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Deem Journal

Deem is a biannual print journal and online platform focused on design as social practice.

11/10/2023

Over the course of the 2022-23 academic year, our editors Alice Grandoit-Šutka () and Isabel Flower () served as Mentors-in-Residence for the Collective Abundance cohort at NEW INC—the New Museum’s incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology. This thematic track was imagined to creatively consider new models for wealth, health, and justice, through disciplines including architecture, hardware design, urbanism, art, and education. To culminate the experience, the cohort’s members staged the exhibition “Emergen-C Archive” at La MaMa Galleria in downtown Manhattan.

To memorialize this moment of imaginative co-creation, we asked each of the aforementioned members to reflect on the time we shared in two parts: a. with a statement on how abundance shows up as a value system in their work b. with a description of the work they contributed to the show.

We hope that their sentiments, which now live on our website as “Emergent Emergency Strategies: 11 Takes On Collective Abundance” provoke and expand on these important concepts for you, as they have for us.

Thank you to our track members:
Amina Hassen (.acid)
Ana Bessie Ratner ()
Cara Michell ()
Eliza Evans ()
Jamica El ()
Lafayette Cruise ()
Melody Stein ()
Micropolitan Studio ( studio)
Philip P**n ()
Smita Sen ()
Office Party (.party

11/10/2023

13/09/2023

This summer, we had the pleasure of working with the LA Design Festival to curate two conversations; one of these was between creative director Nu Goteh and architect, urban designer, researcher, and curator Sekou Cooke on the theory and emergence of Hip Hop architecture, on the occasion of the travelling exhibition “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture” at the A+D Museum. The show is now in its final week, so if you’re interested, make sure to stop by before it closes this coming Sunday.

12/09/2023

The work of Dominican-born artist Lizania Cruz () uses audience participation to investigate notions of being and belonging within the public sphere. In 2018, she created the participatory installation, Here & There, inspired by the following quote from cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s posthumous 2017 memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands: “...identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but constantly shifting the process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming—a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.” Cruz invited participants to fill in the statements, HERE I (AM/CAN BE)___ and THERE I (AM/CAN BE)___ through a website, and these statements were then silkscreened onto fabric and hung in the 2018 exhibition, “Familiar Boundaries, Infinite Possibilities,” at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. For this issue, Cruz has shared a selection of the responses she received.

06/07/2023

Four years, four issues, our fourth birthday 🎈
So much of our work—and our world contextually—has shifted since Deem came to be, and since we released our first issue in 2019.
What we can always return to are the values that seal our purpose as a publication and a platform. These beliefs connect our different outputs, across issues, themes, topics, and formats.
We’re glad to revisit them as we reflect on our birthday month. As always, thank you for being here!

25/05/2023

We’re still celebrating the release of Dr. Dori Tunstall’s () “Decolonizing Design
A Cultural Justice Guidebook,” which addresses the “institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.

‘Decolonizing Design’ first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.”

Dr. Tunstall is Dean of the Faculty of Design at Ontario College of Art & Design University, and contributed her perspectives on this topic to our second issue, “Pedagogy for a New World.”

18/05/2023

In her artist takeover spreads from Issue Four "A Sense of Place," Daleen Saah shares images of her father's and grandfather's official documents. “How can I show you that Palestine is a place?”

"'Keep Your Identity Card,' reads my great-grandfather's ID-carrying case. Continuing the Palestinian exile into today, Israel systemically confiscates Palestinian ID cards, revokes citizenships, and refuses renewals. My family and community tries to conceal their Jerusalem or Palestine IDs when crossing Israeli-manned borders, because these cards are often taken and never returned. Keeping our old, expired IDs might be one way we can come home when Palestine is free. The photo to the right in the forthcoming spread shows my dad and his friends at a party in Ramallah, sometime in the 1950s. They were forced into exile in 1967, and we are their descendants. We (all) want to come home.

