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Design

Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 2b: What is Solarpunk?

This is the second section in Part 2 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore two contemporary, post-capitalist movements that have much to offer our creative endeavor to imagine a new, ecologically sensitive design story. Degrowth and solarpunk are neither finished experiments nor cautionary tales but living, still-unfolding proposals, argued over…

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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 2a: What is Degrowth?

This is the first section in Part 2 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore two contemporary, post-capitalist movements that have much to offer our creative endeavor to imagine a new, ecologically sensitive design story. Degrowth and solarpunk are neither finished experiments nor cautionary tales but living, still-unfolding proposals, argued over…

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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1d: The Design Institutes of China

This is the fourth section in Part 1 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design. Please find the preceding sections below if you’d like to catch up: Introduction Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy…

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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1c: Design in Cuba: Sufficiency and Resourcefulness in Action

This is the third section in Part 1 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design. Please find the preceding sections below if you’d like to catch up: Introduction Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy…

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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy in Socialist Yugoslavia

This is Part 1b of my recent grad school design paper, the introduction can be read here. and Part 1a can be read here. … From 1918 to 1992 Yugoslavia improvised their very own “third way”  type of economy. In 1948 Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin and pulled Yugoslavia (which today is comprised of…

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The Designer as Moral Compass: Minimalism, Animism, and Quaker Plaining

“Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,” things made in the socialist East will actively promote egalitarian socialist culture. They will replace the pleasure of…

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Use-Value Score Calculator: Notes On A Recent Grad School Project

I recently turned in two projects for a grad school class called Emerging Media, which is a graduate seminar that focuses on emerging technological advancements as they relate to the Communication Design industry and design-related fields. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the “emerging technologies” the instructor introduced the class to was generative AI and for…

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The Ordinary Texture of Existence: Reflections on ASMR and The Consummatory Satisfaction of Felt Quality

“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…

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The Theo-Aesthetic World of William Morris

Recently, for a grad school class, we were asked to write an essay on a “design pioneer” of our choice for the first half of the summer session. For the second half, the class was asked to create a visual project based on the designer we had chosen. I chose British designer, writer, thinker, and…

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