“Cities are great places in which to experiment and to try to use design to affect human life — it’s the right kind of scale,” Michael says in a conversation about Cape Town, where Jessica traveled with students to study the severe water shortage, and Los Angeles, which named L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne as its
first chief design officer.
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Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.
Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.