Error: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1030 Got error 28 from storage engineError: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1030 Got error 28 from storage engineError: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1030 Got error 28 from storage engineError: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1030 Got error 28 from storage engine The Observatory Episode 105: Malta, Marketing, Make-Believe: Design Observer

Advertise | Masthead

06.06.19

Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 105: Malta, Marketing, Make-Believe

Jessica and Michael discuss Lauren Oyler’s New York Times magazine column, This Is What It Sounds Like When Brands Cry, about the lengths companies go in attempts to express empathy, such as Burger King’s recent “Real Meals” campaign.

When this happens, Jessica says,

humanism becomes reframed around conflating the ideals of trying to take selling something, which in a sense is a propagandistic mission, with feeling something, which is meant to entice people to spend more money for a thing because they identify with a more human attribute that it conveys.

Also mentioned this week:

London Design Museum, Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition
Claire Messud, New York Times, Malta, Where the West Was Born
The West Wing Weekly podcast
The West Wing Wiki
Mitch Goldstein tweets on Chernobyl typeface
Serpentine font, the typeface for Chernobyl
Scriptnotes, You Got Verve

Subscribe to The Observatory on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, or follow Design Observer on Spotify or Soundcloud.

More from Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand

Episode 127: Fear and Longing
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters; Hrishi Hirway and Mike Errico; The Quiz Broadcast; Shakespeare and Co. Project

Episode 126: Screens and Dreams
Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration; Unorthodox; My Brilliant Friend; The Affair; Anil Dash on the dangers of social media; Anna Wiener on Silicon Valley; quarantine dreams

Episode 125: Zoom Aesthetics
Zoom aesthetics and COVID-19; Kyle Chayka on minimalism; Deborah Berke on shared spaces; Jessica Salfia’s poem “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining”; Megan O’Grady on artistic recluses

Episode 124: That Thing You Do
Making art and design during the COVID-19 pandemic; Christoph Niemann and Daniella Zalcman; Adam Schlesinger; spec scripts for Larry David

Episode 123: Closing Doors, Opening Doors
Looking at COVID=19: Flattening the curve, Washington Post designers Harry Stevens on visualizing social distancing, Alissa Walker on how dots are people, Stephen Sondheim at 90

Jobs | November 25