Design Criticism: David Womack, Elizabeth Demaray, and Karrie Jacobs

SVA’s Design Criticism reading series: Karrie Jacobs, David Womak and Elizabeth Demaray speak on the topic of Home.


David Womack is a writer, editor and consultant who contributes articles on design, technology, and culture to publications including I.D. magazine, Salon.com, The Guardian newspaper (UK) and Cabinet magazine. He is the editor of Adobe’s Think Tank, a series of in-depth articles that examines the relationship between design and technology. He was director of new media at AIGA from 2000 to 2004 and served as executive editor of GAIN: AIGA Journal of Business and Design, and managing editor of VOICE: AIGA Journal of Design. David has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia.

Elizabeth Demaray’s conceptual sculptures explore ways in which thought is mediated by basic psychological needs, such as care, control, taxonomy and love. Her recent projects have focused on domesticating the great outdoors by knitting sweaters for plants, upholstering stones and manufacturing alternative forms of housing for hermit crabs out of plastic. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Demaray studied cognitive psychology and neuroscience before receiving her MFA at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art. She has exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, The M.H DeYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, among other institutions.

Karrie Jacobs is contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, “America,” about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape, and is a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure, where she writes about destinations of interest to the architectural tourist. She is author of The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (Viking, 2006), a book about housing in America. Between 1999 and 2002 Karrie was the founding editor in chief of Dwell, a San Francisco-based magazine about modern residential architecture and design. Prior to launching Dwell, Karrie served as the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and she has written about design, technology, and visual language for many periodicals including The New York Times, I.D., and Fortune. And in the early 1990s, Jacobs was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors Magazine.

This talk is hosted by the Design Criticism MFA department at the School of Visual Arts. For more information about the program, visit http://designcriticism.sva.edu.