Archive

Apocalypse!!!!! How Not to be An Idiot Designing Climate Futures

We real­ly seem to indulge in dystopi­an think­ing. And we love it. And I real­ly won­der why that hap­pens. I don’t know how you feel about this, but it real­ly stress­es me out. And it kind of both­ers me that it’s still a lot of times eas­i­er to imag­ine the end of the world than how we could live on a sus­tain­able planet. 

Kara Walker RISD 2015 Commencement Alumni Address

I came with the inten­tion of speak­ing about my expe­ri­ence at RISD and wish­ing President Somerson a good tenure here, but all I could write on my sketch­book page was blank page.” I wrote tab­u­la rasa.” I wrote a clean slate.” And I wrote those words sev­er­al times, and I real­ized as I was writ­ing them that that’s how I arrived at RISD

Design for Diplomacy: Breaking Down Cultural Divides

We as design­ers have an abil­i­ty to pro­vide per­spec­tive, to bring focus, and to share the tools that we use on a dai­ly basis to align a group of dis­parate voic­es for a cause that is greater than our own.

Elif Şafak on Memory and Learning from the Past

When I look at the signs today, I see a very strong trend back to what I call trib­al­ism, back to nation-states, nation­al­ism, reli­gios­i­ty, all those divi­sive forces that many intel­lec­tu­als in the 1940s, 50s, thought were going to dis­ap­pear grad­u­al­ly. That did not happen.

The Conversation #44 — John Seager

In 1962, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth con­trol pill. I would sub­mit that that’s one of the four or five most trans­for­ma­tive tech­no­log­i­cal changes of the last mil­len­ni­um. Not just the last cen­tu­ry. Because for the first time in the his­to­ry of the world, half the peo­ple on Earth no longer have to depend on the oth­er half for the arc of their lives.

The Conversation #24 — Synthesizing Themes

We feel that this is a good point to sort of take stock, do sort of a quick pré­cis, if you will, of where we’ve got­ten so far. Because I think we’ve got some real­ly inter­est­ing places we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expect­ing to get. And we’re see­ing some inter­est­ing poles between dif­fer­ent large groups of thinkers that we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expecting.