Essays

Lorraine Wild|Essays

New Year's Housecleaning

I am a member of a typical Los Angeles turn-of-the-century multi-cultural family, so the concept of the New Year as we practice it stretches from its mere Gregorian beginning on January 1st through the much grander lunar New Year of early …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

A Review of a Show You Cannot See

Stuck the other day at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, with inescapable CNN thoughtscreens blaring, cell-phone dialogues traversing my own personal airspace, and every decent magazine already read, I longed for a moment of quiet …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The I.D. Forty: What Are Lists For?

How do we measure one kind of achievement in design against another to arrive at a ranking? The truth is we can’t. The real purpose of I.D.’s list was to underscore the magazine’s position as selector and taste-maker.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision

Robert Polidori's photographs depict contemporary architecture in the context of a decidedly imperfect world.

William Drenttel|Essays

Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?

Left: STEP Inside Design, Cover, Jan.-Feb. 2005. Right: Photograph by Victor Schrager.Every once and a while, the plagiarism of one artist's work by another crosses the line, or so I thought. I wrote a different piece for Design Observer a …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Mysterious Disappearance of Carol Hersee

The story of Carol Hersee’s portrait as Test Card F: since it first appeared in 1967 on BBC2, Carol’s face has been on-air for over 70,000 hours.

The Editors|Essays

Understanding and Action

The news from Southeast Asia seems to get worse with each passing day. It is a small consolation, but it seems that disasters, whether man-made or natural, bring out the best in our information designers. Perhaps in the face of …

Rob Walker|Essays

The Good, the Plaid and the Ugly

Reborn dolls, is the name that has emerged for a curious process of altering and enhancing a baby doll to look and even to feel as much like a human baby as possible.

John Thackara|Essays

Tools for Citizen Services [January 2005]

Report on designing knowledge, Doors of Perception 8 in New Dheli, the street as innovation, ethnography in innovation, enabling services and more.

Mark Lamster|Baseball

The Collector

Jefferson R. Burdick transformed the act of baseball card collecting into a culture of commercialism, an achievement that haunted him throughout his career.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part II

Designers come, designers goInventing things to crit.But New Year's Eve's our chance to sharePure silliness — and wit.("Speak Up!"—Armin Vit.)

The Editors|Essays

2004 Book Recommendations

The Editors of Design Observer present their book recommendations for the 2004 calendar year.