I couldn’t help but compare the visual purity of Swiss design—its monolithic, self-assured insistence—with my own racial/cultural/aesthetic ambiguity and ambivalence. I knew from the innumerable faces that had gazed upon mine over the years—quizzical, contemptuous, aroused— that neutrality was the last thing I inspired. My pursuit of Swiss authority just seemed too ironic. It was…

This problem, I think, is further compounded in more critical approaches, where design effectively begins and ends with the creative act. In other words, whether questioning ubicomp or biotech or something else entirely, the objects and ostensibly critical intentions of the designer are treated as givens and little effort has been made to systematically understand…

If Old Money is investing in season tickets to the symphony and writing checks to the Legion of Honor, New Money is buying ultra-limited-edition indie-rock LPs and contributing to art projects on IndieGoGo in exchange for early prints. And if the old conception of art and philanthropy was about, essentially, building a civilization — about…

All educations, we realized then, are not created equal. For Ryan and me, of Pahrump, Nev., just an hour from the city, the Vegas boy was a citizen of a planet we would never visit. What we didn’t know was that there were other, more distant planets that we could not even see. And those…

The book is like the wheel – once invented, it cannot be bettered. Umberto Eco (This Is Not the End of the Book)