Print Magazine: This Year’s Model: pgs 50-57, By Edward Lovett
…Dexter Sinister collapses all activities of design—art-making, publishing, printing, curating, selling, criticizing—into one fluid space. It’s a vision for a new type of studio and a quiet refusal to kowtow to the pressures of specialization that, in the founders’ view, are turning the designer from a true professional who oversees all aspects of his creation into an outsourced provider of a pretty surface layer at the end. The duo wants to “reclaim responsibility for design decisions from P.R. and marketing.”
…“A lot is made about the way design looks,” says Rob Giampietro, a partner in Giampietro+Smith and a friend of Bailey’s and Reinfurt’s. “Dexter Sinister is interested in the way it’s produced.” The studio takes the form of an ethos whereby— as British design theorist Norman Potter argued in his book What is a designer?— design equals thinking, not surface (“pink or orange?” Bailey calls it), and design itself is an open question. “It’s empowering,” says Giampietro. “It holds designers more responsible for what they’re making than more traditional practices do.”
