05.11.17
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 56: All the Presidents’ Libraries


Designer Tobias Van Schneider updated Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design 2017 Tech Industry Edition and posted it in on Twitter, where it got widely circulated. It’s a jaundiced indictment of the abuses of design, but will everyone read it that way?

Jessica isn’t so sure:
I have to say, when I saw this thing—and some of the comments are brilliant, as you say, Michael, and wonderful, and you see immediately that it’s framed with irony. But I found myself wondering if everybody who saw it in their feed would understand he was being sarcastic.
Also mentioned:
  • The Obama Presidential Center
  • Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum
  • Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
  • Chicago Tribune coverage of the Obama Presidential Center
  • ArchDaily, Billie Tsien Discusses Design Ideas for Obama Presidential Library
  • National Archives, History of Presidential Libraries
  • The Fyre Festival pitch deck
  • Wikipedia, List of presidential libraries
  • Ai Weiwei, How Censorship Works
  • Justin Davidson, A Portrait of I. M. Pei at (Nearly) 100
  • Alexandra Lange on Late Modernism


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    Posted in: Arts + Culture, The Observatory




    Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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