The humble piano, an instrument which has breezed through the test of time and remained at the forefront of music for over three-hundred years, but why? Unlike its predecessor, the harpsichord, the piano’s volume responds to the velocity in which its player strikes the keys. This granted generations of players an entire new world of expression that is still being tirelessly explored today and still will be for eons to come, from classical greats like Frederic Chopin to contemporary virtuosos such as Chilly Gonzalez, none of them would have been the person they are today without the piano. Nevertheless, 88 keys wasn’t enough for some. Acclaimed jazz pianist Thelonious Monk was said to have been “searching for the space between the black and white keys” in his music throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and while he may never have found what he was looking for, someone else might’ve.

Product design graduate Roland Lamb was similarly frustrated by the limitations of the standard keyboard. Whilst doing his PhD at the Royal College of Art, he built the first Seaboard prototype: a keyboard which replaced the black and white keys with a continuous touch-surface, completely opening up new possibilities for sonic expression much like the piano did in the seventeenth century. This was enough for Roland to gain the traction he needed to make the innovative new instrument a reality, and so he founded ROLI. The first steps of the company shared similarities with how Tesla tackled the market: Blow everyone away with a stunning product, in this case the now-discontinued 88 key ROLI Seaboard Grand. However the £7,000 price tag meant you would only ever play one in your dreams, unless you were pals with Hans Zimmer. After firmly planting yourself on the Christmas list of half the world’s musicians, it’s time to start making it more accessible. The prices slowly dropped, and smaller 49 and 24 key versions were subsequently released meaning they became way more accessible for the masses, but still remain very much at the luxury end of the market.

ROLI succeeds because it gives piano players the ability to sonically express themselves in ways that only string players could previously. It succeeds because it is the next logical step for keyboard instruments to take. Many high-profile users praise it as one of the most expressive instruments out there, Pharrell Williams has even invested in and joined the company as chief creative officer. The idea of the ROLI Seaboard is an inspiration to me – it’s a gorgeous unification of music and technology which is equal parts timeless and visionary.

I thought it would be crazy to write all this without trying one out, so I went to to the only place in Glasgow that stocked them, Guitar Guitar Digital, to have a shot for myself. It seems no amount of YouTube videos can prevent you looking like a useless idiot the first time you sit in front of one. The squidgy (for lack of a better word) surface is so far removed from any other instrument I’d played that it took some amount of time before I was convinced. But convinced I was, and I left the store with the latest and most compact product ROLI has to offer, the 24 key ‘block.’ Trying out both the old and new generation keyboards, I couldn’t help but think that the (supposedly) higher end models were only priced as such to cover huge R&D costs, and not because they were superior. Now that they had it right, they could afford to sell much cheaper units – I paid £225 for my block and massively preferred the playability when compared to the £549 version of the same size they had out on the shop floor.

I cannot fault the playability of ROLIs products when they work, but the amount of elements related to the product which scream amateur truly make me mad. I was sold on the promise that I could play my existing library of digital instruments with ease, but it is far from easy. Setup time when using the ROLI is a good few minutes every time you want to use a new instrument, as well as a further few inevitable minutes of troubleshooting, by which time that tune you had in your head is long gone. Nevertheless, I trust that with the amount of money ROLI is raking in they can sort out the software side of things and create a frustration free experience.

Following the First World War, a newly independent Finland was desperate to prove itself to the world and undertook the mammoth task of inventing a new design style for the country.

An Italian design magazine called Domus bolstered this effort by sharing postwar Scandanavian design to a worldwide audience. Amongst the garish coffee machines one particular Finnish name popped up more often than others, Tapio Wirkkala. Tapio was an intensive designer known primarily for his decorative glasswork. He personally photographed his work for the magazine in his own unique style which was popular amongst its readers. The objects were heavily inspired by natural forms, particularly that of the forest, and Finnish mythology.

One such piece was entered into a competition organised by Iittala, a Finnish glassworks company, and won. The Chanterelle vase was the first of 120 products Tapio designed for the company, all of which went into production. This company amongst others were to become household names thanks to Wirkkalas work.

Tapio was renowned for his rigorous and exhaustive design process. After doing hundreds of sketches for a single design, Wirkkala would personally involve himself in every stage of manufacture, even carving industrial moulds by hand using his trusty carving knife. Tapio even designed several of these carving knives (or ‘puukko’s) in his lifetime.

This involvement with the process gives Tapio’s work its most valuable trait, the way in which it conveys the designers hand despite being mass-produced. Tapio and his prolific body of work was internationally recognised by the time he passed away on the 19^th May 1985.

