Scratching the Surface

Dan Hill is a designer, educator, and writer. He's currently a director at Arup, a visiting professor at The Bartlett School, and Adjunct professor at RMIT. He's also the author of Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary, and the long-running blog City of Sound. He previously worked at the Helsinki Design Lab and as director of Fabrica. In this episode, Dan and I talk about the evolution of his career, his vision for a new type of design education, and the role of writing in his work. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

Emmett Zeifman is an architect, educator, and writer. He's the cofounder with Alfie Koetter of Medium Office, a design practice based in Los Angeles and New York, and *Project*, an independent publication that investigates the possibilities for developing a critical position in contemporary architecture. He also teaches architecture at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In this episode, Emmett and I talk about the relationship between the classroom and the studio, the role of writing in his design practice, and what he learned studying literature. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

Anab Jain is a designer, futurist, filmmaker and educator. As Co-founder and Director of Superflux, she hopes to realize the vision of the Studio as a new kind of design practice, responsive to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. She also teaches at the University Applied Arts in Vienna and gave a TED Talk last year on design's role in imagining new futures. In this episode, Anab and I talk about Superflux's blend of client and speculative work, her background in filmmaking, and pushing up against disciplinary boundaries. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

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.

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, and the differences between critical design, critical making, and design research. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

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 can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

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 writes about government, policy, and transportation through the lens of design.

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 reconsider how their work lives in the world in this current cultural and political moment. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

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 years. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

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 at Facebook. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.