For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Tag: Design
Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.
Minimal Success
In art, it is often said, less is more. The same may also be true for criticism.
Mend Your Ways
An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.
Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time?
Designing AI with Justice
I will discuss three concepts in this talk: first, the idea of design justice; second, how people are already resisting oppressive AI; and third, the ten principles of design justice ...
Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the ...
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
Design with Disability
The “Accessible Icon” by Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren began as design activism: the artists defaced existing disability access symbols with red and orange vinyl stickers. Today, their so-called ...
Invisible Algorithms, Invisible Politics
Over the past several decades, politicians and business leaders, technology pundits and the mainstream media, engineers and computer scientists—as well as science ...
The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver ...
Our Metrics, Ourselves
In 1994, a doctor named Clifton Meador penned a satirical portrait of “the last well person” for the New England Journal of Medicine. The protagonist, bent on discovering every datum of unwellness …
The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand ...
Underground Distractions, Shanghai
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Windows on trains and planes are equipped with shades: vertical or horizontal ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Siri, Why Am I So Busy?: An Interview with Judy Wajcman
Smart technologies—phones, tablets, wearables, and time-saving apps—are supposed to lighten our load. So why are we always complaining about overwork? Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School ...
Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna ...
As in Painting, So in Poetry
“Colors are not sounds and ears are not eyes,” wrote Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a mid-18th century German philosopher and art critic. He was making a point about what he saw as a crucial division ...
The Look of the Book
John Hersey’s Hiroshima takes place, as one might expect, in Hiroshima. Originally published in the August 31, 1946, issue of the New Yorker, it recounts what the magazine’s editors called, in a ...
Is There Really No Smart Writing on Women’s Fashion?
Reading Women in Clothes is like spending Saturday afternoon at Nordstrom Rack. Massive, chaotic, and noisy, both are messy in a way that could be inadvertent but could be purposeful: is this ...