Procedural generation was born from the memory and hardware restrictions of old computer systems, allowing seemingly infinite two-dimensional video game worlds to be created and explored without ever experiencing the same level twice. Today’s computer systems and games consoles are far beyond such confines, and the three-dimensional perpetually changing worlds made possible through procedural generation have captured the imagination of gamers worldwide. Since its release in 2011, Sandbox video game Minecraft has sold over 154 million copies, and was bought by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion, second only to Tetris.

In its infancy, this technique caused scepticism. The procedurally generated universe in the 1984 game Elite was to contain around 2⁴⁸ (around 282 trillion) galaxies with several hundred solar systems apiece but was reduced to just eight after the publisher decided it would ‘cause disbelief in players.’ Fast-forward over 30 years and you find yourself amidst the hype for something not as dissimilar as you might think. No Man’s Sky took the world by storm after promising a playable universe of around 18 quintillion full-size planets each with procedurally generated wildlife, climate, and atmosphere among many other things. However, when it was released, this ostensibly infinite cosmos felt empty and monotonous, and the tiny ten-man team behind the game didn’t deliver on many of the promises they made in the lead up to the release. David Braben summed it up nicely during his TEDx talk: “Bad procedural generation is art that hasn’t felt the love of an artist.” After huge backfire from the hundreds of thousands of players who purchased the game upon release, the tiny game studio took the profits and eventually over the last few years updated the game into what they had originally promised, and more.

The unexpectedly beautiful redeeming factor of the game for myself was the way the soundtrack was approached. Scoring films and regular video games is much easier: the user is directed through a particular experience and the soundtrack often mirrors and compliments the journey and emotions that come alongside it. Except what about when that story is non-existent, and each player is curating the journey themselves? Sheffield band 65daysofstatic wanted to create something as infinite as the game world itself, and thus took a different methodology to scoring the game. After creating and recording many snippets of music, they worked with the developers to craft a system which strung and layered these elements together in a way which meant you would never hear the same music twice. Although not strictly procedurally generated, smart algorithms meant the music adapted to compliment what you were doing and where you were really rather well.

Could this idea be expanded upon? Could ‘procedurally generated’ music give rise to an entirely new way of listening to music the same way as it did with video games? Could soundtracks and even albums of the future be unique every time you listened to them? Is there an opportunity somewhere between the two to bridge the gap between recorded music and live music? This idea is certainly intriguing.

Thomas Heatherwick is renowned for his architecture and design, but he comes across to me as a thinker. Heatherwick elegantly strides the line between art and functionality, occasionally straying deeper into one than the other depending on the application. He has created definite displays like the 2012 London Olympics Cauldron and the Seed Cathedral for the UK Pavilion in Shanghai, but is often headhunted for more involved design projects such as the updated Routemaster – a modern and more efficient take on the classic London double-decker bus. All of these projects share something in common, their thoughtfulness. Such radical work is always likely to split opinion, but given the chance, Heatherwick’s explanations of the thought processes surrounding the designs are more than likely to draw you in.

To him, large buildings felt cold and without soul, and he became very aware of how similar the entire world was becoming in this respect due to globalisation. Structures were missing the depth and expression he saw in smaller entities like jewellery and musical instruments. This might sound like a gloomy and pessimistic outlook, but to see his creative output is to see how he channels these views into something astonishing. His ability to hone in on the tiniest details and realisations and use them to define massive projects is fundamental to his success.

Thomas has been called the Gaudí or even da Vinci of his time, but I see him more as a Willy Wonka type. The stunning aesthetics of his creations are weird and wonderful enough to make everyone stop and look, and though the fantastical shrink-rays and candy boats of the chocolate factory are far-fetched to say the least, the inner workings of Heatherwick’s designs never fail to impress. Under the hood, every aspect of every project is progressive in the sense that it centres on the state of the world both environmentally and culturally. It’s clear that through being an excessive thinker, Thomas’ design philosophy is so well-defined in his head that it comes naturally to him. At no point does any facet of his design work bypass or compromise his beliefs and responsibilities as a designer, which is why so many have put their faith in him and will continue to do so.

An ex-child super-soldier on guitar; a Satanist hoodlum on bass; the sole-survivor of a drive by shooting on drums; and a coma-surviving frontman are the ostensible recipe for success according to over 16 million album sales worldwide. The remarkable part? None of them exist.

Sometime in the late 90s, flatmates Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were sick to death of how boring MTV was besides the odd Spike Jonze or Hype Williams music video. Jamie was a comic artist known for creating Tank-Girl; Damon had been the lead singer of Blur for ten years. After 6 months of demoing and doodling, Gorillaz was formed. Since then, the virtual band have released 6 studio albums, headlined the likes of Glastonbury and Coachella, and won a multitude of awards for both their musical and visual endeavours.

