Ten Years
On October 19, 2016 — ten years ago today — I announced my new podcast, Scratching the Surface. As part of my thesis for my MFA at MICA, where I was a second-year graduate student, I started producing a conversation series about the intersections of design and writing. I had been working as a designer but I wanted to build a practice that include both design and writing and I wasn’t sure how to do that. Talking to people who were already doing it seemed like a good way to think through it. It turns out that sharing those conversations also was also a good idea. When I graduated, it was important to me to keep it up. Over the last decade, Scratching the Surface has moved beyond that tight focus of design and writing to become a platform for, I hope, thoughtful design conversations of all types.
I’m not good at celebrating milestones so I’ll repeat what I wrote when the show turned five:
Over the years, Scratching the Surface has become a forum for me to ask people much smarter than me about how they think about their work. Every single episode is a conversation with someone who is doing something that I want to be doing but am not sure how.
In that sense, Scratching the Surface is a fundamentally selfish endeavor. If you were to listen back over every episode, listening only to my questions, you’d see the trajectory of my own career, my own interests. You’d see, very clearly I think, the issues animating my work at any given moment: how to write about the craft you practice, how to teach design in the twenty-first century, balancing criticism and practice and scholarship and making, the intersections of creativity and administration, moving from writing to curation. Everything I’ve been interested in, professionally, over the last five years is in this show. I’ve thought of the show as a type of journalism, but maybe it’s actually a type of journaling.
All that is still true. It’s sounds silly to say, but this show means so much to me. I feel like almost every professional opportunity I’ve been given in the last ten years can be traced back to Scratching the Surface. It helped me get jobs writing and teaching and editing. It’s created a network of thoughtful people, many of whom I’ve stayed in touch with, even worked on projects with. It’s, perhaps, the thing I’ve made that I continue to be the most proud of and, if I’m honest, the thing I enjoy doing the most. I feel so lucky to have the space, the time, the platform, to immerse myself in other people’s work for a period of time and then talk to them about that work. Scratching the Surface is the thing I’ve done the longest in my professional life. In January, we’ll be releasing the 300th episode!
But I think what I’m more proud of is this sense that Scratching the Surface should not exist. It breaks so many of the rules of media: it’s longform when the platforms optimize for shorter, it’s dense when audiences want simple, it’s hard to classify when media wants clear guidelines. It’s interviews with people but it’s not a profile show. I’m a graphic designer but it’s not a graphic design show. In this, I hope I’m modeling a new way to talk about design: one that resists disciplines and superficiality. Scratching the Surface, if it’s anything, is a forum for ways to talk about design that don’t really exist anywhere else. It’s given me so much and I hope it’s also given back to the design disciplines.
When I started this project a decade ago, I had grown disillusioned with design — or at least the world of design I was practicing in — and found myself in graduate school in search of something different, of a different way to do this work in the world. Scratching the Surface helped me redefine and reframe my own practice. This has become my critical project. The last ten years has been a project of trying to redefine and reframe design. It’s a wonderful coincidence that my new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, came out as we lead into this anniversary. In many ways, that book is a response to these questions: it’s my attempt to reframe my discipline of graphic design. That book wouldn’t exist without the podcast. That book, perhaps, is what I was looking for a decade ago when I started graduate school.
I’m a pluralist, at my core. I want there to be many definitions of design. I want to open it up, not silo it off. That was, is, and continues to be why Scratching the Surface exists. The conversations of the last ten years are a record of my own thinking but it’s also a record of the many, many ways one can be a designer today, and hopefully into the future.