Identification cards, certificates, and photographs from my family give us one lens with which to show that Palestine is a place. While erasure and exile aim to make Palestine abnormalized and hidden, Palestine is a place; it always has been and it always will be.” —Daleen Saah

18/04/2023

A steward of native Hawaiian cultural values, Ramsay Taum () is a speaker, lecturer, trainer, and facilitator, is mentored by respected kūpuna (elders), and is a practitioner and instructor of several native Hawaiian practices.

For Issue Four, he talked with our executive editor, , about the role and purpose of place within this cultural tradition, and what the rest of the world might learn about interdependence and reciprocity from the most remote inhabited place on the planet. You can now read “Reverence Over Reference: Ramsay Taum speaks with Isabel Flower about the Meaning of Place-Based Values” on DeemJournal.com.

Original illustrations to accompany this story were created by artist Cory Kamehanaokalā Holt Taum ().

14/04/2023

“For me, a place is a space that contains memory.”

In Issue Four “A Sense of Place,” artist Doreen Chan shares her study of dreams in a personal essay.

“I think that, in general, dreaming happens in a space that is always there. But when the dreamer remembers a dream and thinks about it, it becomes a place.”

Read the full essay by purchasing a copy of Issue Four from your local stockist or online at deemjournal.com/shop

13/04/2023

Deem Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” is available to order online at deemjournal.com/shop, as are back issues of “Envisioning Equity”.
To buy from your local bookstore, check out a list of Deem stockists in our stories highlights.

22/03/2023

This spring, cultural/memory worker, curator, organizer and Issue Four contributor Cara Page () welcomes the release of a new book—”Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety,” with coauthor Erica Woodland ().

If you had the chance to experience Page’s conversation, “Where We Are Invited to Enter,” with researcher and designer Sasha Costanza-Chock () and moderated by Alexis Aceves Garcia (), we encourage checking out this crucial compilation of “collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Q***r and Trans healing justice lineages.”

17/02/2023

Our first-ever Symposium—hosted by and fast approaching on March 4—will include a panel discussion on equitable community design in Chicago with three remarkable locally-based practitioners—Paola Aguirre Serrano (), Maya Bird-Murphy (), and Tonika Lewis Johnson (), moderated by the MCA’s own Otez Gary ().

Aguirre Serrano is a native of the Mexico-US region, urban designer, and partner at the Chicago/San Antonio-based design and research practice BORDERLESS.

Bird-Murphy is an architectural designer, educator, and the founder of Mobile Makers, an award-winning nonprofit organization bringing design and skill-building workshops to underrepresented communities.

Lewis Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist, and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood, as well as co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood.

Gary is an artist and Community Engagement Manager at the MCA, where he creates a shared art ecosystem through partnership, collaboration, and using the museum’s platform and resources as an incubator for Chicago’s arts scene.

In-person and virtual tickets are still available for purchase at the link in our bio!

14/02/2023

We are thrilled that Ramon Tejada ()—who contributed crucial insights to Issue Two on expanding design education through the concept of “puncturing”—will join our inaugural Symposium on March 4 to share a presentation about his hybrid teaching practice in specific relation to pedagogy.

Tejada is a (New Yorkino/American) designer (as Estudio Ramon) and an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design Department at The Rhode Island School of Design.

In-person and virtual tickets are available for purchase through at the link in our bio. Please be advised that in-person space is limited, and we are but a few weeks away!

13/02/2023

For a conversation about the power and purpose of place at our inaugural Symposium on March 4, we are honored to be joined by two extraordinary Chicago natives—Germane Barnes () and Toni L. Griffin ()—whose dialogue on the theme of our fourth issue, and in specific relation to their home city, will be moderated by Deem co-founder Nu Goteh ().

Barnes is the Director of Studio Barnes and Associate Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, where he directs the Community Housing and Identity Lab.

Griffin is founder of the New York-based planning and design management practice urbanAC LLC, a Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and founder and director of the Just City Lab.

In-person and virtual tickets are available for purchase through at the link in our bio.

08/02/2023

We are so excited that Annika Hansteen-Izora (.izora)—who explored ways we can create kinder, more fluid and generative online worlds for Issue Four—will join our inaugural Symposium on March 4 to share a presentation about her practice in specific relation to the concept of dignity.

