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11.11.21
Lee Moreau + Grace Jun | Audio

The Futures Archive S1E5: The Uniform


What comes to mind when you think of a uniform? On this episode of The Futures Archive designer Lee Moreau and this episode’s guest host, Grace Jun, discuss the notion of a uniform, and the importance of inclusivity in human-centered design.

With additional insights this week from Anat Rafaeli, Josh Halstead, and Tucker Viemeister.

Lee asked Grace about the role of human-centered design and design research in her work:
Human-centered design, for me, means exactly that. Everything is surrounded around people. Of course, yourself and others who are different from you. For Open Style Lab, we’re more interested in the educational component as well as like, how do we think about design research in a way that hasn’t considered disability in that frame and to actually connect with people. So, I would say 70 percent of our time is connecting with a person with a disability or disability organization.
Lee Moreau is President of Other Tomorrows, a design and innovation consultancy based in Boston, and a Lecturer in MIT’s D Minor program.

Grace Jun is a professor at UGA and CEO of Open Style Lab.

Anat Rafaeli holds the Yigal Alon Chair for the Study of People at Work in the Technion.

Josh Halstead is an epistemic activist working at the intersection of critical disability studies, design pedagogy, and community organizing.

Tucker Viemeister is an industrial designer, and founder of Viemeister Industries.

For our prompt this week, Josh Halstead help us define the project saying:
Design impacts who, when, and how people participate in society. Theories about the body and its relationship to design can be traced back to the concept of historical materialism, which claims that social organization (i.e., who is accepted and who is rejected in the design and structure of society) follows material and technological conditions. Access to natural resources and technologies to make "use" of and commoditize these resources, the theory argues, predetermines how people relate to one another and design values, norms, laws, public spaces, and more. Years after Marx popularized the theory, first-wave feminists used it to critique the design of a "man-made" world, and disabled activists deployed it to protest against inaccessible housing, transportation services, and workplaces—alleging that "disability" is a feature of society, not a body. They argued that disability is produced when, for example, a wheelchair user encounters stairs. Today, disability theory makes room for physical, social, and temporal constructions of the body. What matters most is that designers understand how participation in society is mediated, in part, by them through the material and technological conditions they reproduce and reimagine.
For more on the prompt, check out our Instagram feed.

Subscribe to The Futures Archive on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And you can browse the show archive.

Kathleen Fu created the illustrations for each episode.

A big thanks to this season’s sponsor, Automattic.

And to our education partner, Adobe.



Transcript

Lee Moreau
Welcome to the Futures Archive, a show about human—centered design, where this season, we’ll take an object, look for the human at the center and keep asking questions. I’m Lee Moreau...

Grace Jun
...and I’m Grace Jun.

Lee Moreau
On each episode, we’re going to start with an object. Today, that’s the uniform. We’ll look at the history of that object from our perspective as designers who’ve done work in human—centered design, not just how it looks and feels, but also the relationship between the uniform and the people it was designed for.

Grace Jun
And with other humans too.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive it’s brought to you by the design team at Automattic. Later on, we’ll hear from one of their product designers, Kylea Parker. The Futures Archives education partner, this season, is Adobe.

Lee Moreau
Grace. So great to see you. Thank you for joining us today.

Grace Jun
Yes, thanks for having me, Lee.

Lee Moreau
So we’re here to talk about the uniform, but before we go into that, I want to know a little bit more about you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about the Open Style Lab?

Grace Jun
Yeah. So first off, I consider myself a designer and a creative. I’m always asking questions. I’m always curious about learning new things that led to a rabbit hole of me teaching. So I’m an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Georgia, and I also lead Open Style Lab, which is a 501c3 nonprofit that’s got the mission to make style and design accessible for all people, regardless of cognitive or physical disability.

Lee Moreau
So I know your work as a maker and as a designer, but I also know that you’re a design researcher and design research is such a big part of of how you begin to create your work. You know, this is a podcast about human—centered design. Can you talk about the role of human—centered design and design research in your work?

Grace Jun
Human—centered design, for me, means exactly that. Everything is surrounded around people. Of course, yourself and others who are different from you. For Open Style Lab, we’re more interested in the educational component as well as like, how do we think about design research in a way that hasn’t considered disability in that frame and to actually connect with people. So, I would say 70 percent of our time is connecting with a person with a disability or disability organization.

Lee Moreau
So we’re going to talk a little bit about the uniform, and I know that that could mean so many different things to so many different people. But to you, when I say the word uniform, what do you think of?

