I would say like design and Technology was in some ways like
hip-hop for me. It introduced me to all of these
things Science and Technology studies, at introduce me the
history of political economy and understanding the relationships
between something like cybernetics, which I talked
about a great deal in the book and neoliberal capitalism and
the histories of those things, as they run in parallel, because
that's all underneath. This Iceberg of the apps that we
design and build. Hello, and welcome to design,
adjacent the podcast that talks about the Nexus of design both
today. And tomorrow, I'm your host fin
EF Johnson. And today, our guest is Zach
Kaiser. Zack is associate professor of
graphic design and experience architecture at Michigan State
University, his research and creative practice, examine the
politics of technology, and the role of design in shaping, the
parameters of the individual social, and political Medical
possibility, his work has been featured in National and
international exhibitions, both writings on topics ranging from
the future of Arts in higher education, to dream reading
Technologies appear in both academic and popular
Publications. So today I'm excited to welcome.
Zach to our podcast. Thanks for any thanks for having
me. I'm super excited to be here and
to talk about the book and possibly lots of other things.
I'm excited. I was looking for this
conversation that we get to explore a lot of topics but I
think we'll start off with talking about the future and
it's a fun topic that we like to explore and look Beyond the
Horizon. But I think we don't often get
to have a longer conversation about the future of design and
Technology to talk a bit. What's drawing you to this
intersection of design and Technology?
Whoo, that's a great question. I guess I grew up as like a old
school. Fake designer, you know, an
undergrad. I learned how to make like
posters and books. Right?
You know, and so when I went to graduate school at Mass are in
Boston, that was the very beginning of me starting to be
aware of not only the relationship between design and
Technology. But like, the way that design
and technology and how one uses the other or vice versa creates
certain ideas about people that then Then get sort of embedded
into society and that only really started to like congeal
as a thought. For me, as I was working, both
in the tech world. My friends from grad school and
I started a design studio and we often would get subcontracted
out to ad agencies to help with their like digital quote-unquote
capabilities. And it was always interesting
doing that work and seeing starting to see, like the impact
that was in the early 2010's and so it was like around The time
when everyone's like, oh, there's an app for that, you
know, and I started to wonder like, do is, they're like, hmm,
you know, like I started to get skeptical of that assertion
particularly because I was like, helping build the backend of
these things. And I remember doing that time
period. Everyone wanted to create an
app, even if there was no reason for a nap, you had to have an
app and you'd have apps that actually would just reference
the site that you could go to any way. 100% 100%.
Yeah for sure for sure. And I think the other thing That
spurred some of that interest for me to was I interned at
Sapient Nitro and which is now whatever razorfish recipient
something or other you know. They got eaten up by somebody
and when I was interning there, you know, one of the things we
were talking about all the time is algorithms that were able to
anticipate and sort of predict certain things.
And, like, At first, I had this sense that was like really
great. And then I started to think
about encountered and I have to say, I got to give a shout out
to John Cheney lip old He's a scholar here at the University
of Michigan and friend of mine because I reached out to me
because I was like I was really inspired by your work and he
wrote an article that came out. I think in like 2011 he's a
really long time ago and that article totally changed the
direction of my career. I think talk a little bit about
the article but what really? So it's called it's called a new
algorithmic identity, soft biopolitics, and the modulation
of control, quite the title. That's basically lovely bedtime
reading, right? Right, exactly.
But it really it describes the way that basically, we acquire
algorithmic identities, in the databases of the companies, with
which we do Commerce or do business, it could think about,
like my database entry and Amazon's database, for example,
Amazon has some sort of spreadsheet for lack of a better
term, right? I talk to students about
databases, you know, the first thing I say is like, okay, well,
let's look at a spreadsheet. And so Amazon's got this data.
Listen, I have an entry in it and it has certain properties of
data that are related to me. You know, knows that it probably
knows I'm a guy probably knows her identify as like a cishet
white dude, probably not in those terms.
I don't think their database uses those terms given their
right relatively reactionary politics.
