“All of the people in all of the world,” is the latest work from Stan’s Café, a UK-based theater company. It uses grains of rice to tell important stories about events and inequities in society, via Instagram.

A case study of African “brain gain:” How fashion designer Kofi Ansah’s return to Ghana helped jumpstart an industry.

Stylist and designer June Ambrose — style architect for hip-hop’s greatest stars — wears many hats.

Designer Tremaine Emory has left his position as creative director for skate fashion brand Supreme, alleging a collaboration with filmmaker Arthur Jafa was “secretly shut down,” and citing “systemic racism.” Emory discussed his decision in a detailed Instagram post, which includes descriptions of the images — Black men hanging and enslaved — planned for the Jafa project. “I wanted to work with supreme to change these things and instead I told I was racially charged, emotional, and using the wrong forum by bring up systemic racism in a meeting.”

“We are always crossing disciplines from the very early stages of design to bring together all elements that form a space,” say the co-founders of Studio MUKA, striving to create total work of art, one collaboration at a time.

Plains Cree designer Jontay Kahm, the rising fashion star from the Mosquito First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, is enjoying his Vogue debut. For his first collection, Regalian Bodies, “I wanted to touch on my Native culture and elements of traditional regalia—using obvious shapes and silhouettes, but making it more fashion,” he says.

The glory days of advertisements as art: “Art Deco: Commercializing the Avant-Garde” opens later this month at Poster House in New York.

In London, Lone Design Club has always been at the forefront of nurturing emerging designers, reshaping the retail landscape, and propelling sustainability into the mainstream. From September 12 through October 16th, they’re launching an in-store pop-up within Fenwick’s, on Bond Street store (due to close next year).

Lithub shares its favorite cover designs from August. (Score: most of the designers here are women!)

Can landscape design help protect homes from wildfires?

Plaques, plates, paperweights, duffel bags, key fobs, deadstock stationery, promotional wrench sets, watches engraved with commemorations of forgotten journeymen—a nearly 700-mile yard sale, spanning four states, two time zones, and countless artefacts—this is material culture writ large.

In Cambridge, design, science, and the future: this is The Engine.

A powerful typographic response to another unthinkable tragedy from the print managing editor and team from UNC‘s student-run Daily Tarheel.

If developers replace an existing building with a new one, vast amounts of CO2 are created to make the bricks, cement, and steel for its replacement. Do we really need another argument for adaptive reuse? Yes we do, and we should keep ’em coming until this becomes standard practice.

The kids are alright (in socks): How the internet has shaped Gen Z’s sartorial choices.

Design “mediates our relationships, our work, our communication, our health, our communities, our sense of self,” writes Alison Place, editor of the new anthology Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design. The book offers diverse contributions from over 40 contributors from a wide array of perspectives. Claudia Marina in her essay, “On Calling Yourself a Designer” found value in exploring the label. “Writing this essay, I started to question if capital-D design was inherently misogynistic, and when I asked myself that question, I found it harder to theorize that notion away.”

Los Angeles-based fashion designer Christina Kim returns home to Seoul for a new showroom/art installation with pieces inspired by traditional Korean clothing.

“There’s only two things that New Yorkers really hate,” observes Quemuel Arroyo, who oversees accessibility efforts for the M.T.A. “The status quo and change.” The challenges of making the subway truly accessible for everyone. (Listen to our conversation with Arroyo here.)

In Detroit—a month of design.

From the New York Times, a panorama of design.

A new exhibition explores the role of page design, text, and ornament in books: Graphic Design in the Middle Ages runs through the end of January at the Getty, in Los Angeles.

Can a river write a poem to express its hurt over being polluted? Would a heart-to-heart conversation empower communities to take proactive action to care for the river? “To build on (Keller) Easterling, when the ‘rules of the game’ are broken, it’s time to change them.” For the coming (long) weekend, we bring you a (long) (and serious) read about why we need to redesign pretty much everything.

“While we celebrate today, our work is far from done,” Billie Jean King on equal pay for men and women tennis players at the US Open, a fight she won 50 years ago, but a struggle that continues today.

A story about whitewashing racial violence, in a board game.

In-depth reporting today from the New York Times detailing—with ephemera and charts—some of the countless indignities leveled against children, forcibly taken from their indigenous communities as recently as fifty years ago. Daniella Zalcman’s photographs tell a similar story, in Canada.

This semester, Phio State’s Knowlton School invites scholars and practitioners from architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and allied fields to discuss dynamic design in an era of shifting foundations.

Imagining an energy-efficient future—a competition.

Did you know the US Air Force has a design method? Now you do.

Robots, agriculture—and design? “Even though Chat-GPT is a language model and its code generation is text-based, it provided significant insights and intuition for physical design, and showed great potential as a sounding board to stimulate human creativity.”

