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.
