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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Julian Bleecker is a researcher, designer, engineer, and entrepreneur. He runs Near Future Laboratory, a platform and consultancy focused on design fiction. He is the author of Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction and co-author of The Manual of Design Fiction, among other titles. In this conversation, Jarrett and Julian talk about the origins of design fiction, how he applies it with corporate clients, and how we can get design students to rediscover imagination.
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Mike Pepi is a critic and technologist who writes about art, culture, and technology. He is the author of the new book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, which is both a work of technology criticism and an analysis of how we talk about Silicon Valley. His other writing has appeared in Frieze, e-flux, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail. In this conversation, Jarrett and Mike talk about the role of criticism, the differences between platforms and institutions, and why Silicon Valley needs the art world more than the other way around.
Elizabeth Diller is a partner and co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro where she’s worked on a range of buildings including New York’s The Shed, the Highline, and an expansion of MoMA. Since 1981, the studio’s practices has spanned architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print, all of which is featured in their new monograph Architecture, Not Architecture. In this conversation, Jarrett and Elizabeth talk about the evolution of her practice and approach to architecture, thinking about design both as problem solving and cultural production, and how a generation of paper architects changed the field.
