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Observed


Democratic state lawmakers in Colorado are ending the practice of anonymous surveys to determine which bills should live or die. The change to make all parts of the survey public comes months after a judge ordered lawmakers to stop using their previous secret ballot system to prioritize legislation because it violated Colorado’s open meetings law, reports the Longmont Leader.

Why does the moon need a time zone?

Looking back at the ballot design that prevented the Al Gore presidency. “If you don’t remember — it has been a while — the butterfly ballot was very unusual,” says Nate Cohn.

Artist Mary Miss has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the demolition of her 1996 outdoor installation Greenwood Pond: Double Site at the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC). The museum originally commissioned the piece but says time and decay have rendered it unsalvageable. 

A new trial digs into Autopilot, Tesla’s driver-assistance system alleged to have caused a fatal crash. More lawsuits are scheduled in the coming months.

This year’s Whitney Biennial, entitled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” aims to bring together a “dissonant chorus,” say co-curators and organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. Critics aren’t so sure. “What can the Whitney Biennial be, now, so late after the end of modernism? Is it a grand intellectual battle, or just an insiders’ chinwag? A polemic, or a party?” posits Jason Farago. “[O]ne thing it cannot be is a summation of where art stands in the United States in 2024.”

Chicago’s “Snoopy in a Blender” sculpture is on the move.

The future of work is changing fashion. We have lost the wrap dress. (Boo.) Also, the necktie. (Yay?)

Diversity is critical for the future of AI, says Karim Ginena, a social scientist and founder of RAI Audit, an AI governance and research consultancy. “People of color are greatly overlooked” in the datasets. “I’m not a doom-sayer, but I believe that we have to do our due diligence to be able to direct the trajectory of this technology in ways such that we’re maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms.” More expert voices at Knowledge at Wharton.

In a significant setback for LGBTQ+ rights, the Vatican has declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity. The decision was included in “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page document that took five years to produce.

Huge congratulations to the extraordinary Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel—designer, researcher, and creator of The Designer’s Critical Alphabet (a deck of cards to help introduce designers and design students to inclusive design concepts)who has been named the new Dean of Faculty at OCAD.

Cliff Kuang on design, “consumption engineering”—and the climate crisis.

In a powerful opinion piece today in Hyperallergic, Jamaican-American artist, photographer, and activist Renée Cox takes on racism (and tabloid journalism) in the art world.

Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a social safety net program that supports low-income people with disabilities, is actually keeping them impoverished. Redesigners say it’s time to raise the asset cap — the amount of savings a recipient is legally allowed to have. Proposed bipartisan legislation would solve the problem, but gridlock is keeping it on the sidelines. 

Vision & Justice is an enterprise founded by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, an art historian and Associate Professor at Harvard who believes that images can be powerful in “pushing back against entrenched injustice.” Beginning next fall, and in hopes of widening and deepening our existing photographic canon, Aperture will publish a series of Vision & Justice monographs. “Many of the images made by Black photographers were unknown,” said Deborah Willis, a professor at NYU who has conducted pioneering research in the field. “How do we even the playing field and the archive? How do we rethink making images of stories that are community-based?” (For more on Willis and her own work, listen to our conversation with her in Season Nine of The Design of Business | The Business of Design.)   

Maybe invite ChatGPT to your next family holiday? Researchers from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and the psychology department at Cornell found that when instructed to “deliver well-argued, person-specific debunks,” ChatGPT-4 Turbo had a 20% success rate in reducing someone’s belief in a conspiracy theory. "This effect did not decay over 2 months time,” they write. “It was consistently observed across a wide range of different conspiracy theories, and it occurred even for participants whose belief in conspiracy theories was deeply entrenched and of great importance to their identities.”

We have lost the wrap dress. (Boo.) Also, the necktie. (Yay?)

“Crafting Modernity,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, focuses on domestic design from six countries—Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela—produced between 1940 and 1980, marking a period of massive transformation, industrial expansion, and creativity in Latin America, where design was becoming institutionalized as a profession and opening up new avenues—especially for women. A rave review from Michael Kimmelman in today's New York Times.

Adidas’s new kit design for the German Football Association (DFB) team has undergone a hasty and necessary revision. “None of the parties involved saw any proximity to Nazi symbolism,” said a company spokesperson. Time to re-think your review process?

For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. Census has changed how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity. The changes will more accurately count people with Middle Eastern, North African, and Hispanic heritage. “You can’t underestimate the emotional impact this has on people,” said Meeta Anand, senior director for Census & Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 

How a tiny tweak to a book’s design is saving trees. (Hint: it’s all about the font. Well, mostly.)

Which American style influencer is being sued by the Donald Judd foundation for fake furniture design/copyright infringement

Coming soon to the Center for Contemporary Arts In Berlin, an exhibition featuring more than100 original posters by one of Japan’s most influential and internationally renowned graphic designers and poster artists, Shigeo Fukuda

The Design Newsroom is a new digital platform designed to streamline the interaction between award-winning designers, brands, and the global media landscape.

“The idea was to create a sanctuary in the center of the city where anyone is welcomed, no matter their faith, religion, what brings them there, or their backgrounds, “ observes Krista Nightengale, Executive Director of Better Block, a placemaking nonprofit based in Dallas. Read more about their newest initiative: a design competition to combat loneliness. Elswehere in Texas, Icon—an Austin-based startup—launched own competition, inviting professionals to design homes that could be built for $99,000 or less “without sacrificing beauty, dignity, comfort, sustainability, or resiliency”.

Two Australian First Nation artists, Naminapu Maymuru-White and Daniel Boyd, are uniting at Art Basel Hong Kong to present complex and contrasting views of Indigenous identity. 

March 21st was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. We may need more than one day for this.

Ryan O’Rourke, Alberto Ponte, and Dan Sheniak are responsible for some of the most iconic ad campaigns Nike ever produced. The Wieden+Kennedy veterans are heading out on their own with Someplace, a new LA-based, full-spectrum creative, brand, identity, and design shop. “We wanted to challenge ourselves in a new way,” says Sheniak. “What does our next chapter look like? How do we push ourselves and make ourselves uncomfortable to create something? From there, we just started getting excited about what we could dream up together.”

Along with Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yeeone (originally known as the Antwerp Six), renowned Dutch designer Dries Van Noten—whose clothes are known for their simplicity, elegance, and drape—makes a graceful exit.

Enzo Mari saw design as the production of knowledge (as opposed to consumption). The Italian theorist, ethicist, and spirited provocateur—who died in 2020—is the subject of a new show opening next week at London’s Design Museum, and running through September.



Jobs | April 10