Hansteen-Izora is a multi-disciplinary designer and artist exploring the intersections of design, radical Black imagination, art, and technology to create ecosystems rooted in care.

In-person and virtual tickets are available for purchase through at the link in our bio. Please be advised that in-person space is limited, and we are but a few weeks away!

06/02/2023

We are delighted that acclaimed Chicago-based visual artist Amanda Williams () will be the keynote speaker at our first-ever Symposium, hosted by .

Williams’s work investigates color, race, and space in the city while blurring the conventional line between art and architecture, and she graced the cover of our third issue as a member of the —a nonprofit organization providing funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora.

On March 4, Williams will kick off the day with a presentation around the meaning, importance, and potentialities of design as social practice.

30/01/2023

Issue Four is guided by a few questions.

How do people make place from spatial experiences? How does space come to contain meaning, significance, sentiment, feeling?

As a design journal, thinking about the words “place” and “making” together brought up the popular term “placemaking,” which, though not the crux of our investigation, did offer some points of departure. In our cover story, ’s approach to redeeming and sacralizing space as place offers many ways in, and out, of these inquiries.

We are excited to share that this interview is available to read in full at the link in our bio.

Portraits by Nolis Anderson

27/01/2023

Alongside the release of each issue, we choose a selection of stories from print to share in full on our website.

We are excited to kick off Issue Four’s offering with “Sacralized Space: Theaster Gates on the Practice of Placemaking,” our cover conversation between and Deem co-founders Nu Goteh () and Alice Grandoit-Šutka (), with original photography by .

This dialogue was critical to the issue’s conceptual framework, and we are excited to make it available to you at the link in our bio. Print copies can also be purchased at deemjournal.com.

18/01/2023

“Where We Are Invited to Enter: Sasha Costanza-Chock & Cara Page in conversation” is one of the framing dialogues in Issue Four, “A Sense of Place.”

This urgent discussion around making place through design, justice, and care work is moderated by Alexis Aceves Garcia () and illustrated by Jorge Vallecillos ().

Thank you for joining us as we continue to share the essays, interviews, and interventions that make up this issue. You can order your copy at deemjournal.com.

12/01/2023

Tickets are now on sale for our inaugural symposium, which we are delighted to be co-organizing/hosting with .

Our full day of live programming on March 4, 2023, at the MCA, can be experienced in-person or online, and will comprise a series of presentations and conversations with distinguished contributors from Deem's first four issues alongside several Chicago-based practitioners who will help center the event in this special place.

Tickets for both options now available at the link in our bio, and in-person tickets will include admission to the museum that day.

Stay tuned for more programming announcements soon.

10/01/2023

In the pages of Issue Four, we are honored to share the voices of two esteemed practitioners and thinkers—researcher and designer Sasha Costanza-Chock () and cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer Cara Page ()—who came together in the conversation “Where We Are Invited to Enter,” moderated by Alexis Aceves Garcia () and illustrated by Jorge Vallecillos ().

The two share perspectives on placemaking within design justice, care work, and each of their approaches to world-building.

Find the full text in print in our fourth issue, “A Sense of Place.”

28/12/2022

For one of our artist interventions in Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” we asked the students over at the Bay Area’s to offer creative interpretations of what place means to them. Here is an excerpt from what they shared in our print pages.

To help the MYN community fight for a better future for people and the planet, donate at myceliumyouthnetwork.org.

22/12/2022

SAVE THE DATE

Deem’s first-ever Symposium—hosted in partnership with the MCA Chicago—will be an in-person and online hybrid event bringing together designers, practitioners, and community members to form dialogues around emergent and liberatory directions within design.

Please join us for a day of presentations and conversations around how design draws on diverse perspectives to create more equitable and inclusive communities and futures through the following themes: Dignity, Pedagogy, Equity, and Place.

In addition, Deem will organize a three-day Reference Room to serve as a public gathering space for people to experience some of the reading materials that have inspired our four issues.

Tickets will go on sale in early 2023.

18/12/2022

What transforms a space into a place for you?

This is a question we asked many of the contributors to Issue Four—whether or not you have checked out their perspectives, we would love to hear your thoughts as well.

