New Season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman

We are pleased to announce that the newest season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman will premiere on Observer Media today at 3pm with a video of Design Matters Live filmed by Hillman Curtis. Debbie Millman discusses the launch of Malcolm Gladwell's illustrated collection of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Guests included artist and illustrator Brian Rea, and designers Paul Sahre, Josh Liberson and DeeDee Gordon.

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John Foster

Accidental Mysteries, 01.22.12

Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age.

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Adam Harrison Levy

A History Of The World In 100 Objects

I've been told that our civilization will be known for our diaper landfills and our nuclear waste sites. Other fragments of our culture might survive as well: bits of Tupperware, mountains of lithium batteries or maybe the traces of our highway system. The foundation of a skyscraper might make for a breakthrough excavation but the islands of plastic bottles floating in the oceans may prove puzzling. Perhaps we will bury a cache of digital archives somewhere, to be deciphered one day like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian sarcophagus.

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Michael Erard

Imaging the Brain

Like the map of the American West, the parts of the human brain are named for its explorers, who had a penchant for honoring each other with slices of cerebral territory. Broca. Wernicke. Heschl. Brodmann. Rather unhelpfully to someone who doesn't live and breathe brain anatomy.

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John Foster

Remembering Eva Zeisel

Eva Zeisel, a pioneer of 20th-century industrial design, celebrated her 105th birthday with family and friends last November 13, 2011. After a long and extraordinary life, she passed away less than two months later on December 30. Like so many others who appreciated her influence in modernist design, I was sad to hear of her passing. Her life, at times, read like a Hollywood script.

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Pat Kirkham

Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration

Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including interviews with designer and filmmaker Saul Bass and film director Billy Wilder, this article reassesses the evidence, scholarship and debates about the contributions made by Bass to three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

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John Foster, John Foster

Accidental Mysteries, 01.08.12

James Biber

Vestige(s) of Empire

The 1962 Commonwealth Institute building in London is in the spotlight again as the Design Museum's choice for its new home. In Berlin there was a similar monument to Empire, the now-demolished Palast der Republik in the former East Berlin.The buildings share more than an architectural vintage; they both had, or will have, lives as art museums, and they each celebrated, in their prime, an empire that is both gone and almost impossible to remember.

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