Design Observer

During a recent reporting trip touring Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” I listened to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, published in 1999. It’s the second installment in a prescient trilogy, set in an America barely hanging on in 2032: environmental degradation, economic chaos, widespread violence, a wave of detentions, and a zealous tyrant running for President. It turned out to be… an interesting choice.

With America 250 upon us, brands, museums, and civic institutions are busy shaping how the nation will see itself at this milestone through logos, exhibitions, campaigns, and public narratives. The official America 250 identity, with its star-shaped logo built from red, white, and blue ribbons, presents the anniversary as a broad national celebration centered on unity and civic participation. Yet state-level campaigns interpret that story differently.

Home › Articles › Draw the Line Announcing a new audio documentary on democracy The Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais gutted the Voting Rights Act and rewrote the rules of American democracy. Draw the Line spends ten episodes telling the inside story of Louisiana’s fight over power, maps, and who gets left off them. As goes Louisiana, so goes the rest of the country. Who’s fighting for your vote?

Design makes the world a better place. So does who funds it. Design Observer imagines a better world: one that’s more equitable, more sustainable, more democratic. By expanding what design means and who it serves, we bring a curious audience diverse expert perspectives on everything from AI, to business, to democracy. After 22 years of high-integrity publishing, we believe our readers and listeners seek us out, and we work to earn that.

“I’m 82, I’m going to die. We die because we are born.” It was April 2020 and British artist David Hockney was writing to his friend Ruth McKenzie. The emotional correspondence later appeared in his last book, Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, part of his attempt to capture the liminal space of the COVID-19 lockdown. “The only things that matter in life are food and love, in that order, and also our little dog Ruby. I truly believe this, and for me, the basis of art is love.

A colleague of mine, a designer with over fifteen years of experience and someone I respect, recently came to me frustrated. Another senior executive showed up to a meeting with prototypes. Folks whose domain, until five minutes ago, was limited to PowerPoint or Excel. They were bringing AI-created prototypes and ideas to the table and, in his view, undermining the design team’s judgment, process, and role. I understood the feeling, but I also told him I thought it was a good thing.

A colleague of mine, a designer with over fifteen years of experience and someone I respect, recently came to me frustrated. Another senior executive showed up to a meeting with prototypes. Folks whose domain, until five minutes ago, was limited to PowerPoint or Excel. They were bringing AI-created prototypes and ideas to the table and, in his view, undermining the design team’s judgment, process, and role. I understood the feeling, but I also told him I thought it was a good thing.

Is there nothing Zohran Mamdani can’t do? The charismatic mayor of New York City is barely six months in office, and kids are getting day care, potholes are being filled, and the Knicks are in the finals. NYC is in a very good mood these days. So, it should come as no surprise that his first big outreach to the design community is for city-owned grocery stores.

Larger Than Life: Portraits of Transgender People is an exhibition including nine (true to its name) larger-than-life 65×45 inch canvases with bright-colored portraits of trans people. “I didn’t know whether they were going be shown or what impact they were going to have. I just knew I needed to paint them,” says artist Nina Katz. And painting was the best way to humanize them. “It was the only way I knew how to present them as the cool people they are,” she says.

Editor’s note:This is the third installment of a 10-part series on design lessons learned from Reclaiming Value, Murmur Ring’s four-day multi-disciplinary immersion in Peru’s Sacred Valley. Read more of the series here. When Latin American design is discussed, it is often framed through references to traditional Indigenous art or to the architectural legacies of Barragán, Niemeyer, and Legorreta.