Posts Tagged

design

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 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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The Theo-Aesthetic World of William Morris: Introduction

This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted.  Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…

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Too Many Unnecessary Things Everywhere: Brian McLaren, Kohei Saito, Dieter Rams and Use-Value

“As people who have been shaped by the current empire–first the European, and then Euro-American, and then the global economic empire that we’re a part of now–we have to realize our survival now depends on disentangling our identities from the values and assumptions of this empire.“ –Brian McLaren The above quote comes from an interview…

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The Trembling Gift

It has become a habit of mine over the years to make gifts for friends and family for Christmas, and this year my spouse, Erin, and I wrote, designed, illustrated, and produced home made Christmas chapbooks. This was a wonderful process! I thoroughly enjoyed writing the story and, astonishingly, the writing part came together rather…

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Brief Reflections on Intellectual Effort as Private Property and Economic Commodity, Copyright, and The Social Activity Called Art

“’Authorship’ – in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity – was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was nearly their own. They…

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Theocards! Theologian Trading Cards Coming Soon

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I’m pretty pumped about these theological/philosophical trading cards my friend Tripp and I have been collaborating on. They’ll probably be for sale sometime soon at Homebrewed Christianity, so collecting them all will obviously be the thing to do (if nothing else they’ll make badass, nerdy bookmarks!). In the future we plan to feature other schools of thought like, Masters of Suspicion, Mystics, Heretics, Early Church Thinkers, Radical Theology, and Queer Theology, for instance, as well as release additional thinkers for Team Process, Team Idealism, and Team Liberation.