Grace Jun
I think of, that it’s a gateway to society. It sometimes is a barrier for many people who may not find the appropriate uniform that is functional, yet also mindful of health conditions to be able to wear and to participate in, say, a wedding. Or even if you wanted to be someone in the Department of Transportation, you have a certain uniform and a certain logo and look. That’s not always the case for certain clothes that are designed with mind of the body that’s like seated or hunched or in a different position that isn’t just a size that fits for all because it doesn’t. So that’s what uniform means to me— a gateway into society, but also probably a barrier.

Lee Moreau
A lot of people, I think, associate the notion of uniform with sort of conformity. But the way you frame it is totally different. You know, it’s like it’s an entry sign rather than an exit sign. In some sense, it’s more welcoming than that, which I think is a very novel reading of that.

Grace Jun
Yeah, I mean, we all want to participate in some form, not always employment, but like social codes don’t really have sometimes any guidelines or accessibility points for all people to participate in. So I think it’s a missed opportunity for more people to take part.

Lee Moreau
My associations with uniforms are are varied, you know, from different parts of my life. So when I was younger, I was I was on high school football team and so the uniform was part of belonging, but it was also meant to be threatening and scary— hopefully to other people. I don’t think I came off as particularly scary, but that was the idea. But I also wore like at the same time, I would then switch out into my uniform for McDonald’s because I was working in McDonald’s at the time, and that was almost as significant a uniform. It was the pants it was, the shirt was the whole kind of get up. And it actually felt about as good to wear as an esthetic experience. But those put me in a totally different kind of mindsets. You know, as I was going through through my life and through my day. Do you have any experiences with uniforms that kind of positioned you things you can almost remember from your own experience?

Grace Jun
Yeah, I don’t have a literal uniform, but I have a dress code, I think that’s quite close. And when I used to work at Samsung Electronics, it was a suit and tie, very technology driven type of atmosphere dominated by many men in the industry. So the dressing code wasn’t enforced, but it was very much implied and someone would critique based on how someone presented and how they presented themselves and their work. And designers, unfortunately, I think in the group weren’t always taken as seriously as maybe the engineers. But when they were dressed the part, I think they were able to also express silently what they were trying to say. And that to me, was powerful enough because I’d jump in like bright fuchsia pants and other colors that were, it was still appropriate but borderline like, oh my god, Fashion Week is coming.

Lee Moreau
I love that. I love it. I mean, I have a similar experience in consulting where at a client in financial services and I tried to dress like a banker. And if you’re not a banker, it’s really hard to come off, you know, and like, pull that, pull that off. Whereas when I started to dress like a designer in the same audience, somehow I was able to say different things. I could be myself, and they understood when I said something sort of iconoclastic or something— and oh, that’s just the designer talking. But in some sense that gave me some credibility too.

Grace Jun
Absolutely.

Lee Moreau
So we’re going to talk more about the uniform, and to do that, we’re going to hear from some people that are experts in the field. We’ll talk to some historians and designers who’ve done work on uniforms.

Anat Rafaeli
The term uniform, language wise, refers to identical something, and in this case, it would be identical dress or identical appearance.

Lee Moreau
Anat Rafaeli is a scholar of organizational behavior at the Technion. She’s written about organizational dress.

Anat Rafaeli
When you say the term uniform, people think either about school uniform or military uniform. And in both these cases, there is there is a power element, the element being the organization imposes on people the exact way that people should appear.

Lee Moreau
What’s your take on that Grace? I mean, I feel like with a uniform, you know it when you see it.

Grace Jun
Yeah, I think the big takeaway or the keyword I heard was impose. And I do think clothing becomes a barrier for greater accessibility. And when you’re imposing a certain criteria for someone’s body position or body type that wasn’t considered, it’s very discriminating. And so I think clothing could be freeing, but it could also be a barrier to express yourself.

Lee Moreau
I was working on a project for Chili’s actually, the casual dining restaurant, a few years ago, and we were having to design the uniforms for all the different employees. And you know, some of the roles were sort of front of house like the host or the waiter. You know, the service staff would be dressed a certain way. But then anybody who’s touching food, you had to give them something special. You know, they’re interacting with the core product and you’d want to give them an apron or something that suggested that there was some authority or, let’s say, credibility. And so embedding some of those visual cues was really important to that. When you’re thinking about the kind of hierarchy that imposition of structure, how is that related to the the way that we create uniforms and and even deploy them?

