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Observatory

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05.14.13: Alexandra Lange

Anxiety, Culture and Commerce
Is the museum store a distraction or an enticement?
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01.14.13: Michael Bierut

Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport
Michael Bierut on logo redesign outrages, what they mean, and why we should demand more.
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01.03.13: Rick Poynor

On My Screen: Shooting the Past
Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past, set in a fictitious photo library, is a film that could haunt you for years.
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10.14.12: Alexandra Lange

Shopping With Sandro, and Other Tumblr Delights
Digitizing the Miller House Collection, and other museum and corporate visual archives on Tumblr.
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10.06.12: Rob Walker

Listening to Retail
Disquiet Junto has been listening to retail, and it's changing my ears.
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09.06.12: Rob Walker

Making "Making" Mass
A visit to an outpost of TechShop, the aspriing "Kinko's for geeks," in North Carolina.
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06.08.12: Rob Walker

The Bizarro Storytelling Exercise
The Bizarro Story Exercise: The value in thinking hard about the worst.
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06.01.12: Rob Walker

The Infrastructure of the Cloud
On the material structures we depend on to deliver us the immaterial digital world.
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02.29.12: Adrian Shaughnessy

When Less Really Does Mean Less
Since the banking crises of 2008, designers fromWestern nations are learning painfully to adapt to the new reality: less is the new normal.
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12.21.11: John Thackara

From Milk to Superfoods: Supping with the Devil?
The social and ecological crimes Big Food is committing, in other parts of the world, so that you and I can eat what we damn well feel like.
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09.19.11: Alexandra Lange

What the Cooper-Hewitt Needs: More Design, Less Talk
My six suggestions for how to fix the National Design Museum.
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08.09.11: Rick Poynor

From the Archive: Raging Bull
A response to Michael Bierut’s essay about the relationship between bullshit and design, and the discussion that ensued.
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08.02.11: Rick Poynor

From the Archive: Down with Innovation
Designers have too readily accepted the caricature of themselves as airheaded stylists. Visual form is a vital expression of culture.
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06.11.11: Alexandra Lange

New Apple HQ, 1957
Wouldn't it be more radical for Apple to move back to town?
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05.31.11: Helen Walters

Design and Business Education: The System Is Not Good Enough
In the past few years, there have been interesting attempts from within both business and design schools to elevate the potential of design and creative thinking as drivers of differentiated value.
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01.17.11: John Thackara

How the Banks Want to Make China Sick — and Broke
Is it me, or are some banking people incredibly stupid as well as being venal and sociopathic?
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07.25.10: Michael Bierut

Jerry Della Femina, Mad Men, and the Cult of Advertising Personality
A review of Jerry Della Femina's From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, published in a new edition on the occasion of the debut of the fourth season of the AMC series Mad Men.
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