Design conversations with cultural consequence.
Scratching the Surface treats design as a serious cultural practice, not a style category. Its conversations move through architecture, exhibitions, books, landscapes, galleries, and music with a steady interest in how creative work changes the terms around it.
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Scratching the Surface is a long-running design conversation series with unusually wide edges. It treats design as a way of thinking through culture rather than as a finished product category. The show is calm but never thin. Its conversations often begin with a book, exhibition, gallery, building practice, album cover, or institution, then widen into questions about responsibility, access, authorship, climate, public life, and the limits of professional language. Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider bring architecture into direct contact with the climate crisis. Heidi Korsavong and Benjamin Critton describe MARTA as a space where artists and designers can test utility, function, and resource sharing. Giovanna Borasi’s episode turns the Canadian Centre for Architecture into a question about collections, research, exhibitions, and public access. Walter Hood’s work opens a conversation about landscape, typology, cultural practice, and how disciplines can be made less fixed. Oliver Munday’s episode shifts from book jacket design toward fiction and fatherhood. Sam Valenti’s conversation uses Ghostly International to think about record labels, visual identity, cultural brands, and the long relationship between music and design. Carlo Ratti’s Venice Architecture Biennale episode puts architecture in dialogue with natural, artificial, and collective intelligence. Helen Molesworth’s episode returns art criticism to feeling as well as theory. The show’s strength is not speed. It is attention. Questions are allowed to lengthen, double back, and locate the pressure point inside a word or premise. The result is a design show for people who care about objects but also want to know what surrounds them: institutions, histories, publics, materials, labor, climate, and belief.
Made for: For designers, architects, writers, academics, artists, theorists, and culturally curious listeners who like patient conversations about how creative practice meets public life. It especially suits people drawn to theory when it stays connected to real work and institutions.
What sets it apart: Scratching the Surface stands apart by letting design questions remain complex without turning them into jargon or neat takeaways. It links books, galleries, exhibitions, landscapes, music, and architecture through the social and cultural systems that shape them.
Scratching the Surface is a podcast about design, theory, and creative practice. Hosted by Jarrett Fuller, each episode features wide-ranging conversations with designers, architects, writers, academics, artists, and theorists about how design shapes culture. Previous guests include architecture critic Paul Goldberger, MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, architect and OMA partner Reinier de Graaf, Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, RISD President Rosanne Somerson, writer Kurt Andersen, and designer Jessica Helfand. Featured in Architectural Digest, Dezeen, Curbed, and Eye. New episodes every other Wednesday.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jared Fuller's informed interviews connect design theory to the institutions, collaborations, and material choices through which culture takes shape.
Scratching the Surface treats design as a way of organizing culture, institutions, and responsibility. In extended interviews, Jared Fuller begins with a guest's project or practice, then follows its implications: how a gallery creates room for experimentation, how the Canadian…
Jarrett Fuller makes architecture answer to climate and institutions, so your taste gets a conscience.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A measured design conversation that puts climate inside architecture's history, terms, and collective practice.
Architecture is Climate gives this episode its frame, with Jared Fuller explaining how MOLD's book changed the way he thinks about design and architecture.
A design gallery becomes a testing ground for art, function, and unexpected resource sharing.
Scratching the Surface follows MARTA, the Los Angeles gallery founded in 2019 by designers Heidi Korzong and Benjamin Critton, as it considers what design can become when it steps away from its usual assignments.
A careful conversation about how an architecture institution turns collections and research into public questions.
Giovanna Barassi frames the Canadian Centre for Architecture as a museum and research institution whose exhibitions, publications, events, collections, research grants, and collection-rooted projects bring architectural ideas into public view.
A thoughtful conversation about how album covers can lead into the wider cultural worlds a label builds through design.
Album covers serve as the doorway into a broader look at how design, music, and a label's identity can strengthen one another. Jared Fuller begins with his own discovery of designer credits inside favorite CDs, then follows that curiosity toward Peter Saville, Factory Records,…
A closing-day conversation on architecture's authorship, climate pressures, and exhibition materials designed for reuse.
Scratching the Surface meets Carlo Ratti on the closing day of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where his curatorial frame, Intelligence, Natural Artificial Collective, sets up a conversation about architecture under pressure.
Community radio with a wide front door.
Architecture talk from inside the studio.
Portrait craft from inside the working week.
Architecture as argument, archive, and lived space.
Architecture, patiently thought through aloud.
Architecture practice, told from the working side.
Jared Fuller interviews Jack Murphy, executive editor of the Architects Newspaper, about his background in architecture and his role at the publication.
Jared Fuller reflects on how the mid-2000s web and resources like YouWorkForThem shaped his graphic design career.
Jarrett Fuller introduces an essay by Nicholas de Monchaux arguing that design's original Latin meaning encompassed strategy and organization, not just drawing, and that expanding design today means returning to that broader definition.
Jared Fuller reflects on losing the ability to appreciate art emotionally after studying theory, inspired by Helen Molesworth's new book that balances thinking and feeling.
Jared Fuller interviews Joel Towers, president of the New School, about the state of design education and higher education amid instability and AI.
Jared Fuller opens with a reading confession.
The conversation opens with a question.
The conversation begins with the institution.
Jared Fuller interviews Walter Hood about his multidisciplinary design practice and his concept of cultural practice versus social practice.
Jared Fuller introduces Oliver Munday, a renowned book jacket designer and author of a new short story collection about fatherhood.
Album covers opened the door.
The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale turns into a live question about what architecture can do under climate pressure.