances; but it’s important to remember that any step in the right direction is positive. To end on a slightly more positive note, one company has taken the issue of conflict materials seriously and built their products around it. Fairphone have created ‘the world’s first ethical, modular smartphone’. Not just committed to sourcing materials ethically, the phone is modular, allowing parts to be replaced if and when they break. They actively write about the issues surrounding material supply chain and are slowly becoming internationally recognised. You can check them out here.
I’m writing this a few days after watching Blood in the Mobile, so I’ve calmed down a little bit. I know big change is slow to implement but it starts with us, the consumers. As I mentioned these conflicts are driven by greed and money,which means how we spend our money, who we give it to and what we buy is the easiest and most important way we can implement change.
Rams – Gary Hustwit – 31/01/19
I never expected Dieter Rams to love jazz. There’s a wonderful scene in the documentary where Dieter plays (on his Braun record player) an Oscar Peterson Trio album and a huge smile breaks across his face as he begins to dance small, shuffling steps around his home. A famously improvisatory, intensely collaborative and often messy (if done badly) form of music, Jazz initially felt like a strange contrast to the work of Dieter Rams, which is carefully considered, individual and very disciplined. But the more I learned about him the more this seemed to make sense.
Through a series of remarkably candid interviews, tours and interactions we explore the work that Dieter has produced and the events that shaped how his designs ended up in the world. More importantly though we spend a lot of time just watching him. Whether it’s gardening or previewing a museum exhibition, touring a new factory or reviewing redesigns, we learn so much about him just from seeing how he reacts and interacts with the world. One thing in particular that struck me about his character is how brusque and abrupt he can be. He may cut somebody off to express a like or dislike but if he wasn’t so unapologetic and uncompromising with his opinions would his work have been as successful? I don’t think it would’ve been. Similarly, he comes across in conversation as a very humble and reserved man, which is reflected in his work. If he had been loud, brash and impulsive we most likely wouldn’t be watching documentaries about him.
So while I never expected Dieter Rams to be a fan of Jazz, knowing this, helps, just a little, to understand how he works and who he is. I think what I’m trying to say is that since not that much time is dedicated to looking at and examining famous Rams designs in this film, I’ve learned a lot more from studying designers rather than studying designs.
Eames: The Architect & The Painter – Jason Cohn, Bill Jersey – 24/01/19
I did know that Charles and Ray Eames were a married couple (and not two brothers) before watching ‘Eames: The Architect & The Painter’, but I did think they were just furniture designers. Happy to be corrected, I was fascinated to learn about their filmmaking and the frenzied creative environment of the Eames’ studio at 901 Washington Boulevard. While they are most famous for their furniture and their bent plywood designs, I learned a lot about their whole body of work, their studio and their life together; I just wished I had come away with a clearer idea of who they were. As a documentary, ‘Eames’ talks reverentially and protectively of it’s subjects to a point where it’s hard to disassociate them from their work. Interviews with figures from their past proclaim the charismatic, handsome and charismatic (and handsome) Charles and the artistic, focussed and more reserved Ray but say little else about their character. Similarly, the narrative focus of the film is a sad reflection of the 1950s gender politics it denounces; Ray is side-lined and rarely discussed outside of the context of her relationship with Charles, while Charles (handsome and charismatic as always) becomes the centrepiece of the narrative. Perhaps I was hoping for a dissection of character and thought rather than an exploration some of their more notable projects with brief discussions about their very private and insular relationship spliced in. In the end the film feels like a cinematic version of their ‘Franklin & Jefferson’ exhibition; a fascinating collection of stories that I wanted to spend more time with but wasn’t given the opportunity to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m blown away by the vision of creativity of both Eames’ and can see their influence even more clearly in the world around me, I’ve just been left a little frustrated by the documentary itself. I’m sure I’ll spend more time exploring the work or Charles and Ray Eames myself and if there’s one thing I learned from watching ‘Eames’, it’s this:
Never delegate knowledge.
The Demise of Skilled Traditional Manufacture – Craig Whittet – 10/01/19
Craig’s talk focussed on craft manufacture and the value we place in it. It’s something I think about a lot and try to (try to) buy things accordingly in my life. I have a lot of respect and admiration for craft manufacture. It’s something I think is very special and the relationship between the customer and manufacturer is much stronger and encourages a closer bond with the product. Personally I’m more likely to want to keep an item longer if I’ve met the person who made it. This was touched upon in an exhibition hosted by Vitsœ as part of the London Design Festival, where a curated selection of items that had been passed down through generations and cherished by their owners were on display. I think I’ve written about this before but it’s always worth reiterating.
I try to buy responsibly when I can whether that’s by buying items to last, buying second hand or even repairing broken things. The reasons behind this are mostly environmental; throwaway consumerism seems to be on the increase, at least from my perspective. Maybe I just notice more now that I’m buying my own things. I’m quite privileged in having an understanding of how and where the things I buy are made which will go a long way to informing my purchasing decisions. Something I think most people are at best oblivious to and at worst ambivalent to is the story behind the things they buy. Everybody kind of knows why Primark is so cheap but they still shop there (yes, me as well sometimes). Few people are willing to make a change big enough to address this fact and, being honest, I’m one of them. Yes money is a big part of this but there’s more going on here.
Craig spoke about how wages for skilled workers and apprentices aren’t high enough to encourage growth in small, manufacturers but I think the role of the consumer has a big part to play. My home city of York has seen a huge change in the use of the city centre of the last decade. Recent popularity in tourism has driven up rent prices for city centre retail units, small independent businesses close because they can’t afford to sty open, large businesses move to out of town parks with more space and bars and restaurants crowd the streets with drunken race-goers and hen parties making the city centre a less friendly place, especially at the weekend. I’m getting off topic here, but the reason I bring it up is I’ve started seeing advertising for ‘Indie York’. This is a social media and advertising campaign to promote small businesses (a number of them also manufacturers) in the city. It’s refreshing to see a a group coming together to try to combat the changes seen in the centre and I really hope it works out.
You can check them out here.
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