Mindy Seu is a designer, educator, and researcher. She is currently a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was previously a designer at 2x4 and MoMA. She's also designed and produced archival sites for Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin’s Eros and Avant Garde magazines. In this episode, Mindy and I talk about her early career and why she decided to go to graduate school, the role of research and archives in her work, and how graphic design is just one pillar of her practice.
Jul 25, 2018•44 min
Jessica Barness is a design theorist, educator, and writer whose research interests include interactive environments, sound, and critical practices. She's currently an associate professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University and her writing has appeared in Design and Culture, Visual Communication, Dialectic, and more. In this episode, Jessica and I talk about her career as a practicing designer before making the shift to academia, the state of design discourse, a...
Jul 18, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity, and she's written about architecture, design, and building for various publications. In this conversation, Keller and I talk about studying theater, how she ended up in architecture and her desire to move away from it, and the role of criticism in the discourse. Links from this episode ...
Jul 11, 2018•48 min
Alissa Walker is the urbanism editor at Curbed where she writes about cities, infrastructure, transportation, and policy. Before that, she was the urbanism editor at Gizmodo and has written extensively about design, cities, and architecture for places like Design Observer, Dwell, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. In this episode, Alissa and I talk about the differences between writing about designed objects and writing about the city, the role of the critic, and how she...
Jul 04, 2018•41 min
Cameron Tonkinwise is a design theorist, educator, and writer based in Australia. He's written on subjects ranging from sustainability to interaction design, design thinking to systems design and has taught in design institutions around the world. In this conversation, Cameron and I talk about his early interest in philosophy and politics and how design became a way he could bridge the gap between those, the challenges with design's newfound cultural currency, and how designers need to reconside...
Jun 27, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Francisca Monteiro is a typographer and book designer based in the United Kingdom. While I was working on my MFA thesis on design criticism in Baltimore, Francisca was also working on a thesis, at the University of Reading, on Emigre and the relationship between design and writing. I was struck by the similarities in our projects which we use to frame a discussion about the history of design criticism, the role of magazines in creating a discourse, and how the design writing has changed over the...
Jun 20, 2018•46 min
Tim Belonax is a designer and educator in San Francisco. He currently works as a brand designer at Pinterest and teaches at the California College of Arts. He previously worked as a designer at Airbnb, Mine, and was a principle designer in Facebook's Analog Research Lab. In this episode, Tim and I talk about institutional critique and how to encourage reflexivity while working in house, how teaching has influenced his work in the tech industry and vice versa, and why he left grad school to work ...
Jun 13, 2018•51 min
Silas Munro is a designer, educator, and writer based in Los Angeles. He's currently an Assistant Professor in Communication Arts and MFA in Graphic Design at Otis College of Art and Design, Advisor, Chair Emeritus in the MFA program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and his work and writing has been published in many forms around the world. In this episode, Silas and I talk about what it means to be a 'design nomad' and how this applies to ideas around expanded practices and cr...
May 30, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Jonathan Hanahan is a an artist and designer whose practice explores the cultural and social ramifications of experiences which transcend physical and digital occupations and the role technology plays in shaping, mediating, and disrupting our everyday realities. He's also an Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and an artist in residence at California College of the Arts. In this episode, Jonathan and I talk about his backgro...
May 23, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Rudy VanderLans is a graphic design, type designer, and co-founder of Emigre, the type foundry and magazine he created with his wife Zuzana Licko. In the 1990s, Emigre Magazine became the place to read and discuss issues of graphic design, design criticism, and theory and gave a platform for some of the best design writers like Randy Nakamura, Mr. Keedy, Anne Burdick, and Kenneth FitzGerald. In this episode, Rudy and I talk about Emigre and his own relationship to graphic design and design theor...
May 16, 2018•1 hr 19 min
Andrew Lister and Matthew Stuart are designers, editors, educators, and publishers. Together, they edit and design Bricks from the Kiln, a new journal that 'centers in and around graphic design.' In this episode, Matthew, Andrew, and I talk about Bricks from the Kiln and how they started it and what their goals are, how publishing and editing has influenced their design practice, and the overlap between editing, teaching, and writing. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface....
May 09, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Peter Mendelsund is a graphic designer, writer, musician. Until recently he was the associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf where he designed book covers for everyone from James Joyce to Franz Kafka, Stieg Larsson and Simone De Beauvoir. In 2014, he published What We See When We Read and Cover and will publish his first novel, Same Same next year. In this conversation, Peter and I talk about his relationship to graphic design, working across mediums and disciplines, and the differences between...
May 02, 2018•1 hr 18 min
Aggie Toppins is a graphic designer and educator whose work centers around active citizenship and intellectual pursuit. She's currently teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and maintains an independent studio practice publishing zines, collages, and a fun series called Critical Theory Cocktails. In this episode, Aggie and I talk about her introduction to critical theory and how she introduces challenging texts to her students, how her time at MICA inspired her to start teaching,...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Shannon Mattern is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focuses on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She's the author of multiple books and writes a regular column for Places. In this episode, Shannon and I talk about what media studies is and she got interested in it, how to connect theory and artifact — in both teaching and writi...
Apr 18, 2018•44 min
Bryan Boyer is a partner at Dash Marshall, an architecture and strategic design studio based in New York and Detroit, where he leads their Civic Futures practice. Bryan studied architecture and interior renovation before heading to Finland to help start the Helsinki Design Lab, where he worked on a team that helped improve public institutions through design. In this episode, Bryan and I talk about the value of an architecture degree, the ideas behind strategic design, and the limits of design th...
