There’s been a lot going on around here the last few weeks. The weather has turned, giving us a preview of spring so I’ve been spending the weekends outside prepping the gardens, building new raised beds, and generally getting excited for this year’s harvest. We’ve been eating outside and walking to the library. Despite the flu moving through our house, it’s been a good start to the year.

We’re a few weeks into the new semester and I’m also wrapping up a fun design project this month that reminded me that I still love designing when I get to work with fun people on intellectually engaging projects. I’d like to do more of this again — if you have a project in need of a designer, let me know.

Here’s what else has been going on:

Introducing SCRATCH, a new platform for design writing

A few weeks ago on Scratching the Surface, we launched SCRATCH, a new platform for design writing, ideas, and stories from across the design fields. I’ve long believed we need more venues for deep, thoughtful, accessible writing on and around design and I hope this can be a forum for those kinds of discussions. Expanding on the conversations I have each week, Scratch is a place for new voices, for experimental writing, for engaging ideas. You can read more in my editor’s note.

We’re starting slow and allowing this to see where it takes us. Up on the site now is a conversation between designers Minami Hirayama and Benedetta Crippa on what graphic designers can do in the era of climate crisis and an exclusive excerpt from Dori Tunstall’s new book on decolonizing design. We already have some other great stories lined up so check back often for updates.

Scratch, in many ways, builds upon the work I got to do with Eye on Design over the last three years. My hope here, is that we can expand this type of writing beyond graphic design. I want to publish stories across architecture, urbanism, product design, and more. If you have stories, pitches, ideas, send them my way!

Speaking of Scratching the Surface, I recently released two back-to-back interviews with Michael and Katherine McCoy, the longtime co-chairs of the design department at Cranbrook. As a longtime fan of Cranbrook’s pedagogy, it was a complete pleasure to get this time with them to understand, basically, how Cranbrook became what it did.

Latham Fellowship

I’m honored to be the 2022-2023 Latham Fellow at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech in Chicago — an institution I’ve long admired.

As part of my fellowship, I’m taking over their podcast, With Intent, turning the mics back on the faculty and the administrators for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews, to explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today. The first episode just came out and focuses on how does someone become a designer?, asking questions about foundation classes, how personal experiences shape design processes, and more.

The six-episode season will see new episodes every week and each episode focuses on the big quesions facing design today. This has been a blast to work on and these conversations have influenced so much of my recent thinking.

How To Be A Design Student

Speaking of design education, my friend Mitch Goldstein has a new book coming out next month from PA Press called How To Be a Design Student (And How To Teach Them. Mitch asked me to write the foreword and I’m honored to have played a very small part of what will be an essential book for the next generation of design students. Here’s a preview of my essay:

When I was a design student, I knew what design was. I was a precocious teenager, arriving at design school already having read a handful of design books and could rattle off some famous designers from history. I was told design was the sensible choice for someone with an artistic bent and I agreed. In design school, defining design was easy: I spent my days picking colors and fonts, laying out pages and drawing logos. My classmates and I would laugh at the poor kerning on our dorm’s signage, thinking that’s what designers did. I was excited to spend the rest of my life making magazines or designing book covers or building websites. I loved it.

But it didn’t quite turn out that way. In the fifteen years since I began undergrad, I’ve designed websites and brands, exhibitions and books, mobile apps and live events. But I’ve also made podcasts, written essays, edited publications, and taught design classes. This strange set of activities I’ve cobbled together into a career doesn’t look like the design I thought I knew when I was eighteen. Yet, for some reason — whether I’m teaching a class or interviewing someone on a podcast, writing a text or editing a book — I still call myself a designer.

Reading/Watching/Listening

Like basically everyone, we’ve been captivated by HBO’s The Last of Us. As two non-gamers, we weren’t sure if we’d get into this but both my partner and I were enraptured very early. Yes, it’s an end of the world show. Yes, it’s a zombie show. Yes, it’s a show about a global pandemic. But at it’s core, I think, it’s a show about parenting. (I’ve come to see every story as a metaphor for parenting, but this time it’s really true.) We’re also enjoying Shrinking on AppleTV+ which is almost as far away from The Last of Us as you can get.

About ten years ago, I got really into Haruki Murakami and blew through a bunch of his novels in a short time and then moved on. Last month in a used bookstore, I picked up Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage — one I had not read before — and completely adored it, making me think it’s time to return to Murakami and read the rest of the books I missed.

Told Slant’s 2020 album Point The Flashlight and Walk captured me in a way few albums have in recent years. It’s sort of bedroom pop, sort of lo-fi folk and is both joyful and heartbreaking, intimate and soaring. In the last month, I’ve listened to this more days than I haven’t.

Speaking of music, Young Fathers’s new album Heavy, Heavy is the first great album of 2023. Alex Marshall, in the New York Times, notes its the first joyful YF album; which is the perfect word for it.

Ted Chiang, the great sci-fi short story writer, in the best thing I’ve read on ChatGPT:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp. 

This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

Here’s Ezra Klein on Barnes and Noble’s miraculous come-back that brought back all sorts of memories of hanging out in our local B&N with my best friend growing up. It was there, in those hang outs, that I first started reading about architecture, then graphic design, then philosophy. It was there I started drinking. It was there I learned I loved reading. What’d I’d give to be 15 hanging out in a Barnes and Noble with nothing else to do again.

Here’s Zachary Kaiser in Fast Company on why technology has an interface problem. And Rebecca Ackermann in the MIT Technology Review on what happened to design thinking. Or maybe reading Lindsay Zoladz on John Cale is more your style? I loved this history of American Socialism in LitHub as well as Sasha Frere Jones’s complicated feelings about audiophiles and Japanese jazz kissas.

From Raleigh,
JF