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Design’s greatest challenge?
Space | Edwin Heathcote visits a Design Museum exhibition that imagines making a life on Mars
Raymond Loewy became famous designing steam locomotives in the 1930s — huge, streamlined, Art Deco beasts that looked as if they could break the sound barrier. Thirty years later he was designing the interiors of Nasa spacecraft. The 20th century moved fast.
According to Justin McGuirk, the curator of Moving to Mars, a striking new show at London’s Design Museum, Nasa’s spaceships had been designed entirely by engineers until then. When Loewy came on board, he suggested that if people were to spend months in space they might, perhaps, need a window to look out of or a table where they could eat together. His drawings are here, surprisingly simple, elegant, not a million miles from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey which was being made at the same time. They go some way to underlining the show’s theme, that moving to Mars might be humanity’s most challenging job for design.
Perhaps in keeping with the Extinction Rebellion protesters on the streets nearby, who are suggesting that we might think about saving our own planet, the underlying idea here is not that we will all have to move to Mars but rather that the extreme difficulty of sustaining life on the Red Planet might be the spur to finding solutions back home.
Mars has always been a special case. Since the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli identified a series of lines across the planet in 1877 (the beautiful maps are displayed here) and dubbed them “canali” (translated as “canals”), the erroneous notion spread that it had been terraformed by a civilisation. Subsequently the image of the planet was developed by sci-fi. From HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds with its tripod-riding monsters to the big-brained, glass-helmeted, ray-gun-toting aliens of 1950s pulp, Mars was the go-to planet for evil aliens. It was a bit of a disappointment then to find, decades after Schiaparelli drew his maps, that Mars is in fact a dead red desert with a misty mauve sky.
Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian captures its hostility pretty well, astronaut Matt Damon reduced to growing potatoes in his and his departed colleagues’ faeces, battling starvation, dust storms and loneliness. Yet only last month SpaceX released the designs for its “Starship”, the fulcrum of Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars. It looks oddly like something Raymond Loewy might have designed, with its retro ray-gun fins and shiny metallic body.
So why the attraction? The epic, immersive installations featuring real panoramas of the surface of the planet from the Curiosity Rover certainly seem seductive to architects and designers imagining a wholly designed new world. But for the rest of us? I find myself, despite the irresistibility of the aesthetics and the tech, curiously unattracted.
There is, for instance, the journey itself. The moon was three days’ travel; Mars (142m miles away) would take six months or more. The brilliant Soviet designer Galina Balashova is featured here, her plans for interiors featuring tartan blankets, curtains and landscape pictures she painted herself to create some semblance of home aboard the spacecraft. In a contemporary response to Loewy, there’s a new spaceship dining table commissioned by the museum from designer Konstantin Grcic, an elegant disc which rises from the floor with a yellow Hula-Hoop for seating, metal straps for the feet to keep the astronauts fixed in place.
There are spacesuits (including a new one designed specifically for Mars by the University of North Dakota) with their incredible complexity, and the eye-watering detail of gloves that allow astronauts to do intricate work. There is also a room of architectural models from a competition to design a new structure for the planet, weird mounds of red Martian earth piled over 3D-printed armatures and inflatable pods, including one design from Norman Foster. It all looks oddly 1960s.
Another room is devoted to off-world agriculture, with terraria and complex hydroponic closed-loop systems, though it all depends on either transporting water from Earth or finding and extracting some of the ice at the Martian poles. Architect Xavier de Kestelier from Hasell suggests a circular economy is a matter of life or death on Mars — the extreme self-reliance necessary for a Martian mission, the need to recycle everything, might prompt better use of our resources on Earth.
It all ends with an intriguing installation by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg about a Mars “wilding”, populating the planet not with people but with plants, presented through a series of screens and a gaming engine which maps the development of the fauna over millennia.
The most arresting suggestion, though, comes from Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. He proposes that by the time we are ready to go to Mars, in 40 or 50 years, biotechnology and micro-robotics will have advanced so much that the first generation arriving on the planet might re-engineer subsequent generations so they become better adapted for life on Mars — perhaps only partly human, perhaps not at all. This first generation of post-humans might be almost immortal and lacking our limitations for lengthy space travel: physical decay, ageing, boredom, loneliness, madness . . .
Mars, he suggests, could be just the beginning, the launch pad for the rest of space. But then he does sensibly add we might also do well to look after the planet we have where everything is, at least for the moment, astonishingly comfortable and easy.
