perhaps magazine – home

Like an echo, which can change over time, a return may be more than just a repetition. What sounded one way before can start to develop into something new and different. In resonance, a single word can become a conversation, an extension, a dialogue between past and present, present and future. 

Several articles in this issue take up new ways of looking, from visual representations of the planet we call home (p. 80) to the ways we mark and understand the passage of time (p. 22) — and, to some extent, the frustrations and futility of these representations.

Can we ever return to what was? And even if we could, would we still be the same, having gained new experiences along the way?

In this issue, Nene Villalobos returns us to his childhood memories growing up in the Inland Empire in Southern California and reflects on his recent sculptural work about the warehouses that now sprawl across the desert landscape (p. 14).

What happens when we reframe the past and start to tell different stories?

In conversation with BIPOC Design History (p. 64), we consider the limitations, many definitions, and possibilities of “design” and “craft” and explore their platform’s role in rethinking design, how it’s taught, and the communities it serves. As one possible intervention, Randa Hadi challenges the notion of the hero — the central figure, the lone innovator, the “master” — and turns our attention to collective archives that enact and embody multiplicity (p. 75).

Lara Knutson, reflective material study, 2018.

Multiplicity may also be found in our own creative processes, as Lara Knutson shows by tracing her own journey across design, fine art, and architecture. Through her in-depth explorations of light as material (p. 56), she has been reflecting and refracting ideas off each other to create new relationships, new discoveries, new worlds, new experiences — like the sparkling material study that shimmers on our cover. In a constant state of reimagination and reinterpretation, her work is ignited by light and perceived uniquely by the individual viewer in an ephemeral moment.

These moments of beauty and discovery can find us every day. Jer Thorp reflects on his practice of recording bird sightings and the wonder that data art can bring to our experience of the environment (p. 6). Animals abound in this issue, with a collection of ten pieces of short prose and poetry (p. 42) that bring to life different familiars — companion creatures that bridge the human-animal world as guides, helpers, and bearers of knowledge. Even the words of a mechanical fortune-teller (p. 34) can offer wisdom, if we only have the will to listen. When we commit to reevaluating our world, we can begin rebuilding it. 

We hope this second issue resonates with you.

Michael, Nancy, and Chris