I think, like, the identity that we acquire.
So, what Cheney liberals article argues to some degree?
Is that the identity we acquire in those databases has material
implications for our everyday? Lives.
Okay. And the inferences and
recommendations at those algorithms make about us then
shape and Taylor. He calls.
He says they tailor our conditions of possibility.
So, like when we rely on systems of algorithmic, inference and
recommendation, all the time, whether it's Google Maps, taking
you the fastest, or perhaps quote-unquote, safest route to
get somewhere. We rely on these Technologies
but then they shape what parts of life like we experienced and
what we don't and there's like a, an element of Troll in that
as well. And I remember reading that
article and thinking about some of the projects that we were
working on at our studio at the time and it was really a
revelation. And that was I think sort of
where a lot of this got started. So shout out to John.
Yeah, it's interesting in just to speak a little bit more about
the article. Did it speak about that?
Dissonance that happens when the algorithm is in conflict with
what's happening in your life where we kind of have a control
set where My Amazon shopping perch is really just a
combination of identities or in the moment, as a dad, I'm
purchasing for other people, as well, but my experience is a
little different outside of it and it talked about those
moments as well. So, yeah, one of the things that
his book. So he may be six or seven years
after that article came out. I was already at MSU, so I'm
thinking it was maybe, like, 2017, his book, we Are data,
came out, and with NYU press, and that book is sort of I would
say like an expansion of his article and so he talks about
how he might be seen in the databases of these companies and
like you know, because you do things like purchase stuff for
your kids or like maybe you your browsing Behavior correlates to
that of a 60 year old woman instead of 40 year old dude,
you're advertise to in particular ways as well.
I think it has a lot to do with. Also the relationship between
data capture and advertising. So yeah, he addresses Is that a
little bit? Probably more.
So in his book than in the article itself?
Well, you know it speak about publishing and kind of pushing
through in writing. I'm going to skip ahead to what
encouraged you to come up with your latest book, which has a
slightly different more. Digestible title, I believe
interfaces in as user experience, design, and the
making of computable subject, no less important.
But you know, more palatable of the of the top.
Thanks honey. You know, writing.
Has such a good question. I was talking to dear friend and
colleague. Rebecca take Meyer.
Yeah, it's this very thing. Rebecca's friend of your pod.
Rebecca's a friend of our pod, her and Marty are going to be on
an upcoming episode with their book as well.
We love Rebecca. Yes, great, it's a great book.
Everybody should go buy it. Collaboration and design
education, shout out, Rebecca Tech Meyer.
Yeah, so Rebecca and I were talking about this and the
designers Hurley, those of us who come from, especially like
who grew up in the sort of early who grew up under the modernists
in design? I would say right under the
modernist era under the shadow of modernism.
You know those of us who learned from modernists I think a lot of
us are seeing primarily as practitioners and the reflective
nature of what we do to some degree.
Has often been foisted on us by the academy.
You have to, you know, like go and give a presentation about
your work or whatever because you need a line on your CV
because you To like, get tenure or whatever it is, right?
And so, to have something like for me, I always knew that
making was not the only part of my work but I didn't really know
how to explore whatever the other part of that would be like
I wasn't really a writer. I didn't identify as a writer
necessarily even until graduate school.
And then, once I started grad school, I really embraced.
The explanation part of the work I was doing like I was making
projects and I was doing sort of experimental design practices.
You do in grad school, but I was also at the same time be
encouraged and often forced to write about those things and so
that was the beginning of it. And I found that I really liked
writing. And I wrote a journal article in
2014, I wrote a journal article that was published in design and
culture about copyright law and design.
Oh, nice and I wrote That was my mom who's a professor of Law.
And so that changed that again, like another seminal moment,
totally changed the game for me, I was like, all right, I love
writing. Like, how do I, how do I do more
of this? And so the book, I think, like,
and writing the book kind of came out of my enjoyment and my
relationship with I've no Karma Gorman another like, amazing
design scholar, huge fan, of Karma's word and Karma.
