Inclusion


Amplifying Accessibility and Abolishing Ableism: Designing to Embolden Black Disability Visual Culture
An excerpt from from An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design.


The Editors
Advocacy
At its core, advocacy is an art of creative benevolence: to advocate for someone (or something) is at once an act of generosity and a form of compassion, a mark of conscience and an expression of citizenship.



On Fighting the Typatriarchy
"My intent was to make a typeface that stands for the strength of a woman at different times in her life. In Indian culture, a woman is expected to be the powerhouse of responsibilities." An excerpt from Feminist Designer.


Cindy Chastain, Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt, Lee Moreau
Design Observer x Mastercard
For three days in March, we gathered with some sixty people—designers and scholars, social entrepreneurs and independent consultants, creative leaders and senior practitioners from across a range of industries—to discuss the current state of everything from collaboration and craft to cultural transformation, technological innovation, and the social and systemic changes impacting the ways we live and work.


Don Norman
Design for a Better World
An excerpt from Don Norman’s new book, Design for a Better World.


Dana Arnett, Kevin Bethune
S10E12: Decolonizing Design
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook is a guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.


Daniella Zalcman
What We See
The inaugural book from Women Photograph, What We See, is a broad survey that represents the equally broad careers of our members.


Dana Arnett, Kevin Bethune
S10E6: Richard Ting
Richard Ting is the Vice President of Design for Revenue at Twitter.


Sloan Leo, Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive S2E10: The Automatic Door
The automatic door is a part of most peoples everyday lives, and certainly considered a convenience. But when you walk up to one does it feel magical? Futuristic? Frustrating? On this episode, Lee Moreau and Sloan Leo discuss the automatic door, and how we can design thresholds of all kinds to be inviting to all people.


Sloan Leo, Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive S2E3: The Blender
Do you have a blender? Do you use it? Does it make your life more convenient? On this episode of The Futures Archive Lee Moreau and Sloan Leo discuss the blender, gender roles, and power structures.


Sloan Leo
The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post-Traumatic Growth
This essay interrogates the relationship between power, decision-making, and organizational healing. It asserts that community design as a practice offers a theoretical framework for organizational dynamic healing that structurally enables those harmed to set the pace and nature of resolution and repair.


Maurice Cherry
Make the Path by Talking
The Birth of Revision Path: The year is 2006.


adrienne maree brown + Lesley-Ann Noel
This Is Our Time!
adrienne maree brown on design, liberation and transformation as told to Lesley-Ann Noel.


The Editors
Ritesh Gupta + Useful School
Useful School is the world’s first pay-what-you-can online product design school for people of color.


Lee Moreau + Grace Jun
The Futures Archive S1E5: The Uniform
On this episode of The Futures Archive designer Lee Moreau and this episode’s guest host, Grace Jun, discuss the notion of a uniform, and the importance of inclusivity in human-centered design.


Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S9E10: Quemuel Arroyo
Quemuel Arroyo is the first ever chief accessibility officer at the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority.


The Editors
Terms of Service: June 2021
In advance of this weekend’s second annual Where Are The Black Designers conference, we are pleased to share this interview with some of their members.


Connect 4
Min Lew and Zaiah Sampson: Finding Your Creative Voice
Feeling confident in yourself and your work—especially when you’re still a student—can be a challenge.


Connect 4
Kojo Boateng and Brian Jean: Making Decisions, Making Your Mark
Brian Jean and Koto Boateng talk about decision-making as a creative, about being a Black designer, today and in the past—and why now is a great time to enter the design world.


Kaleena Sales
Teaching Black Designers
The vibrant complexities of the urban landscape create visual impressions in the mind, eventually serving as a mental library of stored images to use or reference when necessary.


Ellen Lupton
Confidence Equity
Are we born with confidence, or do we earn it? If we don’t have it, how can we get it?


Connect 4
Victor Newman and Ana Amaro: Becoming an Animator
In this episode, hear student Ana Amaro and her mentor, creative director Victor Newman talk about how they each found their calling and first encountered their animated favorites.


Connect 4
Natasha Jen and Adnan Bishtawi: How Do You Survive as a Designer?
How can you stay inspired, make great work, take care of yourself—and still pay the bills?


Connect 4
Forest Young and Sakinah Bell: Follow Your Curiosity, Find Your Inspiration
Finding joy, purpose, and personal evolution through creation.


Connect 4
Eddie Opara and Tyriq Moore: How Do You Build Knowledge as a Designer?
How learning and discovering new things is at the heart of being a good designer.


Connect 4
Man-Wai Cheung and Angel Blanco: “Mom, Dad, I Want to Be a Designer”
Man-Wai Cheung, founder and creative director of Adolescent and design student Angel Blanco, talk about choosing a creative career as first generation immigrants—and how they each explained that choice to their parents.


Harriet Gridley
Terms of Service: March Edition
Harriet Gridley, UK director of No Isolation, makes the case for a technological solution to loneliness.


