Co-founding Editor of Futuress, 2020
Futuress is an online magazine and community space for design research. I co-founded the platform in the summer of 2020 with Nina Paim and Eliot Gisel of the design research practice common-interest, after receiving cultural funding from Pro Helvetia as part of its “Close Distance” Covid-19 funding scheme. We came together out of a desire to build a home for the histories, people, and perspectives that have been—and still often remain—underrepresented, oppressed, and ignored, especially in the mainstream press. Futuress has a two-fold model: It runs online workshops on design research and publishes original storytelling.
Futuress understands design as an expansive social and political practice, examining the objects, systems, and structures that shape our lived realities. For the platform, design is as much artifacts and aesthetics as it is, for instance, the grammatical structure of a language, the infrastructure of a border, or the systems underpinning how food is circulated. It publishes stories on the politics of design and the design of politics, on marginalized visual and political histories, on design’s role in activist causes, and on the impact of social structures and processes on our personal experiences of the world.
Co-founding editors: Nina Paim, Eliot Gisel, Madeleine Morley. Current co-directors: Nina Paim and Maya Ober. Website design: Eliot Gisel. Website programming: Morgan Brown. Logo design: Ann Kern. Current editorial assistant: Mio Kojima. Current facilitator and editor: Cherry-Ann Davis. Current copyeditor: Sacha Fortuné.