Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon | McMansion Hell https://mcmansionhell.com/post/618938984050147328/coronagriftin...

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Coronagrifting: A Design
Phenomenon
May 23, 2020 ! 3,179 notes

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled content to bring you a critical

essay on the design world. I promise you that this will also be funny. 

This morning, the design website Dezeen tweeted a link to one of its
articles, depicting a plexiglass coronavirus shield that could be
suspended above dining areas, with the caption “Reader comment:
‘Dezeen, please stop promoting this stupidity.’”

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This, of course, filled many design people, including myself, with a kind
of malicious glee. The tweet seemed to show that the website’s editorial
(or at least social media) staff retained within themselves a scintilla of
self-awareness regarding the spread a new kind of virus in its own
right: cheap mockups of COVID-related design “solutions” filling the
endlessly scrollable feeds of PR-beholden design websites such as
Dezeen, ArchDaily, and designboom. I call this phenomenon:
Coronagrifting. 

I’ll go into detail about what I mean by this, but first, I would like to
presenet some (highly condensed) history. 

From Paper Architecture to PR-chitecture

Back in the headier days of architecture in the 1960s and 70s, a number
of architectural avant gardes (such as Superstudio and Archizoom in
Italy and Archigram in the UK) ceased producing, well, buildings, in

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favor of what critics came to regard as “paper architecture.” This “paper
architecture” included everything from sprawling diagrams of
megastructures, including cities that “walked” or “never stopped” - to
playfully erotic collages involving Chicago’s Marina City. Occasionally,
these theoretical and aesthetic explorations were accompanied by real-
world productions of “anti-design” furniture that may or may not have
involved foam fingers. 

Archigram’s Walking City (1964). Source.

Paper architecture, of course, still exists, but its original radical, critical,
playful, (and, yes, even erotic) elements were shed when the last of the
ultra-modernists were swallowed up by the emerging aesthetic
hegemony of Postmodernism (which was much less invested in
theoretical and aesthetic futurism) in the early 1980s. What remained
were merely images, the production and consumption of which has
only increased as the design world shifted away from print and towards
the rapidly produced, easily digestible content of the internet and social

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media. 

Architect Bjarke Ingels’s “Oceanix” - a mockup of an ecomodernist,

luxury city designed in response to rising sea levels from climate
change. The city will never be built, and its critical interrogation
amounts only to “city with solar panels that floats bc climate change is
Serious”  - but it did get Ingels and his firm, BIG, a TED talk and
circulation on all of the hottest blogs and websites. Meanwhile, Ingels
has been in business talks with the right-wing climate change denialist
president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. (Image via designboom) 

Design websites are increasingly dominated by text and mockups from

the desks of a firm’s public relations departments, facilitating a
transition from the paper-architecture-imaginary to what I have begun

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calling “PR-chitecture.” In short, PR-chitecture is architecture and
design content that has been dreamed up from scratch to look good on
instagram feeds or, more simply, for clicks.  It is only within this
substance-less, critically lapsed media landscape that Coronagrifting
can prosper.

Coronagrifting: An Evolution
As of this writing, the two greatest offenders of Coronagrifting are
Dezeen, which has devoted an entire section of its website to the virus
(itself offering twelve pages of content since February alone) and
designboom, whose coronavirus tag contains no fewer than 159
articles. 

Certainly, a small handful of these stories demonstrate useful solutions

to COVID-related problems (such as this one from designboom about a
student who created a mask prototype that would allow D/deaf and hard
of hearing people to read lips) most of the prototypes and the articles
about them are, for a lack of a better word, insipid. 

But where, you may ask, did it all start?

One of the easiest (and, therefore, one of the earliest) Coronagrifts

involves “new innovative, health-centric designs tackling problems at
the intersection of wearables and personal mobility,” which is PR-
chitecture speak for “body shields and masks.” 

Wearables and Post-ables

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The first example came from Chinese architect Sun Dayong, back at the
end of February 2020, when the virus was still isolated in China. Dayong
submitted to Dezeen a prototype of a full mask and body-shield
that “would protect a wearer during a coronavirus outbreak by using UV
light to sterilise itself.” The project was titled “Be a Bat Man.” No, I am
not making this up. 

Screenshot of Dayong’s “Be a Batman” as seen on the Dezeen website. 

Soon after, every artist, architect, designer, and sharp-eyed PR rep at

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firms and companies only tangentially related to design realized that,
with the small investment of a Photoshop mockup and some B-minus
marketing text, they too could end up on the front page of these
websites boasting a large social media following and an air of
legitimacy in the field. 

By April, companies like Apple and Nike were promising the use of
existing facilities for producing or supplying an arms race’s worth of
slick-tech face coverings. Starchitecture’s perennial PR-churners like
Foster + Partners and Bjarke Ingels were repping “3D-printed face
shields”, while other, lesser firms promised wearable vaporware like
“grapheme filters,” branded “skincare LED masks for encouraging self-
development” and “solar powered bubble shields.” 

While the mask Coronagrift continues to this day, the Coronagrifting

phenomenon had, by early March, moved to other domains of design. 

Consider the barrage of asinine PR fluff that is the “Public Service

Announcement” and by Public Service Announcement, I mean “A
Designer Has Done Something Cute to Capitalize on Information Meant
to Save Lives.” 

Some of the earliest offenders include cutesy posters featuring flags in

the shape of houses, ostensibly encouraging people to “stay home;” a
designer building a pyramid out of pillows ostensibly encouraging
people to “stay home”; and Banksy making “lockdown artwork” that
involved covering his bathroom in images of rats ostensibly

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encouraging people to “stay home.” 