Grace Jun
Yeah. I mean, historically, I think in apparel for American history, a lot of the clothing sizes were dictated from postwar. So a lot of the uniforms that we look at, or even just clothing in general and sizes in the United States, were based off of very outdated notions of sizes that were related to war or uniforms back then. So I think when you think of that structure relating to today’s world, it’s not going to fit. It’s just a no brainer that we need to really rethink about what power structures are we inhibiting and which ones are we allowing more space to become a conversation rather than here it is, you get a size small.

Lee Moreau
That’s not going to work for just anyone, exactly.

Anat Rafaeli
Within organizations, when we look at the way people appear, they’re not necessarily identical. A prime example is restaurants that tell their staff to wear black. So they wear black. The color is uniform, but everything else varies. It can be pants, it can be skirts, it can be socks, it can be a sweater, it can be a shirt, it can be a T—shirt, long sleeve, short sleeve— it will all be black. So there are some parts that are uniform, others that are not. To go to p—perhaps another extreme high tech organizations have a very clear dress culture. And some of us would call that uniform. But what’s uniform about it is something about the messages that it sends rather than the actual appearance of people. So the term is very difficult to define, even though intuitively it is understood.

Lee Moreau
Uniforms make you feel a certain way. Right? It’s not just about standardizing everything and making everyone look the same. It’s also about the feelings that that gives you.

Grace Jun
Right, and I think the nuances of what a uniform means and the messages it sends out, ultimately, I take it as— it’s a way for us to transform. And that’s probably the most attractive part of why I think design holds such power is that it really allows you to transform and uniforms do exactly that. You’re all of a sudden, maybe in a position of authority as you’ve mentioned, or you’re— you’re blended in, you’re able to transform into the group.

Anat Rafaeli
If we take a step back or move away from uniforms and just think about the way people dress, in a way we all dress to be unique, be ourselves. But at the same time, we dress to fit in. So simultaneously we’re fitting in or homogeneous with our environment, but at the same time also unique and standing out from the environment.

Lee Moreau
This is a complicated topic, right? You know, on one hand, we’re trying to use uniforms to deny our individuality, to kind of be homogenous and to play a part in the larger whole. But on the other hand, we want to be ourselves and we want to identify as unique. And in the Open Style Lab, how does your work kind of fit into this very complicated world?

Grace Jun
Yeah, it’s the ancient question of personalization or customization versus for the mass public. So with Open Style Lab we had created in the past very bespoke one of clothing that we would donate and give back to a person with a disability we’ve made and designed with. But that’s not scalable. And so for us, we really wanted to see what’s the driving question? It wasn’t the clothing. It was more about the design research on what makes clothing inaccessible. What are the exact details? Why do people even care? And how does that improve our quality of life as we even age and maybe face disabilities gradually? So if we’re going to design something and make something, the biggest gift I think you can give is empowerment through education. Empower yourselves to like hack the clothing yourselves. Where designers play, I think, is really, you know, synthesizing and seeing everything because we’re great observers. But to have more people care about that conversation really will drive, I think, inclusive design.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic, which is building a new web and a new workplace all around the world.

Kylea Parker
My name is Kylea Parker. I am a product designer at Automattic. I work on the apps team, on the WordPress dot com mobile app, and I’m based in Montreal, Canada.

Lee Moreau
Kylea joined Automattic because she wanted to work remotely.

Kylea Parker
I have family that’s all around— I’m from New Zealand, I live in Canada, so I was like looking for that flexibility in my life. Something I’ve learned about myself at Automattic, is that I think that I am a really self—motivated person, which I didn’t necessarily know in the past. It’s kind of up to you to lead your career and like your path as a designer, what projects you work on and like how you work on those projects and how— how motivated you are. You’re forced to kind of lead yourself in that way. And I find that as a benefit. It just makes you feel like you have more ownership over the product.

Lee Moreau
Designing a better web. Join us at Automattic dot com slash design. That’s AUTO—M—A double T—I—C dot com slash design.

Josh Halstead
Someone could be in a wheelchair, but it’s not until they roll up to a building that has no ramp, that disability is really something that impacts their life.

Lee Moreau
Josh Halstead is a design educator and disability studies scholar.

Josh Halstead
With the social model of disability, locating disability at the intersection between bodies and environments right, it does two really important things. One, disabled bodies become part of a broader biodiversity. So the problem of disability isn’t necessarily located in the body. Disability is that interplay between bodies and environments, and in environments designers have usually some control or some agency in how those things are designed.