To February 23, designmuseum.org
Fixed income. Intensifying competition
Online brokerages scramble to recover from gruelling fee war
Protecting margins is vital as US sector converges around move to zero commissions
RICHARD HENDERSON — NEW YORK
When Charles Schwab scrapped commissions to trade US stocks this month, cutting its fee from $4.95 to zero, it opened up a new front in a gruelling price war.
Schwab stock fell a 10th on the day but its rivals, who matched the move of the San Francisco-based group, suffered even more. TD Ameritrade shares lost a quarter of their value while E*Trade lost 16 per cent. By the end of the week, billions of dollars had been wiped from the combined value of the trio.
The decision by Schwab — the US’s biggest listed online brokerage with more than 10m active accounts — to eliminate fees for trading stocks, exchange traded funds and listed options may prove smart, over time.
Not only did it hurt its nearest rivals, which derive a bigger share of their revenues from trading commissions, but the firm laid down a direct challenge to no-cost upstarts such as Robinhood, a Silicon Valley “unicorn”, that have chipped away at the incumbents.
Schwab did not want to “fall into the trap that a myriad other firms in a variety of industries have fallen into, and wait too long to respond to new entrants”, said Peter Crawford, its chief financial officer.
But the key problem now for Schwab and others — how to protect margins. Fee cuts by the online brokers come at a time when they are facing drops in income from falling interest rates, which sap the money they can make from the core business of holding cash on behalf of customers.
Meanwhile, other income streams are under apparently relentless pressure. Across the financial services industry, where it can be hard to distinguish between commoditised products, customers are increasingly reluctant to pay up for anything.
Wealth management platforms such as Betterment offer low-cost portfolio management, for example, giving everyday investors access to financial markets for just 20 or 30 cents for every $100 invested.
Schwab’s move to zero commissions across the board marked a step beyond Vanguard, the $5.6tn-in-assets mutual fund heavyweight, which last year removed trading fees for 1,800 ETFs offered on its platform, joining other fee-free providers including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Interactive Brokers.
Analysts are in no doubt that fee compression will continue. ETF provider Salt Financial, for example, won regulatory approval in March for a fund with negative fees for a year as it builds scale.
“People are getting paid to put their money in, just like in a bank account,” said Spencer Mindlin of research company Aite Group, adding that such a feature could extend to stock trades before long. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next 10 years, the retail investor gets rebated back some of their money.”
Schwab is now doubling down on investment advice and guidance while bulking up in asset management, through acquisitions such as the $1.8bn deal in July to buy USAA Investment Management.
Others are grinding down on costs. Tim Hockey, chief executive of TD Ameritrade, said on an earnings call this week that he assembled the company’s senior leadership team to review its strategic initiatives and “reprioritise [them] in light of the new environment”.
TD Ameritrade will shave up to 7 per cent from its cost base, the company said this week. E*Trade has announced plans to cut annual expenses by $5m.
“Individuals can now gain access to the financial markets with zero friction,” Michael Pizzi, chief executive of E*Trade, told analysts last week. “The value proposition for customers is truly extraordinary.”
For the established brokerages, a no-fee world may eventually have benefits, said Rich Repetto, an analyst with Sandler O’Neill in New York.
“We haven’t seen all the after-effects of this. People may trade more and the brokerages may be able to fill in the lost revenue,” he said. For example, brokers can receive payment from market makers for directing trades to them.
Analysts noted that brokerage groups have proven adept at protecting profits in the past.
Pre-tax margins at Schwab have averaged more than 40 per cent in the past three years, even as fee pressures have mounted, marking a steady increase over the previous five years.
But for now, share prices tell a discouraging tale. Even after a big rebound after the move to zero commissions, stock in Schwab remains about 30 per cent off its May 2018 high point — a period over which the S&P 500 index has gained 10 per cent.
E*Trade and TD Ameritrade have each lost almost 40 per cent from respective highs reached in the same period.
Fee cuts had been a “sword of Damocles hanging over us”, said Mr Hockey as he tried to strike a positive note on the call with analysts.
“Yes, it was very painful and the revenue give-up wasn’t helpful at all but it’s actually a bit liberating in terms of really trying to understand where we can create value for clients and then potentially charge for it,” he said.
Fee cuts have been a ‘sword of Damocles hanging over us’
Tim Hockey, TD Ameritrade
Tim Hockey, TD Ameritrade
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