Design and Consumption: Mechanisms of Conveying Information

Gabrielle Cornish is an assistant professor of musicology at UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. Her research broadly considers music and everyday life in the Soviet Union. In particular, her monograph-in-progress, Socialist Noise: Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin, traces the intersections between music, technology, and the politics of socialist modernity during the Cold War. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Musicology and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and she has bylines in Slate, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She has also appeared as a guest to discuss Russian history, culture, and politics on NBC Nightly News, BBC World Service Television, and BBC Radio Newsday.

Kevin Nute is a British-American architectural theorist and professor of architecture at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He trained at the universities of Cambridge and Nottingham and spent much of his early career in Japan, initially as a visiting research scholar at the University of Tokyo and later as an associate professor of architecture at Muroran Institute of Technology. His books include Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited (2025), Embodied Time (2024), The Constructed Other (2021), This Here Now (2020), Naturally Animated Architecture (2018), Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004), and Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993).

Blue Rachapradit is a Thai interdisciplinary visual artist and MFA candidate at UW-Madison. Her works explore feminist themes through a surreal aesthetic that highlights the morbid in the mundane. Born and raised in Thailand, Blue is inspired by the complicated relationship she has with her home country. Her works employ a punchy and subversive visual language to convey an expressive and rebellious inquiry in the everyday.