Design Observer

“‘Hobby' implies that it's an activity that doesn't go anywhere. Try telling that to somebody who works a 9 to 5 soulless job, but they have an art studio in their spare bedroom. That's where they like bring their soul to life.”

How the Quechua word for reciprocity gave this design leader new ideas for how he thinks about design

In his recent oral arguments , Chief Justice John Roberts described Louisiana's newly defunct 6th Congressional District as a snake, a caustic nod to the way it wound across the state, spanning some 200 miles connecting parts of Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Alexandria, and Lafayette.

The poet Mary Bernard called Icarus a disturber of the unseen The New York Times called Lindbergh the Icarus of the twentieth century

I am, I now realize, nearing the end of this exploration. Narratives unpacked, etymologies revealed, a story deconstructed, unpacked, reimagined.

Debbie Millman is a designer, brand expert, educator, master interviewer, and dear friend of Design Observer. Her most recent short TED Talk, “ You Got What You Wanted, Now What ?” was posted this spring. It's a don't-miss.

“If anybody knew trans people, of course they'd love them,” says the painter and mother of a trans child.

I have separately begun a series of drawings exploring the line language that comes from combining an apparatus with a human form. Not quite cyborgs, these hybrid explorations tease at movement and stasis, veering into anatomical dislocation and a new (for me) kind of visual language. Pencil and paper. Some watercolor. Waxed thread, (because, well,

And we asked the design community to respond Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the

What to learn from Latin American designers who are using design to reinterpret the region's past while shaping its present and future