Design DraftsDesign Drafts

Since 2021, Aric Chen is the new General and Artistic Director at the Nieuwe Instituut, the institute for architecture, design, and digital culture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Before arriving at the Nieuwe Instituut, Chen was the founding lead curator for design and architecture for M+, a museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, the first creative director of Beijing Design Week, as well as of Design Miami. 

Emmanuel Olunkwa is a New York-based artist, writer, and editor. He is the co-founder of November Magazine, a nonprofit that publishes longform interviews and expository essays on culture, art, and architecture. Since September 2021, he has served as editor of PIN–UP Magazine. Olunkwa also distributes his own furniture designs under the label E&Ko.

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron is an internationally-recognized curator, writer, and critical thinker on contemporary design. Since 2018 she holds the title of Curator of Contemporary Design and Hintz Secretarial Scholar at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

Danah Abdulla is a designer, educator and researcher interested in new narratives and practices in design that push the disciplinary boundaries and definitions of the discipline. She is the Head of Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea, and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL). Her first book Designerly Ways of Knowing: A Working Inventory of Things a Designer Should Know was published by Onomatopee (2022). She is working on her forthcoming monograph Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Felix Burrichter is the founder of PIN–UP magazine, a biannual architecture and design publication. He was trained as an architect and now works as PIN–UP’s editorial and creative director. He has curated internationally at institutions and galleries and has published and co-edited several architecture, design, and artist books and articles.

Delany Boutkan is a writer, editor, and curator, and since 2019 a researcher as part of the Nieuwe Instituut’s Research team — where she is (amongst others) responsible for the Design Drafts program and several other collaborative research projects and public programs, such as Collecting Otherwise. She has published and co-edited design and art-related articles and essays for national and international publications.