Design Observer

Some eight million people attended thousands of “No Kings” rallies in the U.S. this past Saturday, turning out to protest the Trump administration’s violent immigration policies, the escalating war in the Middle East, and to send a message that regime change was coming. “Grab ’em by the midterms,” read one sign held by a protestor at the rally in Trump’s newly democratic Mar-A-Lago district. More than 100,000 people showed up at Minnesota’s State Capitol. CNN&nbs

PropellerOil and cold wax on canvas60 x 48 inches2026 David Moolten imagines Icarus as an immigrant, adrift on a wayward voyage: He doesn’t fall into the sea, but back Toward Russia Bill Callahan imagines him in hiding: Young Icarus flew at night for years He flew and flew and flew …  As obsessed with evolution as ever From a hill behind a gas station in Scranton The (late, great) American poet Edward Field imagines Icarus still alive somewhere, living a quie

When a major tech platform goes down for any reason, a meme typically circulates as the online masses gleefully imagine the panic of the incompetents as they rush to find the problem. “SysAdmin looking at server rack” is one of the most popular of the genre; it shows a young Black man in a t-shirt and jeans, hands on his hips, staring into a janky server cabinet and its befuddling tangle of wires. According to the AI Memes archival site, the image “is commonly used online to humorously d

Read the introduction to this series. Precipice24 x 24 inches2025 I have been thinking about Icarus’s father, Daedalus, and about the often persistent impasse between adults and adolescents that is hardly unique to Greek myth. Unspoken rivalries. Complex legacies. A parable of a different sort. Icarus: Son (sun?) at the center of his father’s universe Daedalus : Dad, designer, control freak.  Measure twice, cut once.  I wonder about the origin of this proverb, and dis

In recent weeks, renewed attention on the Epstein files has resurfaced a familiar and unsettling truth: abuse of power never exists in isolation. It is sustained by networks of wealth, reputation, institutions, and silence. What’s striking is not that powerful individuals behaved badly. History is painfully consistent on that point. What is difficult to absorb, even now, is the scale of harm survivors describe, and the realization that many of these stories were told for decades before they w

Read the introduction to this series. Polyommatus12 x 12 inchesOil and cold wax on canvas2025 Polyommatus Icarus is known colloquially as the common blue butterfly. Its adult lifespan lasts, on average, two to three weeks.  A life too brief, like that of its namesake. A wing not attached to the upper arm but to the … upper lip? Groucho glasses spring briefly to mind. Ovid, after all, described Icarus as something of a goofball. (In his play, Ovid wrote, he hindered his fath

Just ask, well, everyone. Last month OpenAI president Greg Brockman wrote on X that “Taste is a new core skill.” Sam Altman, posting before both OpenAI’s latest $110 billion funding round and controversial Pentagon contract, agreed. “We believe the best research teams are built through context, taste, and a real feel for where the field is headed next.” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, a longtime champion of taste, is still weighing in. “In

Read the introduction to this series. Featherweight60 x 48 inchesOil and wax on canvas2026 Recently I have been thinking of Icarus as a kind of footsoldier, out scavenging in an open field. Acquiring his arsenal. Gathering materials, and weighing his options. (Weighing his fate.) The idea of painting him in a flight suit seems right—adventurer as aviator—and I think there will be another version at some point where the flight suit becomes a straitjacket. That line between freedom a

Read the introduction to this series. Meltdown24 x 24 inchesAcrylic, oil, and wax on canvas2026 I have been thinking about wax as a medium for simulation, about how I might use it to morph or maneuver the skin into some kind of altered state. Tissue stripped away, facial integrity diluted. A face that dissolves. And with it goes the spirit. So easy to see all of this as a subtraction, even though wax—as a verb—actually means to grow. (Its opposite: to wane.) What does a melting fa

A war over the U.S. government’s use of AI played out in an actual war in the Middle East. On Friday, the Pentagon abruptly blacklisted Anthropic, the maker of the popular Claude LLM, after the company refused to lift key guardrails on the military’s use of the model for potential autonomous weaponry and widespread mass surveillance. In short order, rival OpenAI inked a deal with the government, replacing Anthropic, and positioning itself as both safety-oriented and a leader in the field.

In honor of Black History Month, here are some Black authors who are addressing the persistent issues of inclusion in the modern design era — many are cherished contributors to the Design Observer community. As always, proceeds from book sales support local booksellers and our editorial programs. Kevin Bethune Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation (MIT Press, 2022) A first-person navigation of design, engineering, and corporate America — from Westinghouse to Nike to fo

Read the introduction to this series. Misfit24 x 24 inches2026 I’ve been thinking about halos. And the halo effect (which is its own kind of myth). The simplicity of that geometric form, a simple curvature above the head. The perfection of it. The divinity of it.   Sketching children and circular crowns of light led me to balloons: here, a child lost in thought. Is he behind the balloon? Is he inside of it?  The world’s a bubble, wrote Saint Augustine. The balloo

In the 1940s, Paul Revere Williams was a well-established architect to the stars in Los Angeles when he turned his sights on humbler, more American, fare. “An eager generation of young people coming out of the war is filled with the desire to have homes of their own — and homes of their own planning and building,” he wrote in his 1945 volume, The Small Home of Tomorrow. A futurist and optimist, he offered detailed advice on building the “Kitchen of Tomorro

This message is for self-identifying women, nonbinary, and queer creatives: This is a call to action, but not the kind you might expect. Instead, I’m here to invite you to join a growing movement of professionals who are rewriting the rules entirely.  On International Women’s Day 2024, I challenged the narrative around women-founded creative ventures. Unfortunately, the broader reality reveals persistent obstacles — from funding gaps to systemic leadership barriers. But focusing solel

In 2019, artist, designer, writer, and Design Observer co-founder Jessica Helfand published Face: A Visual Odyssey, a compelling examination of the history of images of the human face — from historical mugshots to medical research images to humanoid robots, and beyond. “The face has always been a hieroglyph, at once the instrument of lucidity (we all have one) and an enigmatic canvas (we’re all different),” she wrote in the prologue.  Her timing was impeccable.  With social

Read the introduction to this series. Fifteen Pages Old60 x 48 inchesOil and wax on canvas2026 I am finding Icarus references everywhere. He’s a symbol for so much: adventure and aspiration, peril and mishap, the embodiment of recklessness, the fragility of youth. I’m still stuck on the youth part. In Raymond Queneau’s absurdist 1968 retelling, Icarus is imagined as a bit of a louche, drinking absinthe in a bar in Paris and hanging with a courtesan named Hélène (phonetically ref