Once told me she's exact, your kind of, a Manifesto writer, and
I think that's sort of true. I think I write as a part of Of
putting my work out there and saying, this is what I'm trying
to do. I was going to ask you that
question, it's a great way to describe it.
I can ask you that question of, how did you see writing as a
part of or service of your creative practice?
Yeah, that for sure, it, orient's me, I would say, like,
I think I always write about the projects.
I do sometimes in retrospect and sometimes in advance of the
projects. And so the structure of the book
actually. And this was one of the hard
things about actually, pitching this book and thank God for
Louie. Is over a Bloomsbury for taking
a chance on this because it was really hard to get across what I
was trying to do with the book which is like the book has a
series each chapter, basically begins with a project like a
reflection and explanation of a project.
I've worked on whether it's like an artistic project or a
designer Leaf project and then it uses those as like an entry
point to the historical, social technological and sort of
philosophical discussions that follow.
Whoa, and all of it, of course, centering around this idea of
the computable subject. I think it was hard to pitch the
book in part because it wasn't a history book, right?
It wasn't in the realm of Science and Technology studies,
which is like, the sort of body of literature that I probably
engage with most but it also wasn't like a design but right.
But it also isn't an artist monograph but it's also not a
pedagogue book. Even though I talk about
education in the last two chapters, I think it was hard to
sell it to a publisher and That going back to like designers who
right? I think that's a pitfall and
that was like, really hard for me because I don't have the more
I become a scholar. The more I've gotten into this,
like, Middle Ground of Academia, and also, like, of the design
world, right? It's really interesting and it
just part of the conversation, your exploration really speaks
to this notion of design, adjacency of all these spaces in
which you're touching and looking at design.
I love Of these story. I didn't realize that you're
doing riding with your mom. Wait, not everyone's moms a
professor of law, got it but you know but let's just have this
conversation of a son riding with his mom.
What was the most revealing part of engaging with your mom?
As a professional professional to professional?
I mean she's she's part of the reason I would say that I have
engaged the wide range of interests that I have.
And the reason I've been really committed to doing that.
She is my mom's a super Rounded well-read person and she doesn't
confine her intellectual interests to just like her
field. And so, when we were working on
the article together, it was so it was so nice because there was
no, I mean, there's no it's like territorialism.
I was like, oh Mom, I found this article.
What do you think about this like in a law review journal?
But I don't know about that stuff.
And so she was like, oh, that's cool.
You know what about this? And we've continued that
dialogue over the years. Like I'm hoping, you know, we'll
see but I'm hoping To continue to collaborate with her in the
future on work around data, brokerage firms, okay?
And looking at the really socially detrimental effects
that data brokerages have and also blockchain and
cryptocurrency stuff as well. I'm definitely I'm in the show,
he's a crypto, Skeptics Camp. Shouldn't be a surprise to you.
It's and so on, but I'm making notes, we definitely going to
have you back for our next conversations around that topic
as well. So yeah, you for sure.
So, I like the one I think the intersection of law design
technology and political economy is like a really interesting
space. So this is really interesting
for me as well in a past life. I worked a lot with privacy and
privacy by Design, in my work with the Better Business Bureau.
We looked at privacy and love to hear your thoughts about that.
The topic area of data privacy and how that plays into
contemporary design? It's so interesting.
One of the things that I would say, let's see.
So there's a few things. It's sort of like this is a
perhaps a multi-layered conversation.
When we ask ourselves questions about the data we give up quote
unquote, right? There's a few probably important
dimensions of that question. So one is the kinds of things
that get captured about us. How they get captured and how
they relate to us as people, and that's to some degree, some of
what my book takes on, they have a kind of in-depth pretty in
depth and possibly pretty boring.
Some people, but I really geeked out about it.
So it's in the book. Exploration of all of the
sensors that were inside early models of the Fitbit and the
kinds of things required. To actually have those like log
data about steps and the number of translations that occur in
order to actually count something as like a step.
