Scratching the Surface

Natalia Ilyin is a designer, writer, and teacher based in Seattle. She's currently a professor at Cornish College of Arts in Seattle where she teaches design history and criticism, design for social activism, and transition design and is a founding faculty of the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her new book, Writing for the Design Mind, was published by Bloomsbury in Februar...

Michèle Champagne is a designer who moves between research, creative direction, and publication design across media. Michèle works with publication as a public conversation, and meanders open source dynamics, collaborative authorship, and reader participation and her research interrogates anti-criticism culture, positive psychology, happiness measurement, and their communication phenomena. In this...

Oliver Wainwright a writer and photographer based in London. He has been the architecture and design critic of the Guardian since 2012. He trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, and worked in strategic planning at the Architecture and Urbanism Unit of the Greater London Authority and at a number of architecture practices, including OMA in Rotterdam and...

Vera Sacchetti is a design critic and curator. She's currently the co-curator of TEOK Basel, one-half of the curatorial initiative Foreign Legion, and was the associate curator of the 4th Istanbul Biennial. Her writing has appeared in Domus, Disegno, Metropolis, and the Avery Review. She is a graduate of SVA's Design Criticism program. In this episode, Jarrett and Vera talk about her move from des...

Paul Bailey is a designer, educator and researcher. He's currently the Course Leader for the MA Graphic Media Design program at the London College of Communication, an advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and is a founding member of the Design Displacement Group. Paul's expanded practice mixes client work with self-initiated projects and take various forms such as exhibitions, publications, perfo...

Kurt Andersen is a writer, radio host, and journalist. He's the author of novels True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century, and has written for film, television, and stage. He is the host and co-creator of arts and culture radio show Studio 360, co-founder of Spy Magazine, and author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. Oh, he was also the design critic at Time for eight years. In this...

Reinier de Graaf has been a partner at OMA since 1996. He co-founded the studio's think tank AMO and has overseen projects ranging from an exhibition of the history of the European Union to masterplans for projects around the world. He has also taught in Harvard's architecture department and is the author of Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. In this episode, Jarrett...

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and designer based in Japan. He’s written extensively about books, publishing, walking, and technology for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Medium. He also publishes two newsletters, Roden and Ridgeline, and hosts On Margins, a podcast about making books. In this episode, Jarrett and Craig talk about his background as a designer and programmer, the evolution o...

Kimbro Frutiger is an architect and writer. He studied classical languages and archeology at Amherst College, with a focus on reconstruction of Greek-era sites in Sicily, before receiving an MArch from Yale University’s School of Architecture. Since 2000, he's written about architecture history and culture for a variety of publications and is currently working on a book. In this episode, Kimbro ta...

Nate Pyper is an alphabet artist working in publishing, performance, and video. He maintains an ongoing research practice on queer anarcho-punk zines and is a 2018 Graduate of the Yale School of Art. He previously worked as a designer at the Milwaukee Art Museum and organized the Designers Talking series. In this episode, Nate and Jarrett talk about his expanded practice, the role of writing and r...

Sam Jacob is an architect, writer, and teacher. He is the founder and director of Sam Jacob Studio, an architecture and design practice based in London, has written for all sorts of architecture publications, and is currently Professor of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago and Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture. In this episode, Sam and Jarrett talk about how he start...

Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and is on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate Sc...

Mark Minkjan is an urban and architectural geographer. He is Editor-in-Chief at Failed Architecture and produces the Failed Architecture Podcast. He is also part of Non-fiction, office for cultural innovation, and has written for numerous publications including VICE, The Guardian and The Architectural Review. In this episode, Mark talks to Jarrett about the origins of Failed Architecture and his g...

Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell are designers, authors, and educators. They operate Skolos+Wedell where they are interested in demising the boundaries between graphic design and photography through collaged three-dimensional images influenced by painting, technology, and architecture and are long-time faculty members at RISD. In this episode, Nancy and Tom talk to Jarrett about how they met at Cranbro...

Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey are the principals of Inventory Form and Content, a Los Angeles-based design and editorial studio focusing on graphic design, spatial design, strategy, and content development. They also operate Inventory Press, a publishing imprint that specializes in books on art, architecture, design, and music. Previously, Adam and Shannon were a part of the New York design stu...

Kate Wagner is the creator of the viral blog McMansion Hell and has written about architecture, design, and culture for a variety of publications including Curbed, The Atlantic, Architectural Digest, and more. She recently graduated from Johns Hopkins with a Masters of Arts in Audio Science, specializing in architectural acoustics. In this episode, Jarrett and Kate talk about origins of the site,...

Cab Broskoski and Chris Sherron are two of the founders of Are.na, a knowledge sharing platform that combines the creative back-and-forth of social media with the focus of a productivity tool. Before working on Arena, Cab was a digital artist and Chris a graphic designer and in this episode, they talk about their desire for a new type of bookmarking tool and building a platform for collaborative,...

Chappell Ellison is currently a content strategist at Huge. She previously worked as a designer and was part of the inaugural class of SVA's MFA in Design Criticism Program. In this episode, Chappell and Jarrett talk about her move from design to writing, the role of the critic, and how a dreamlike memory from Disneyworld made her realize she wanted to be a designer. Links from this episode can be...

Laurel Schwulst is a designer, writer, teacher, and webmaster. She runs an independent design practice in New York City and teaches in design programs at Yale and Rutgers. She previously was the creative director for The Creative Independent and a web designer at Linked By Air. In this episode, Laurel and Jarrett talk about how horses got her into graphic design, what websites can be, the potentia...

Martin Lorenz and Lupi Asensio are the founders of the Hamburg-based design studio TwoPoints.net. Founded in 2007, the studio's work blends graphic design, typography, and editorial. The couple are also teachers and have taught in design programs around the world. In this episode, Jarrett talks to Lupi and Martin about their work and process, the role of teaching in their practice, and how writing...

For the 100th episode of Scratching the Surface, Jarrett Fuller is joined by one of his oldest and closest friends Rory King to talk about their parallel journeys in design and evolving design practices. Rory is currently a graduate student in Cranbrook's 2D Design Department and has worked as a designer at Pratt Institute and 2x4. Together, Rory and Jarrett collaborated on Sway, an experimental z...

Kelsey Keith is the editor-in-chief of Curbed. Before that, she wrote about design and architecture for Dwell, Architizer, and a variety of other publications. In this episode, Kelsey and Jarrett talk about the late 2000s New York media landscape, cobbling together a freelance career, and her editorial vision for Curbed. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

Alexander Tochilovsky is a designer, curator, and educator. He's currently the curator at the Herb Lubalin Study Center and an instructor at Cooper Union. He studied graphic design at Cooper Union and went to graduate school at Cranbrook. In this episode, Alexander and I talk about his background and how he got interested in design, the role of design history in his practice, and how we can do a b...

Andrew Blauvelt has been a designer, writer, curator, and educator. He's currently the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum, a position he's held since 2015. Before that, he worked at the Walker Art Center in a variety of roles including Senior Curator of Design, Research, and Publishing; Chief of Communications; and Design Director. He also served as Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the...

Christopher Hawthorne is the Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles, a brand new position appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Before that, he was architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to early 2018. He is Professor of the Practice at Occidental College and has taught at U.C Berkeley, Columbia University, and Souther California Institute of Architecture. In this episode, J...