Select Writings

"From Intertextuality to Intersectionality: The Soft Power of the Bibliography," 2022 
After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy, Geoff Kaplan, ed., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, forthcoming March 2022)

"Defuturing the Image of the Future," 2019
Designs for Different Futures, Kathryn B. Hiesinger et al, eds., (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019)

"The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture," 2015
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, 1964-1974; (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015)

​"Towards Relational Design," Design Observer, November 3, 2008
​"Towards Relational Design," Walker Magazine, 2008

"No Visible Means of Support: Architecture and Painting," 2001
Painting at the Edge of the World, Douglas Fogle, ed., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001)

"In and Around: The Design of Cultures and the Cultures of Design," 1994
Émigré #32, Berkeley, CA: Emigre Graphics, 1994)

My writing practice combines a critical, theoretical approach to the study and analysis of cultural production and artifacts. This approach was born from my research practice as a designer and educator, where I pioneered the integration of critical theory and design subjectivities in studio courses that explored the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the early 1990s. I have since written about paradigm shifts in the discipline, from the contextual turn in design and the creation of problem-posing (versus problem-solving) and critical pedagogical methods in order to foster designer agency to the historiography of graphic design history and the "defuturing" of design altogether in the face of systemic social failures and ecological crises. My writings, like my designs, are tailored to specific contexts and audiences, and thus vary in approach, from book and exhibition reviews to historical essays and scholarly texts. My writings have appeared in a variety of publications, from professional trade magazines and blogs to academic journals and exhibition catalogues.