The Design Observer Twenty
Ellen McGirt
Wemimo Abbey + Samir Goel
 A fintech firm with an innovative new business model serving previously invisible customers once facing homelessness
Ellen McGirt
Deanna Van Buren
 Eliminating mass incarceration through architecture and design.
Delaney Rebernik
Mariana Matus, PhD + Newsha Ghaeli
 An unusual collaboration yields a new tool to detect public health threats and redesign cities in a world defined anew by the pandemic.
Ellen McGirt
Judy Samuelson
 Bringing together diverse players in business, science, government, design, and the arts to tackle the most urgent problems facing the planet.
Ellen McGirt
Alison Mears + Jonsara Ruth
 Giving architects and designers the tools they need to remove the toxic chemicals in affordable housing and beyond.
Ellen McGirt
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
 While working on the greatest design question of all, the particle physicist has become a powerful force for full diversity in science, academia, and society.
Delaney Rebernik
Cindi Leive
 A feminist media collective dishes up gender and worker equity at scale.
Ellen McGirt
Dr. Dima Gazda
 Bringing elegant design, inclusion, and responsible AI to the field of prosthetics.
Delaney Rebernik
Edwin Keh
 Preparing the fashion industry for a sustainable future through breakthrough research and collaboration.
Delaney Rebernik
Black Feminist Fund
 Showing the philanthropic sector — and us all — how to fund Black feminists like we want them to win: with $100 million to power the global movements they’re leading.
Ellen McGirt
Henry Timms
 A cultural institution expands the canon of classical art to become affordable, relevant, and accessible to everybody.
Ellen McGirt
Dr. Ismail D. Badjie
 An innovative model delivers dignified, community-centered preventive health services in The Gambia.
Ellen McGirt
Lata Reddy
 The former civil rights attorney is working to bridge the racial wealth gap with initiatives created with and for Black and brown communities harmed by historically racist banking practices.
Ellen McGirt
Massoud + Mahmud Hassani
 A childhood toy grows up to become a tool to end the scourge of landmines.
Delaney Rebernik
New Red Order
 A public secret society of Indigenous artists and filmmakers using art, humor, and provocation to respond to settler violence and recruit non-Native accomplices to the cause of returning Indigenous lands.
Ellen McGirt
Games for Change
 A new coalition of gaming industry leaders led by Dove, including Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and Women in Games, is changing how girls and women are represented in digital games.
Ellen McGirt
Suzanne Ishaq, PhD
 A community forms to advance social equity at the microscopic level.
Delaney Rebernik
Timnit Gebru
 Turning AI into a joyful tool for real people: The data scientist first turned her work on algorithmic bias into a public critique of big tech and then into an inclusive movement aiming to solve real problems.
Ellen McGirt
The Redesigners
 The Design Observer Twenty is our curated selection of twenty remarkable people, projects, and big ideas solving an urgent social need.
Ellen McGirt
Deondre Smiles, PhD
 A global, distributed Indigenous-led geography lab supports Indigenous communities doing political, cultural, and climate-based work.

The Redesigners
 A few months ago, I stumbled upon a quote from Zaha Hadid that stuck with me: “We have the knowledge and the tools to create a much better world. But I don’t think we can do it unless we really have a sense of responsibility for that future.” Many of us feel that responsibility in our bones—only some of us do something about it.



Observed


"If MoMA is going to get serious about this world, it needs to start by dumping the whole concept of “Latin America” and start getting specific." Carolina A. Miranda skillfully reviews Crafting Modernity, an exhibition about design (yes, in Latin America) that runs through the summer at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Logo lunacy for the New York Jets!

Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan—a philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and futurologist who currently leads the Geopolitics and Global Futures Department at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland—holds strong opinions about architecture, which he characterizes as “an intrinsically philosophical enterprise grounded in aesthetics and ethics, including theories of human nature”. And he has something to say about its future, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence.

Co. Design is now Fast Company Design.

From our friends at the MITPress Reader (an occasional newsletter that we can't recommend highly enough), the architect Moshe Safdie offers a beautiful remembrance of steps—and insights on their complexity—that led him to a life in design. (Also in this edition: graphic design enthusiasts will love this story on the design of the original edition of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas.)

At The Design Museum in London, a more "rainbow-hued version of the Barbie universe". 

Right-leaning public interest groups have filed a barrage of federal lawsuits intended to dismantle long-standing corporate and government programs that consider race in job placement. With an alleged goal of “complete race neutrality” (a view of radical equality that, for example, lawyers for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty think is “in line with the Declaration of Independence”) litigants are chippping away at the use of affirmative action across America.  

As we wind down Pride Month 2024, a look at how queer theory apples to urban design: as theory and practice grows more empathetic towards the needs of its diverse stakeholders, queer urban design brings a broad and holistic shift to understanding identity and community in publicly inhabited spaces, challenging traditional (and often rigid) methods of city planning by applying more inclusive criteria to reflect fluidity and interconnectedness. 

Longevity, by Design: Apple has published a 24-page document outlining its key principles for designing hardware that endures.

Manchester City released a brand-new club font to use on the player’s shirts. But instead of tapping the skills of renowned typeface firms who routinely work with sports teams and brands, the Premier League champions asked former Oasis rocker Noel Gallagher to submit a brief. So he did! And the crowd went wild.