Apr 11, 2018•51 min
Joe Potts is a graphic designer, educator, artist, and writer working with found and synthesized images, sound, typography, and language. He teaches typography and graphic design at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California, and is the founding director of the Southland Institute (for critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices). In this episode, Joe and I talk about the Southland Institute, both why it exists and what it's trying to do, the economi...
Mar 28, 2018•56 min
John L. Walters is the editor of Eye Magazine. Before becoming the editor in 1999, John worked as a writer and editor on a variety of publications and newspapers, including The Architectural Review and The Guardian, and previously was a musician, touring England with his band, Landscape. In this episode, John and I talk about the transition of music to writing, how he started writing about graphic design, and how the design discourse has changed over his nearly twenty years of editing Eye and ho...
Mar 21, 2018•59 min
Rob Walker is a writer and journalist covering design, technology, business, the arts, and other subjects. His writing on design has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Design Observer, and The Atlantic and was featured in Gary Hustwit's film Objectified. He currently writes the Workologist column for The New York Times and is writing a book about attention. In this episode, Rob and I talk about how brought design into his writing beat, wrestling with the consequences of design in th...
Mar 14, 2018•44 min
Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator. He is currently the chief curator at the Design Museum in London and a faculty member in the Design Curating & Writing program at Design Academy Eindhoven. Previously, he was director of Strelka Press, design critic for The Guardian, and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2014, he published Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. In this episode, Justin and I talk about the similarities between writing and curating, m...
Mar 07, 2018•45 min
James Langdon is a designer, writer, and curator. He is one of six directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, England, runs an independent design practice, and has written for publications like The Serving Library and Bricks from the Kiln. He's a professor in the communication design department at HfG Karlsruhe and in 2013, he founded the itinerant School for Design Fiction, working with students to investigate the storytelling inherent in the design process. H...
Feb 28, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey is a designer, writer, editor, and publisher. He co-founded Dot Dot Dot with Peter Bil'ak in 2000 and began working with David Reinfurt, under the name Dexter Sinister, in 2006. Along with Reinfurt and Angie Keefer, he's the co-founder and publisher of The Serving Library. Late last year, he was appointed Head of Design at the ICA in London. In this conversation, Stuart and I talk about his early design career and working with Richard Hollis, the relationships he sees be...
Feb 21, 2018•1 hr 18 min
Paul Ford is a writer, programmer, educator, and technologist. He is currently the co-founder of Postlight, a digital product studio in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He's written for publications like Harper's, New York, Medium, and The Morning News and is a frequent commentator on technology and the internet. In 2015, he published "What is Code?" for Bloomberg Businessweek, an issue-length essay explaining programming to a mass audience. In this episode, Paul and I talk abo...
Feb 14, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Dmitri Siegel is a creative director, designer, and writer. He's currently the Vice President of Global Brand for Sonos and was previously Executive Creative Director at Patagonia. He also was one of my favorite writers of the Emigre-era, where his writing appeared in Emigre, Design Observer, and Dot Dot Dot. In this episode, Dmitri and I talk about his interest in writing about design, going from writing for Emigre to leading design at Sonos, and how design criticism has changed over the course...
Feb 07, 2018•57 min
Mitch Goldstein is a designer, artist, and educator based in Rochester, NY. He is an Assistant Professor the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, works in collaboration with his wife Anne Jordan on client projects, and maintains an ongoing art practice focusing on experimental darkroom photography. He also co-hosted the design podcast Though Process and has written and lectured extensively on design and design education. In this episode, Mitch and I talk about our evolving ...
Jan 31, 2018•1 hr 15 min
Paul Soulellis is a designer, writer, and educator. After spending twenty years working as a designer, fifteen of those years under his own studio, Soulellis Studios, Paul recently has shifted his work into a more expanded and experimental practice. In 2014, while part of the New Museum's incubator, he started Counterpractice, his new design studio, and began publishing his now-ongoing project Library of the Printed Web. He also recently joined the faculty at RISD in their graphic design departm...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Rory Hyde is an architect, curator and writer based in London. His work is focuses on new forms of design practice, and redefining the role of the designer today. Currently, he's Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the author of the book, Future Practice, a collection of interviews about the edge of architecture. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rory and I talk about his early career as an architect and interning at Volume magazine, the di...
Jan 10, 2018•54 min
Sara De Bondt is a designer, educator, and publisher. She runs her own independent design practice working with cultural clients and is the co-founder of Occasional Papers, a small publishing company focusing on publishing affordable books devoted to the histories of architecture, art, design, film, and literature. The Walker Art Center called Sara "the epitome of a cultural designer, combining a love of contemporary typography with a deep investigation into the history of graphic design. Throug...
Jan 03, 2018•49 min
Alice Twemlow is a design writer, critic, and educator. She was the co-founder and chair of SVA's Design Criticism program in New York City and is now the Head of the Design Curating and Writing Program at the Design Academy Eindhoven. She also recently published the book, Sifting the Trash, which is a fascinating history of design criticism. In this episode, Alice and I talk about her interest in design and writing, the history of design criticism and how its evolved, and the collapsing borders...
Dec 27, 2017•54 min
Penelope Dean is an architectural theorist and critic whose research focuses on contemporary architectural culture with an emphasis on the exchanges between architecture and the allied design fields. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the founding editor of Flat Out, a fascinating new independent magazine of architecture and design criticism. In this episode, Penelope and I talk about the concept...
Dec 20, 2017•48 min
James Goggin is a designer, educator, and writer. He runs his own design studio with his partner, Shan James, under the name Practise and recently joined the faculty of RISD's graphic design department. He previously worked as Director of Design, Publishing and New Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and has taught at Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and at ECAL in Switzerland. His writing on design has appeared in numerous publications and he currently serves as art...
Dec 13, 2017•1 hr 5 min
