Sara De Bondt is a designer, educator, and publisher. She runs her own independent design practice working with cultural clients and is the co-founder of Occasional Papers, a small publishing company focusing on publishing affordable books devoted to the histories of architecture, art, design, film, and literature. The Walker Art Center called Sara “the epitome of a cultural designer, combining a love of contemporary typography with a deep investigation into the history of graphic design. Through her design practice, which consists of client-based work, designing and editing books, and curating conferences, she is consistently contributing to the critical discourse.” In this episode, Sara and I talk about her background from studying acting to working with Stuart Bailey, Daniel Eatock, and James Goggin; the importance of design history in contemporary practice; and what designers can learn from other disciplines.
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Leonard Koren is a writer, aesthetics expert, artist, and publisher. He’s the author of books like Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, What Artists Do, Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, Musings of a Curious Aesthete, and most recently On Creating Things Aesthetic. From 1976 to 1981, he was the editor and publisher of Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. In this conversation, Jarrett and Leonard talk about methodologies and conceptual tools, bookmaking, avant garde graphic design, and the influence of Leonard’s architecture education on his career.
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Ingrid Schroder is the director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She was previously Head of Design Teaching and Director of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture. In this conversation, Jarrett and Ingrid talk about the legacy and future of the AA, the changing states of architecture and design education, and what experimental design education looks like today.
Cynthia Davidson is the cofounder and executive director of Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit architecture think tank. She is the editor of the architecture journal Log, and previously ANY magazine, an architecture theory tabloid that published from 1993-2000. She is also responsible for more than 40 books in print, including 24 books in the Anyone project’s Writing Architecture series, published with MIT Press. In this conversation, Jarrett and Cynthia talk about the evolution of architecture publishing, the state of design discourse, and how the visual design of Log and ANY shapes how it is read.
