Clara Balaguer of Hardworking Goodlooking and the Office of Culture and Design discusses the potential for brand “wokeness,” the role of design in equity movements, and her timely research project—a close look at political trolls in the Philippines at a time when the alt-right is ascending internationally. She also issues a challenge for designers critical of Black Lives Matter’s use of a certain typeface: “Use Comic Sans, Curlz, Brush Script, Papyrus. Understand why people respond to it.”

“Utopia, like any tool, is conjured from a future but it is destined to remain just out of reach of the technological self.” In this illustrated essay, curator Andrew Blauvelt unpacks the term hippie modernism, discussing the hippies’ counterintuitive embrace of both the preindustrial and the modernist fascination with new media, materials, and technologies.

Fifty years ago, on October 2, 2018, Mexican military police violently quashed a student demonstration in what is now known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, killing anywhere from dozens to hundreds of activists. Ten days later, the Olympic Games opened. In this 2014 interview, Lance Wyman, the designer behind the ’68 Games’ iconic graphic identity, talks with the Walker’s Emmet Byrne about the ideas that went into the design and the way it became a part of student protests.

“… gender must be understood as an expressive format that evolves with the needs of its user. As a species, we continue to move beyond the constraints of the body. So, too, must the constructs of gender and the vocabulary we use to describe them.” In this collection of exploratory texts, designer and publisher Riley Hooker invites seven graphic designers to imagine seven typefaces that in some way evoke the seven gender classifications, as described by Esben Esther P. Benestad.

In 2013, designer Manuel Raeder and artist Mariana Castillo Deball released the catalogue Marginália 1, which acted as a monograph for Rogério Duarte (1939–2016), a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist/designer who played a key role in ushering in the Tropicália movement through his work in design, writing, poetry, visual art, music, performance, and politics. Here, Raeder discusses the process of working with Duarte and how the Tropicália icon has influenced his own practice.

After spending six months as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome researching and experimenting with Bruno Munari’s product-artwork, the Tetracano, David Reinfurt reflects on his research and how the Tetracono can act as a model for thinking through larger questions surrounding design, art, and the fertile grey areas in between.

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.

The design canon is often the foundation of practices by educators in the field, but it is inherently reliant on impenetrable binaries.  In our second edition of Soundboard, guest editor Nicole Killian asks Kristina Ketola Bore, Nate Pyper, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Ramon Tejada how they envision a queering of design pedagogy.

Oakland-based graphic designer Erik Carter addresses a number of issues increasingly coming to light within the profession of graphic design, from the profession’s lack of examination of its societal implications, to the profession’s obsession with personality and itself, to its lack of inclusion throughout its history and in the current discipline. Carter examines and outlines these issues as a way of trying to map a better future for our field.

From corporate mascots to misspelled style guides, Brooklyn-based design studio, Other Means, weighs in on why institutions should partner with independent designers and design studios to develop adaptive, flexible visual identities that reflect the necessary complexities of cultural institutions.

“Design education not only teaches its technical and historical canon, or how to design, but more importantly teaches students how to be designers in society and in relation to capital,” writes designer Jacob Lindgren. “A school becomes a factory producing designers, one that, in keeping with the principles of ‘good design,’ turns them into efficient and interchangeable parts ready to hit the market.” In a new essay, Lindgren proposes models that may help us undo this factory setting of graphic design.

“Reading is a civic act. As much as we are suckers for the oral, the written word manages to constitute a social body in ways too often lacking today: a rigor in terms of focus, a polyphony of voices.” In conversation with designer Aryn Beitz, the Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars discusses its contributions to the Siah Armajani: Follow This Line exhibition and catalogue, both of which strive to attain what it claims Armajani has mastered: the ability to engage and create a public by suggesting reading, without actually requiring it.

For nearly fifty years the Walker Art Center published Design Quarterly, a remarkable magazine dedicated to covering the fields of contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and product and graphic design. Included here are 15 hand-selected issues available for download.

Eric Hu and Harry Gassel of Talk Magazine share their opening essay from Issue 2, titled “Some Politics on Style.” Issue 2 of Talk Magazine “gathers a hodgepodge of writers, artists, designers, (and in this particular issue, comedians) to examine style and its effects on larger cultural forces” and which “continues [the] discussion about the politics of style.”

Conceptual art pioneer Stephen Willats uses cybernetics as a mode of questioning how art functions in society. Taking the form of diagrammatic renderings and conceptual models, his work shifts focus from the art object to the audience, comprising a practice concerned with the “the fabric of society.” Following the launch of the new issue of Control Magazine, and in the final days of his solo show at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, we connected with Willats to discuss self-organization, the origins of punk, and what it meant to create clothing that requires assembly.

