Designers produce artifacts for multiple reasons that range from the idealism that shifts our thinking about how to create a more just world to satisfying the profit motive and the search for design celebrity. Artifacts need representation. Online magazines, books, mobile devices, trackers, bikes, buildings and shoes work across popular culture to construct desire through representation. This theory-based seminar examines numerous, desirable artifacts from late twentieth century to the present. We will evaluate the complex influence we (as makers) exert on popular culture and its equally forceful influence on us. Guided by informative texts through an examination of star-quality artifacts, we will critique production, consumption, and representation and question the distinction between want and need. Readings provide a critical understanding of design, consumption, and the changing urban behaviors that result in endless surfaces made available for the image through consumer-oriented phenomena such as "station domination" in the physical world and those used in social media. The readings for this seminar address artifacts from a variety of design disciplines and investigate connections among artifact, image, and popular consumer culture.

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