Every album has so far represented a ‘phase’ in which the visual style and extensive lore behind the characters progresses. This has been drip-fed to us using everything from music videos and biographies to more experimental means such as an interactive DVDs and fake interviews, compelling the fans to piece together the story themselves. While some might think it would be great to have a Gorillaz movie, finding and piecing together fragments of lore deepens the emotional connection to the band and gives the narrative more power than it might otherwise have if it was spoon-fed to the fans in a feature-length film.

Just as the storyline develops, so too does the graphic style. Hewlett’s two-dimensional characters may be just that, but they have garnered a brand identity that most big companies, never mind artists, can only dream of. That’s what impresses me most about Hewlett and Albarn’s creation today—the project’s art and music have become inseparable to the point that having one without the other feels soulless and empty. I remember becoming aware of Gorillaz for the first time and pursuing my interest in them myself when I was just nine years old: my attention being caught by the characters but captivated by the music—something I believe only a cartoon band could’ve done at that age.

All images from Welcome Home via Apple.

For the record, I despise adverts. It breaks my heart when I hear my favourite track over the top of someone rattling on about the new Land Rover, and you won’t catch me crying over whatever animated character John Lewis comes up with this Christmas. But I don’t really see the Apple HomePod commercial as an advert so much as another magical music video from the mind of Spike Jonze.

The advertisement, titled ‘Welcome Home,’ is a fantastical representation of music’s power to captivate one’s mentality, break it out of the mundane and into impossible spaces. Jonze’s film playfully expresses this through a dance performance in which the main character’s movements (played by FKA Twigs) cause the area around her to stretch, bounce, flash, and bend in response. It may look like the mutating apartment is a whole load of CGI, but every twist and turn is, in fact, part of an elaborately engineered set which is choreographed as beautifully as the dancing itself

Compression hydraulics provide the most intense set change: an entire room needed to twist 270 degrees and morph in time with the music in about 11 seconds. The other wall movements, spinning sofas, and expanding mirrors hung on the nuances of FKA Twigs actions, and so were carried out by a team of humans.

 

Spike brought architectural models of his concept to creative director Arnau Bosch and showed him how he would approach the extrusion of the house in time to the music. From this (with the help of no less than small village of people), the advert came to fruition. It truly inspires me to see that such a radical concept can executed so well. Sometimes the backing of a trillion-dollar company is just what’s needed to make something as spectacular as this.

A one-thousand pound marble kettle bell and a three-thousand pound fancy Scrabble set. These were some of the most outrageously lavish items being stocked by The Conran Shop during London Design Week. It was fun to wander around gawping at preposterous price tags for nothing more than neat commodities, although I couldn’t help feeling a bit lackadaisical when I noticed how little thought had been put into the environmental and social aspects of them all. That’s why the likes of the Beazley Designs of the Year attracted my attention the most—the eighty-seven nominees had not only considered the aesthetics of their projects, but also addressed issues like public health, waste disposal, equality, and much, much more.

The experts behind the nominations clearly liked the idea of looking out for future generations. Amongst an isle of Dutch plastic-free grocery packaging and a ceramic carafe for cooling tap water through evaporation was a biofabricated ‘leather’ grown from collagen. As well as being completely animal-free, it has the remarkable ability to be grown in a mould meaning any texture, size, or shape can be realised. The museum piece was a t-shirt which boasted different possibilities such intricate breathable leather amongst other things.

It wasn’t just breakthrough technology featured in the exhibition: Nike’s new strip for the Netherland’s women’s football team takes the forty-six year old lion crest and brings it into the modern era by simply changing it to a lioness; Burberry added a splash of colour into their classic print to show their support for the LGBT+ community; and Lacoste swapped out the world-renowned crocodile logo so that endangered species had their moment in the spotlight.

London Design Fair was instead full of people looking – or should I say paying – for their moment in the spotlight. I swore not to take every booklet, leaflet, and postcard that caught my eye, but sure enough there’s about sixty sitting under my coffee table as I write this and probably also as you read this. I’m not going to pretend I looked into many of the products for more than a minute but many of them did well to catch my eye amidst six floors of bustling creatives.

In Hyde Park, it was interesting to visit Christo’s first actual-size Mastaba which floated on The Serpentine. It was not quite as grandiose as the proposed four-hundred-and-ten-thousand barrel Mastaba he planned to build in the Abu Dhabi desert, but at least he got his fix somewhat. It’s bright colours and sheer size certainly made for a spectacular first impression against the London skyline, but even though it was paid for in full by Christo (around three-million pounds) it still just seemed like a large waste of barrels. If it had been like the Abu Dhabi Mastaba in that you could walk right up to and around it, I think it would work better as a monolithic structure, but as it stands (or floats), it could just be a large water sports obstacle.