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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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.
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Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist, strategist, curator, and writer. She’s the author, with Michael Pawlyn, of Flourish: Design Paradigms for our Planetary Emergency and the founder of Desire Lines, a cross-disciplinary studio that helps places, communities, and organizations chart paths toward thriving futures. In this conversation, Jarrett and Sarah talk about moving beyond sustainability towards regenerative practices, how thinking about the climate crisis as a cultural problem changes the role of designers, and why curiosity is a driving force in her work.
Matt Owens is co-founder and Chief Design and Innovation Officer at Athletics, a brand studio based in Brooklyn, and author of the book, A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design. A graduate of Cranbrook’s Graphic Design Program, he previously worked as an art director for Methodfive, founded a small design studio, One9nine, and self-published the Flash-experimental design quarterly Volumeone. In this conversation, Jarrett and Matt talk about the gap between graphic design education and practice, the parallels between design today and design in the 1990s, and why Flash was a transformative piece of design software.