For a chance for your reply to be featured on our Instagram Stories, tag us in a photo of a place that holds meaning for you.

14/12/2022

For episode 180 of hosted by , co-founder and editor-in-chief Alice Grandoit-Šutka () traced her creative practice back to her kindergarten classroom, reflected on the origins of Deem, and much more.

Listen to the episode in full at the link in our bio.

28/11/2022

As a thank you for being here with us, use code THANKYOU22 at checkout on our website for free shipping.

With care,
The team at Deem

25/11/2022

As Issue Four finds its way to you over the next few weeks, we are running our very first Reference Room bundle giveaway.

In addition to a copy of Issue Four, one winner will receive a copy of Belonging: A Culture of Place (1990) by bell hooks and Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020) by Sasha Costanza-Chock ()—two texts that imperatively shaped our journey in creating this issue.

To enter, do the following:

🏹 Follow .

✅ Like this post.

📚 Tag 1 friend in the comments section. 1 tag = 1 entry!

📙 Share this post in your Instagram stories for an additional entry.

We will announce a winner on Monday, November 28th.

This giveaway is not affiliated with Instagram.

21/11/2022

Issue Four, “A Sense of Place” is now shipping.

Order your copy at DeemJournal.com.

17/11/2022

In last month’s newsletter, we caught up with , who invited Shirley Ngozi () to spend two days at Work in Wellness—an Activation Residency x program centering rest and input over output. Here’s what Shirley had to say about her time freedom dreaming.

If you’d like to support Activation Residency’s impactful work, donate at their website: activationresidency.com.

📸: Juan Felipe Rendon ()

11/11/2022

Three years, four issues.

We’re so proud of our explorations in print and grateful for the people who’ve lent their time, ideas, and experiences to our pages.

Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” is now available to order, as are back issues of “Envisioning Equity” and “Pedagogy for a New World.”

04/11/2022

We opened Issue Four’s letter from our editors with an expression of gratitude for the life and work of the late bell hooks, who passed away shortly after the release of our last issue.

The intellectual place that she created and cultivated has been a refuge for us, and will undoubtedly remain so for all those who continue to discover her ideas.

28/10/2022

A thought from co-founder Nu Goteh () on the difference between space and place.

Pre-order your copy of Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” at the link in our bio.

26/10/2022

“How do people make place from spatial experiences?”

An excerpt from the Editors’ Letter for Issue Four, “A Sense of Place.”

Pre-order is now live at DeemJournal.com.

25/10/2022

We are delighted to introduce the contributors who lent their perspectives and stories of belonging to Issue Four, “A Sense of Place.”

Acacia Rodriguez ()
Alexis Aceves Garcia ()
Alice Grandoit-Šutka ()
Annika Hansteen-Izora (.izora)
Cara Page ()
Cherry-Ann Davis ()
Cory Kamehanaokalā Holt Taum ()
Daleen Saah ()
Doreen Chan ()
Femi Adeyemi ()
Guarionex Rodriguez, Jr. ()
Isabel Flower ()
jah elyse sayers ()
Jorge Vallecillos ()
Jun Lin ()
Lizania Cruz ()
Marquise Stillwell ()
Melody Timothee (.visuals)
Mycelium Youth Network ()
Nolis Anderson ()
Nu Goteh ()
Ollie Olanipekun ()
Prentis Hemphill ()
Ramsay Taum ()
Ruth Gebreyesus ()
Sara Pooley ()
Sara Zewde ()
Sasha Costanza-Chock ()
Shirt ()
Tamika Abaka-Wood ()
Theaster Gates ()
Toni L. Griffin ()
Valencia Gunder ()
Warren Le Platte ()
Will Carr ()

24/10/2022

Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” reexamines the meaning of place, and its making, while considering the emergence of new social landscapes, spaces, and needs.

We are deeply honored to open the issue with a conversation between our cover artist, Theaster Gates ()—who shares his perspectives around place as the connecting thread in his practice—and co-founders Nu Goteh () and Alice Grandoit-Šutka ().

