The coming Labor Day weekend may find you jetting off to an island paradise, hitting the highway for a road trip, or seated in a comfortable yet chic chair, trying to make some readerly headway with Vogue’s 916-page September issue (worth the $5.99 cover price for Amaranth Ehrenhalt‘s charming Giacometti tale alone!). If you’re still stuck in binary hotel-or-a-friend’s-place travel mode, consider upgrading with an alternative: Airbnb (née AirBedAndBreakfast.com). The San Francisco-based startup, which has raised $120 million in funding, recently reached 10 million nights booked and has amassed a massive, fun-to-browse menu of unique spaces worldwide. Joe Gebbia is the graphic and product design mind behind the company, which he co-founded in 2007 (with Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk). The RISD alum took time away from his holiday weekend preparations to answer our seven questions.

Give us your elevator pitch: What’s Airbnb?
Airbnb is a trusted online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. From a private room to a private island, we offer an entertaining and personal way for travelers to unlock local experiences and see their surroundings through the eyes of a local.

What led you and your co-founders to create the company?
In October 2007 the rent increased on our San Francisco apartment. The timing couldn’t have been worse—my roommate, Brian, and I had recently left our jobs to become entrepreneurs. We knew that a prominent design conference was coming to town, and that all the nearby hotel rooms were booked solid. We decided to rent airbeds in our apartment to designers attending the conference, and provide them with a unique and quintessentially local experience. As it turned out, a lot of people were looking for this type of accommodation, so we brought on Nate to be our third co-founder and we started to expand. In 2007 we had two airbeds, and three employees. Now, just four years later, we have over 200,000 listings in over 26,000 cities in 192 countries and 10 offices in 9 countries.
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(Photos courtesy Debbie Millman)

A gust of great design is blowing through the Windy City as the Chicago Design Museum welcomes visitors through June 30. Created by Mark Dudlik and Tanner Woodford, the 6,000-square-foot Humboldt Park pop-up—complete with a gift shop called “Ignorance & Ambition“—is part of Lost Creature, a non-profit that aims to bridge culture and creativity with community projects. The museum’s five concurrent exhibitions spotlight a range of design work, from hand-painted signage and IBM icons to Ed Fella’s spirited flyers and posters and the illustrated essays of Debbie Millman. The indefatigatable AIGA president emeritus, Design Matters host, and Sterling Brands honcho talked with us about the exhibit following last week’s opening bash.

How did you get involved with the Chicago Design Museum?
I met Tanner Woodford and Mark Dudlik when they were taking the Phoenix design scene by storm with their involvement in the Arizona Chapter of AIGA and with their creation of Phoenix Design Week. Their talent and entrepreneurship blew me away, and I sensed that they were on to something BIG. After the massive success of their pop-up Phoenix Design Museum, they moved onto Chicago. Tanner had been asking if he could show my work as part of the debut exhibit of the Chicago Design Museum and I thought I was dreaming. I have been riding their coattails ever since.

For those who aren’t familiar with your visual essays, what are they and how did you come to start making them?
Visual storytelling—the art of using language and images to convey a narrative account of real or fictional events—is something I’ve been fascinated by for as long as I can remember. I started creating visual essays in the early 1990s when I expanded from painting words to painting stories. My best friend, a painter and art dealer named Katharine Umsted, urged me to insure that when creating art with words, the quality of every illustration must be comparable to the quality of the writing. She helped me understand that neither discipline could overwhelm or dilute the impression of the other; both needed to be fully integrated. This helped me take each element of the essays with equal care and dedication. After a big exhibit at Long Island University in 1992, I all but abandoned my artwork to focus on my day job and a commercial career. My non-visual essays re-emerged when I started writing monologues for my podcast, Design Matters, beginning in 2005.
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David Stark has made a name for himself with design that is simultaneously innovative and playful, monumentally scaled yet welcoming and thoughtfully customized. His Brooklyn-based firm’s events, for clients ranging from Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and New Yorkers for Children to West Elm and discerning brides often transform quotidian materials—Post-Its, paint chips, bundled newspapers—into one-night wonderlands. Guests have been known to marvel, look closer, and then ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Stark’s latest production is WOOD SHOP, a “surprise ambush” of Nina Freudenberger‘s Haus Interior in New York. “For about a month, all of the product that Haus usually carries will be removed and replaced with our limited-edition WOOD SHOP collection that is inspired by the iconic wood worker’s atelier,” explains Stark of the collaborative concept store-cum-art gallery, which opens to the public on Friday at 11:00 a.m. (sneak a peek at some of the goods and buy them online here). “We’re excited to take the pop-up store to the next level.” Stark took time away from last-minute preparations to answer our seven questions about wooden must-haves, his start in event design, and how he created a “garden of Versailles” out of shredded paper.