Lee Moreau
So Grace, could you maybe make an everyday example of this social model? An example from your research and practice that would really shed light on how powerful this is.

Grace Jun
Yeah, I have a personal example, and then I have an actual lab research example. One is I’m five foot two, and sometimes some things are out of my reach. So I’ve been looking for all of these crazy like Korean stools that are like compatible and foldable, so I can take them with me. But they’re also really great for people who identify being a small person. I think for Open Style Lab, we’ve done it with our toolkit on really thinking about what are some drawing tools that are not always accessible for someone who may be facing paralysis or different forms of dexterity that are not always considered, even just gripping a pencil, a sewing needle is really hard. Even to thread a needle is another issue. Just thinking about how our hands and our bodies or our voices or other parts of our body that can be activated like a hands free type of drawing is super fascinating. And that’s the stuff that we look to do as we create like prototypes or other types of designs.

Lee Moreau
Let’s hear just a little bit more from Josh Halstead, where he talks about other ways to think about disability.

Josh Halstead
There’s the individual way of thinking about disability, there’s the social way of thinking about disability, and there’s a broader kind of identitarian or cultural way of thinking about disability. Most people, if you kind of talk to someone on the street, are familiar with the individual model and scholars would call it the medical model. So this is kind of when we look at people’s bodies and notice a difference from person to person, that’s when someone’s difference kind of fits our category of disabilities.

Lee Moreau
So this is the sort of disability that motivates a universal design practice, right where we look at sort of extreme use cases and design to those as a way of bringing more people into the conversation around design. One iconic story of universal design comes from the OXO Good Grips. So this is a classic example in product design, where the designers sort of looked at use cases outside of the normal range and really beyond the consideration set that had been looked at before. I think they were working on the potato peeler at first, but they were designing for someone with severe arthritis, and that led to a whole explosion of design in consideration of other realms of use. Let’s listen to one of the founders of Smart Design, Tucker Viemeister.

Tucker Viemeister
We really dove into this potato peeler way beyond any reasonable amount of work. We made hundreds of different handles. We got people with arthritis to come in and try the different handles.

Lee Moreau
The OXO Good Grips are, well, they’re ubiquitous. Many of us have them there in almost every major design collection as an iconic example of universal design. How do you teach this Grace? I mean, this is an example from industrial design, but what you’re doing is very much aligned in some sense in that sort of prototyping and iterative design mode of practice.

Grace Jun
Yeah, this is probably the hardest thing about just education and design in general is to explain its value process to other people. Just taken in account, most of my students were able bodied or quote unquote haven’t faced disability, but knew someone that did or wanted to make something for a disabled person. But they were having trouble with just language and framing a way to socially approach someone to to think like, you know, this isn’t about me prescribing to you a design this is about me trying to learn about how a community or a group of people or just an individual with different life experiences can benefit and also improve maybe all of our future products and services. So that— that gargantuan task is probably a very big weight on student shoulders. But it takes like three to four weeks even have that conversation in a classroom. And I always have brought my friends and my colleagues who have disabilities to facilitate most of the discussion, so I don’t speak for them.

Lee Moreau
I mean, it does strike me that teaching design skills is relatively easy compared to teaching people how to have really hard conversations.

Grace Jun
It is.

Lee Moreau
Let’s hear a little bit more from Tucker.

Tucker Viemeister
When you’re in the design phase of a project. If you think about designing things for more people than the normal middle of the bell curve, you increase your market. But you also invite a lot of people into the market who, or into your project or your community that weren’t invited before or were excluded, which is worse than being not invited.

Grace Jun
I think he’s touching on a very important part about market segment, and this is something I talk to a lot of people and industries and corporations that we’re we’re missing out are the largest minority group, which are people with disabilities. Because at one point or another, we’re going to face something similar. And I think most of the time, they don’t want to hear that. And so at our lab, a lot of it is to use design or technology to convey those stories and those narratives that it is important and that it does have value.

Todd Waterbury
What every parent wants, who has a child with differing abilities or different needs is to make sure that that child feels like every other kid.

Lee Moreau
So that was Todd Waterbury, Chief Creative Officer at Target. He was actually talking at our 2019 Design of Business | Business of Design conference. He’s talking about Target’s Cat and Jack line of products, which I imagine you’re familiar with. These are just everyday clothes by a major manufacturer, but they’re designed with a sort of, well, they’re sort of sensory friendly, right? So that the kind of tags and buttons and rough seams that might impact some kids are just not as much of a challenge. It’s definitely operating on a mass scale, right. You know, trying to address a huge market which only a company like Target can do. But when we get into the design at the small scale, functionality isn’t necessarily the only thing that we need to think about when we design.