Laetitia Wolff
Design is Capital: Five Lessons I Learned from Lille
Useful ingredients to bring design to cities.


Isometric Studio
Terms of Service: November Edition
Providing tangible steps to rethink institutions from the ground up and examine meaningful alternatives.


George Aye
How We Shook Up the World’s Oldest Student Design Competition
A story in Design Observer started a life-changing collaboration between the RSA in London and a small design studio in Chicago, Illinois.


Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S8E4: Ari Melenciano
Ari Melenciano is an artist, creative technologist, educator, and the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation.


Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel
Terms of Service: October Edition
I got a bit quieter and listened a bit more, noting blindspots about critical theory, pedagogy, identity, and inclusivity. As I listened, I researched critical theory, anthropology, and social justice concepts I thought could improve the kinds of conversations I was hearing.


Debbie Millman
Maurice Cherry
On this episode, Debbie talks with Maurice Cherry about his education and career, and about why the profession of graphic design has been so slow to acknowledge Black designers.



Scott Boylston
Design, Belonging, and Human Capabilities
The space between what we hope to achieve in our lives and the realization of those desires is riddled with contradiction and confrontation.


Scott Boylston
Human Capabilities and Design
Blindness to social injustice doesn’t diminish its existence.


Steven Heller
Tolerance: Spreading the Word
THE TOLERANCE PROJECT is a traveling poster collection that celebrates and honors the starting point of all meaningful discourse: tolerance.


Laura Scherling
A Tale of Long Island City: Between Industrialization, Innovation, and Gentrification
The multi-faceted aspects of development in Long Island City, with creative and technological development deeply ingrained in it’s rich urban identity and history.


Steven Heller
Closing New York’s Penal Colony
How design is playing an integral role in the campaign to close Rikers Island.



Observed


Coming soon to the Center for Contemporary Arts In Berlin, an exhibition featuring more than100 original posters by one of Japan’s most influential and internationally renowned graphic designers and poster artists, Shigeo Fukuda

The Design Newsroom is a new digital platform designed to streamline the interaction between award-winning designers, brands, and the global media landscape.

“The idea was to create a sanctuary in the center of the city where anyone is welcomed, no matter their faith, religion, what brings them there, or their backgrounds, “ observes Krista Nightengale, Executive Director of Better Block, a placemaking nonprofit based in Dallas. Read more about their newest initiative: a design competition to combat loneliness. Elswehere in Texas, Icon—an Austin-based startup—launched own competition, inviting professionals to design homes that could be built for $99,000 or less “without sacrificing beauty, dignity, comfort, sustainability, or resiliency”.

Two Australian First Nation artists, Naminapu Maymuru-White and Daniel Boyd, are uniting at Art Basel Hong Kong to present complex and contrasting views of Indigenous identity. 

March 21st was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. We may need more than one day for this.

Ryan O’Rourke, Alberto Ponte, and Dan Sheniak are responsible for some of the most iconic ad campaigns Nike ever produced. The Wieden+Kennedy veterans are heading out on their own with Someplace, a new LA-based, full-spectrum creative, brand, identity, and design shop. “We wanted to challenge ourselves in a new way,” says Sheniak. “What does our next chapter look like? How do we push ourselves and make ourselves uncomfortable to create something? From there, we just started getting excited about what we could dream up together.”

Along with Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yeeone (originally known as the Antwerp Six), renowned Dutch designer Dries Van Noten—whose clothes are known for their simplicity, elegance, and drape—makes a graceful exit.

Enzo Mari saw design as the production of knowledge (as opposed to consumption). The Italian theorist, ethicist, and spirited provocateur—who died in 2020—is the subject of a new show opening next week at London’s Design Museum, and running through September.

Are you lying awake at night pondering the future of the world—and in particular, of design? “And when it doesn’t seem to matter, suddenly it really does..” The extraordinary Forest Young weighs in.

Prospective students working at the nexus of virtual reality, video games, political campaigns, or even on the next Hollywood blockbuster, look no further. A new one-year Masters program at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles may be just what you're looking for.  

Designing an app for a … (wait for it) … parrot.

Fast Company's Most Innovative Design Companies for 2024 include Adobe—"for embracing generative AI the right way—and a shortlist of tech, product, and branding firms.

While human-centered design was once the pinnacle of progressive ambition, a tricky question now confronts us all: what about the rest of life? Working with John Thackara and Caterina Castiglioni, at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano twenty international design students were asked to design an urban ecology tool, place, equipment, or experience, that would enhance the interdependence of all of life in practical ways. Their conclusions are diverse, inspiring, and powerful. (Read the full report here.)

Reports of discrimination (and a lawsuit) at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Native American graphic design: a primer.

Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.

Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.

Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.

Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!

An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference,  and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.) 

What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts

Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.

The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.

Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!

The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)

Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)

Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)

Should there be an Oscar for main title design?

Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.

Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.



Jobs | March 28