The Design Comedy: The Decent Through Inferno

Design is a hellmouth of disappointment and a harrowing pit of professional failure. In this paraphrase of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Otto von Busch, a pitiful design professor, searches for the design workshop at Parsons. Proving inaccessible, the lost professor falls into despair. However, a recently fired workshop technician, Virgil, appears to know the way. They descend the crumbling corridors of design’s collapse, through the ruins and anguish of broken promises, failed research, self-absorbed design theorists, and hypocritical designers, to the very nadir of design’s inferno.

Introduction by Nicola Masciandaro
Commentary by Aaron Sechler