“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
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Peek Into The Private Library Of Instagram’s Coolest Book Dealer

Press SF is interested in a refined but never rarefied melange of burgeoning artist’s movements and localized design, the kitschy and the iconoclastic, sourced from library sales and small secondhand bookstores with “a lot of different buyers and a lot of different viewpoints.”
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Katie Stout and the Subversion of American Craft

In her latest solo exhibition at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, called Sour Tasting Liquid, Katie Stout focuses her experiments exclusively in ceramics, exploring processes like slab-building, mosaic, pinching, kintsugi, and more to make a body of work that is at once figurative and abstract, logical and absurd.
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A New Show Takes Inspiration From the Same Idea That Drove Duchamp and the Dadaists

For Hilda Hellström’s latest exhibition at Étage Projects, opening this Friday, the Swedish-born, Copenhagen-based artist looked to a rather unusual source for inspiration: a semi-obscure literary idea known as "pataphysics," popularized by the 19th-century French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry (and once memorably referred to as "your favorite cult artist’s favorite pseudoscience" by Pitchfork). Pataphysics is a philosophy that gives credence to that which exists even beyond the metaphysical realm — in other words, the imaginary, the irrational, and the unreal.
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The Los Angeles Design Scene Has Officially Hit Its Stride

From a giant Block Shop mural to the now annual Hem Fest to Sarah Ellison's launch at Hawkins New York to Intro/LA — whose showcase we're featuring here today — the LA Design Festival and its surrounding events looked like a crazy amount of fun, as we well as a serious display of how far the LA design scene has come in terms of both community and cohesion.
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In Artisan-Heavy Guatemala, a Young Maker Forging a New Path in Industrial Design

The last time we featured the work of Sofia Véliz — a two-piece set of folded-steel gallery furniture made for a Diego Sagastume exhibition — we wondered what else the Guatemala City designer might have up her sleeve. Over a year and a half later, we’re finding out: From extracting rubber powder from tires to seeking inspiration from Finnish film sets, to exploring the balance between utilitarian design and the urge to experiment, there’s no question that the 25-year-old designer keeps herself busy.
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Josef Albers is One Of Design’s Biggest Influences — See What Inspired the Artist Himself

Things have changed quite a bit since we began Sight Unseen eight years ago, but one interview question has remained steadfast in our arsenal: Who are your biggest influences? And while the same answers tend to pop up often enough — Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Luis Barragán, Donald Judd — there's one name that seems to get checked more than anyone else: Josef Albers, the 20th-century artist, educator, and designer, whose book, Interaction of Color, is one of the most essential design texts ever written. But in a new exhibition at the Guggenheim, Josef Albers in Mexico, one of Albers's own greatest influences is laid bare.
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Tauba Auerbach on Making Art — and Salad — In a New Cookbook

There's been a glut of cookbooks lately with as much a foot in the art and design world as they do the food (see Nacho Alegre and Peter Shire's amazing photography collab in the recent Sqirl book, for starters). But perhaps no author has meshed the two worlds together as effortlessly and as completely as Julia Sherman, the artist behind the immensely popular blog Salad for President, whose cookbook of the same name was released last month and which we're excerpting here today.
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Chicago architect Ania Jaworska

This Chicago Architect Wants Furniture To Boss You Around

Since receiving a second degree from the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art — alumni of which include Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Knoll — Ania Jaworska has been living in Chicago, working as a professor and developing a practice and a body of work that spans art, design, and architecture, more often than not finding her surest footing at the point where all three intersect.
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Angela Dimayuga on How the Design of Downtown NYC’s Favorite Restaurant Came to Be

If you’ve ever been to Mission Chinese Food on New York’s Lower East Side, chances are you’ll remember the food — the legendary kung pao pastrami, or that one dish that makes even celery taste delicious. Chances are even better, though, that you’ll remember the experience, from the cocktail topped with flaky, edible Post-Its, to the epically grand piano music, to the friends you happened to bump into late on a Wednesday.
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A Designer-Made Breakfast Cafe at the Venice Biennale

For the opening of the Venice Biennale last week, the city's A plus A gallery became a three-day Breakfast Pavilion — part curatorial project, part café — where art could be discussed, produced, performed and eaten. Artists hosted and conceptualized the meals, while more than two dozen designers outfitted the space with furniture and objects.
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