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 …

Ed Whitfield’s talk here makes for a nice complement to the previous post’s look at Michel Bauwens’ big-picture program for socio-economic transition. Whitfield too is concerned with emergence …

… It is useful to recall at this point that the civil economy has two main meanings. The “Civil Economy,” written with initial capitals, is a tradition of thought and a perspective for studying the economy that understands the entire economy differently from the dominant Anglo-American capitalist tradition. This first …