This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.
The Casio F-91W, a $14 plastic watch worn by everyone from Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, exemplifies a design philosophy of \"unreasonable adequacy\"—meeting basic needs through durability, reliability, and ubiquity rather than sophistication. Its emergence as both a cultural icon and an object of security concern reveals how humble consumer gadgets become entangled with geopolitics, popular culture, and surveillance.
Timber Stinson-Schroff
Faber Birren pioneered the strategic use of color in industrial design to shape worker behavior, safety responses, and emergency protocols, making color a crucial but often overlooked element of Protocol Experience (PX) design. The essay explores how pigment functions as a cheap, persistent, and robust design variable for control systems, from OSHA safety standards to control room layouts, requiring only ambient light rather than electricity to establish effective default schemas.
Venkatesh Rao
The Memory Research Group convened over six months to read texts about memory in reverse chronological order, from classical techniques through digital AI systems and back to physical substrates, tracing which contemporary memory problems are genuinely new versus recurring under different names. The group met biweekly with interdisciplinary participants from neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, architecture, and design to understand how memory operates differently across contexts rather than develop a unified theory.
Kei Kreutler