Even this question of like, is that data?
What does it mean to for something to be data about you?
And to what degree is that actually not only is Johanna
Drucker. Is it capita as opposed to data
but also, to what degree does that?
Actually reflect anything? About the material world around
us? So that's like one part of it
that we can get back to you later.
The other part is that when you take all this data and you have
all these things, there's a really, really good article by a
legal scholar speaking for why I named Daniel solve a not try to
pronounce his last name. Sol o ve.
Anyway. Super cool article.
And he says, his article is called.
I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of
privacy and He basically argues that we live lesson world, that
is like 1984 which is like the reference lot of people talk
about a CIA. We like we hear in the news, Big
Brother all the time and he says it's less like that.
And it's more Kafka ask in the Kafka story.
He's referring to is the trial where the main character Joseph
K gets arrested. He doesn't know what, he's being
charged with or what his crime is and basically solid phase
point is that we have all of these algorithmic systems that
are not only capturing all This data, but then correlating it
with other kinds of data correlating with data, not just
about you and about other people who are supposedly, like you
again like users. Like you bought this and he says
that we have no idea at some point, how that stuff is being
used. And so it almost when you say I
have nothing to hide, it's like you actually don't.
It doesn't matter. You don't know what's happening
when all this stuff sort of disappears in these inferences
are being made about you. And again, I would say to that
has an effect Beyond Individual that there is a pump that a goal
in like social dimension of that.
It's really, really important to think about the other the more
sophisticated quote unquote, again like I use these terms
with some some care. I suppose the you know, when
machine Learning Systems get like more and more sophisticated
and especially when we're looking at like the work that's
being done within their own networks, there are computer
scientists that admit that, once something enters the neural
network architecture. They've designed They're not
entirely sure how the system they've built makes the
inferences that it does or does some of the things that it does.
There's like these layers of the relationship between the capture
of data about people. What it means to have like data
about you and then what happens to it when you have
conversations and these are kind of deep experiences that we
have. But they're also I think framed
by Our Generation or approaches. Well, how have you seen, you
know, the way your students? Back to these trade-offs that we
have with design technology and privacy with say our generation
or say Your mother. If he will.
Ya, these mean it the reaction saying because I can see if we
have this conversation going completely being understood by a
portion of our population in going over and under the heads
of the other parts of our conversation.
So maybe before maybe, okay, I'm going to back up first before I
before I do that. The one other thing I wanted to
say about like the The relationship, we have to the
giving up or not giving up of data about ourselves, is the way
that that is often used and often weaponize that
conversation to obscure like a much bigger conversation, which
is what my book tries to address which is what does it mean for
someone to be understood as a Computing machine?
Or what does it mean for someone to be understood as nothing but
an agglomeration of data that can be understood exclusively by
Right? Because that itself.
And we can talk about this later.
That has a political Dimension, as well.
But more my students and we talked about the kinds of tools,
they use and the things they use.
One of the things that, I mean, I talk to them a little bit
about that comparison between 1984 and kafka's.
The trial, and I think it's a really wide range, right?
And they're under to varying degrees, a lot of pressure, I
would say pressure, maybe that I didn't experience in any way in
undergrad between the Massive amount of debt that they're
incurring and the increasingly competitive job market.
Particularly as we watch the tech sector kind of implode.
I think like they They have concerns that either allow them
to bracket certain parts of their life.
You know. I also like weirdly think
Tick-Tock kind of change their calculus a little bit with that
I have students who are in the sort of social justice
Tick-Tock, okay, world. And they're just constantly
coming to me with like I had a student yesterday who was
talking to me, like we ended up talking about the assassination
of Patrice lumumba because of the tick tock that she was
watching. About Belgian colonialism and I
was like, okay, this is amazing. What let's do this, this is
great. So I think that that like, to
some degree, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm giving Tech
talk too much credit, but I think that to some extent
Tick-Tock change their calculus with some of the ways that they
give up or don't give up data, right?
