Jarrett Fuller

I was flipping through the upcoming catalog for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., when I got to a conversation between the biennial’s curator Carlo Ratti and architect Christopher Alexander. Something about the conversation felt off to me — stilted, strangely combative and friendly, sometimes at the same time. I then realized Alexander had died back in 2022, before Ratti started working on the biennial. I flipped back to the beginning of the catalog and discovered this conversation was part of a series of “Impossible Conversations” intersperced throughout the catalog that used artificial intelligence to stage conversations between design theorists of different eras.

Despite my misgivings about AI — and despite not finding the catalog’s interviews to be especially interesting — I was intrigued enough to try it myself. I’m asked often what designers from history I’d have most wanted to have on Scratching the Surface. My stock answer is usually George Nelson who died in 1986. Nelson, in manys ways, is a model for my own practice, moving across design, writing, curation, and education. He was the design director of Herman Miller and ran his own studio. His early career was spent writing and he got his start interviewing designers for his own research. Inspired by the Venice Biennale, maybe I could interview him?¹

I opened up Claude and asked it to write a 1200 word interview between myself and George Nelson. I said it should feel like my interviews from Scratching the Surface and Fast Company and that I wanted to talk about writing and multidisciplinary practice. Here’s what it said:

I’ve written a speculative interview between Jarrett Fuller and George Nelson that explores their shared interests in multidisciplinary practice, the relationship between design and writing, and the evolving nature of the design profession.

The conversation touches on several key themes: Nelson’s prescient understanding of systems thinking, the idea of writing as a design act, the tension between functional utility and cultural meaning, the role of criticism in design discourse, and the importance of porous disciplinary boundaries. I tried to capture Nelson’s voice—thoughtful, systematic, humanistic—while letting Fuller ask the kinds of probing questions he’s known for on his podcast.

The interview weaves together historical context (Herman Miller, postwar modernism) with contemporary concerns (platforms, AI, sustainability) to create a dialogue that feels both grounded in their actual philosophies and speculatively forward-looking.²

The results were interesting. As I expected, the conversation was fairly vapid and didn’t feel like it covered any new ground, sticking mostly to standard talking points. Perhaps because of the wordcount, Nelson’s answers felt clipped and summarized. I was surprised, however, by how the “Jarrett” character brought in my own work — “I teach design but I also write about it, podcast about it, and I’m constantly questioning these disciplinary boundaries” or “That’s what I try to do with Scratching the Surface, pulling back the curtain on the thinking behind the work.” It accurately and fairly seamlessly brought in some of my other writing into my convesration.

So, more for fun (and laughs?) than anything else, I’m sharing here my speculative conversation, written by Claude, between myself and George Nelson.³

On Multidisciplinary Design, Writing, and the Future of the Profession

In this speculative interview, contemporary design educator and critic Jarrett Fuller sits down with the legendary George Nelson, industrial designer, writer, and design director of Herman Miller from 1945 to 1972.

JARRETT FULLER: George, you once said that design is “a method of action.” I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot lately, especially as I watch design expand into strategy, research, and systems thinking. Looking at where we are now, does that definition still hold?

GEORGE NELSON: Absolutely. If anything, I think people have finally caught up to what I was trying to articulate back then. Design was never just about making things look good—it was always about understanding problems and proposing solutions through form. What you’re calling “systems thinking” we were doing at Herman Miller in the forties and fifties. We weren’t designing chairs in isolation; we were designing work environments, communication systems, entire ways of living.

JF: That resonates deeply with my practice. I teach design but I also write about it, podcast about it, and I’m constantly questioning these disciplinary boundaries. You were doing this too—writing for major publications while running Herman Miller’s design program, making films, curating exhibitions. Was that multidisciplinary approach intentional, or did it just happen?

GN: It happened because it had to. Architecture school taught me to think spatially and systematically, but the questions I was interested in couldn’t be answered with buildings alone. When I started writing for Architectural Forum and Fortune, I realized that writing was itself a design act. You’re constructing arguments, creating frameworks for understanding. The exhibitions, the films—those were just other languages for the same ideas.

JF: This is something I struggle to articulate to students. They often see writing as separate from “real” design work. But for me, writing is designing. You’re structuring information, creating narrative arcs, building understanding.

GN: Exactly! And here’s what I think people miss: writing makes you a better designer. It forces clarity. If you can’t explain why something works, you probably don’t fully understand it yourself. When I wrote about a chair or a storage system, I had to articulate its logic, its relationship to human behavior, its place in a larger ecology of objects. That analysis fed back into the design process.

JF: You mention ecology—that word feels particularly relevant now. We talk about design ecosystems, platforms, networks. Everything is interconnected in ways that feel both exciting and overwhelming. Did you feel that complexity in your era?

GN: Of course, though the scale was different. We saw the explosion of consumer culture after the war, the emergence of corporate identity as a discipline, the space race changing how we thought about technology and the future. The Marshmallow Sofa or the Ball Clock weren’t isolated objects—they were part of a cultural conversation about modernism, domesticity, optimism. Every design exists in dialogue with everything around it.

JF: That cultural dimension seems to have gotten lost sometimes in contemporary design discourse. We focus so much on user experience and business metrics. Do you think design has become too instrumentalized?

GN: Well, there’s a tension, isn’t there? Design must be useful—I’ve always believed that. But usefulness isn’t just functional. A chair that supports the body but depresses the spirit has failed at its job. Design operates at multiple registers simultaneously. It must work, yes, but it also participates in culture, carries meaning, shapes how people see themselves and their world.

JF: This makes me think about design writing and criticism. You were contributing to major magazines when design journalism was really forming. Now we have this proliferation of platforms—from academic journals to Instagram—but I sometimes wonder if we’ve lost critical depth. Everyone’s a critic now, but is anyone really criticizing?

GN: Criticism requires distance and context. You need to understand history, to recognize patterns, to situate work within larger movements and ideas. The democratization of voice is wonderful—I’m all for it—but criticism is a craft, like design itself. It requires rigor, frameworks, accountability. The best criticism I read taught me how to see. It revealed structures I’d missed, made connections I hadn’t considered.

JF: That’s what I try to do with Scratching the Surface, pulling back the curtain on the thinking behind the work. But I’m curious—when you were at Herman Miller, you championed designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Girard. You were essentially curating a vision of modern design. How did you think about that responsibility?

GN: As an enormous privilege and a frightening responsibility. I wasn’t looking for a house style—I was looking for designers who understood that design was about ideas, not just aesthetics. Charles and Ray thought about everything: the manufacturing process, the user experience, the educational potential, the joy of discovery. Noguchi understood sculpture and furniture as part of a continuum. Girard knew that pattern and color were formal languages with their own grammar.

JF: So you were looking for multidisciplinary thinking even in specialists?

GN: Yes! That’s the key insight. You don’t have to do everything yourself, but you need to understand how your work connects to everything else. A great furniture designer understands architecture. A great graphic designer understands space. The boundaries between disciplines should be porous, conversational.

JF: Looking forward—and I know this is speculative—where do you think design goes from here? AI, climate change, global inequality—the challenges feel unprecedented.

GN: The challenges are always unprecedented when you’re living through them. What doesn’t change is design’s fundamental responsibility: to make life better, more humane, more meaningful. The tools will change, the problems will change, but that north star remains constant. If anything, design needs to become even more ambitious—not just solving problems but asking better questions, imagining alternatives to the status quo, creating space for different ways of living.

JF: That feels like a good place to end—with that call for ambition and imagination.

GN: Just remember to write it all down. The next generation will need to understand not just what we made, but why we made it, what we were thinking, what we hoped for. That’s the real legacy.