By Joel Calvert CLICKBAIT: AN ENTRY POINT INTO THE ETHICS OF DESIGN “Increasingly, the way we use our skills is to compensate for the deficit between the audience’s desire for a sensitive, intelligent product or service, and the product itself. The end result is a total breakdown of trust between the audience and their visual environment. The intelligent observer has almost no choice but to … Continue reading WHAT’S THAT? TIME TO TALK ABOUT ETHICS IN DESIGN? : AN OVERVIEW OF A MISSING DESIGN DIALOGUE

By Chandler Ryd When I was fourteen, the thought one day struck me that what I wanted most in life was to be a great writer. Since then, it’s been an ambition that I’ve never quite shaken. To be more specific, I’ve wanted to be the sort of writer that others read and revere by saying, “Yes, he really was a great writer.” I’ve wanted … Continue reading The Forgotten Author: On Vanity of Ambition and Fame

By Noah Diekemper People have clashed in controversy since the news broke that Disney’s live-action update of Beauty and the Beast would use Gaston’s lackey LeFou to feature an “exclusively gay moment.” Some decried Disney’s gay parade (“think of the children!”), while others failed to see the change as newsworthy at all (“Wait, he wasn’t gay before?”). I think that the latter view is more … Continue reading No One Says No To Gaston: How Lefou Models Typical Human Behavior

By Andrew Egger How do you brew an evolutionary culture war? Take one long-standing religious tradition, then add one serious scientific challenge. Season with cultural suspicion, and add a dash each of class prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and intellectual arrogance. Take outside and let curdle in the sun for a century. The age-old (for us) conflict of creation and evolution carries with it much of the same … Continue reading Intelligent Design: Neither Science nor Faith

By Mark Naida 1 On an early April morning, lines of fog still hung over the corn stubble that lay in the fields waiting for a plow to turn it under. I saw the fog through a break in the young wall of thin birches and ash trees that divided the interstate from the field. This line of trees is a sliver of the Northern … Continue reading A Small Stand of Trees

By Emily Lehman “There would be just one right thing, without alternatives: he must do that.” -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury “I took the road less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost, “The Road Less Traveled” “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” -John Greenleaf Whittier, … Continue reading There is No “Might Have Been”: The Multiplicity of Goods and Learning to Affirm Reality