Interesting. If as we talked about data and
privacy and design, and all these intersections of
Technology, you visualize, all of these points coming together.
And it allows me to Think about your work, something we were
talking about before your love of music and experiences a DJ
and cooling these pieces together.
So I'm going to take a little spin off of where we were before
and just ask as you think about writing Design, Technology, the
future. You've got all these streams
coming together. How do you manage that as a DJ,
how does your mind work in that moment?
The DJ thing has always been there with me.
And I think so much about sampling.
I think about like the way that this Even this book is
constructed because I don't identify really anymore with a
specific discipline. Like I teach graphic design and
I teach ux because I know how to do it.
It's not necessarily that that's the field.
I personally identify with but I'm not a trained Science and
Technology studies scholar. I don't have my PhD in SDS so
like I'm not in that field either.
I'm kind of in no man's land a little bit and emotionally as a
faculty member who has as we all do extraordinary imposter.
And Rome, that's really hard. But I will say that being a DJ
and a producer and someone who cultivated from a very young
age, you know, I got my bought my first sample or when I was
15, the love of hip-hop music. The love of the art of sampling,
yard of juxtaposition, the art of resuscitating old things and
changing them and manipulating them.
Hip-hop is the reason that I love all the music I love.
Now hip-hop is the reason that I love, I don't know.
Hard bop. Jazz.
If you think about the reason that I got into, I mean, it's
cliche. But like why do I love?
John Coltrane? It's not because my dad was
playing John Coltrane albums and my dad is a jazz man.
For sure, my dad is a lawyer also but he plays the trombone
tuba baritone, flugelhorn piano. And so there was always jazz
music on in my house when I was a kid and I was like, man, dad
that's whack. But once I started making beats,
I was like oh this is amazing. This music is amazing.
Same with like Funk and Soul music, you know, right?
I knew It was there and I enjoyed it but I didn't have the
appreciation for any of the things, whether it's like Stax
Records or even thinking about, you know, like Roy Ayers and
just realizing how much everyone sampled Roy Ayers and I didn't
know any of this and Hip-Hop introduce me all these things.
I would say like design and Technology was in some ways like
hip-hop for me. It introduced me to all of these
things Science and Technology. Studies, at introduce me the
history of political economy and understanding the relationships
between something like Six, which I talked about a great
deal on the book and neoliberal capitalism and the histories of
those things as they run in parallel, because that's all
underneath this Iceberg of the apps that we design and build.
And so I think the approach of sampling, the approach of the
kind of juxtaposition like we were talking about earlier that
Prince Paul was doing on those early De La Soul.
Albums is just that approach is just baked into like how I live
my life and sometimes it With folks and sometimes it totally
doesn't again. That's why I think this book was
I hard to sell hard to pitch to people because it did take, it
takes that, sampling that producer oriented approach to
everything. It's one of the things that
we're excited about having you as a guest on this podcast
because what you just described was the energy and the
motivation for us creating this adjacent space where we're
bringing things together. That may not seem like they work
on the surface but are just right.
We're going as fast face and time, I think About that all the
time with music. How we enter in in songs and
watching my newly minted, teenager fall in love with John
Coltrane, because he's overhearing the samples that I'm
playing that's happening or him telling me about British Rock
and funk in the 60s. And clearly my born after 2000,
son was not a part of the experience, but having the
conversations about how that music is transported, it really
does speak to this area of the adjacency and the kind of
creative tension. In Opportunities and Revelations
that come from all of these spaces.
I love the fact that we're talking about creating new
public policy, creating understanding consumer Behavior
talking about user experience. And then the power of design to
continually reinvent morph and extend itself in all these
Realms to think is really great. I also think that question of
adjacency is really important when we talk about what is
really important in design, education.
Today, there's not that much information about how design
arrived at especially graphic design and user experience
design arrived at defining themselves.
In the ways that they do along the lines that they do.
