Emmet Byrne

Expand your understanding of design with the Insights Lecture Series, presenting leading designers from around the country. This year, hear Piotr Szyhalski discussing his powerful project created in response to the pandemic, design duo Morcos Key laying out their work with both companies and communities, Danielle Aubert on how her design practice influences her work as president of her local teacher’s union, and Tracy Ma on guiding the design of Frank Ocean’s luxury brand Homer.

How have artists and designers continued to effectively come together during the global pandemic? As part of the 2021 Insights Design Lecture Series, Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson created a visually vibrant, media-rich Zoom chat—unofficially titled How to Be a Human—in which they discuss many of their shared projects including the visual system for Bon Iver’s recent album i,i.

In this Zoom conversation, biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg and activist Chelsea Manning discuss their collaborative projects exploring genetic phenotyping and identity, the relationships between biosurveillance and biopower, and the usefulness of speculation in a tumultuous present.

In this lecture film, Daniel DeSure chats about meditation, process, and the intersection of community and design—digging into the genesis of his studio Commonwealth Projects, fashion line Total Luxury Spa, and health food initiative Tropics.

“An accessible world is one that shifts the burden off of disabled people,” says Aimi Hamraie, director of the Critical Design Lab, “and also asks what the user experience of all these new technologies is, and who are they potentially harming.” Here, curator Michelle Millar Fisher speaks with Hamraie and fashion model and activist Jillian Mercado about how designers can imagine accessible futures even as people with disabilities are “surviving apocalypses that are happening in the present.”

“Architects and designers are facing a new problem when they aspire to build for a habitable planet,” says renowned theorist Bruno Latour. “They have to answer a new question, because what used to be a poor joke—‘My dear fellow, you seem to live on another planet’—has become literal—‘Yes, we do intend to live on a different planet!’” In this essay Latour maps out a solar system of influences filled with seven fictional planets, exploring the disconnect between the physical lands we inhabit and the geopolitical territories that determine our freedom and agency.

By 2080, there will be more metal ore above the surface of the Earth than below. This was the starting point for Formafantasma’s Ore Streams, a project exploring the complicated relationships between large electronic companies, designers, and consumers when seeking to understand the increasingly abstract systems of production that result in enormous amounts of e-waste.

How does our understanding of our own products affect the way we perceive time? Through the skilled craftsmanship of traditional footwear design, Helen Kirkum creates bespoke sneaker collages, combining pieces of discarded and recycled shoes to evoke “fossils of people’s lives.” Her work has been highly influential on the reworn/patchwork aesthetic currently prevalent in the sneaker industry. 

Justin Vernon assembled a cast of creatives to make Bon Iver’s Grammy-nominated LP 22, A Million. Here we catch up with one such artist, Eric Timothy Carlson, whose design for the album is less a graphic identity than a rich documentation of a network of players, places, times, and tools.

In this interview, David Kirby describes how designers, scientists, and filmmakers collaborate to create “diegetic prototypes”—future technologies that exist within speculative worlds such as science fiction films—and the counterintuitive need to create open-ended narratives to successfully convey scientific truths in today’s post-consensus reality.

For many designers the term “bootlegging” resonates with our impulse to exhume the past, our ongoing quest for production of meaning, and a desire to both participate in and critique the broader industries that commodify the artistic act. Here Christopher Schulz and Jordan Nassar discuss how a T-shirt can be a publication, how bootlegs create community, and the radical spirit of generosity that curator Shannon Michael Cane brought to the world of printed matter.