ZXX started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software.

Through its raw and candid, yet carefully composed memes, Screen Saviors has managed to poke fun at the idea that design can save the world while generating a compelling discourse on the design industry, contemporary culture, and the weird things that make designers tick.

As a glimpse into the thinking behind Google Design, the SPAN Reader seemed a good place to start when trying to understand the culture and philosophies at work in the office. This interview with Rob Giampietro and Amber Bravo, creative lead and editor of Google Design NY, respectively, investigates the editorial mission of Google Design, the ever-evolving metaphor of “material,” and the process of creating the book.

Of all the women working in design in the 1970s and ’80s, few had as large a contribution on contemporary graphic design today as Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. “Her contributions to postmodern design pedagogy opened doors to female voices in a male-dominated society, encouraged students to be more experimental, and supported non-traditional art environments,” write Izzy Berenson and Sarah Honeth.

Designer Julia Born and artist Shannon Ebner discuss their collaborative approach to Ebner’s publication A Public Character, touching on everything from Merce Cunningham to faux otabinds, the use of skeleton black, and the way the reflection of foil stamps cancel out all material states.

Can algorithms have style? What role will AI play in design practices or outcomes? From generative typography to elaborate algorithmic tapestries, Kyuha (Q) Shim’s work is a synthesis of contemporary visual vernacular and emerging technologies. In conversation with the Walker’s digital designer Jas Stefanski, the two discuss his multifaceted approach to computation and its integration into graphic design practices.

In an in-depth conversation, New York–based graphic designer Geoff Han discusses his experimental print and web work, the consequences of running an independent design practice, and the necessity of collaboration.

In 2015, the Walker Shop released Intangibles—a line of products and artworks with no physical form. Participating artists and designers included Martine Syms, Alec Soth, CFCF, and K-HOLE. Here author Marvin Lin responds to the collection, suggesting that we “rethink our bias toward physical objects and re-envision our aesthetics on a grander timeline, offering lateral pathways that cut through the level of tangibility and place us on new timescales altogether.”

“How can artists contend with the current state of the internet? What tools, communities, and media can we create in order to empower each other as individuals?” In March 2019, we invited six figures in the arts to sound off on ways artists might reinvent the internet. One year later—as COVID-19 has made so much of our work, education, and social relationships digital—we revisit their prescient and instructive Soundboard discussion.

“Abolish the Wage System, Abolish the State, All Power to the Workers!” Such was the printer seal of the Detroit Printing Co-op, a radical community publishing initiative that existed from 1969 to 1985. The co-op’s printing facilities and equipment were deemed “social property,” meant for use by individuals in the community for little to no charge, and notable publications included Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and the journal Radical America.

With dismal representation by women and people of color in tech and art fields, it’s time to imagine a new landscape of digital art, one that’s diverse and equitable, writes Black Contemporary Art founder Kimberly Drew. Here she highlights—in their own words—18 artists shaping this new terrain.

How can publishing act as a mode of resistance? Why do archives matter? How can print and digital publishing become one and the same? These are some of the questions that designer, author, and teacher Paul Soulellis tackles in his work. Watch his full Insights Design Lecture Series presentation and get a sneak peak at his newest project, in which Soulellis enacts an “urgent archive” in response to ongoing information crimes.

Jon Sueda, a speaker at our 2016 Insights Design Lecture Series, interviews Joe Potts, the founder of the Southland Institute in Los Angeles, which Potts describes as an “unaccredited postgraduate graphic design workshop and evolving public repository of educational resources.” This in-depth conversation between Sueda and Potts revolves around the subject of counter-education and the realities of building a new, alternative model to traditional Masters-level graphic design programs.

What do our collective images of the future tell us about our priorities in the present? How do we design visions of the future intended to defuse other, more perilous futures? Published on the occasion of the exhibition Designs for Different Futures, this essay by designer, curator, and museum director Andrew Blauvelt examines the momentous game of catch-up that humanity must play in order to survive its own conceptions of the future.

“The challenge for design,” according to curator and museum director Zoë Ryan, “is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design.” Here, Ryan pursues this idea through the vital work of designers Dunne & Raby, Mary Maggic, and Forensic Architecture.

