Support/Structure
Letter from the editor: Hannah Bigeleisen 1/17/2026
If you are a designer, artist, maker, curator,
or thinker working in and around design, I invite you to send me what you are making. Send work you want seen. Send work that takes risks, that resists neat categorization. Send work that deserves to be engaged with seriously, that asks questions of itself and of us, and that rewards critical attention.
Criticism can be defined in many ways: a practice, a field of study, an act, and in some cases, even its absence. The world of art criticism is often traced back to ancient philosophers. In the Western canon, Plato and Aristotle questioned art’s truth. In Eastern traditions that predate them, including Yuan dynasty, Indian, Buddhist, and Japanese discourses, criticism focused on symbolism, divine forms, and ideas such as wabi-sabi.
Today, there are established fields and voices within contemporary criticism across art, food, literature, movement practices, and music. In the world of design, however, there remains a noticeable void. There is no shortage of journalism about design history, some of it personal, some analytical, and at times even critical of the work or the designer being discussed. But as a field, design criticism has yet to exist at the same scale or with the same rigor as its counterparts.
Design, its practitioners, and its broader community deserve more than the endless “buy this, it’s the best beige sofa known to mankind” flood of media that flattens design into product rather than practice. While there are articles that consider design as a reflection of how we live, our values, and what we build, there must be a more deliberate effort to articulate the standards, values, and criteria by which we judge design beyond saleability or spectacle.
The most compelling design work is often shaped by decisions that remain invisible, or at least appear seamless. Just as we encounter a painting as its final image rather than the underpainting, revisions, and accumulation of marks beneath the surface, design carries within it a history of choices. Material considerations, structural logic, labor, constraint, engineering, risk, ethics, and intention all shape what we ultimately experience. A chair is never only a chair. A surface is never only a surface. The objects we live with communicate values long before we articulate them.
As editor of design at Tussle, my goal is to engage design through a wide lens: formally, politically, technologically, historically, culturally, and philosophically. I am interested in how design intersects with systems of power, including housing, access, labor, climate, the politics of taste, production versus craft, and the role aesthetics play within the increasingly porous boundary between design and art. Design is not separate from society and culture. It is a structure within them, and an extension of them. Design shapes our environments, our bodies, and our expectations of what life should, or could, look and feel like. Because of this, design deserves criticism that is as layered, rigorous, and expansive as the field itself.