Grace Jun
Yeah. And I think for a majority of people, it’s like, "Well, there’s something for us that’s great"", and that’s that’s the first step. And then maybe after that, you know, as you continue with that product, how do you evolve it? What are some other reasons people would want to have it?

Lee Moreau
So we’re going to hear from Josh Halstead again with a slightly critical take on human—centered design, that I think builds on some of those ideas.

Josh Halstead
When we’re thinking about disability through an individual model, we’re typically talking about usability. So questions that designers might ask is, how might I make it easier for someone to put on a shirt, right? And how might I make it easier for someone to put on a pair of pants? They’re questions that they might not be as interested in, though they’re probably on the periphery is, how do I make a shirt that’s easy to put on that’s sexy?

Lee Moreau
That’s the next level. Basic human needs and functionality is one thing, but let’s go beyond that, and I want to feel like a rock star in my clothing, right? We need to be doing— operating on both registers.

Grace Jun
Yeah, I think functional and sexy is a great way to set your expectations, but isn’t it for everyone? This is probably the argument I’m making, it’s not just for people with disabilities. There’s so many reasons I think that aren’t always logical and just about function, why people buy things and do things. That’s still a mystery, I think for many people and many companies, but it’s intrinsically, I think, somewhat if not very relevant to the study of design and aesthetics. It’s the ability to see that something functional does carry aesthetic value, and to be able to piece that together is a skill that we all train for in the design field.

Lee Moreau
So one of the critiques of human—centered design is that it falls down on the aesthetic side like it’s great for front end research, but it may, it may not be easily supportive of our process moving into the back end as we’re moving into aesthetics and form and so forth. Here’s Josh Halstead again.

Josh Halstead
Human-centered design in general is kind of uncritical. So what do we mean by human? Where are we starting when we say human—centered design? You know what kind of what are we doing to unfold the complicated history of what we mean by human?

Lee Moreau
But some of your work is definitely like probing at all dimensions of this, right?

Grace Jun
I think it is great to have a critical view, but where I— I align with his perspective, I would also say you have to have a discussion. It cannot just be about you figuring out what being human means in your own world. And so I learn more about what it means to be myself by my relationship with other people as well. So I think when I have a more diverse or inclusive team, I don’t feel very much the CEO sometimes, I just I’m just like— I’m listening, this is interesting, I definitely learn something new. How do I help move this forward or what part do I take? And I think that’s part of the human—centered design process that we maybe have to unpack.

Lee Moreau
Let’s hear from Josh Halstead one more time remembering he’s an educator like you are and like I am, and we’ll see how is his kind of perspective shifts in the classroom,

Josh Halstead
In our western culture and in the US specifically, there are a lot of stereotypes around disability, so this one is it’s tragic to be disabled. Another unquestioned and tacit assumption is that disabled bodies are broken and they need to be fixed. So we have these stereotypes and then we pair it with a procedure like universal design or inclusive design. And we get kind of locked into moving from bullet point to bullet point without much creative agency to the question the bullet points. So we’re locked into someone else’s procedure and we don’t have really much room to move around as creators.

Grace Jun
Yeah, I think I guess for all three of us as educators, you know, that is the perspective that we’re always dealing with, with our students and ourselves. But you know, it’s taking it day by day. It’s also dismantling certain biases your own personal stigmas, your own unlearnings. And it’s not something overnight, so I agree. It takes work, and it should be a continuous work, hopefully as fun as your creative practice.

Lee Moreau
But we get to the, you know, we start to talk about the limits of design, which is that while many of us work in teams, as I know you do with the lab and I do in a consultancy or at school— yes, we’re working at teams, but sometimes we are working individually and those biases that we bring in are literally our own. And so we’re constantly like battling against those internally, but also within our teams. And you talked earlier about how you’re having constant conversations as you’re forming collaborations, encouraging team members to go out and reach out to people, bringing the outside in. Is that where we’re at in in design right now is like an effort to not only push things out of our studios, but also to bring things into the studios?