How can remnants of digital pasts inform our paths towards diverse futures? How do our digital tools reflect our ethical orientation towards our technologies? In this wide-ranging interview, Mindy Seu discusses the Cyberfeminism Index and its strategies of radical gathering and sharing; what it means to create an “anti-canon”; and design and social justice.

From Al Ruppersberg’s Colby Printing Co. posters, to diffuse sky radiation, to iridescent clouds, to photoelasticity and many more. In honor of this online publishing initiative that we call The Gradient, the following attempts to survey anything and everything related to the edgeless and ever-shifting phenomenon we know as the gradient.

Even after four years of programming, the New York storefront P! has managed to elude any form of archetypal gallery classification. The freewheeling spirit of P! can be attributed to its founder, Prem Krishnamurthy, whom many reading this blog know from his graphic design studio, Project Projects. Prem’s profound understanding of both graphic design and curating elucidates interesting relationships between the two disciplines.

“Reflection and action should always inform one another,” says designer Corinne Gissel on the educational mission of the 26th International Biennial of Graphic Design in Brno. “And as long as we do not blindly step into the alluring trap of self-involved or profit-oriented educational mannerism—and create one curated library or one alternative school after the other without thinking about it twice—there is absolutely nothing wrong with continuously addressing the current problematic and future potential of design education.”

Like many designers, Justin Hunt Sloane’s practice frequently extends outside himself—placing him in proximity with a slowly cultivated network of like-minded friends, partners, and artists. In this multi-part interview, we explore three of his ongoing projects via conversations with his collaborators at Total Luxury Spa, Garagisme, and Ghostly International.

Counter-Signals critiques the current state of digital communication, in which “likes, messages, and posts have become abstract economic commodities in the current state of Late Capitalism, becoming ever more instantaneous, accessible, individualized and disposable—discouraging collective settings and making references to the past difficult.” To mark the publication of Counter-Signals’s third issue, Marie Hoejlund interviews its makers about its approach to exploring the intersection of design and politics.

Joshua McGarvey is a Minnesota-based clothing designer, fashion artist, and installation/video artist who creates garments under the name Uselding Fridays. The results are often loud, colorful pieces—uncanny mashups of styles, brands and silhouettes which frequently collage together elements of second hand or deadstock garments. These chaotic amalgams offer concise, wearable critiques of the love/hate relationship we have with our hyper-capitalistic environment, often reducing brand symbolism down to abstract texture (a technique he refers to as “ambient distraction”).

“The impetus for this interview was kind of selfish,” writes the Walker’s Somnath Bhatt. “As a designer of south Asian background, I wish I’d read something like this when I was a student.” Here he speaks with Shiva Nallaperumal and Juhi Vishnani, founders of the India-based design studio November, about their work developing a framework for a plural design practice, gathering a regionalized Indian graphic archive, exploring nuances of world typography, and questioning what it means to design in an era of rising fascism.

In response to their 2017 essay published on The Gradient titled “Post-Identity Design: Brands, Politics, and Technological Instability,” as well as the masters-level design course that they teach titled “Debranding and Post-Identity Design,” Christopher Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro are interviewed by Jon Sueda about the present and evolving manifestations of visual identity design within the extremes of our societal and technological landscapes.

We are excited to present an exclusive mix for The Gradient by Frank Lyon accompanied by an essay on the art of the mixtape by Matt Olson of OOIEE.

How can design be a performative act? What insights can be gleaned from a production by approaching it from the perspective of its graphic identity? With today’s launch of a new Perfume Genius single and project trailer, Ben Schwartz speaks with designer Andrew J.S., dancemaker Kate Wallich, and musician Mike Hadreas (aka Perfume Genius) on their collaboration The Sun Still Burns Here, a lush dance/live music performance coming to the Walker this winter.

“As feminist designers we’re quite weary of how patriarchal the writing of history is. So in bringing our work and our take on a historical text to the forefront, we’re trying to contribute to an alternative history where a looking back becomes a way to look ahead.” Two members of the Rietlanden Women’s Office, a feminist graphic design collaboration, discuss Useless Work versus Useless Toil, the forthcoming publication in its MsHeresies series.

“I believe that fashion makes people happy; it allows people to let others know about themselves by the way they look and dress. Hairstyles, makeup, fragrance, tattoos: it’s more than just clothing,” says designer Delina White of IAmAnishinaabe. This lookbook—showcasing fashions and models featured in our June Indigenous Spirit: Gender Fluid Fashion show—celebrates designs that honor Native tradition, diversity, and nonconformity as imagined through the Anishinaabe term Niizho-Manidoog: the sacred embodiment of two genders.