In the design of a commemorative sculpture, does the race of the artist matter?

Walter Williams, the creator of the SNL character Mr. Bill, brought the always-imperiled figure out of retirement in 2004 to make ten public service announcements to help save Louisiana’s wetlands. One featured Mr. Bill getting stuck in New Orleans as Hurricane Sluggo approached. The spot was replayed as Hurricane Katrina advanced on the city.

AI-generated mushroom foraging and identification books are proliferating on Amazon and other online retailers. They’re a huge problem. “[T]he authors are invented, their credentials are invented, and their species ID will kill you,” warns one expert.

Blessed are the data designers for they will know justice: Documented, the investigative journalism site, compiled wage and hourly records from New York State and the Department of Labor from January 2012 to December 2022 to find out which employers illegally withheld wages from employees. Search their NY Wage Theft Monitor here.

California is poised to become the first state to ban caste-based discrimination.

How to build a homemade levee.

To give the concrete wall depicted in this Swiss stamp design an actual tactile dimension, cement pigments were added to its ultra-matte finish.

When innovation is a thing of the past: Ikea shuts down its design lab.

“The title ship couldn’t look as slick or as roomy or as functional as the U.S.S. Enterprise did in 1966, so the designers backscaled everything 100 years.” See the real-life military tech that inspired Star Trek: Enterprise’s ship design.

In the age of AI, rethinking brands as “conversational entities”—and more.

Job searches we love: an anti-racism cluster hire in the urban humanities, at the University of Michigan. More here.

Networking experiments we love: OtherNetwork connects independent art spaces to the artists who need them—meeting them where they are. At the moment, the network’s biggest hubs are Accra and Kumasi, both cities in Ghana.

When the New York Times takes over the New York Subway.

The fourth Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism will take place in Seoul from September 1 through October 29.

We’re doing recycling all wrong.

Should law and policy expect security by design from software developers? Yes, says the Lawfare Institute, which is launching a multi-year project to evaluate ‘security by design’ for software, and recommend secure-by-design principles. “The hardware and software on which we rely is pervasively insecure,” say the Institute founders “If you want one metaphorical symbol for the problem, consider that on the first Tuesday of every month, Microsoft pushes out a series of software patches, and nobody considers this remarkable.”

Want to get the world on a more environmentally sustainable path? Get good and angry.

An Apple-powered computer. Literally.

And there’s Winnie the Pooh, hiding in a cellar in an old dish towel.

The Urban Land Institute is publishing a series of conversations which connect real estate and development professionals and Indigenous-led organizations with expertise in environment and climate justice. Find the introduction to the Indigenous Environmental and Climate Justice Series here.

Hey—have you heard the one about the nurse who designed a font? Now you have!

Did you know that the use of emojis—and their design is a legal matter? Now you do!

The goal of the Folly Cove Designers was purely to produce “good design.” Read about them here—and then buy the book.

We’d say you can’t make this shit up but apparently that is exactly what you can make up.

The fifth annual Black in Design Conference will take place at the Harvard GSD from September 22 to 24.

Legendary zoo designer Bernard Harrison on saving the bears, “naturalist” design, and ethical urban planning. “The problem with zoos is, they are not evolving in the right direction,” he says. “The key principles of zoos should be conservation, education and recreation – animal welfare must be central.”

Everyone’s a critic! Curtis James Jackson III (aka 50 Cent) has taken to Instagram to complain about the Photoshop work for his upcoming action film, Expend4bles.

Legendary game designer Hideo Kojima (Death Stranding, Metal Gear Solid) turns 60 this week. In tribute, here’s journalist Gene Park explaining how Kojima predicted a tech-enabled dystopian future characterized by isolation, disinformation, bigotry, fear, and violence. “The original meaning of communication is to care and feel for others, but technology has carried us in a wrong way,” Kojima said.

This piece on the problem with book blurbs is an instant classic: Compelling storytelling that urgently illuminates the most vital issue of our time. A must read.

The latest design news, from our friends at The Guardian, includes a new book (Voices: Ghana’s Artists In Their Own Words) from Manju Journal, an arts and culture platform based in Accra which is focused on emerging African talent.

The first Black Mayor of Charlotte was also an architect. A beautiful story about a baptist church’s design.

FOOD design!

Women’s soccer is just as thrilling as the male version, right? A brilliant ad from the Marcel agency created for the French telecom Orange to promote the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, reveals the deeply ingrained bias against celebrating women in sport.

Malaria is on the rise as mosquitos evolve to become resistant to the insecticides used in sprays and bed nets. Can genetic modification help?

Earlier this year, NASA launched an instrument into space which is monitoring airborne pollutants over North America. Here are the first data maps. How’s the air where you live?

A co-production of the design critics Vera Sacchetti and Federico Duarte, Fazer is a new dedsign publication from Portugal.