Disegno #36

Disegno is the world’s leading quarterly journal dedicated to long-form independent reporting and critical writing on design.

Sheep, sugar machetes, second-hand windows, and masturbatory shower heads. These are just some of the building blocks of Disegno #36, the new issue of The Journal of Design

The 36th issue brings together a series of essays, interviews, reports, roundtables and photo galleries that assess different elements of the design process, exploring the way in which contemporary practitioners interact with the world around them.

Designer Corinne Quin digs into the phenomenon of the sizegiver, in which online communities place everyday objects into photographs to enable judgement of another object's material properties.

Marianna Janowicz follows up on the design implications of Brda Foundation’s Okno project, which manages the international distribution of windows to Ukraine as a form of humanitarian relief.

Disegno’s editor-in-chief Oli Stratford provides feedback of the Apple iPhone, examining the ways in which the tech company is seeking to minimise and control its environmental impact and legacy.

Studio Saar invites Rupal Rathore and Eshwarya Grover to Udaipur to examine the construction of Third Space, a community space seeking to simultaneously engage the city’s cultural, social and environmental context.

Amal Alhaag and Bachir Tayachi meet with designer Yassine Ben Abdallah for a discussion about the potential for design to operate in the context of colonial legacies and entrenched ethnographic institutions.

Modern art emerges as a discipline in deep collaboration with Lagos’s tropical modernist architecture, in a piece in which Olorunfemi Adewuyi and Ọlájídé Ayẹni seek to reset the discussion around a historic architectural style.

Formafantasma meet with Evi Hall at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet to discuss the research behind Oltre Terra, an exhibition that reframes design’s use of wool as a complex symbiotic relationship with sheep.

Selma Alihodžić visits a semi-industrial neighbourhood in Tokyo to get  to grips with Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku’s philosophy of architecture as a process of urban wild ecology.

The economies behind sex tech come under the microscope when India Block and Claudia Chanhoi look into Hansgrohe and Lovehoney’s design for a masturbatory shower head.

And Nathan Ma and Jonas Holthaus drop by Ableton’s Berlin office to explore the industrial design development behind the company’s new musical instrument, the Push 3.