The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design of has launched Ian McBlog, a new online publication dedicated to uplifting the voices of "the rising generation of designers who will lead—and are already leading—the response to our overlapping crises of climate, capitalism, and resurgent fascism."

The blog already features two entries, one from McHarg Center director Billy Fleming explaining some of his rationale for initiating the blog. 

Decrying the insular, disconnected, and sluggish nature of conventional academic publishing, Fleming writes, "Our conventional platforms for Very Serious publishing remain stubbornly disconnected from the overlapping crises that now shape every rising generation of designers. They too are slow, small, and focused on tweaking our bodies of knowledge. At their best, our peer-reviewed journals force scholars to slog through years of reviews, revisions, and resubmissions, much of which is dictated by the idiosyncrasies and grievances of the reviewers—some of whom are stunned to learn that not everyone has found their work relevant to every article they dare to send into the peer-review ether." 

• Illustrating the massive scale of America's decarbonization challenge
• AOC and Bernie Sanders unveil "Green New Deal for Housing" plan
• UPenn and The Architecture Lobby to livestream "Designing a Green New Deal" symposium
• McHarg Center exhibition highlights global ecological urbanism

"Outside of this peer-reviewed system, the publishing landscape for designers is vanishingly small. Though there are a few exceptional outlets that often commission design writing, they can be difficult for new authors to crack—and there are few, if any, platforms dedicated to cultivating young designers’ writing and to creating pathways to publishing beyond the conventional structure. We need more on-ramps to these kinds of cultural platforms," Fleming adds.  

A second post by current Weitzman School of Design student and Ian McBlog editor James Andrew Billingsley went live today and focuses on chronicling some of the intellectual and artistic traditions that deal with apocalyptic and dystopian thinking. Billingsley offers a fascinating analysis of the five-stage Standard Model of Apocalypse specific to Abrahamic traditions and of the Mahayana Buddhist construct of 末法—or Mò Fǎ—that centers not on rapture and apocalypse but "degeneracy" and lawlessness. The essay highlights the intellectual crisis taking shape within professional groups with regards to eroding core disciplinary knowledges resulting from climate collapse and how these ideas are tied to the work of professional organizations like the American Society of Landscape Architects (The McHarg Center is housed within Weitzman School of Design's landscape architecture program). 

Billingsley's essay is an outgrowth of the McHarg Center's Design With Nature Now conference that took place in 2019 and will be followed up by other student generated essays from that event. According to Fleming, the blog is fielding pitches for additional essays and is offering $200 in renumeration for articles that make it to publishing.