James Goggin is a designer, educator, and writer. He runs his own design studio with his partner, Shan James, under the name Practise and recently joined the faculty of RISD’s graphic design department. He previously worked as Director of Design, Publishing and New Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and has taught at Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and at ECAL in Switzerland. His writing on design has appeared in numerous publications and he currently serves as art director and is on the editorial board of the architecture publication, Flat Out. In this episode, James and I talk about closing the gap between theory and practice, the value of writing in his design process, and subverting the traditional lecture/slideshow format.
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Nick Foster is a futures designer and author of the new book Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About The Future. Trained as an industrial designer, he has spent his career exploring the future for a range of companies, most recently as the Head of Design at Google X, where he led a team of designers, researchers, and prototypers in the company’s “moonshot factory.” In this conversation, Jarrett and Nick talk about where our images of the future come from, design’s role in thinking about the future, and why we need to find new ways to talk about the futures we want.
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Joel Towers is the president of The New School in New York City. Trained as an architect, President Towers joined the school in 2004, first as a faculty member and director of Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology and most recently as executive dean of Parsons School of Design from 2009 to 2019. In this conversation, Jarrett and President Towers talk about the state of higher education, the shifting nature of design education, and how studying architecture in the late eighties shaped the work he does today.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator, critic, and art historian. He’s the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and the author of many books, including Ways of Curating, A Brief History of Curating, and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask. In this wide-ranging conversation, Jarrett and Hans talk about the role of conversation and interviews in his work, the evolution of the Serpentine Pavilion, and why it’s important that the art world is still his home base.
