Undesigning luxury
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About the talk:
Boutique hotels, lifestyle magazines, fine dining, design museums, catwalks: none of these would exist without luxury. And luxury would not exist without wealth. This episode of Design Interrupted discusses the impact of the super-rich on design and how design shapes the lives of the super-rich and, indeed, the rest of us.
Our keynote speaker is Andi Schmied, a Budapest-resident artist and architect. Andi is best known for her inside investigation by posing as an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire to access Manhattan鈥檚 most exclusive high-rise properties. There follows a panel discussion where we will hear from Nastasia Fomina, who used to design exclusive interiors in Kyiv, Julia Lohmann, who showed her work at the 2020 Davos World Economic Forum, and Seona Candy of Demos Helsinki who is working on the project that investigates questions of ecological limits and consumption. Attendees are invited to join a conversation that explores the lines between excess and sufficiency.
Why should we be discussing luxury, design and the rich? In recent years, the influences of the super-rich have become a hot topic of cultural, policy and political debate. Studies show that the top 10% are responsible for two-thirds of global warming. Of these, the upper 1% are responsible for more carbon emissions that 66% of humanity. But their exclusive apartments, super-yachts and private jets are not only environmentally harmful in themselves, their tastes set the aspirations for many others. Design is therefore active in defining what luxury should look like for the super-rich, but for many others as well. We鈥檒l discuss how design functioning in this context and what might be done.
About the speaker
Andi Schmied
Andi Schmied graduated in urbanism from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL, London) and is a doctoral graduate of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Her work explores urban anomalies鈥攑laces that, for various reasons, do not follow conventional urban logic yet remain part of the cityscape. These may include spaces that diverge from their originally intended function, utopian architectures, or even spaces of privilege.
Drawing on her background in architecture and industrial design, she creates site-specific installations for her exhibitions often accompanied by artist books. Her most recent book, Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan (VI PER Gallery, Prague, 2021), won first prize in the art category of the 鈥淢ost Beautiful Czech Books鈥 competition. As a taster of her approach, .
Panelists
Seona Candy
Seona Candy is a Senior Researcher at Demos Helsinki, where she leads work on socio-ecological justice and just transitions. Through the SRC-funded SISU project, she explores how societies can live within ecological limits by applying the principle of sufficiency 鈥 designing systems around 鈥榚nough鈥 rather than 鈥榤ore鈥.
Seona has experience in the design and completion of innovative, multi-stakeholder research projects at multiple scales, and across a number of different contexts in developed and developing countries. During her time working with the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL), and later with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI), she was a research fellow for the ARC Linkage project, titled 'Modelling policy interventions to protect Australia's food security in the face of environmental sustainability challenges鈥 and used scenario modelling to link land and resource use with food consumption at a national level.
Nastasia Fomina
Nastasia Fomina is a designer and researcher with a background in product, industrial, and spatial design and is currently pursuing her doctoral studies at Aalto University of Art, Design, and Architecture. She holds a Master鈥檚 degree in Art and Design and a Master of Science in design research. She has been deeply immersed in craft practices in Ukraine, intertwining her design work with the stories and meanings embedded within objects. In her second Master鈥檚 thesis, Storytelling by Design, completed at the Bauhaus Dessau, she shifted her focus from creating objects to exploring processes and narratives.
Throughout her career, she has led multicultural and interdisciplinary design research projects, collaborated with businesses, institutions, and design agencies, gained experience in global production, launched and managed design brands and studios. Before the war in Ukraine, she ran a successful interior design business in Kyiv.
Julia Lohmann
Julia Lohmann is a designer, researcher and educator who explores the ethical and material dimensions of our relationship with nature. She is an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in Regenerative Design and Associate Professor of Contemporary Design at Aalto University, Finland. Julia is passionate about eco literacy and ocean protection. In 2013, she founded the Department of Seaweed, a community exploring the sustainable development of seaweed as a design material with a regenerative eco-systemic impact. Lohmann promotes an empathic, more-than-human-centric mindset and uses design to connect knowing, caring, and acting across disciplines. Julia holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art and contributes to research consortia that relate design to biomaterials, science, and ecology.
In 2020, Julia exhibited her work at the Davos World Economic Forum, giving her an insight into a meeting space between design and the rich and powerful.
Chairing
Guy Julier
Guy Julier is a writer, academic and practitioner with over 30 years professional experience observing and researching global changes in design, economics and society. He is credited with having established Design Culture as a field of study and research. While he was Professor of Design at Leeds Metropolitan University (2001-10), Guy Julier founded and directed DesignLeeds, a cross-disciplinary research and consultancy unit specializing in social design. He was also a co-director of LeedsLoveItShareIt, a company formed to develop and prototype new approaches to urban regeneration. In 2011 he was appointed as the Victoria & Albert Museum/University of Brighton Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design and Professor of Design Culture. At the V&A he contributed to new approaches to curatorship while also directing the museum's Design Culture Salon.
Guy was born and spent his early childhood in Jersey, a tax-haven in the Channel Islands close to France. Since then, he has maintained an interest in how surplus capital results in particular design forms. His book Economies of Design (2017) explores this relationship.