“Nobody stops at a stop sign and thinks: ‘When are they going to redesign that? It’s so old!’”
So declared Susan Kare, the American artist and graphic designer, during a design panel in Paris for the buzzy digital security company Ledger. Kare, renowned for her pioneering work at Apple—where she created many of the company’s earliest and enduring bitmap icons and typefaces—was brought on by Ledger to “add a little graphic welcome,” via interchangeable plug elements on its latest storage device, the Nano Gen5.
That same company also employs Ian Rogers, former Chief Digital Officer of LVMH (and another Apple alum) and, currently, Ledger’s Chief Experience Officer. A few minutes prior to the panel, he told me that “the more time we spend with technology, the more we’ll value human connection. You don’t fall in love with a robot—you fall in love with a human.”
Both were speaking to the same idea: that what feels essential to human life—things experienced away from screens—remains vital to design, even as tech’s importance compounds. Fittingly, this year’s Design Miami.Paris, which alongside Art Basel now anchors Paris’s annual October art and design week, marks Apple’s first direct participation in the fair. The brand commissioned four artists for a series called “Designers of Tomorrow.” The twist? Each used an iPad to create their work.
Of course, big tech looms over nearly every conversation today. It has its hand, or rather its code, in everything. Yet from a design standpoint, it seems there’s an emerging return to the behavioral, the emotional, the biological, and even the nostalgic. Hand-crafted and artisanal methods have been trending for a while, yes—but what I sensed in Paris felt different: an aesthetic grounded in lived experience. The world may be accelerating forward on crypto, AI, and quantum computing, but design, rather nicely, seems to be rediscovering its innately human appeal.
Harry Nuriev’s Public Exchange at Objets Trouvés
Photo: Nick Remsen
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