A tweet thread seeing some decent circulation in the past week has recalled to view the minor spectacle surrounding a couple of high-profile re-branding projects done for PepsiCo by the Arnell Group a decade and change ago. Peter Arnell’s public image, at that time rising a long while in the …

In the last (the second) in this series of ‘design suspicion’ notes, I refer briefly to the range of professions adopting designer as title, hinting at one of the themes I expect to emerge as I explore here: design culture’s expansiveness. The question of that expansiveness has something to do …

What I mean to explore by way of ‘design suspicion’ undoubtedly owes a good deal to the ideals of the 19th-century medieval revivalists, guild socialists, and assorted companions. Those theorists and critics of culture, economy, and social order famously saw the world that liberal industrialism was bringing into being as …

A long, dry — but not unreadable — discussion of some of the developments in law, on one hand, and failures of law to keep pace with developments in technology, on the other, through which large swaths of the economy are coming under the control of companies that have risen …

“Where do humans fit into this new economy? Really, not as the creators of value but as the content.” — Douglas Rushkoff

“Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, ‘scenius’ is the creative intelligence of a community.” — Brian Eno

An element of what I do is graphic design, of course. I’ve been interested in the general subject — can’t help wanting to capitalize it, Design — for a long time; have had some limited occasion to study it formally. But with time, too, oddly maybe, I’ve come to a …