1. What are a few of your favorite products in WOOD SHOP?
Oh, I love so, so many of them that it is hard to name one or two, but I am particularly happy with the hand-crocheted paint can and brush pillows, the turned poplar vases, and I do love the “Pining for You” poster/valentine. It’s a fantastic card to send in the mail, and it is also cool to frame and put on a wall. This pieces is the newest in our company tradition of newsprint cards that we have sent to friends and clients over the last couple of years. Those cards have become so popular that they are commonly saved and framed as wall art.

2. You went to art school at RISD. How did you get your start in event design?
Totally by accident! I didn’t even know there was a career called, “event design”! Back in the day, I worked with flowers and a partner, making arrangements for parties to support my fledgling painting career. Over time, I did more and more floral work than painting and got better and better at it. One day we were invited to interview for the job of designing the décor for New York City Opera’s fundraising gala. Carolyn Roehm, a noted florist in her own right, was the chair lady of the evening, and she took one look at our book and said, “Well, there is no question that you make the most beautiful flower arrangements, but this evening is not about flowers at all.”

All of a sudden a light bulb went off! It was a real a-ha moment. The revelation that flowers were not the only decorative tool for a party was mind-blowing. It seems real obvious of course, but at the time, it was radical. Now flowers are just one of the tools in my tool box, and the rest of the world of options is readily at my fingertips.
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You probably know Allan Chochinov as the core of Core77, the beloved industrial design megasite of which he serves as editor-in-chief. The designer and educator’s latest creation is a new MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. As chair of the MFA in Products of Design, Chochinov has devised the graduate program around a new way of considering the design of artifacts, experiences, sustainability, strategy, business, and point of view. The design star-studded faculty ranges from Paola Antonelli (MoMA) to John Zapolski (Fonderie47). “We have created a program that I feel represents a optimistic, rigorous, and future-forward step in the future of design education,” he says, adding that applications are now being accepted for the inaugural class. “We are looking for all kinds of applicants: the highly-skilled, seeking more meaningful applications; the deeply-knowledgeable, looking for greater scale and impact; the passionate, looking for more rigor and process; and of course the iconoclastic, looking for a home.” In answering our seven questions, Chochinov gives us the full scoop on the program, discusses some of his own career highlights, and proves that unwieldy edibles (or useless machines) make the best gifts.

1. What led you to create the MFA in Products of Design program?
I’ve been teaching design at the college level for 17 years now, and I’m passionate about students, creativity, and point of view. When SVA approached me about creating a new MFA program, it was an incredible opportunity to spend time researching, conceiving, and collaborating on a program that would represent future practice and equip students with the skills and fluencies that the world will demand of them. The program that resulted, I feel, is at the sweet spot of business, making, storytelling, and stewardship. It’s a program that aims to engage, ennoble, and empower. It’s also going to be a ton of fun.

2. What can prospective students expect from the program, in terms of coursework, faculty, and experience?
The program is rigorous but joyful, multi-disciplinary and multi-sensorial. There are no grades. Most of the classes are in the evenings. Several classes happen off-site (the Design Research and Integration class is held at IDEO in SoHo, for example; the Materials Futures class is held at Material ConneXion). Two of the classes are co-mingled with MFA Interaction Design students. There’s our new Visible Futures Lab fabbing space next door, and a city brimming with design making, design thinking, and design doing right outside the door. We’re dedicating a lot of the architecture and curriculum to food and food systems, and we’ve got a faculty comprised of some of the most fascinating, progressive practitioners in design.

