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One For the Kids
David Stairs My senior design students at Central Michigan University recently completed a capstone exhibition dedicated to the changing experience of childhood. All of these young people grew up in the era of social media, AI, and the implications that has for exploitation. While many of them are digitally well connected, some even addicted to…
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The Snap-Brick Approach to World Conquest
David Stairs Almost everybody knows the story. LEGO was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Billund Denmark and named for the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well.” Originally manufacturing wooden toys, after several fires, the company adopted injection molding techniques in 1947, then copied Hilary Fisher Page’s self-locking Kiddicraft toy bricks and…
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The Jewish Genocide in Gaza
David Stairs. I don’t know how else to put this: It seems that the people of Israel learned nothing from the Holocaust. The current Israeli government, led by corruption riddled war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, is dead set upon extending what the Palestinians call “al Nakba,” the 1948 catastrophe that displaced many of them, until none…
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Black Holes and AI
David Stairs Blackhole visualization by NASA The first photographic image taken of the super massive black hole at the center of Messier 87 by the Event Horizon Telescope was released in 2019. We finally had verifiable visual proof of their existence, confirming Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Since 2019 the EHT’s imaging has only improved.…
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The Thing About African Vernacular
David Stairs Sometimes it takes a minute. By that I am referring to the 20-years it took me to get this book out. The design establishment is not very interested in Africa except as a potential market. I know this because of the discernible yawn my project proposals elicited from any of the design publishers…
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Defying Gravity Comfortably
David Stairs Classic tubular chrome “Barbershop” lounge chair The design history course I’ve taught for nearly 30 years has been referred to as “the chair class.” That has a lot to do with our species’ need to work and relax in a seated position, and the many designers who’ve chipped in their ideas over the…
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Americans Are Just Assholes. Period.
David Stairs Driving back from three weeks out west I was struck by how hysterical the society we’ve built for ourselves has become. This was my 28th continental crossing. I moved to Michigan thirty years ago, and have made an annual pilgrimage back to Oregon to see family and check on property there ever since.…
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Biophilic Design Comes of Age, Perhaps?
David Stairs Rainbow eucalyptus trees. Courtesy Vincent Callebaut Architects Almost thirty years ago I published an essay in Design Issues, subsequently anthologized in The Designed World, about how, in a world evolved for biophilia, the design world leaned toward technophilia. I am happy to say that, although the problem hasn’t been solved, it is finally…
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This Is Reality?
David Stairs The irony about reality television is how incredibly over-produced most of it is. I mean, the conceit is that this medium is supposed to provide candid insight into human nature, but much of it is about as “normal” as a choreographed fight on Jerry Springer used to be. First, the premise. When Big…
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The Glory and Agony of Extended Adolescence
David Stairs Main cast members of The Summer I Turned Pretty Have you ever thought about how much attention is focused on teens? I don’t mean as a target market. Anyone can make vague statements about “youth culture” and its purchasing power. This has been a topic of discussion since Elvis and Rebel Without a…
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Dancing Through the Product Milieu
David Stairs Pedro Pascal dancing through the new Spike Jonez AirPods4 commercial America is dance crazy. Before there was Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, or World Dance, Americans got their dose of dancing from Fred Astaire or Busby Berkeley musicals. Gene Kelly made dancing in the rain look cool, and…
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Designing A Unique Type of Insanity
David Stairs The new chest shield for superheroes Babble of the talking heads has it that last week Josh Allen, the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, signed a six-year extension for $330,000,000. Allen was a 7th round pick in 2018 who has since worked wonders for his team. Although he hasn’t yet gotten them into…
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Empire By Design
David Stairs Americans are by nature a careless people. This statement will likely anger some Americans, who prefer to think of themselves as generous and caring. But the facts show otherwise. Americans are largely responsible for the environmental catastrophe about to descend upon them. Their rapacious 150-year love affair with fossil fuels might be excusable…
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When Clarabell Spoke
David Stairs It’s funny how we tell time. Some people can place where they were on November 22nd, 1963 or September 11th, 2001, but I think many of us are more influenced by media events. Who can forget the 159th episode of Seinfeld, our four anti-heroes sitting in a jail cell, quarreling like they always…
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World’s Foremost Authority
David Stairs Professor Irwin Corey (1915-2017) Determining who was the world’s greatest authority used to be easy. It was Irwin Eli Cohen, aka Professor Irwin Corey, and he told us so. Corey, who died in 2017 at age 102, was for decades the king of nonsense stand-up. I remember his appearances in the 1960s on…
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Eichmann in Jerusalem: Netanyahu in New York
David Stairs In 1961 Hannah Arendt was hired by the New Yorker to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been apprehended by the Israeli intelligence service the previous year in Argentina and abducted to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. The man in the glass booth. Jerusalem,…
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The Plague is Now
David Stairs Transmission electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion. Image credit: Frederick Murphy / CDC. I recently finished Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague (1995). Thirty years ago I read it for the first time, and it stayed with me as one of those unforgettable books one refers back to again and again. The history…
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The Athlete’s Mantra
David Stairs The games of the 33rd Olympiad are in the books, or, awaiting the outcome of Jordan Chiles’ bronze, nearly so. The bump in world airline travel, television ad revenue, and croissant sales has ended, with the geographic center shifting to the Western hemisphere and yet another L.A. games forthcoming. Aside from the U.S.…
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A Hysteria for Death
David Stairs When the scientists of the Manhattan Project solved the technical challenges for the first atomic bomb, they were under the impression they were in a race to the death with evil forces, their Nazi counterparts in occupied Europe. As it turned out, there was no race, and the forces of evil were much…
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This Umwelt is Worth Fighting For
David Stairs With each passing year, as the realization is brought home to us just how misdirected industrial capitalism is, the names of certain visionaries come to mind as exemplars of how we need to think in order to design the survival of humanity. Note I did not say “salvage life as we know it,”…
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Children of a Vengeful God
David Stairs Gaza, before…… With pro-Palestinian sit-ins criss-crossing the nations’ campuses at the end of the ’23-’24 academic year, it seemed like maybe the message about Israel’s ongoing genocidal assaults in Gaza was finally sinking in. But a naive and myopic Congress still approved billions in military aid to the Israelis in spite of their…
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The Covert AI Kluge
David Stairs Rube Goldberg at work © Heirs of Rube Goldberg I’ve been hearing about the advantages of utilizing AI in design for about 5 years now. I attended a conference where the keynote was delivered by a woman who was working on a book about it. I do not remember being very impressed by…
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Do(ugh)nut Preferences and Design Dissonance
David Stairs Subway foot long churro “Sidekick” I wonder what makes people want to read about anything? I mean, if you look casually you can find people holding forth about the most inane topics. There is no lack of fother about Taylor Swift, for instance. The Royal Family burns more column inches than an entire…
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Annals of Design: Mac & Cheese Nation
David Stairs You know how they say a people is defined by what they drink? The British have their stout, Russians vodka, and the French wine. But what about what a people eats? Of course, Americans would be on pretty thin ice with this one, considering the amount of junk and snack food they consume.…
