What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

In a world propelled by swift technological progress and perpetual obsolescence, women frequently find themselves adapting and altering their daily experiences in order to remain functional. In the 21st century, as technology purports to comprehensively assess and address women’s conditions and physical discomfort, Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed delves deeply into the realm of female health technologies, revealing a space where science, holistic methods, and mythology converge. This book challenges the idea of combining ancient wisdom with modern innovation and takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey to explore the intricacies of female’s health.

Design Fiction is a method to vividly render tangible futures by creating material artifacts that represent the implications of change. Design Fiction is as much a mindset as it is a methodology whereby foresight, research, expectations, strategic direction, and planning can be cohered into representational ‘artifacts from possible futures.’from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices.

Over fifteen years in the making, this book explores the origins of design fiction, and details the practical approach to assessing the consequences of decision making by creating tangible artifacts from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices. The writers of this book have used design fiction approaches with clients such as Apple, Warner Bros, IKEA, Edelman, Dubai Museum of the Future, Google and Facebook, and they aim to bring these techniques to a wider audience through the publication of this book.

Written by Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova in collaboration with Patrick Pittman and Chris Frey of No Media Co. Designed by Chris Lange

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of ‘Immutable: Designing History’ (2022) and includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as a remapping of graphic design’s historical, pedagogical, and practical assumptions.

This book frequently uses the word ‘we’. We, as in the general public, engaged citizens, humans of planet Earth… And we, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, together with our team at Daily tous les jours, as we seek new models for living together. Welcome to our journal. 

We crave living in environments that support us, nourish us and inspire us. We dream of places to go through our lives together, inclusively and tolerantly. Can we re-enchant the raw material of our collective daily experiences? We have been creating interactive art and narrative experiences in public spaces around the world for fifteen years. Using music, dance, art, and other mediums to emphasize the joyful, whimsical, and unexpected, we create moments of connection and care between strangers. 

Through this book, we share our experience in building an emergent practice combining technology, storytelling, performance, and design, while asking fundamental questions to create meaningful work in a world in crisis. Meet us outside the urban masterplan, where we experiment with infrastructure for the human spirit.

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course? Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.” - Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts

An occult history that grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life. 

In these essays by scholar and self-initiated witch Brooke Palmieri, occult history, the eternal now, and our magickal queer futures align, connecting us to an enchantment both contemporary and classic. Drawing upon the knowledge and influence of practitioners from Rachel Pollack to Tituba, Palmieri grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life, whether exploring the gossip of feuding Salem witches, paying the rent by playing "wizard" for news cameras, or detailing the psychic ups and downs of working in an occult bookshop. Written in a voice electrified with love for the craft and its lineage of eccentrics, Bargain Witch shows us witch life in all its quotidian humor and splendor, taking its place amongst the magickal classics that inspired it, a literary ouroboros.

Brooke Palmieri is a writer and artist based in Joshua Tree. His writing considers the past as a supernatural encounter, spanning hundreds of years of queer and trans history, and the magic, mystery, and erotics of working in archives. Bargain Witch: Essays on Self-Initiation is his first book.

The Flesh is a collection of Yves B. Golden's poems, lyric essays and social criticism – and often these generic distinctions become blurred. Published by Ediciones La Escocesa (Barcelona, ES), TABLOID facilitated this book's production as editors and book designers. A selection of Golden's texts are also translated by Leto Ybarra, rendering the author's work into Spanish for the first time.

“Respectfully! The Flesh feels like a conjuring and a force of nature—unyieldingly raw, full of delectable sensitivity that shapes a world Yves B. Golden deliveries with formidable honesty—where her word is the journey, the body and the bond. Yves writes: ‘not one bird is declined entry into heaven’. The Flesh is succulent in the mouth of the mother— Yves is a steward of time machines, celestial bliss and untethered healing. The Flesh unties the tongue, waters the mouth and the garden. Within Yves’ 5th book she offers us a timeline in recognizing that all birds and angels alike can touch the sky. We are always, already, held and drenched in glory and deserving of love and safety. The Flesh is Black like obsidian. May our love bloom like the flesh in every lifetime.”
- keioui keijaun thomas

“Yves B Golden has given us a protection spell against tyranny; a Blue Guide for the conscious and the daydream; raw free jazz that knows the standards as well. Golden’s linguistically liberated fantasies can transmute into a body of politically imperturbable ethoses in the same sentence. This book offers information for an evolutionary sensitivity, for the next level of sense-making and particularity of the human being. Though the poet urges us to de-realize the flesh, to split our own heads open, we must also accommodate the flesh’s intangibles that interlock, conjoin, negate, and negotiate: such ‘outward and inward facing conundrums’ go on and on. Welcome this ‘bearer of turbulent news.’”
- Losarc Raal

Great is the Power of the Name considers the works of authors Elena Ferrante, Pauline Reáge, Karl Ove Knausgård, Colette and artist Lee Lozano. 

In 2016, when Anne-Mette had invited Signe to take on the role as editor of her text The Institute of Applied Speech, they both began reading Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Novels. They were specifically fascinated by the author’s use of pseudonym. Anne-Mette's Institute of Applied Speech was a tale of a fictive place, a pseudo-topos, and Elena Ferrante’s ideas about the pseudonym as a space for the writing itself was useful in thinking about fictive authorship. In a number of written interviews, Elena Ferrante unfolds the feminist perspective of her use of pseudonym. They were attracted by the idea that the author could avoid the biographical question; that she could disappear behind her own writing. 

To them, the artist Lee Lozano is the ghostly presence of hard-core moralist and humorous fuck-off art from another decade. During the course of her life, Lozano continuously reconfigured and gradually dissolved her own name, starting from Leonore Knaster ending up with E. Her work Boycott Women, in which she decides not to have any contact with women, expands the notion of feminist critique. 

Great is the Power of the Name publishes a readership interested in the position of the artist, and how it conditions the way we make art.