3. What’s been the most challenging and/or rewarding aspect of working on the program?
The most challenging aspect has been to clarify this very fuzzy place where I think design needs to be right now. (That last sentence is a bit fuzzy in itself!) Referencing the challenges inherent in designing for systemic, interconnected conditions, faculty member Manuel Toscano remarked to me that “we will need students who are comfortable being uncomfortable.” I think that’s very true. Design is at an incredible moment right now, but the challenges of production, consumption, labor, resilience…these demand a nimble kind of practice.
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It’s been a great year for Debbie Millman. The AIGA president emeritus recently celebrated the publication of her fourth book, Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits (Allworth Press), and a few days later picked up the 2011 People’s Design Award for her pioneering podcast, Design Matters on Design Observer. Born in 2005 as a weekly radio program, the show has become a kind of Charlie Rose of the creative world, tackling topics ranging from graphic design and branding to cultural anthropology and art with guests such as Milton Glaser, Barbara Kruger, and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. Here Millman dishes on Design Matters outtakes, recounts a fateful encounter that involved a Sausage McMuffin, and shares her graphic design pet peeve.

1. Congrats on winning the 2011 People’s Design Award for Design Matters on Design Observer. How did you celebrate?
The week after the award ceremony I turned 50, and I also hosted the launch party for Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits. Between all three events, I did a lot of celebrating. Aside from feeling old, I am still walking on air.

2. What led you to create Design Matters? Did you have a particular audience in mind at the time?
I often say that Design Matters began in February 2005 with an idea and a telephone line. After an offer from the Voice America Business Network to create an online radio show in exchange for a fee (yes, I had to pay them) I decided that interviewing designers who I revered would be an inventive way to ask my heroes everything I wanted to know about them. I started broadcasting Design Matters live from a telephone modem in my office at Sterling Brands in New York City. After the first dozen episodes, I began to distribute the episodes free on iTunes, making it the first ever design podcast to be distributed in this manner.

I realized the opportunity to share the brilliance of my guests with an audience I never expected was the gift of a lifetime, but as the show grew in popularity, I recognized that I needed to upgrade both the sound quality and the distribution. After 100 episodes on Voice America, I was invited to publish Design Matters on Design Observer by co-founder Bill Drenttel. Design Matters is now the anchor show on Design Observer’s media channel, and the show is produced at the specially built podcast studio located at my Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
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Rina Stone loves a design challenge. Before taking the creative helm of InStyle in 2007, the Boston University grad held a series of positions that had redesigns as their initial focus, from helping GQ freshen up its look and reimagining US Magazine as a weekly to defining the visual identity of Tina Brown‘s smart yet short-lived Talk and finally, updating People. “That was as much a design challenge as it was reimagining a workflow that could allow for more breaking news without sacrificing quality in design and photography,” says Stone, for whom InStyle was a natural next step. “My previous experience had been celebrity-focused, but fashion is truly where my heart is,” she explains. “It was a perfect place to blend the two.” Read on as Stone offers a peek into life at the glam monthly, outlines a design dream project, and shares what it was like working with a couture-clad Miss Piggy for this month’s issue.

1. The look of InStyle has evolved but maintained a clean and bold yet glamorous aesthetic that has spawned many imitators. How would you describe the visual identity of the magazine at this point in time?
InStyle is playful, luxurious and clear. We deliver content with ease and authority. The reader should feel inspired to try something new after reading an issue.

2. What do you consider your greatest challenge as creative director of InStyle?
With a circulation as large as ours, it’s important to be able to create a widely appealing look that is inspiring to many women and a mix of ages, backgrounds, and styles. It’s also crucial to deliver at least one WOW in every issue.