Grace Jun
I think we’re in a bit of both. I have a sense that there is a strong need for personal voice and to have an individual’s voice and style to be as it is, appreciated and also heard if they’re not heard. But at the same time, it’s the same problem with uniforms and clothes. There’s this personalization, but there’s also social conformity and it’s I think it will be a continual balancing act to do both. But sooner or later, you know, if you make decisions, you make them, not because someone told you to make them, you do them based on hopefully some coherent understanding or discussion with others to credit yourself your own perspective and unique voice as an individual. And so trying to do that, I think, is going to be the challenge for today’s designer or creative. It’s the balance that both and I see my students where they have like social media. For most of the students today or this generation, they’re just always exposed to it. I almost wonder if it’s sometimes too much where collaboration drowns your own individual voice and your power to make those decisions or to just have a stance and a critical perspective.

Lee Moreau
So let’s take what we were just talking about, let’s focus on the uniform, but then push it out into the future.

Grace Jun
There are so much textile and smart material innovation in athleisure wear that I think could be applied for uniform. We already see a lot of companies that kind of straddle between athleisure and work wear uniform, and they’re making it more comfortable. There’s also, I think, the potential for things to become virtual. So we see clothing take on a more virtual characteristic using tools such as 3D modeling and rendering, so you don’t need to have a body present or someone wearing it. But it could still be a modeled to size and be produced, which I think is definitely around the horizon in the next 10 years.

Lee Moreau
We have the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has had a huge impact on the built environment. We don’t have that in the world of clothing, right?

Grace Jun
Yeah, I mean, we don’t have ADA compliance for clothes, especially if it restricts you or if it’s a barrier for uniforms to employment. That’s one of Open Style Lab’s goals, is to think about what are some of those barriers? How do we frame them in a way that everybody or every company could think about applying some of those things to their own practices? And it’s hard because clothing is such a fluid topic, anywhere from pants to accessories. So it’s tough, and I think there is some components of it, like the built environment that are more predictable or less predictable, but still, you know, it’s illegal to have inaccessible websites. But still, people make them and it’s more enforced, maybe in Europe or in Israel, especially. But until it’s enforced or someone says something about it, I don’t think much change will be done.

Lee Moreau
Do you think that’s possible? Do you think we could actually have a world in which we do have real restrictions and constraints on certain types of apparel such that we could make some of these changes stick?

Grace Jun
Yeah, but I would also say situational. Nobody wants to go into a workforce and be told I can’t wear this, why, you’re like inhibiting my freedom of speech. But little do they know it’s like, actually, you’re making room also to make it inclusive of someone who has spinal cord injury and uses a wheelchair, right? Like there’s, I think, this level of awareness that goes in part with the compliance that sometimes um is not always told.

Lee Moreau
So we’re trying to make compliance sexy.

Grace Jun
Yeah, that’s the goal, ten year goal.

Lee Moreau
That is futuristic. That’s probably the most futuristic thing that will ever be said on this on this podcast.

Lee Moreau
Every episode of The Futures Archive will end with a prompt, a sort of design exercise for you, the listener, to keep working on the object and the ideas that we’ve talked about on this week’s show. Disability theory can help us reflect on how design shapes our personal and social experiences in a body. What we’d like to do this week is to find one example of design, that you can interact with. Could be a room, a spoon, or a park and respond to the following prompts: What about the design works with or against your body? And, what specific features of that design afford bodily ease and or friction? Please post your reflections, text, audio or another mode of creative expression on Instagram and use the hashtag #TheFuturesArchive, that’s all one word. We’ll share some of our favorite responses in our Instagram Story at Design Observer.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is a podcast from Design Observer. To keep up with the show, go to TFA dot Design Observer dot com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard today, make sure you ratw and review us and share this with your friends. Grace, thank you so much for being here. If— if listeners want to learn more about you or stay in touch, where can they find you?

Grace Jun
Definitely our website, www dot open style lab dot org, not dot com, dot org. And they can definitely look at our Instagram handle, so its just the simple handle, the IG is open style lab, so they can find us there.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive’s education partner is Adobe. For each episode, you can find the supporting materials, including further reading, lesson plans and all kinds of activities suitable for college level learners. For more information about Adobe’s educational initiatives, follow them at EDEX dot adobe dot com. And The Futures Archive is brought to you by Automattic. Thanks again to Anat Rafaeli, and Tucker Viemeister for talking to the Futures Archive, and to Josh Halstead for his many contributions to this week’s episode. You can find more about them and my co—host Grace Jun in our show notes, as well as links to our archival audio and other interesting stuff. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. Owen Agnew edits the show. Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo helped develop the show. Thanks as always to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand and to Design Observer executive producer Betsy Vardell.






Jobs | December 13