TBD (To Be Designed)

In typical Julian manner, he said “It’ll be a thing. I think.” Julian wanted to bring together these folx to come up with “A SkyMall Catalog from the near future” as a means of exploring and criticizing potential futures by creating possible, but not necessarily preferable scenarios revealed through the means of designed artifacts. He was looking for somewhere “between Europe and California, that wasn’t New York.” He wanted to know if we could make it happen in Detroit. We rolled up our sleeves and got to work on it.

In October 2012, we set up our temporary studio at the University of Michigan’s Detroit Center and spent three days with a small group of invited designers, writers, curators, journalists, and technologists for a broad discussion about shifts going on in the world of making, manufacturing, design, and innovation. The workshop was generously supported by Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at University of Michigan, and we also spent time in the archives of the Henry Ford Museum looking at the history of innovation. We spent our time discussing, pitching, voting, revising, designing, reviewing, and laying out until we had a rough draft of a catalog. Christian Svanes Kolding filmed the entire thing and did talking-head interviews with us all.

Having established the methodology, tone, and template for the catalog everyone returned home. Over the next 2 years, the results of the ideas from the initial brainstorm were refined and many more added. Finally, the catalog was finished and published. The irony was, that in the time it took to fully develop the catalog, several of the things we had imagined were released as commercial products, and SkyMall, LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2015.