About surfactant

Surfacehot is an ongoing investigation into the representation of safety and danger. Warning labels are an interesting point of contact between industrial designers and their products’ end users–in many cases, pictograms and a few choice words are all that’s allowed. This blog is the result of a semester-long project undertaken by Derrick Mead, a degree candidate in the Design Criticism MFA program at SVA. Derrick has worked at various times with lots of sharp objects and dangerous machines, from farms to kitchens to crawlspaces all over New York State’s Hudson Valley, and still has all of his fingers and toes. He’s written recently for the Architect’s Newspaper and Eric Fischl’s America: Now and Here Foundation, and is the recent recipient of a Barnabas McHenry Grant from the Open Space Institute. You can get in touch with him with questions for his father, a third-generation orchardist and paragon of occupational safety, or any dangerous situations you might encounter, dialectical or otherwise, at dmead@sva.edu.