On Design

Massimo Vignelli

design

Massimo Vignelli on Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Ideas

Spoken Word

Innovator, artist, protagonist, and positive provocateur, Maria Giudice has pursued a vision of intelligent, elegant, people-centered design throughout her professional life. Her grasp of the pragmatic, the authentic, and the essential have kept her at the forefront of design and business for over 20 years. Under Maria's leadership, Hot Studio, the experience design firm she founded in 1997, grew from a two-person outfit into a full-service creative agency with an impressive list of Fortune 500 clients. Facebook paid Maria the ultimate compliment in Mar 2013, by acquiring her and most of her employees in their largest "acqui-hire" to date. Maria's new role as Director of Product Design at Facebook allows her to experience first-hand the challenges and opportunities DEOs face. She is the co-author of Rise of the DEO: Leadership By Design. 

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Maria Giudice

As the Co-Founder and CTO of Bespoke Innovations, Scott Summit leads a continuing effort to create products that radically change lives. In this lecture, Summit shares insights from creating customized prosthetic devices using new technologies in nascent markets. He also discusses some of challenges his company faced in discovering a working business model and developing customers.

Scott Summit - Products With a Purpose

Excerpt from Jeff Goldsmith's Q&A with Ray Bradbury, recorded at Comic Con 2010. Discussion and other highlights here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/04/ray-bradbury-comic-con-interview/

Full audio here: http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-q.html

Ray Bradbury on Libraries

Ray Bradbury on NASA

Ray Bradbury on (Not) Growing Up

Ray Bradbury on Loving Life

David Foster Wallace's iconic 2005 Kenyon College graduation address. Context and transcript here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/

Part 2 here: http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2

David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 1)

David Foster Wallace's iconic 2005 Kenyon College graduation address. Context and transcript here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/

Part 1 here: http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-1

David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 2)

"The arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my 'self-assurance.'"

Background and context:  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/18/vladimir-nabokov-james-mossman-interview/

Vladimir Nabokov on literature and life (1969)

Read more: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/10/massimo-vignelli-debbie-millman/

Excerpt from Debbie Millman's Design Matters interview: https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/massimo-vignelli

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli on the three pillars of design education

Read more: www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/10/massimo-vignelli-debbie-millman/

Excerpt from Debbie Millman's Design Matters interview: https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/massimo-vignelli

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli defines "junk"

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli on creative nobility

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli on intellectual refinement

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli on print vs. digital books

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org), an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness and curiosity, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are. She has also written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. 

In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Maria discusses curation, creativity as pattern-recognition, growing up in Bulgaria, and her grandmother following her Google Alerts.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Maria Popova

Full conversation and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/06/wendy-macnaughton-caroline-paul-design-matters/

Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/carolinepaulandwendymacnaughton

Caroline Paul on "Design Matters"

Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American Institute of Architects (AIA): 

"Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors."
 
A group called Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) has taken the stance that there are some buildings that just should not have been built. Buildings that, by design, violate standards of human rights.

Specifically, this refers to prisons with execution chambers, or prisons that are designed keep people in long-term isolation (or as prison officials call it, "segregation"). The latter kind of prison is called a "supermax," or "security housing unit" (SHU). There is no legal definition for solitary confinement, so it's up for debate as to whether the SHU constitutes solitary confinement.  

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding one SHU at a Northern California prison called Pelican Bay.

Life inside of the SHU at Pelican Bay means 22 to 23 hours a day inside of 7.5 by 12 foot room. It's not a space that's designed to keep you comfortable. But it's not just these architectural features, that concern humanitarian activists and psychiatrists. It's the amount of time many prisoners spend in that cells, alone, without any meaningful activity. Some psychiatrists, such as Terry Kupers, say there is a whole litany of effects that a SHU can have on a person: massive anxiety, paranoia, depression, concentration and memory problems, and loss of ability to control one's anger (which can get a prisoner in trouble and lengthen the SHU sentence). In California, SHU inmates are 33 times more likely to commit suicide than other prisoners incarcerated elsewhere in the state. There are even reports of eye damage  due to the restriction on distance viewing.  Terry Kupers says that a SHU "destroys people as human beings."

Compared with some other prisons in the California system, the Pelican Bay SHU has some redeeming architectural features. Inmates can get natural light from skylights outside of their cells, which drifts in through doors made of a perforated metal. These porous doors also allow for inmates to communicate with each other, even though there are no lines of sight to any prisoner from within the cell. 

But on the other hand, cells don't have windows. Inmates never get to see the horizon. The only times prisoners get to leave the cell is to visit the shower, or the exercise yard--which is an empty, windowless room not that much bigger than a cell, with twenty-foot high concrete walls. 

Again, there is no universally accepted definition of solitary confinement. But some groups, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have gone beyond calling the SHU solitary confinement--they call it torture. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture said anything over 15 days in solitary confinement is a human rights abuse--which other sources have interpreted as torture.
So if it is the ethical code of architects to promote human rights...what is their responsibility to the people who are incarcerated in their buildings? 

Enter Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco-based architect and president of ADPSR. He believes it's up to architects to lead the charge against these buildings. Sperry and the ADPSR are trying to get the American Institute of Architects to adopt an amendment to their ethics code:

"Members shall not design spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement."

This episode is a special collaboration between 99% Invisible and the podcast Life of the Law. Find out about their show at lifeofthelaw.com