3. What is your greatest graphic design/publication design pet peeve?
Snapping to the grid.

4. Was was your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
Shooting Miss Piggy. A definite highlight. What a diva! She refused to remove her pearl necklace and who knew she always must wear gloves? Raiding her glove wardrobe was a blast.
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Bill Powers purchased his first work of art—a Terry Richardson photo of “ToeJam the Clown”—in 1998, shortly after taking the editorial helm of Blackbook. Since then, he’s built an art collection that includes works by Richard Prince, Elizabeth Peyton, Dana Schutz, and Irving Penn; opened New York’s Half Gallery with partners Andy Spade and James Frey; and co-founded Exhibition A, the online art hub that offers affordable editions by some of the big names on Powers’ own walls. Tonight he is back on Bravo to dispense more good-natured yet constructive criticism on the cable network’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. So which of the new contestants should we keep an eye out for? “We’ve got Michelle, who has worked for Marilyn Minter and had also been an assistant to Josephine Meckseper. It’s interesting to see someone with that background,” he says. “Or Kathryn, who went to Yale grad school for photography, versus a toymaker, The Sucklord. I think it really is a nice spectrum.” We chatted with Powers about the reaction to Work of Art, the judging process, and what’s in store for the new season (KAWS!).

1. How would you characterize the reaction—particularly that of the art world—to the first season of Work of Art?
I understand people’s skepticism. I mean, it is reality TV, right? Personally, I was really flattered at how many contemporary artists I admire watched the first season, whether it’s Cecily Brown or Rob Pruitt or Jeff Koons or Rachel Feinstein. That meant a lot to me that those people would watch and get into it. People said that the show reminded them a lot of grad school and that a lot of the personalities and the work that was produced was reminiscient of that. There’s always somebody getting naked. There’s always somebody tackling social issues. And there’s a photographer, who’s probably better suited to commercial photography, making fine art pictures.

2. Are there certain aspects of season two that you think will surprise people?
I was always surprised by the range of materials employed, and what somebody can make in four or five hours is pretty impressive. And I would ask viewers to remember that it’s a lot of pressure to say, “OK, here’s the theme of the show this week, now make something and we’re going to show it tomorrow as if we’re picking people for the next Venice Biennale.” I feel like people at home or on blogs sometimes can be looking at this work as if someone had a year in their studio to make it. They have five or six hours sometimes to make what you’re seeing. I know that’s part of being a part of a competition series, but to see something that you like and that someone made in a few hours? Most working artists today spend weeks if not months putting together a piece. I think that people are, if I can borrow a term from Jerry [Saltz], “demonstrating radical vulnerability” by their participation on the show.
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It’s hard enough to craft intelligent design criticism, let alone guide others in doing so, but Alexandra Lange excels at both. The Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and architectural historian pens pointed reviews and thought-provoking observations on the visual world for Design Observer (“Stop That: Minimalist Posters” is among our recent favorites) and on her own Tumblr (Hello Kitty spotted in Lisbon!), and teaches design criticism in SVA’s D-Crit program and at New York University. Having co-authored the 2010 must-read Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle), Lange is preparing for the release of her next book, a primer on writing and reading architectural criticism that will be published next spring by the Princeton Architectural Press. In the meantime, she’s branching out beyond the built environment with Let’s Get Critical, her new shortform blog that cherrypicks reviews and essays from the wider world of culture. What makes a piece of writing worthy of appearing on the site? “Everything on Let’s Get Critical should be well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky,” says Lange. We reined in our verbosity and formulated seven semi-lucid questions for the veteran critic and pied piper of quality criticism.

1. What led you to create Let’s Get Critical?
I’ve been writing and teaching architecture and design criticism for about six years now, and while I love it, the topic started to feel a little confining. I love movies and TV, prefer to read novels, follow pop culture. A person cannot live by architecture alone. At the same time, I felt like most sites about culture, like most sites about design, were purely celebratory. So I wanted to create a place for intelligent writing about intelligent work, where culture was front and center rather than secondary to politics or business or sports.

2. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
Since I got my first iPhone in January, it is usually my email. But I still get the hard copy New York Times, so then I go downstairs to breakfast and try to read at least one section (I have two small children). I read it back to front, so I usually start with Arts, Dining, or Home. I feel that I get much more out of the paper than I do the Times online or on my phone. By the end of the day I have at least flipped through every section, so I see things in Business or Sports that I would never seek out.