Lol. Screenshot from Dezeen. 

You may be asking, “What’s the harm in all this, really, if it projects a

good message?” And the answer is that people are plenty well
encouraged to stay home due to the rampant spread of a deadly virus at
the urging of the world’s health authorities, and that these tone-deaf art
world creeps are using such a crisis for shameless self promotion and
the generation of clicks and income, while providing little to no material

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benefit to those at risk and on the frontlines.

Of course, like the mask coronagrift, the Public Service Announcement

coronagrift continues to this very day. 

The final iteration of Post-able and Wearable Coronagrifting genres are

what I call “Passive Aggressive Social Distancing Initiatives” or PASDIs.
Many of the first PASDIs were themselves PSAs and art grifts, my favorite
of which being the designboom post titled “social distancing applied to
iconic album covers like the beatle’s abbey road.” As you can see, we’re
dealing with extremely deep stuff here. 

However, an even earlier and, in many ways more prescient and

lucrative grift involves “social distancing wearables.” This can easily be
summarized by the first example of this phenomenon, published March
19th, 2020 on designboom: 

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Never wasting a single moment to capitalize on collective despair, all
manner of brands have seized on the social distancing wearable trend,
which, again, can best be seen in the last example of the phenomenon,
published May 22nd, 2020 on designboom:

We truly, truly live in Hell. 

Which brings us, of course, to living. 

“Architectural Interventions” for a “Post-COVID

World”
As soon as it became clear around late March and early April that the
coronavirus (and its implications) would be sticking around longer than
a few months, the architectural solutions to the problem came pouring
in. These, like the virus itself, started at the scale of the individual and
have since grown to the scale of the city. (Whether or not they will soon

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encompass the entire world remains to be seen.) 

The architectural Coronagrift began with accessories (like the

designboom article about 3D-printed door-openers that enable one to
open a door with one’s elbow, and the Dezeen article about a different
3D-printed door-opener that enables one to open a door with one’s
elbow) which, in turn, evolved into “work from home” furniture (”Stykka
designs cardboard #StayTheF***Home Desk for people working from
home during self-isolation”) which, in turn, evolved into pop-up
vaporware architecture for first responders (”opposite office proposes to
turn berlin’s brandenburg airport into COVID-19 ‘superhospital'”), which,
in turn evolved into proposals for entire buildings (”studio prototype
designs prefabricated 'vital house’ to combat COVID-19″); which, finally,
in turn evolved into “urban solutions” aimed at changing the city itself
(a great article summarizing and criticizing said urban solutions was
recently written by Curbed’s Alissa Walker).

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There is something truly chilling about an architecture firm, in order to
profit from attention seized by a global pandemic, logging on to their
computers, opening photoshop, and drafting up some lazy, ineffectual,
unsanitary mockup featuring figures in hazmat suits carrying a dying
patient (macabrely set in an unfinished airport construction site) as a
real, tangible solution to the problem of overcrowded hospitals;
submitting it to their PR desk for copy, and sending it out to blogs and
websites for clicks, knowing full well that the sole purpose of doing so
consists of the hope that maybe someone with lots of money looking to
commission health-related interiors will remember that one time there
was a glossy airport hospital rendering on designboom and hire them. 

Enough, already. 
Frankly, after an endless barrage of cyberpunk mask designs, social
distancing burger king crowns, foot-triggered crosswalk beg buttons
that completely ignore accessibility concerns such as those of
wheelchair users, cutesy “stay home uwu” projects from well-to-do art
celebrities (who are certainly not suffering too greatly from the
economic ramifications of this pandemic), I, like the reader featured in
the Dezeen Tweet at the beginning of this post, have simply had enough
of this bullshit. 

What’s most astounding to me about all of this (but especially about

#brand crap like the burger king crowns) is that it is taken completely
seriously by design establishments that, despite being under the
purview of PR firms, should frankly know better. I’m sure that Bjarke
Ingels and Burger King aren’t nearly as affected by the pandemic as

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those who have lost money, jobs, stability, homes, and even
their lives at the hands of COVID-19 and the criminally inept national
and international response to it. On the other hand, I’m sure that
architects and designers are hard up for cash at a time when nobody is
building and buying anything, and, as a result, many see resulting to
PR-chitecture as one of the only solutions to financial problems. 

However, I’m also extremely sure that there are interventions that can
be made at the social, political, and organizational level, such as
campaigning for paid sick leave, organizing against layoffs and for
decent severance or an expansion of public assistance, or generally
fighting the rapidly accelerating encroachment of work into all aspects
of everyday life – that would bring much more good and, dare I say,
progress into the world than a cardboard desk captioned with the
hashtag #StaytheF***Home. 

Hence, I’ve spent most of my Saturday penning this article on my blog,

McMansion Hell. I’ve chosen to run this here because I myself have lost
work as a freelance writer, and the gutting of publications down to a
handful of editors means that, were I to publish this story on another
platform, it would have resulted in at least a few more weeks worth of
inflatable, wearable, plexiglass-laden Coronagrifting, something my
sanity simply can no longer withstand. 

So please, Dezeen, designboom, others – I love that you keep daily tabs
on what architects and designers are up to, a resource myself and other
critics and design writers find invaluable – however, I am begging,

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begging you to start having some discretion with regards to the
proposals submitted to you as “news” or “solutions” by brands and
firms, and the cynical, ulterior motives behind them. If you’re looking
for a guide on how to screen such content, please scroll up to the
beginning of this page. 

—-

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon,

as I didn’t get paid to write it.  

#architecture #design #coronavirus #dezeen #designboom #capitalis

m

" # $

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