Design Observer Twenty Years 2003-2023





Inclusion

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.


The Design Observer Twenty: Our Partners


Observed


At 10 AM today,  Wednesday, October 4, show your support for libraries and the freedom to read on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Use the hashtag #FreedomToRead to share why open access to books, information, and knowledge is important to you or your community. More here.

On nurturing creativity in children—and for the rest of us.

The future of design education—a compendium of writings by a powerhouse roster of seasoned educators and practitioners—and downloadable here.

Architect Beverly Willis, who got her start as a designer in Hawaii, where she studied fresco painting under the painter and muralist Jean Charlot, has died. She was 95.

Horace Ové, considered the first Black director to make a feature-length film in Britain (and knighted for his services to media) has died. The Trinidadian photographer and filmmaker was 86.

Did you know the iconic Mini Cooper owes its design inspiration to a Greek designer? You do now!

“Doesn’t it just scream “lived-in”? Probably because I was screaming so maniacally while bludgeoning it with my spoon.” A three year old takes on interior design, via McSweeneys. 

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month? Dial it back, says the design columnist at the Los Angeles Times. “What I’m not celebrating is the related graphic design, which is often a pastiche of brightly-colored patterns and stylized decorative fonts with awful names like ‘Taco Modern.’”

Rami Al-Ali becomes the first Syrian designer to be recognized by the Business of Fashion list.

Want to fully embrace the circular economy? “The design industry needs to let go of its obsession with the new and start venerating the patina of age,” says Katie Treggiden.

The world’s oldest shoes — sandals, actually — have been found in a cave in Spain. Estimated to be 6,200 years old, the elegant weave and classical details took the wearer from day to night in comfort and style.

AI and regulating the use of actor likenesses move front and center as contract talks continue in Hollywood. (Here is SAG-AFTRA’s dental plan information.)

No, Tom Hanks is not trying to sell you an affordable dental plan. (It’s an AI deep fake video.)

Trauma-informed design “realizes how the physical environment affects individuals, recognizes that it can have a physiological and emotional impact,” In Pittsburgh, thinking about housing, dignity, and more.

“Instead of rooms or units, each resident gets a “home” on a quiet little indoor street reminiscent of the neighborhoods many of them grew up in.” Rethinking nursing home design, and its impact on memory care.

From tiny, moss-enshrouded plantation plots to sprawling urban sites, tens of thousands of Black burial grounds lie in ruins, their history fading or lost. Three Black women, shocked by the condition of cemeteries in Washington, Georgia, and Texas, have turned their anger into action. None have prior experience in historic preservation, landscape architecture, or design. But like many others working to save Black cemeteries, they view the work as a sacred trust and payment of a debt to ancestors who led the way.

What does it mean to say games have objective truth in them? Game enthusiasts, look no further. (And you should subscribe to this wonderful newsletter, too.)

Helen Cammock’s I WIll Keep My Soul is a new “prismatic” artist’s book, just out from our friends at Siglio Press. The book also corresponds to a city-wide, multi-site exhibition of film, performance, music, archival documents and books opening in New Orleans in October.

Legendary editor George Gendron interviews legendary everything, Gloria Steinem.

A Native American man was shot at a New Mexico rally acknowledging the removal of a controversial statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate. The rally was organized by Native American group The Red Nation, the attacker was wearing a red MAGA hat. The victim is in stable condition.



Jobs | October 04