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“How you get to a finished product is just as important as the final design.”
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| Yves Behar on the Power of Design’s Reactivity
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To kick off Surface Summer School, the designer and Fuseproject founder Yves Behar addressed students at UPenn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design last night as they began a month-long competition to design a mobile testing unit for Covid-19. “One of the best qualities of design and designers, besides being humanistic, is our reactivity—our ability to look at problems, see what’s happening in the world, and contribute with our tools, creativity, and learned skills,” he told students. Behar’s presentation showcased four of his projects with synergetic themes to the competition.
|  | PlantPrefab YB1: The prefab accessory dwelling units (ADU) are designed to quell the construction industry’s environmental impact as well as the affordable housing crisis in low density cities such as San Francisco and L.A. Each one is entirely customizable with the option of rooftop solar panels. The decrease in construction time and waste is vast. “Imagine telling your neighbors you’re building a building in the backyard and it’s only going to take 24 hours. The efficiency of prefabs is enormous,” he says.
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|  | New Story: The world’s first 3D printed community, in Mexico, may provide a template to solving homelessness. (The residents have an average income of $200 per month.) Each house can be built in 24 hours and offers a novel design language for the technology. “It’s a new type of texture because the concrete layers, laid down in succession, can feel adobe at times.”
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Learn about more of Behar’s projects and watch the full lecture.
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| What Else Is Happening?
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Banksy stages a virtual vigil that makes a poignant statement about police brutality.
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Dutch Design Week plans to stage an online fair after calling physical events “unrealistic.”
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Demonstrators are covering a brand-new fence around the White House in protest art.
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Airlines have not been enforcing new rules that say all passengers must wear masks.
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People may now need to seek permission before embedding someone else’s Instagram.
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Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.
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| Height Limit of New Chinese Skyscrapers
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According to a circular issued by China’s housing ministry, new skyscrapers will soon be subject to sweeping restrictions on height and style. The two most notable provisions include a self-explanatory ban on “copycat” buildings (a knock-off Eiffel Tower sits outside Hangzhou) and skyscrapers taller than 500 meters, or roughly 1,640 feet. According to Li Shiqiao, a professor of Asian architecture at the University of Virginia, the circular is less about height, more about “Chinese culture, the urban context, the spirit of the city, and the appearance of modernity.”
Half of the world’s ten completed buildings that measure more than 500 meters are located in mainland China, but it seems that intolerance for such supertalls is on the rise, so to speak. Blame real estate firms, which tend to use expensive, unprofitable towers to embellish their new developments. Likewise, local governments have been utilizing supertalls in an attempt to put their cities on the map—a distant cousin of the Bilbao Effect. According to data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, around 70 in-progress towers that rise above 200 meters are currently “on hold” in China amid the current economic slowdown, making the height provision a timely consideration for the country’s architects, developers, and urban planners.
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| Maxis: SimRefinery
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Before Maxis captivated the hearts of budding urban planners with SimCity, the software company was developing novel game-like programs that helped businesses run virtual simulations. One of these includes SimRefinery, an obscure oil refinery simulator that had been virtually forgotten until the librarian and archivist Phil Salvador published a lengthy, largely untold history of Maxis back in May. After reading an Ars Technica report of Salvador’s story, an anonymous internet user whose friend worked as a chemical engineer at Chevron in the early ‘90s uploaded the long-lost game from a 3.5-inch disk to the Internet Archive, where it’s now free for everyone to play.
SimRefinery may feel technical, but don’t expect to learn the ins and outs of managing an oil refinery in one go—the prototype is unfinished and slightly difficult to use. It served its purpose for Chevron, which tapped Maxis to develop a program that showed “how the dynamics of the refinery worked and how all the different pieces invisibly fit together,” writes Salvador, “like SimCity did for cities.”
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| Member Spotlight: Schiller Projects
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| Schiller Projects is an integrated design, architecture, and strategy group. With expertise in architecture, landscape, graphic design, and branding, the firm develops informed and intelligent client-centered solutions, from the home to the workplace.
| Surface Says: Whether designing a home, a shop, or an office, Schiller Projects has a knack for creating inviting yet sleek spaces that put the end user first.
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| Today’s Attractive Distractions
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In Madrid, an immersive neon-lit exhibition celebrates the history of video games.
Quotidian household objects of the quarantine inspire new furniture by Jumbo.
A new documentary about Bruce Lee sheds light on his lifelong activism.
This VR demo lets users explore the anatomical workings of cats.
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