Scratching the Surface

Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel, Oval, and the essay collection, Death by Landscape. She's contributed to publications like Frieze, Artforum, 4Columns, Rhizome, and e-flux and was a founding editor of the design and architecture publication uncube. In this wide-ranging conversation, Jarrett and Elvia talk about the intersection of criticism and fiction, how writing essays is a type of design...

Matthew Wizinsky is a designer, researcher, educator, and author of the new book Design After Capitalism. He is an Associate Professor & Graduate Program Director in the Ullman School of Design at the University of Cincinnati, PhD researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and Associate Editor for Visible Language. In this conversation, Jarrett and Matthew talk about the relati...

Tripp Mickle is a tech reporter for The New York Times and the author of After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, a book about the tension between design and commerce in a post-Steve Jobs Apple. In this conversation, Jarrett and Tripp talk about how design is viewed inside Apple, what happens when design gets a seat at the table, and learning to write about design...

Eva Hagberg is an author, architecture writer, and editorial and publication strategist. Her new book, When Eero Met His Match, is a hybrid biography of Aline Louchheim Saarinen and an account of her time working as an architectural publicist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Dwell, The Architect’s Newspaper, Wallpaper, and more. In this conversation, Jarrett and Eva talk about writ...

Maria Nicanor is the director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She previously was the executive director of the Rice Design Alliance at Rice University’s School of Architecture and a curator at the design, architecture, and digital department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this conversation, Jarrett and Maria talk about the mandate of the Cooper Hewitt, the role of museums, and...

This episode originally aired April 11, 2018. — 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...

This episode originally aired June 24, 2020. — Deanna Van Buren is an architect, activist, and the design director and co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and real estate development non-profit working to end mass incarceration by building infrastructure that attacks its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itsel...

This episode originally aired May 16, 2018. — Rudy VanderLans is a graphic designer, 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. Ke...

This episode originally aired April 19, 2017 — Sara Hendren is a designer, artist, writer, and professor whose work centers around adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture, and related ideas. She teaches inclusive design practices at Olin College in Massachusetts and writes and edits Abler, her site to collect and comment on art, adaptive technolo...

This episode originally aired June 27, 2018. — 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 Jarrett talk about his early interest in philosophy and politics and ho...

This episode originally aired June 28, 2017. — In the final episode of my June series on my professors, I talk to the co-director of MICA’s MFA graphic design program Ellen Lupton. In addition to her work at MICA, Ellen is the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, and a prolific author of notable design books like Thinking with Type, Type on Screen, and Graphic Design: The New Ba...

This episode originally aired July 26, 2017. — Jack Self is an architect and writer based in London. He recently founded The Real Foundation, an architecture practice and curatorial institute. The Foundation’s flagship publication, The Real Review is a quarterly magazine about architecture, material culture, and what it means to live today. In this conversation, Jack and Jarrett talk about his car...

Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he holds dual appointments in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His new book, Design as Democratic Inquiry is an exploration of ‘doing design otherwise’. In this conversation, Jarrett and Carl talk about the overlap of critical design and social design, what...

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director whose work spans design, fiction, and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thought Today, an urban futures think tank, and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio. He is also the director of the Masters in Fiction and Entertainment program at SCI Arc. His latest project is Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of ea...

Nicole Killian is a graphic designer and educator whose work spans design, publishing, video, and installation. They are currently co-director of the Design, Visual Communications MFA and associate professor of graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University. In this conversation, Jarrett and Nicole talk about studying at the Bauhaus and Cranbrook, how institutions can become more experimental,...

Robert A.M. Stern is an architect, teacher, and writer. He is the founder of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016, hosted the PBS series Pride of Place in 1986, and served on the board of directors for the Walt Disney Corporation from 1992 to 2003. He’s the author, most recently, of Between Memory and Invention: My Life in Architecture....

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar. She is an assistant professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, the author of the book The Architecture of Closed Worlds and is the co-curator of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale. In this conversation, Jarrett and Lydia talk about being an architect who doesn’t build, Lydia’s concept of ‘immersive scholarship’, and alternati...

Chris Rudd is a designer, community organizer, and youth worker. He’s currently a professor of community-driven design at IIT Institute of Design and founder of ChiByDesign, a black-owned and people-of-color led human-centered design firm. In this conversation, Jarrett and Chris talk about the intersection of community organizing and design, the limits of co-design, and what anti-racist and post-c...

LinYee Yuan is the founder and editor of MOLD, a print and digital magazine about designing the future of food. She previously was an editor for Core77, the entrepreneur in residence at Quartz, and has written about design, art, and food for Food52, Design Observer, Cool Hunting, and Elle Decor. In this conversation, Jarrett and LinYee talk about the intersection of design and food, the decision t...

Zara Arshad is a curator and researcher interested in twentieth- and twenty first-century material and visual culture, liminal spaces, speculative histories, and design futures. She documented contemporary design in China, conducted oral histories on South Korean graphic design, and operates a speculative design practice with media artist Yaloo. In this episode, Jarrett and Zara talk about her jou...

Justin Beal is an artist and writer based in New York. His first book, Sandfuture, is both a biography of the architect Minoru Yamasaki and a personal memoir about our relationships to the built world. In this conversation, Jarrett and Justin talk about how this book came together to uncover how he arrived at its unusual structure and format, what spending time in archives taught him about archite...

Michael Gericke joined Pentagram in 1985, originally working for Colin Forbes before becoming a partner himself (making him the second longest-serving Pentagram partner!). His new monograph, Graphic Life , collects much of the work he’s done at the studio across environmental projects, posters, and identity design. In this conversation, Jarrett and Michael talk about putting together a monograph,...

Sean Anderson is an Associate Professor and Director of the B.Arch. Program at Cornell. He previously was the Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA where he most recently co-organized Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America with Mabel O. Wilson. In this wide-ranging conversation, Jarrett and Sean talk about his interest in both history and practice,...

Lorraine Wild is a designer who teaches and writes. A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Yale School of Art, Lorraine runs Green Dragon Office in Los Angeles and is on the faculty of the graphic design program at California Institute of Arts. She’s written extensively about graphic design for a variety of publications. In this wide-ranging conversation, Jarrett and Lorraine talk about the ea...

Lorne Buchman is the president of ArtCenter College of Design and the author of the new book, Make To Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery. He also hosts the podcast Change Lab: Conversations on Transformation and Creativity. In this episode, Jarrett and Lorne talk about new ways of thinking about creativity, his background in the theater, and the intersection of practice and the...