Gates's approach to redeeming and sacralizing space as place lays the groundwork for a multitude of other interviews, essays, and interventions that address how we make place from spatial experiences. And it is our hope that this investigation will help us all think about place in ways both new and old.

Pre-order is now live at the link in our bio.

Cover photography by Nolis Anderson ()

20/10/2022

“What if our environment was designed to promote our identities, our cultures, our ways of life?”

For episode 1 of “The Sweet Flypaper,” Marquise Stillwell () spoke with Sara Zewde () of on editing, shaping place, expanding design typologies, and more.

“Sara Zewde on Landscape Psychology and The Craft of Construction,” is now live under Audio at DeemJournal.com.

18/10/2022

Deem Audio is an exploratory approach to audio interviews, oral histories, and storytelling. Deem will produce an ongoing series of distinct, five-episode podcast programs that highlight voices and interests within our community—and in some cases focus on specific topics that have especially resonated in print and in our forums.

This fall, we are introducing the Sweet Flypaper with our co-founder Marquise Stillwell (), who sat down with five authors, thinkers, designers and change-makers to discuss the power of design—across disciplines—in creating better conditions for the human experience.

Tune in to the first episode at the link in our bio.

14/10/2022

Issue Four of Deem Journal is officially on its way to .

More from us very soon.

12/10/2022

We’re delighted that our editor-in-chief Alice Grandoit-Šutka () and executive editor Isabel Flower () will be mentors-in-residence for this year’s Collective Abundance track at , the first museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology founded by the .

Members in the new Collective Abundance track are creatively reimagining new models for wealth, health, and justice. They span many disciplines including architecture, hardware design, urbanism, art, and education. Through practices of community engagement, artistic immersion, and cultural critique, this creative cohort is building newly formed pathways for healing, social care, economic empowerment, and joy.

Portraits by

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Videos

For episode 180 of @cleverpodcast hosted by @amydevers, co-founder and editor-in-chief Alice Grandoit-Šutka (@met_fanm_sou_mwen) traced her creative practice back to her kindergarten classroom, reflected on the origins of Deem, and much more. Listen to the episode in full at the link in our bio.

To celebrate Deem’s third birthday, each member of our staff chose a question from our print and digital offerings that resonated with them. “What if care is the work? What if caring for ourselves is the revolution, meaning, what would happen if we divested from dismantling white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and invested our energy instead in equalizing the care we are able to provide each other?” -Kamra (@careecologist), “What if care is the work?” Issue Two “Kamra’s questions helped me recontextualize my relationship with computer work and have become an instrument within my facilitation practice. The idea of focusing more energy on the quality of care we provide feels not only worthwhile, but necessary.” -SL, Visual Director (@4348.5)

To celebrate Deem’s third birthday, each member of our staff chose a question from our print and digital offerings that resonated with them. “I think that equity is also about sharing, by asking yourself—what do I have in abundance that I can open up for others around me so that more of us can have what we need to live well and to live in alignment with what we inherently deserve to sustain ourselves?" Jezz Chung, “On Neurodivergence And Communal Care,” Issue Three “This is a question that resonates with me and one that I think about often. Equity sounds like a big word, but even outside of institutions, we can let it guide us on an individual level in our relationships with those around us. How can we make space for others, and ensure that they are seen, heard, understood, supported?” -Jun Lin, Designer (@yuujunlin)

Can we hold possibility and collapse at the same time? @adriennemareebrown believes so. Keeping her words from an interview with Krista Tippett of @onbeing close on this July Monday. For more parcels of brown’s wisdom, revisit our cover interview from Issue One, “Designing for Dignity,” at DeemJournal.com. 📸: @anjalipinto

Thank you to all who attended our second Forum session yesterday. Our third (and final!) session will take place this coming Thursday, February 3, at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CET. The conversation—which will explore how design can help create more equitable life outcomes for mothers—will be moderated by Marcel Rosa-Salas with guests Gabriella Nelson and Zoë Greggs (of @designingmotherhood) alongside LinYee Yuan (@linyeezy). The session will be streamed via Youtube with both captioning & ASL interpretation. RSVP at the link in our bio!

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