Design is at a turning point

Like hundreds of other true believers around the world, I dialed in to a day-long event at MoMA last month, celebrating an outstanding exhibit called Pirouette: Turning Points in Design. By all means, check it out if you’re in New York City before October 18, but the event itself was a revelation. 

Billed as an “abecedarium event” — literally, a series of presentations from A-Z — some 26 designers, scholars, photographers, DJs, entrepreneurs, you get the drift, presented what they believe were paradigm-shifting ideas each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. As a conceit, it might have felt tiring. Instead, a steady stream of objects, voices, and perspectives shone light on a world in all its granular complexity. Post-it notes. Nail art. The astronaut cup. The tampon. What hung in the air were the promise and peril of unseen impacts and unintended consequences.

“Usually, MoMA only shows examples of great, perfect, impeccable design,” explained Paola Antonelli, senior curator, department of architecture and design, and director, research and development, who organized the exhibit with Maya Ellerkmann, curatorial assistant, department of architecture and design. “Well, we think it’s time to talk about ambiguous objects — ambiguous like the monoblock chair that really changed the world and is the symbol of affordability and mass production. But at the same time, it’s also the symbol of pollution and overconsumption.”

Jamer Hunt, the co-host of the convening, opened his remarks by thinking out loud about the magic of literal turning points, or the pirouette. Hunt, an author, educator, and open frameworks designer who currently serves as program director for university curriculum at The New School, says the trick to pulling one off without getting dizzy is spotting: finding and re-finding a focal point as part of every rotation. “So what’s interesting to me about that experience of the pirouette is this combination of focus and blur,” he said, recalling his own days as a dancer. It was a fair warning for the disorienting day ahead, which sought to draw lessons and parallels from the disparate objects while examining the designer’s quest to find inventive solutions to increasingly urgent problems.

But I found Hunt’s analogy to be a useful one for the alarming timeline we’re all currently sharing, one of constant blur and only occasional moments of focus. Turning takes practice, of course, but it also takes some faith.

“You will be spinning, but that’s the point,” he said, referring to the day, but also the Day. “So feel free whenever you get a little, you know,” he waved his hands around his head in a gesture of overwhelm, “to just stand up, and do a little pirouette — it will help.”

Ellen McGirt
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Podcasts

In Season 12 of DB|BD, we’re designing for the unknown.

Michael Eliason, founder of Larch Lab, is an architect, a researcher, a writer, and an urbanist based in Seattle. He’s a self-described activist for dense, livable, affordable, and sustainable cities and the author of Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities.

In the aftermath of the fires in Southern California, Michael helps host Ellen McGirt understand how we can build or rebuild communities to anticipate the significant climate changes imperiling our world, and to become healthier, happier, more connected people.

Go Figure

Join me May 6-8 live in San Francisco or virtually from around the world. I’ll be there and and on stage at Config. Register on config.figma.com. #config2025

Observed

The post-Trump tech boom is not coming. “Corporates are handcuffed by antitrust policing, price mismatches, and market turmoil. And the new leadership at the FTC and Department of Justice is much more critical of Big Tech market consolidation than some Silicon Valley power players might’ve expected.” More at PitchBook.

Content designers, the unsung heroes of design? “We’re often associated with voice and tone on the surface level, and that language is put in there as design material,” says Jonathan Foster, who leads the content design team for Microsoft 365 and Copilot. It’s a bridge between cold tech and the warm hearts of the people using it. But with the addition of LLMs, “what’s happening is the evolution from a purely deterministic UX to a probabilistic paradigm.” Alt title: Blessed are the English majors, for they shall wrangle AI.

Our brains are built for visuals, says Paolo Perrone, the founding editor of the Data Science Collective. “Beyond speed, visuals also build credibility. While words or numbers convince about 68% of people, a simple chart can push that trust level to 97%,” he writes in this compelling design visualizations primer.

Dark energy is weakening, and the universe could (eventually) collapse, which, to be honest, feels about right. Dark energy, once considered a cosmological constant, is actually more dynamic than expected, according to a new study. “Is it just [that] we are missing something big in the model of our universe and we just don’t know it?” asks Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, the co-chair of Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a unique collaboration between some 900 scientists around the world. More here.

A controversial Frank Lloyd Wright project is complete. The three-bedroom house in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, was built using plans of Wright’s 1959 Usonian called Riverrock. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation says the project falls short. “The Riverrock home is not Frank Lloyd Wright’s work — varying due to codes, materials, and other differences,” the Foundation told ArtNet.

The independent design studio Two Times Elliott recently shuttered its permanent studio space, a decision that founder James Horwitz says is more about the way people work rather than the state of design. “It was something we sat with, debated and questioned. Some of our team had thrived in the studio, while others thrived outside of it.” Instead of a now traditional hybrid model, the team hit upon a third way. “This thinking has led us to consider a new model of residencies: short-term, high-impact spaces that adapt to the work at hand.”

After a five year renovation, a refreshed Frick collection shows off a new Gilded Age.

The Wreden Parable. In 2013, video designer Davey Wreden released a polished version of a free game he’d invented in college to unexpected acclaim. The crush of success turned into an extended period of depression. Wreden sat down with The New Yorkerfor an extended interview before the launch of his third game, Wanderstop. “I’ve had phases of my life where I became not very functional as a person because I couldn’t distinguish myself from the absurdism of the media that I liked,” he says. 

Another sign that design isn’t dead? Paper, a new design collaboration tool still in beta, recently announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. And, they’ve got mo’ beta fans. “I designed in @paper today,” posted HYTOPIA design director Dann Petty. “Initial reaction — it made me feel like a mad scientist again. Like I could create anything. Literally anything…in one tool (without plugins). That same feeling I got when I first discovered Photoshop.”

Fresh pAInt

“I paint who I want to know. And I am increasingly of the opinion that artificial intelligence can be inflected with subtlety and nuance, pointing us to evocative, emotional, even intimate ways of connecting to our own humanity.” — Design Observer co-founder Jessica Helfand, who is celebrating her birthday today. (JessicaHelfand.com)

This is the web version of The Observatory, our twice-monthly dispatch from the editors and contributors at Design Observer. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. While you’re at it, come say hi on YouTube, Reddit, or Bluesky—and don’t miss the latest gigs on our Job Board.