And what they've chosen to sort of include an extra food, not
only in their Cannon but also in just like literally what
students should learn about. And Paul Dewar ish rights
eloquently about this and what he calls a legitimate the
legitimacy trap and basically what he says in order to be a
legitimate field, you have to make certain exclusions.
But then to continue to assert that legitimacy, you make these
s epistemological or like conceptual boundaries this kind
of myopia. And then you continue to do
that. Even as the conditions around
you change, for me, it's really important to peel off those
epistemological. Blinders from graphic design and
user experience design. And talk about things like the
history of Science and Technology, the history of
political economy, the history of philosophy thinking Like what
shaped our understanding of people.
Because when we say, like, even just the terms, we use to talk
about people, like we talked about consumers, it's a really
indicative term of how we think about political participation
under capitalism, right? We say, oh, well, you can vote
with your wallet. Well, really can I, when
there's, like, 300 different kinds of toothpaste, I can
choose from, but nobody can afford dental insurance, right?
Kind of choices that right now, but that mode of political
participation, and the idea that the Horizon of one's political,
Participation is like voting every couple of years and buying
stuff. The idea of making a more
sustainable, world comes to fruition, through the purchase
of Seventh Generation, toilet paper, or something like that.
That's done by Design and that caters, to the status quo and it
allows neoliberalism to continue to perpetuate itself and like,
to some degree because we're mired in some of the sort of
more nitty-gritty. Shall we say?
Facets of our discipline. We don't, A chance to back out
and be like wait, hold on, I'm not so sure that this is the
direction we should be headed in and so I try to give students
that opportunity. What surprised you the most with
your engaging with students. Now, I think about how our
landscape has changed over the last decade last five years and
definitely over the last three years of our pandemic, what has
surprised you in the way students are looking at their
role, their agency and their craft.
It's an interesting question. My like to think about my
students. So I will say, first of all, the
students in my course, has come from the really wide range, both
of backgrounds, but also of skills.
That's the requirements for the programs that I teach in because
I teach in a couple different programs and some of my classes
are required for students from multiple programs.
They come to my classes with a really different ideas about
what design and Technology really are.
And so, I think one distinction that I've noticed over the
years, it's not inherently. Again, I hate to generalize
about my students because they're all individual and great
and wonderful. For the most part is there are
students who are in like our ux degree program, who I think have
a really strong sense of social justice, particularly within the
Realms of accessibility. And institutional language, will
call it DUI, right? They're interested in
diversifying the field of ux practice.
They're, I think more comfortable, talking about
Computing and technology, and then I have a most, some of my
like more formally, straight-up graphic design, students who
come to interaction design classes or ux classes, and
they're more comfortable with a formal properties of graphic
design there. You know, some of them are like,
really gifted for makers, but they're not comfortable thinking
about how their computer works. Like, if I say, okay, we're
going to open up terminal and We're going to push things to
GitHub through terminal. They're like, wait, what am I
going to break my computer? If I like accidentally type,
something wrong in terminal, probably not, you're going to be
fine, but like it's interesting to like see these different
levels of Engagement depending on what they're taught to.
I mean, it's a something of a pitfall to that.
I've most of the classes, I teach I get students later on in
their careers. And so that's actually tricky to
when I teach graphic design, one we live in a totally different
world than Joseph Miller Brockman.
We can't do A fake design one in the way that maybe we used to
and so what is graphic design one?
Even meet, what should it be? What should they be learning
about? It's really, I mean, I don't
know. It's great, that's great.
That's a great question. I, you know, I'd love to hear
your thoughts. If you could, if you could remix
graphic design one, what would be the three foundational
things? You would add?
If you could remix like the three, I like the limitation 30k
to me. I think one of the first things
Is that we have to do is contextualize the practice of
design a little bit with in like the history of technology in the
history of political economy. So like how does graphic design
serve particular interests in the world that we live in like
in let's call it the quote unquote West, or quote unquote
Global North and what's its relationship to the will call it
like the hegemonic ideology. Right?