With this directive, Elizabeth Price engaged the British studio Spencer Fenton to create two custom typefaces for her SLOW DANS trilogy: “I want it to be modular, created using variations and arrangements of a single unit, shaped like a stitch or a seed, with hints of jacquard looms, pianola scrolls, and Tetris games.” Here Matthew Fenton discusses collaborating with Price to create works on view in her Walker solo show.

Exploring the new, unpredictable, and tech-reliant terrain where brands and visual identities now operate, Federico Pérez Villoro and Christopher Hamamoto map out design-driven tactics for a more plastic form of branding in a world defined by instability.

Designer João Doria interviews designers and curators Elisabeth Klement and Laura Pappa about their recent exhibition and book Signals from the Periphery and discusses the economy, cultural exchange, and hybridization of contemporary graphic design.

How can an exhibition represent and give voice to a forgotten group of people? On The Inside, curated by Tatiana von Fürstenberg and designed by Eline Mul, puts on display the work of hundreds of LGBTQ+ artists currently serving time in the prison system. The submitted artwork, coupled with quotes from the artists, creates a powerful and humanizing message about injustice, but also about identity, love, and acceptance. Here, designer Ben Schwartz discusses the project with Mul.

“I used a children’s toy to respond to the childish masculinity and bravado of someone like Peter Thiel, but also to play with these words of ‘toying’ and ‘gaming.’ They’re toying with the world’s future.” Zach Blas discusses Icosahedron, a Walker-commissioned installation that references elves in The Lord of the Rings, Silicon Valley, and the Magic 8-Ball toy to critique today’s prevalent predictive technologies.

Indigenous fashion has seen a surge in public interest of late, with high-profile runway shows and exhibitions popping up across North America. But with this spike in attention, inevitably, comes controversy, as Native fashion continues to be appropriated by major houses and designers, from Victoria’s Secret to Jean Paul Gaultier. Can efforts to counter these trends be described as decolonization? Or should we sidestep that trending term altogether and focus on Indigenizing the industry instead? We asked four voices in Native fashion to tackle these questions.

What does car culture look like beyond the car? With a background in art direction, photography, and a complex relationship to cars, Gilles Uzan started Garagisme in 2012, as a self-described “Contemporary Automotive Journal.” The magazine focuses on our relationship to these polarizing objects, utilizing them as a means of accessing the past and present in addition to becoming a platform for speculation. Now on its sixth issue Garagisme approaches the complexities of capitalism through the lens of its nearly 30 contributors and their associated marks, artifacts, futures, and stories.

In this world of cheap visual proliferation, we’re forced to make quick binary judgments—i.e. real/fake, good/bad, man/woman—which often leave us feeling disempowered and reduced to slotting. In the 13th installment of the Artist Op-Eds series, composer and visual artist Jules Gimbrone proposes what they term Trans-Sensing as a model for a more nuanced way of experiencing the world, one that transcends the quantitative binary of real/fake and doesn’t rely on the categorical flattening of complexity that comes with merely seeing.

From 2013 to 2018, a humble alley in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park neighborhood was transformed into an unlikely showcase of global design innovation. On a 72 x 36-inch garage-side panel, Erik Brandt hosted typographic experiments by the likes of Eike König, Sarah Boris, Bráulio Amado, and Walker designers Jasio Stefanski and Aryn Beitz—1,641 in total. In a Walker Reader exclusive, we share a conversation with Brandt from Ficciones Typografika: 1642, a new monograph chronicling the project.

Mind Walks documents the work of graphic designer/illustrator Karl Nawrot from 2004 to 2017. The dense publication showcases nearly 900 images of design, architecture, illustration, stamps, and stencils from Nawrot, who has up until now been reserved about revealing the depth of his practice. Here, he talks about Mind Walks, the process of sorting through one’s own archives, and the futility of closing your own chapters.

To date, artist and educator Maia Ruth Lee has made some 250 sculptural glyphs from the scrapped steel decorative elements that adorn fences and window bars around New York City. Here, she talks about the process of making a new lexicon of symbols and the connection between feeling, intuition, and language.

Born out of frustration with a lack of criticality in design, Evening Class is a London-based “experiment in continuous learning” within the design field. In a recent interview, its members reflected on how the program became a space to explore politics as a defining element of their practices, how it functions as a support structure in a highly competitive environment, and what it means to “occupy space in, between, with, around, and against” the academy and industry.

