September 2025: Karel Martens, Queer Typography, why AI isn’t design’s biggest problem
New episodes return this month!
In August we shared two old favorites: our 2021 episode with designer and creative director Zak Kyes and our 2022 conversation with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. New episodes return this month!
EDITOR’S NOTE
I spent a lot of this summer writing about something I’ve been trying to avoid: artificial intelligence. I admittedly find the AI discourse slightly boring and just a bit frustrating. I’ve been trying to articulate why the focus on AI has felt off to me and I used my latest essay for Fast Company, that came out in August, as a way to explore the subject a bit more. The title, AI isn’t design’s biggest problem, gives it a way a bit. It’s not really about AI. Instead, it’s a quasi-revisionist history of graphic design over the last twenty years to understand how we got to this moment. As I write in the piece, graphic designers afraid of AI taking their jobs are already designing like AI. Indeed, so much of the design industry today has focused on systems, standardization, and same-ness: all things AI is good at. But I think there’s a way out/forward and we can look at other moments in history to think through where we go next. I’ve been delighted by the response and hope it shifts the focus of the conversation, even just a bit, in how we talk about what it means to be a designer today.
Also in Fast Company, I did a small round up of five books perfect for the back to school season. (Not trying to tease but a few might offer hints at some upcoming guests!)
More relevant to our interests, the next time you get this newsletter, we’ll have released our first episodes of our new season. We’ll be back with new episodes this Wednesday, September 3! I’m very excited by the first set of guests and it feels great to be back behind the microphone talking to smart thinkers working today.
If you like what we do here and want to support us, you can upgrade your subscription for just $5/month or $50/year. Paid members get bonus interviews each month and help keep the show free for everyone, all the time. Thanks for listening.
See you next month,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
Scratching the Surface is proud to partner with AIGA to offer our listeners 15% off tickets to this year’s AIGA Design Conference in Los Angeles! This year’s theme, Design + Performance, explores the dynamic intersection of creativity and execution. Through storytelling, movement, and innovation, we’ll examine how designers craft experiences that engage, inspire, and perform in the world, shaping culture and driving change. The conference runs from October 9-11 in Los Angeles, CA
Use the code SCRATCHINGTHESURFACE15 at registration!
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
💡 Elvia Wilk on the dark side of constant illumination. (New York Review of Architecture)
👎 Mike Pepi on why the independent curator has always been a bankrupt idea. (Heavy Machinery)
🎭 Free Shakespeare’s Central Park home gets an $85 million glow up, writes Michael Kimmelman. (NYT)
☁️ More like Copenheaven: Jack Murphy reviews 3 Days of Design. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
🎧 Tobias Revell started a new podcast with Rahda Mistry called Futur-ish. (Futur-ish)
🖥️ Marcin Wichary assembled a comprehensive history of the design of Mac user preferences (!!). (Ares Luna)
✏️ Great interview with Christopher Hawthorne on architecture criticism. (Azure)
📢 ”I believe in making things public” says Chicago Architecture Biennial curator Florencia Rodriguez. (Dezeen)
🤔 Deyan Sudjic on a museum show about disability that asks ‘who’s sorry now?’. (NYT)
BOOK ROUNDUP
Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!
Alive by Madeline Schwartzman
Curated from new developments in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, engineering, biology, and art, this broad-ranging survey from curator Madeline Schwartzman demonstrates the myriad ways in which our perception of what it means to be alive has dramatically changed from a silicone jellyfish with a rat’s heart to a drone that smells using the antenna of a moth.
Assemble: Building Collective by Aaron Betsky
This retrospective of the first decade of architecture collective Assemble's dynamic work highlights how their methods, working practices, interest in craft and building, and focus on reuse and material choices set them apart from other architecture practices. The book draws together nearly forty major projects — that range as widely as Granby Four Streets, a community-led project to rebuild a derelict neighborhood in Liverpool, to a brewery in rural Japan and a train depot renovation in Arles — through photography, drawings, and text. Providing an overview of the group, from their self-initiated temporary projects to their meteoric rise to international acclaim, Aaron Betsky explores how Assemble's playful and subversive buildings have forged a pioneering new model of progressive architecture that continues to challenge the establishment.
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
🕑 Robert Wilson, architect of avant-garde theater, dies at 83. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
🎭 Robert Wilson expanded our sense of theatrical possibility. (NYT)
👎 How big tech is force-feeding us AI (hint: design!). (Blood in the Machine)
🤮 Donald Trump reportedly set to name Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to chief design role. (Dezeen)
📚 Architecture Exchange, a multimedia platform, launches a new book series. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
JOB WATCH
People getting new jobs in and around the design world.
Hua Dong appointed Director of The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the RCA. (RCA)
The London School of Architecture announced the appointment of Lee Ivett as its new head. (Architect’s Journal)
POSTSCRIPT
Longtime Scratching the Surface favorite designer Karel Martens has his first major retrospective, Karel Martens: Unbound, on view at the Stedelijk Museum until October. The exhibition design looks great — and it’s fascinating to see the range of his work in one space. Now I need to find a way to get to Amsterdam before October.
