- Kamau High

Kurt Andersen is known for many things. Co-founder of the seminal snarky magazine, Spy, author of Turn of the Century and Heyday, and host of the arts and culture show Studio 360, which is heard on public radio. Less well known is his background in the design community.

Andersen was the architecture and design critic for Time magazine in the mid- to late-'80s, where he wrote about topics ranging from Austrian architect Hans Hollein winning the Pritzker Prize to German skyscraper designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

When he, along with Graydon Carter, the current editor of Vanity Fair, founded Spy in 1986, they wanted design to drive the publication. They hired designer Stephen Doyle and art director Alex Isley "when the magazine was still embryonic and in flux," Andersen says. "You have to find designers who can step up to the plate of having interesting ideas and bring them into the process early."

Spy covers were famous for their illustrations of celebrities such as Hillary Clinton scantily dressed in a dominatrix outfit or Bruce Willis naked and pregnant. In 2002, New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum asked Andersen, who at the time was writing Heyday, a historical love story, to curate an exhibition on design. Andersen agreed on one condition: The exhibition would reflect his obsession with the 19th century, also the setting for his book. The museum agreed, and the result was Faster, Cheaper, Newer, More: Revolutions of 1848, a look at the political, technological and social changes of the time. Items on display included a telegraph key, daguerreotypes and a hand-held rubber mirror.

Andersen now sits on the board of trustees at the Cooper-Hewitt as well as the Pratt Institute in New York. This fall he will teach a graduate-level class on design criticism at New York's School of Visual Arts.

Andersen's varied credentials led the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to name him its second "visionary in residence" for the spring semester in 2009.

"We're always trying to infuse the arts center and community with an outsider who can influence the students. It's not about designers, because we have a lot of those already. People in different fields have a different energy," says Mark Breitenberg, dean of humanities and design sciences at the college, which has about 1,500 students. "Kurt is so eclectic. He's done novels, plays and design shows. He's such a lightning rod for creative fields."

So what does a visionary in residence actually do all day? When noted science-fiction author Bruce Sterling became the first one in 2005, he wrote a book, Visionary in Residence: Stories, and attended design classes, among other things. Andersen's plans include lecturing and design-devoted episodes of his radio show, which will move to Los Angeles for the duration of his stay in California.

"I will create some trans-discipline course or project ... that reflects the embarrassing and flattering and wonderful title they have given me," Andersen says. "They have a lecture series Toyota sponsors, so I'll be doing stuff with them. Beyond that, it's wide open. I'm going to spend the rest of this year figuring out what nutty projects I can do with them."

Pressed for specifics, Andersen elaborates: "Design, in all of its fluid ways, can and will be a big factor in what's next. The degree to which the boundaries between graphic design and filmmaking and environmental design are collapsing -- those sort of pigeonholed borders that existed 10 years ago are falling." He points to the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George, a musical inspired by painter Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as an example.

As for what the Harvard graduate thinks is big right now in design, he points to sustainability and how companies can bring design more front and center. "People are trying to figure out how to make the world beautiful at the margins, which is what design really is, but not in an after-the-fact, frosting-on-the-cake kind of way," says the 53-year-old.

"Depending on the business, if it's consumer goods for example, people in marketing often conceive of the product and then it goes down the line before finally getting to a graphic designer who is told to make it pretty. What these businesses need to realize is that design is useful and profitable and to think of design as more than picking fonts and colors."