April 2026: Design from the in-between
A series of conversations about multi/trans/anti-disciplinary practices and what that means for design and culture.
In March, we spoke with landscape architect and artist Walter Hood and Canadian Center for Architecture director Giovanna Borasi.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The connecting thread between the two episodes this month — with landscape architect and artist Walter Hood and Canadian Centre for Architecture director Giovanna Borasi — increasingly feels like the overarching theme of Scratching the Surface: the blurring boundaries between disciplines and the expansive opportunities for designers. For Hood, that means moving across scales and contexts to blue typologies in landscape word. For Borasi, that means imagining other spaces for architects to inhabit. In a world that is in flux — culturally, technologically, politically, economically — this feels increasingly important and increasingly exciting to me. The old forms of practice are no longer sufficient, those that work on the edges, in the in-betweens, on the margins, provide us with the new models.
There are many challenges that come with this, the first is one we talk about often on the show: legibility. How do you articulate what you do, and the position you have, when you work across disciplines? Another that comes to mind is where these disciplines engage with the larger context. How do these outside forces—the environment, politics, culture, technology—encourage new forms of practice. This tension between the internal and the external is increasingly interesting to me when talking about design practice and it’s a tension I think we’ll continue to explore here.
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See you next month,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
Typography is more than organizing words. It's understanding the identities of those who read and interact with those words.
A new essay by Nicole Killian from the new book, Identity is Variable, on the relationship between typography and identity.
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
👏 Nick Foster: software designers must abandon their roles as the custodians of libraries, logic, and grids. (Dezeen)
🔥 Techno-development and desire: Mindy Seu’s Sexual History of the Internet. (032c)
🤔 Mimi Zeiger visits the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art building. (NYRA)
📺 Dream Facades: Eva Hagberg reviews a new book on the architecture of reality TV. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
🍦California Crazy: Steve Heller reviews a new book on American pop architecture. (Print)
🔨 Paul Goldberger says Trump will destroy Washington if it’s the last thing he does. (NYT)
🤯 Software Bonkers: Craig Mod built his own accounting software using Claude Code. (craigmod.com)
🪑 Christopher Hawthorne reviews a new exhibition on Shaker design at ICA Philadelphia. (NYT)
👏 Unreal Architects: Liam Young on ten years of SCI-Arc’s Master of Science Fiction and Entertainment. (Archinect)
✏️ Justin Davidson reviews OMA’s new addition to The New Museum in New York. (Curbed)
✋ Hot Hand: Glenn Adamson on designer Rio Kobayashi’s far-flung sensibility, millennial restlessness, and aesthetic wisdom. (Puck)
🍷 Kyle Chayka on why tech bros are now obsessed with taste. (The New Yorker)
🪑 Alexandra Lange on why a Shaker revival points to something deeper than a trad obsession. (CityLab)
🧹 Jack Cheng hired an AI to do his chores. Now he maintains the AI. (Every)
🪦 Aaron Betsky on the death of the starchitect. (Architect)
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
😢 School of Visual Arts shutters its Curatorial Practice MA program. (Hyperallergic)
👏 Smiljan Radic, a Chilean master of modest design, wins this year’s Pritzker Prize. (NYT)
JOB WATCH
People getting new jobs in and around the design world.
John Ochsendorf named associate dean for research at MIT School of Architecture and Planning. (MIT News)
Ramon Amaro steps down as creative director of Design Academy Eindhover after six months. (Design Academy)
POSTSCRIPT
One of my favorite discoveries in researching for my interview with Giovanna was the resources in the CCA’s collection on AMO, the think tank arm of OMA, founded by Rem Koolhaas and partners in the early 90s. Longtime listeners will know my interest in AMO — I talked to former OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and current OMA partner Reinier de Graaf about it, as well as included some history in my Fast Company story on strategy — but I had never come across the series of diagrams included in the CCA’s show An Other Architect that outline how AMO might function and with who. The above positions AMO as OMA’s ‘virtual’ arm, working in collaboration with such entities as Harvard and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Another example of modeling a practice between disciplines!
