David Stairs
Research is a well-established human activity. We see examples in science and social science, of course, and have the Nobels and MacArthurs to award it. Research advances medicine and communication, history and jurisprudence. It is even a project for literature in all its various manifestations…. Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “segregated by race” that entered the general vocabulary during white control of South Africa and Namibia from 1948 to 1994. Its usefulness has expanded in the years since until nowadays it has become a universal term denoting enforced segregation…. Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Sigmund Freud in the parallel universe that is America (Photo credit: Library of Congress/Corbis Historical Collection)
Amid all the loose talk about lost American greatness, there seem to be many people worrying about just what has gone so terribly wrong,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Who doesn’t love a podcast?
Some weird personality or obscure ideology you need to catch up on on that long commute to work in the morning? Needing to block out ambient noise in your open space office cubicle?… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
I haven’t yet been able to locate a source that estimates the overall number of vehicles that have been manufactured in the last century. In 1950 there were 50,000,000 cars in the world, not necessarily including all of the 16,500,000 Model Ts Ford produced between 1908 and 1927…. Continue Reading →
Vassiliki Giannopoulos National Design Awards Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum 2 E 91st St, New York, NY 10128
Dear Ms. Giannopoulos, Regarding your December 23rd email notifying us that Designers Without Borders has been nominated for the 2014 National Design Awards,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Ask my Indian friend: Americans are in a coma. What would evoke such an evaluation? Last year, while I was living in Bangalore, an American friend visited and my son and I met her for lunch. While crossing a busy boulevard she grabbed my arm and said,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
In Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord attempted to define the interrelationship between government and commodity capitalism. No finer recent example could be found than the 9/11 10th Anniversary commemorative activities that took place around the country this past month…. Continue Reading →
David Stairs
I was over at Design Observer yesterday, reading Rick Poynor’s lament about the depressed state of design criticism. The comments, posted by the usual band of DO nabobs and groupies, were unusually critical. One commentator referred to DO as “a likedy-like NYC mafia,”… Continue Reading →
Wes Janz
This piece was recently presented at a workshop at Ball State University —Ed.
I. Whose vantage point is privileged when we speak of “the base of the pyramid”? Whose construction of “base” and “pyramid” are we talking about?… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Dear Julie—
I’ve been watching with a mixture of mild horror and benign amusement the recent fascination that Africa engenders in Western design circles. It’s inevitable, I suppose, that that portion of the human world known by the UN as the LDC (Least Developed Countries) would become some sort of 21st century refuge,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Dear Bruce, Following your much-discussed July 7th “reasoned but misinformed volley” about design imperialism on the Fast Company blog, you were practically cut off at the knees for your viewpoint. The folks at Fast Company were probably happy about this,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
I was recently in Austria where I delivered a lecture in Graz during Graz Design Month.
The thing most striking about traveling in Central Europe is the sense of the past preserved. The cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire survived WWII better than their German counterparts,… Continue Reading →
David Stairs
Ezio Manzini is an optimist. Four years ago he envisioned a design conference dedicated to the notion that although things must, will, and do change, perhaps we ought to spend more time planning that evolution. This vision was realized last week at the Changing the Change conference held in the World Design Capital at Torino’s Institute of Biotechnology,… Continue Reading →
An Open Letter to Ric Grefé
Mr. Grefé,
Remember the ’60s TV western The Guns of Will Sonnett? Airing from 1967-’69, it featured a 73-year-old Walter Brennan in a ridiculously oversized 10-gallon hat, stomping around the Old West with his grandson,… Continue Reading →
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