“Comic Sans is a good example of why I think typefaces, like people, have their own course of life, their own history, ideas, and feelings.” Walker designer Marie Hoejlund interviews Jungmyung Lee of Jung-Lee Type Foundry about making—and exploring the “tone of voice” embedded within—typefaces.

It’s “Boulder.” Dive into the design decisions behind the Westboro Baptist’s notorious hate campaign in this late-night email interview with their media director, Steve Drain.

The 100th issue of the seminal architecture journal OASE is dedicated to Karel Martens’s work on the journal. The issue provides a tremendous amount of insight from the editors, former students, and Martens himself. In this interview I chat with guest editor Marius Schwarz about his experience researching, co-editing, and co-designing OASE 100.

Artist Tauba Auerbach founded Diagonal Press in 2013 with the intention of creating “publications in open editions,” where “nothing [is] signed or numbered.” Since Diagonal Press’s inception, the publishing imprint has released a steady stream of books and multiples ranging from pins and rolling papers to type specimens and manipulatives. In the following interview, Auerbach discusses the advantages of the book space, her interest in typography, and the exploration of dimensional multiplicity.

Dinamo, winners of a 2017 Swiss Design Award for their eclectic body of type design, is the multifaceted practice of Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb. Their typefaces—such as Favorit, Galapagos, and Ginto—are hits among graphic designers around the globe. Yet Dinamo has created a community and following for themselves that goes beyond the typefaces—a result of their efforts to translate their type design thinking into tangible objects through a parallel platform that they call Dinamo Hardware.

In 1966, Amiri Baraka wrote that Black poems, and Black art as well, should “shoot, come at you, love what you are.” It’s in this same vein of urgency and cultural importance that the work of Minneapolis-based photographer Bobby Rogers strikes you—as lightning at first, strong and electric, then as a subtle love nestled into the details. Here, Devyn Springer follows the thread between Rogers’s personal artistic practice and his recent commission photographing the jazz innovators of the Walker’s Sonic Universe Project.

In this new interview, Folder Studio’s Takumi Akin, Wesley Chou, and Jon Gacnik talk with graphic designer Ben Schwartz about four of their archive-based projects, covering topics from used books and post-punk to riots and a project preserving the legacy of Tupac Shakur.

“The cloud renders geography irrelevant, until you realize that everything that matters, everything that means you don’t die, is based not only on which passport you possess, but on a complex web of definitions of what constitutes that passport.”

Adam Pendleton’s concept of “Black Dada”—which has guided his art making practice—melds references from LeRoi Jones’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and Hugo Ball’s “Dada Manifesto” of 1916. To give context to Pendleton’s work in the exhibition I am you, you are too, we share an essay by Walker curator Adrienne Edwards from the “overwhelmingly American assemblage” that is Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader.

PLAYLAB, INC. is an NYC–based design/idea studio consisting of Archie Lee Coates IV, Jeff Franklin, Ryan J. Simons, Luiza Dale, Anya Shcherbakova and Davis Scherer. Together the collective works on everything from websites to publications, performances to public swimming pools. In advance of Coates’s Insights 2018 design lecture, we invited him to discuss five projects that begin to define PLAYLAB’s ever-expanding practice.

On October 11, the art collective Slavs and Tatars gave the lecture-performance, Red-Black Thread, in conjunction with the exhibition Siah Armajani: Follow This Line. The event, the collective notes, “addresses the construction of race, namely blackness, from the perspective of Russia, the Soviet Union, and communism.” Watch it here.

At the 2016 Brno Biennial, Wayne Daly and Adrien Vasquez exhibited A Shelf for Lothar, showcasing Lothar Reher’s stark covers for the Spektrum series. This year, the pair worked together to produce the accompanying publication, Dressed In Black, which documents the shelf at Brno, with 1:1 reproductions of each book cover.

When asked to create imagery for Bon Iver’s 22, a Million, Cameron Wittig was given one rule: don’t show Justin Vernon’s face. Here he shares the process behind the photography, his collaboration with artist Crystal Quinn, and influences on the final product, from Blue Velvet to Francis Bacon.

Michèle Champagne examines how technology questions both the tradition of typography and the romantic “aura” of the human hand in art and design. This dynamic is at the heart of Champagne’s school for typography in Toronto, where designers, artists, and coders explore typography online and off.

Draw Down Books and Project No. 8 team up to present These Posters are Fireworks, a poster exhibition in NYC celebrating an impressive range of formal expression from a veritable lineup of graphic makers.

For some time now, Belgian designer Ines Cox has been actively exploring how the nuances of on-screen interfaces can be translated into elements of her practice. Here, Ines shows us examples of her design research; how a framework becomes an idea moving seamlessly from one piece of design to the next.