Designer Vivienne Westwood’s personal wardrobe goes to auction.

The UK's Design Council has announced a plan to upskill one million designers for the green transition by 2030. Their report, A Blueprint for Renewal: Design and Technology Education, was published with a group of 20 design and education organizations. 

The Peabody-award nominated audio documentarians at Scene on Radio have just dropped CAPITALISM. A full season, a dozen or so episodes, exploring the world's dominant economic system -- how people shaped it over time and what to do about it now that more and more people see capitalism as the problem, not the solution. Produced by host/producer John Biewen with co-host Design Observer’s Ellen McGirt and story editor Loretta Williams, among other amazing collaborators.  The trailer is here; find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaking of AI, Kevin Bethune would like a word with Adobe. 

#Config2024: Figma announced a significant redesign, including new features and AI tools designed to help simplify the user experience. And, in case you were wondering, “All of the generative features we’re launching today are powered by third-party, out-of-the-box AI models and were not trained on private Figma files or customer data,” writes Kris Rasmussen, Figma’s CTO. 

Designed by PearsonLloyd for Teknion (a family-owned business with an environmental conscience and an international reach) Aarea is a chair that unites the concept of circularity and the simple reality of human needs: intuitive and ergonomic in use, it is made with a minimum of components and materials.

Old news: Apple rejected — “spurned,” actually —a proposal to integrate Meta’s AI chatbot with iOS “months ago,” says Bloomberg. Get a room already, gah.

It only touches the ground in six places: how to build a house that sits lightly on the land.

Graphic designer and artist Ming Hsun Yu is on a quest. “I explore human experience, metaphors and questions through graphic methods,” they say, “seeking possibilities within structures, fluidity between dualities, and constant joy.”

Forbes has accused Perplexity, an AI-powered search/chatbot startup, of stealing their content. The service describes itself as being able to provide “concise, real-time answers to user queries by pulling information from recent articles and indexing the web daily.” A new Wired investigation shows that it does that, in part, by surreptitiously scraping parts of the web that are deemed off-limits by operators. Wired also observed this: “[While Perplexity] is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, it is also prone to bullshitting, in the technical sense of the word.”

Civil rights attorney and jazz pianist (!!) Bryan Stevenson has teamed up with jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to release Freedom, Justice, and Hope, a live performance album of historic jazz records created to protest racial injustice. It’s streaming now.

The Vatican was forced to apologize “to those who were offended” after Pope Francis used a homophobic slur in a closed-door meeting. Then, two weeks later, he allegedly used the term again. While it deeply disappointed LGBTQ Catholics and their supporters who had been encouraged by his inclusive signals, attendees of this year’s Pride parade in Rome pointedly reclaimed the term and made the Pontiff the unexpected star.

Happy Pride: the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center is set to open. 

The annual design confab that is Config goes live June 26 and 27! Tune in online as acclaimed filmmaker, actor, and photographer Spike Jonze joins Ellen McGirt, editor-in-chief of Design Observer, as they explore the art of taking creative risks, facilitating unconventional collaboration, and navigating the future with AI. June 27th at 5:10pm Pacific Time; find the full agenda here.

De.fault is a recommendation engine built to reduce bias and broaden horizons. intentionally providing de-personalized information to enlarge our perspectives and counteract filter bubbles, ideological rigidity, social anxiety, and increasingly addictive and toxic content. Designed by Yoonbee Baek, De.fault is also the recipient of the 2024 Core77 Design Award for Best Speculative Design in the student category.

In stripping objects of all but their essential elements, the Shakers not only exposed the elegance inherent in even the most humble of items but also reinvented the concept of beauty itself. With its emphasis on durability, functionality, and timeless minimalism, Shaker design has had a profound effect on generations of artists, architects, and designers. (“Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live,” urged Shaker leader Ann Lee, “and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow. ) Now, they have their very own postage stamp.

At MIT on June 27—Designing With, Not For: a conversation between Richard Perez, founding director of the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town; Amy Smith, founding director of the MIT D-Lab; Surbhi Agrawal, 2022 MAD Design Fellow, urban planner, and data scientist at Sasaki; and Aditya Mehrotra, instructor of Mobiles for Development at MIT. This event is part of this year's Design Research Society (DRS) conference, on the theme of recovery, reflection, and reimagination.

Multi-Species Worlding is an experiment, for no more than twenty people, into the felt perspective of another species, in which participants will practice speaking as that species, and build shared worlds that serve all of life.  This workshop brings together multi-species artists, architects, researchers, storytellers, communicators, educators, entrepreneurs, designers, and anyone curious about co-creating worlds where all species thrive. 

Coming this fall, join a pivotal gathering of minds from Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, China, Kenya, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Finland, Hong Kong, and the United States for Designing Nature and Humanity-Centered Future,  at ISMAT Portimão (in Portugal's Algarve) from 8 to 11 of October. Interested? You have until the end of July to submit an abstract.

“Must be buff, charged with the emblem of the State, a pine tree proper, in the center, and the North Star, a mullet of 5 points, in blue in the upper corner; the star to be equidistant from the hoist and the upper border of the flag, the distance from the 2 borders to the center of the star being equal to about 1/4 of the hoist, this distance and the size of the star being proportionate to the size of the flag .”  The State of Maine is seeking design ideas before voters in November determine whether to adopt a new, more distinctive flag.



Jobs | July 03