by Rashid Owoyele, March 14, 2025

This month I had the honor of being interviewed by a personal Design hero. For her upcoming book on the exploration of how design education will be shaped over the short term future by influences like AI and the shifting value of institutional fidelity, I was invited to be one of approximately 15 contributors through interview. In the coming weeks I expect to see quotations that seem foreign to me which were of course words that I strung together during our talk. It always feels a bit odd to see my own words when they have not been written by me firsthand. So much of unconscious thought goes into speaking, for me, that when I am presented with something that resonates with others I find myself a bit shocked.

Lucy was really great and accommodating during our interview, particularly when it became clear that I was a visual thinker who had to really listen to the questions to ensure that I was answering the questions that were given. Pasting the questions into the chat so that I could also read them allowed me a totally different degree of access to my own thoughts. This is a practice which I think I would like to offer in my own practice more going forward, and one I wish others would adopt as well.

As the world seems to be crumbling as we watch, I find myself really quite eager to see how far things will have to go before new paradigms, new regimes, and new approaches to design emerge. While it is a challenging time, this is definitely interesting. Like, who would have ever thought a US President would become a car-salesman for his corporate crony campaign investor?! What a strange couple of weeks!