Little-known today, educator Nikolay Ladovsky was a key figure in redesigning teaching. Using scientific-like instruments, his studio was a laboratory for architectural instruction, helping students make risk-taking, internationally-recognized designs meant to push the Soviet Union into the future.

Volume is a new music publication that focuses each issue on only one artist. The first issue, in fact, consists of one essay and one photograph.

A conversation with Geneva-based designer Mathieu Christe about precision, his collaborations, looking back on the history of Swiss type design, inventing a portmanteau, the study of typewriter typefaces in criminal investigations, affordable means of publishing, and what to expect in the forthcoming issue of Mathieu’s new type design periodical Footnotes.

In this conversation, I speak with artist/designer/teacher Simon Johnston about his new publishing imprint Verb Editions, several of the works in the catalogue, and the importance of maintaining a personal practice.

We figured out who took an iconic photo that’s been the source of some speculation in the art world—and he works right here at the Walker.

Timo Gaessner of Milieu Grotesque, a Zurich-based independent publisher and distributor of typefaces, responds to ten questions regarding his and Alexander Colby’s practice as type designers. Timo, who made his start as a graphic designer, frames-out a healthy introspection (and even, at times, cautionary observation) of the discipline of graphic design and it’s interlaced relationship to type design.

Filip Matejicek and Jan Horcik of the Prague-based type foundry Heavyweight respond to ten questions regarding their practice as type designers. They elaborate on their entry points into type design, observing their typefaces in use out in the world, their aspirations as a type foundry, reacting to and evolving alongside the field of graphic design, and more.

Black Lives Matter is the most significant broad-based human rights coalition for black Americans since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. But the struggle today could not be fought in its current iterations without the contributions of Black Panthers artist Emory Douglas and others who illuminated hidden ugly racial truths in compelling and beautifully executed images.

In the work of Ken Isaacs, creator of Superchair (1967) and the Knowledge Box (1962), simplicity is “absolutely monumental.” The architect/designer/writer discusses the ideas behind his pivotal designs, the concept of a “total environment,” his Microhouse project in Groveland, Illinois, and the way he developed and practiced “a lifelong commitment to a populist form of architecture.”

What does it mean for a museum to function as a publisher now? Publishing is no less complicated an endeavor within an institutional context than it is in the external “real” world, where the consumer-grade Internet began altering the production, consumption, and distribution of text decades ago.

How will we be reading and writing about art in 10 years’ time, if we are at all? And how will changes in technology shift the work of critics, curators, arts reporters, and artists? In part two of our series on the future of this field, we posed these questions to an array of experts–from critic Brian Droitcour to podcast producer Tyler Green, museum technologist Koven Smith to Kickstarter curator Willa Köerner.

Archi-tourism is a web community waiting for its own digital address, writes Alexandra Lange. She longs for a dream site—“Archimaps, Designtrip, whatever”—to map her architectural explorations using smartphone photos. The trick: how to keep that contagious energy as you make snaps into an archive.

Daniel Eatock discusses his work Felt-Tip Prints (2011), part of the Walker Art Center’s exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production.

Can design be a realm of pure magic? How do designers manipulate symbols imbued with historical texture and richness? How does a trans spirit not only survive but thrive in abundance? Rin Kim—a New York–based trans multidisciplinary chimera, demi, hydra, mutt, graphic designer, filmmaker, alchemist, performance artist, writer, and yong (룡)—discusses these and other questions in a new interview. When asked banal questions about their design process and career Rin returns with mystical pleasures, spells of vengeance, and prayers of golden victory.

There is a “dilemma uniting artists and many of today’s workers,” writes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future: “flexibility and freedom on the one hand, precariousness and instability on the other. … Herein lies an opportunity for a new kind of solidarity.” In this article, Gorbis lays out a case for the necessity of art when imagining new, equitable futures, and introduces the Institute’s expanded concept of Universal Basic Assets.

“[…] small, local, open, connected. These four adjectives work well in defining this scenario because they generate a holistic vision of how society could be,” says renowned social innovation expert Ezio Manzini. “At the same time, they are also readily comprehensible, since everybody easily understands their meaning and implications by looking at the prototypes and the transformative normality on which they are based.”

In this interview we speak with designer Roman Gornitsky about the origins of his current type foundry, the shifting definition of independent cultural production, his latest typeface release Gramatika, and how a myriad of strategies—writing, workshops, and research—all serve to inform his practice.

“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.”