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In the late eighteenth century, when American colonists established detainment centers for criminals, they borrowed what they knew from Europe. Jails were disorderly, unsanitary, and lenient regarding regimen. People with means could purchase their way out of the discomforts of incarceration, buying or bartering for – among other comforts – clothing.
Lila Allen, Class of 2016, wrote her thesis on the design of children’s spaces. Her research was adapted for publication in the 4th issue of Kinder: A Journal Dedicated To Child Design, Past, Present, and Future. Consider the choice between two cribs: One is a Vetro, a fully recyclable, limited-edition acrylic pen by Nursery Works […]
The experience we have of a place is a combination of what we see, read, and hear about it. From social media to virtual reality, today we have even more ways of traveling the world, both physically and imaginatively. As digital technologies become more advanced, the depiction of space becomes more immersive and new forms […]
While we have completely embraced digitization in our daily lives, we are still in the process of grasping and understanding its impacts in other professional fields. The digitization of museums has transformed curation from an academic, intellectual, and cultural practice into a social process based on the visitors’ personal experience of the museum. Today, the […]
Today, New York City is in the midst of a construction boom. “Supertall” skyscrapers and large-scale “megaprojects” are currently taking shape at rapid speed. While many of these projects may not yet exist, architectural hyper-renderings, ostensibly, provide us with ways of envisioning how they will unfold within the urban fabric. These hyper-renderings have helped popularize […]
To understand North Korean propaganda posters, it is important to understand North Korean ideology; if the text on the poster is the written ideology, the image on the poster becomes the drawn ideology. This research provides a window into this logic, by identifying the themes and symbols recurring in North Korean posters, and considering their […]
Co-design is the practice of designers involving clients and/or end-users to inform design solutions. In recent years, design consultancies have packaged co-design as a methodology, codified for example in the form of free-access toolkits to help marginalized communities. At the same time, as designers become an integral part of large corporations, co-design is being oversimplified […]
“Design thinking” emerged in the workplace as a management practice, intended to codify and package designers’ way of thinking and doing into a step-by-step approach. The term tapped into executive, mid-management, and entrepreneurial anxieties about perpetually being innovative. But as companies adopt the fun and fast approach to innovation, a new myth about design is […]
The rooms we live in are sites where status, ideology, and anxiety surface materially: they are, in a sense, portraits of us. From this point of view, rooms inhabited by children are doubly fraught, reflecting not only clues to the identity of the child but the viewpoints of parents as well. Through their purchase or […]
Successful experience designers, self-identified or not, tend to employ similar strategies, especially when it comes to opening people up to risk in a caring way. This research will inform a lexicon for designing experiences, with a specific focus on experiences that aim for human enrichment. Drawing from game studies, positive psychology, and the anthropology of […]
After six weeks researching in Detroit, MI, Sarah Cox limns how a city can rebuild itself through design initiatives by its local artists and activists.
Ping! Pop! Whistle! Ring! Stephanie Coffee investigates the spectrum of sounds emitted by designed objects in our surroundings.
It’s not just about the music, man. Aileen Kwun explores how video productions augment the listening experience and amplify a musician’s image.
Amelie Znidaric ruminates on the evocative story of Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine typewriter, a design classic that was a commercial failure at the time it was launched.
Saundra Marcel dives into the multi-billion dollar character licensing industry marketed to young girls
Designed by architecture luminaries such as Michael Van Valkenburgh, David Rockwell and Frank Gehry, Kim Birks looks into innovations in children’s playgrounds in New York City.
Zach Sachs looks at the West’s conflicted valuation of an object’s permanence and offers a new perspective for designers and architects.
Avinash Rajagopal explores the convergence of the two dominant modes of creation 21st century and its role in realizing an open ecotopia, straight out of Buckminster Fuller’s theories and Bruce Sterling’s fiction.
Molly Heintz interrogates how designer “myths”—stories and images that are repeated and exponentially amplified, particularly through social media—generate a form of celebrity that often clouds a critique of the designer’s work.
Social design is the most interesting direction the design field has taken in the last generation, but it has yet to become a better practice. Vera Sacchetti tackles state of social design projects and demonstrates why good intentions are not enough.