Who gets to set the standards for communication, and why? Bo-Won Keum, Triple Canopy’s associate designer, addresses this question in “On the Letterform of the Age,” an essay on the role of the designer in shaping how people make meaning out of language. In considering the current state of design, Keum revisits the work of Bauhaus designers who advocated for the transformation of typography in response to the rise of the typewriter and printing press, as well as dramatic changes in the habits of readers. “The efforts by Bauhaus masters to update and standardize type for the machine age prefigured current discussions about the form and function of design in the digital age,” Keum writes, “and the need for typography to adapt to various surfaces, formats, and operating systems.”
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who helps communities leverage emerging technologies to effect positive change in the world. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist at Contentful in the SF Bay Area. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the host of Contentful + Algolia’s Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.
Somnath Bhatt is an artist and designer living in-between India and USA. Seeking the new in the old, and the old in the new is his favorite form of making.
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Capital is Dead (Verso Books), Sensoria (Verso Books), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte) and various other things. Her next book is Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, to be published by Duke University Press in fall 2021. She is currently editing a special issue of eflux journal on trans | fem | aesthetics, to be published in Spring 2021. She was awarded the Thoma Prize for digital art writing in 2019. She is professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate liberal arts division of The New School, in New York City.
Spring 2021 Design Lecture Series is here! All lectures are open to Rutgers students. Please visit the lecture series pagefor Zoom information and dates.
Drawdown Dialogues (drawdowndialogues.com) is a conversation series between five climate leaders and 14 student designers from Rutgers Design Practicum. Drawdown is a critical turning point for life on earth. This is that moment in the future when greenhouse gases begin to decline. It indicates the reversion of climate change and global warming. Project Drawdown is a solutions-based climate organization whose mission is to understand nature’s means of rebalancing the climate system.
Interviews and Graphics by: Alexa Reyes, Anna Pittas, Cathryn Esposito, Derek Li, Marinelle Manansala, Nick Plyler, Pauline Yanes, Sarah Poon, Sebastian Lijo, Steve Tomori, Xinyi Huang, Yogini Borgaonkar, Yuchao Wang, Zhongxuan Lin
Web Design and Development by: Pauline Yanes, Alexa Reyes, Yogini Borgaonkar
