Design Issues. Volume 39, Issue 4 (Special Issue 2023)

Design Issues out of MIT Press, the oldest American academic journal examining design history, theory, and criticism, requested a special issue cover design foregrounding philosopher John Dewey’s impact on design. In the 20th century, Dewey invigorated the idea of pragmatism in the U.S., centering the importance of immediacy and experimental inquiry over theoretical abstraction. Pragmatism surfaces key insights for the practice of design, offering a theoretical lens that helps us understand the ontological way we fit into the world around us. This special issue cover design for "Pragmatism and Design Inquiry,” needed to engage with this dense theory while simultaneously enticing and exciting potential readers.

This cover design proposes a pluriversal past that pragmatism might offer the field of design, meditating specifically on the form of the horseshoe crab. Descended from the Jurassic period, the horseshoe crab (genus Limulus, from the Latin "a little askew") is adapted to harsh intertidal extremes, yet has dwindled in population due to habitat destruction, climate change, overfishing for food, and blood harvesting. Balancing the visual vernacular of an archive with that of speculative futures, the illustration of the horseshoe crab’s otherworldly hybridity holds a strange mirror up to the history and legacy of human beings. Furthermore, the spiraling abstraction of the creature represents the alternative, ontological way we might fit into the natural world.

In the three months since its publish date, this special issue of the journal has been downloaded over 1,960 times (which is about 3% of the total downloads in the journal’s almost 40 years of publishing).

Final Design

Previous cover designers for Design Issues have been among the top designers in the world: Louise Fili, Michael Beirut, Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, and Milton Glaser (left to right), as well as my former mentor who passed in 2015, Robert Sedlack.