Like what is its relationship to supporting the status quo and
you know, how do you Do that as a graphic designer, in everyday
life and in practice and then the other thing I would say is
systems and mapping. So not from necessarily
exclusively, a formal perspective, but really thinking
about again, just emphasizing the relationality of things to
one another. So whether it would be a
diagramming the Investments, perhaps the MSU makes in its
portfolio of a stock And Trades. What happens if we look at the
public disclosure, Ms. Use finances.
What can we learn from that and how can you map those against
looking at the detrimental effects of some of those
companies have on our environment and then visualize
that in some way? I think about the work of
somebody like, Mark Lombardi or a project like they rule from
Josh on and Future Farmers. Those things were about mapping
diagramming power and thinking about how power exerts itself
through multiple channels. And I think that that idea of
connectivity and mapping and systems is, like, really, really
Central to To not only design practice but also being able to
look at the world and analyze it through a lens that is not
myopic and doesn't try to put graphic design in this little
box, you know. And it's like something we
encounter all the time. Like if I remember like working
at this big company in Boston and we felt like we were the
make it pretty department and everybody came to us to just
make things pretty. And I think that oftentimes
graphic design education unintentionally of feeds into
that and again it calls into question To a little bit of like
graphic, designs ongoing existence as a singular
discipline. It's so integrated with so many
other things and I wonder what something like canva.
The third thing I would talk about is platforms and templates
and systems for other people to do design.
Then I would talk to students about that.
It's really important to know about and honestly, like some of
those things, some of the automated systems and do some of
our work for us. Let him do it.
I suppose right? They do but they lack the heart.
Yeah yeah I mean I think again. Like my question would be.
Where's the heart necessary to me?
It seems as though the kind of design early activity that we
have associated with graphic design for so long, may not be
where we really need to put our energy in society right now.
Can we push beyond that in order to have the kind of impact that
we really need to have especially in the face of 1.5
degrees Celsius global warming? We're there and like the urgency
of change needs to Be reflected and how we talk about what we do
as designers. There's this great article by
Cameron Tonkin. Why is called I prefer not to
anti-progressive designing it to some degree.
It asks, what would an active refusal by designers look like,
do we need to continue to do the things that we're doing?
And I think the answer really If we're honest about it is no.
And that opens up a whole possibility for really
transformative change and so if you ask me like this graphic
design, one look like, maybe it doesn't look like What we have
come to understand is graphic design under the historical
weight of European modernism. And as our world continues to
change for, every reason, our design studies and design 101
needs to change and need to adjust with her.
I absolutely. I think we see that.
I love your approach to thinking about this, and I definitely
going to invite you back. I can't believe we're we've run
through our time for this episode of design adjacent, but
you are coming. My friend because we're going to
talk about solutely, we're going to next time spin a little more
music and we're going to talk a bit more about the way in which
the work that you're exploring layers and refines and
challenges the work we're doing. I mean I think about this Nexus
that continues to expand and maybe you know, we have
conversations about professions and the fact that years ago
you'd have a guild and there was a series of tools and sets and
approach. Churches that someone will learn
and that created a guild that provided support and covering
for the work in the family as that expands.
And as we think about contemporary professions and
design is definitely one. I often think about it was
helpful for me to think about the more like our universe
something that's constantly expanding and explodes into a,
we look at design, 20 years ago, we wouldn't recognize.
We won't recognize what design is 20 years from.
Now, if we try to think about it the way, in which we've
expanded, so I love to bring you Back and talk some more about
this Nexus of technology and policy and our political
economy, along with design and how we shape the future above
to, for sure that it's been a delight and I know that our
audience is, has enjoyed this conversation to have someone to
design, educator a design leader, and I'm giving you
titles, I know you said you fall in no area, which means that
you're perfectly adjacent where you fall in this space.
Yeah, but I thank you for joining Ting us and I thank all
of you for listening to this episode of design adjacent, the
podcast that truly finds the Nexus of both design today and
Zack tomorrow. Thank you, man.
Thanks so much Benny. Show notes for this episode will
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My name is Li Xian zhuang until next time.