Talk

MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism presents Susan Yelavich, who will discuss Thinking Design Through Literature, her publication that deploys literature to explore the social lives of objects and places. The first collection of its kind, it embraces things as diverse as escalators, coins, skyscrapers, pottery, radios and robots, and encompasses places as various as home, country, cities, streets and parks. Here, fiction, poetry and literary non-fiction are mined for stories of design, which are paired with images of contemporary architecture and design. Through the work of authors such as César Aires, Nicholson Baker, Lydia Davis, Orhan Pamuk and Virginia Woolf, this book shows the enormous influence that places and things exert in the world. RSVP here.

Susan Yelavich is Professor Emerita, Design Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she continues to teach in the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program. A Fellow of the American Academy of Rome and the Bogliasco Foundation, she is also a member of Scientific Committee for Design at the Politecnico di Milano. Her contributions to design and its scholarship span over four decades, including 25 years at Cooper Hewitt Museum. During that time she has published and lectured widely. Among her books are Thinking Design through Literature (Routledge, 2019), Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon, 2007).