I also think it is important for my kids to have an idea that reading the paper is something that you do every day. If all they see is me staring at my phone all the time, they don’t know what I am doing. Last spring, when the Times was writing about Turn Off the Dark every day, my son got very interested in the news about Spiderman, which I thought was great.

3. What’s the best thing you read over the summer and why?
Not the best, but one that I still think about, and one which relates to culture and criticism: Tina Fey‘s Bossypants. Why, I thought after I read it, do you have to be as fabulously successful as Tina Fey to be listened to when you speak about the way women, and particularly mothers, are treated at and treat work? There’s a terrible silence in architecture about how it really is for women, and I think we all need to be bolder and more straightforward about talking about our children, the trade-offs we make, what we can and can’t do. If no one listens until you have a cult hit, there’s a problem.
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“Please put your shirt back on.” Rarely does an art director have cause to utter these words while on the job—and rarer still when the job in question is a Maxim photoshoot with starlet Olivia Wilde—but it’s all in a day’s work for Dirk Barnett. The editorial branding pro, who earned an undergraduate degree in journalism before finding his calling on the art and photo side of the masthead, moved from Maxim to Lucky last fall, but put in only a few days at Conde Nast HQ before Tina Brown wooed him to her newly formed “NewsBeast,” the Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Since then, Barnett and his team have rolled out a redesign (the eighth major newsstand title he’s overhauled), a new logo, and a special “Osama Is Dead” issue, all the while making images and photojournalism more prominent in the magazine. Now they’re working their magic on the Newsweek and Daily Beast websites. We caught up with Barnett after his presentation at Friday’s ABSTRACT Conference to ask him seven questions.

Barnett’s design work for Blender and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine

1. What has been your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
When I was a young designer at Entertainment Weekly in ‘97, I was working on a story about Van Morrison, and we were using one of Anton Corbijn’s portraits from the 80’s. Photo editor Michelle Romero knew I was a huge Corbijn fan, and as I was designing the opener, she ninja’ed me and brought in Anton to take a look at the layout. My jaw dropped and he started telling stories about Van, etc. It was a fantastic early career moment that always sticks with me.

2. What is your greatest graphic design pet peeve?
Laziness

3. What do you consider your proudest design moment?
Pulling off Newsweek’s Osama bin Laden special issue in 36 hours.

4. You were among the design star-studded list of presenters at the ABSTRACT Conference. For those who couldn’t make it to Maine, what did you talk about?
At ABSTRACT, I talked the conference attendees through “a day in the life” of what it means—and takes—to art direct, conceptualize, and design a news weekly magazine in 2011. Looking through the lens of Newsweek’s recent redesign, I walked through how we dealt with the Japan earthquake and tsunami disasters and bin Laden’s death.
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“Much of what we have known as designers has suddenly shifted,” says Luke Hayman. “However, we still have the ability to establish identity, and to communicate and engage through our design tools.” A partner at Pentagram, Hayman is something of a world champion in establishing identity, communicating, and engaging, whether on behalf of New York magazine (which he famously overhauled as design director) or the Khaleej Times, a Dubai broadsheet. Other publications that have enjoyed a visual rebirth at the hands of Hayman include TIME, Consumer Reports, and the Atlantic. This afternoon, he’ll take the stage at the ABSTRACT Conference in Portland, Maine, to lead a session entitled “Identity Crisis?” We took the interrogative hint and asked Hayman to answer our seven questions.

1. Can you give us a sneak preview of your ABSTRACT Conference presentation?
I’ll be talking about the importance of finding and establishing identity for a publication. What makes up the DNA of a magazine and how can it be expressed in rich, lasting way.

2. What is your greatest graphic design/publication design pet peeve?
Thoughtless stealing…as opposed to thoughtful ‘borrowing’!

3. What has been your most memorable design-related encounter?
George Lois calling to give his opinion on the cover of the first issue of New York magazine we did. He didn’t like it!

4. What do you consider your proudest design moment?
Joining Pentagram.

5. What’s on your summer reading list?
I’m on a Lee Child binge: guilty pleasure/escapism.
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