Design Impact

Sanaphay Rattanavong|Design and Climate Change

The prepper’s palette: designing for collapse in a culture of control

From bunkers to backpacks, the visual language of doomsday prepping is designed for social dissolution. But when disaster strikes, it’s not the trappings of rugged individualism that will save us; it’s radical interdependence.

Ellen McGirt|Analysis

Authoritarian by design

The “America by Design” initiative proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country.

Alexis Haut|Analysis

Say it with your chest: WNBA players fight for pay and justice on their t-shirts

Earning just 9% of league revenue, WNBA players are demanding fair pay. Their protest t-shirts are changing how sports activism looks today.

Chantal Flores|Analysis

GenAI art is enlivening the search for Mexico’s disappeared 

Families who’ve lost loved ones to the country’s decades-long Drug War are turning to an unlikely source to reenergize search efforts: ‘Ghiblified’ AI art.

Rebecca Billi|Analysis

Cop cities and covert communes: how architecture shapes urban conflict

Friction is inevitable, but urban practitioners have a say in whether it builds or destroys cities.

Seher Anand|Essays

Food branding without borders: chai, culture, and the politics of packaging

280 million people live outside their homelands. A new generation of brand designers is stepping up to foster cultural exchange — not extraction — across diasporas.

Jennifer White-Johnson|Books

Amplifying Accessibility and Abolishing Ableism: Designing to Embolden Black Disability Visual Culture

An excerpt from from An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design.

Oliver Vodeb|Books

Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design, and Art

An excerpt from Oliver Vodeb’s Food Democracy on how design, art, and communication can transform our relationship to food, power, and society.

Chappell Ellison|Essays

Compulsion: Where Object Meets Anxiety

At the age of 30, my brother turned to our mother and said, “I never thought I’d make is this far.” In his early 20s, he was officially diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).