08/25/2025
⚠️ Design-In-Crisis Communications from a high-value target (please help): The Infantilisation of Design Educators in Exile
Published: August 24, 2025 | All rights reserved. The skeuomorphic design newsletter is protected under U.S. and international laws governing free speech and journalism.
On August 10, 2025, I published two articles (protected under U.S. and international laws governing free speech and journalism) raising awareness about the exponentially expanding problem of: Design Educators in Exile: The Forgotten Architects of Civic Stability (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten) and The Defense Brief of a Morally Unfit Designer (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten) following The Attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten).
Design Educators challenge norms for a living (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/position-letter-to-one-more-thing) and require the same level of diplomatic security as diplomats, journalists, and scientists because our work directly influences the stability, resilience, and adaptability of society’s core systems (https://apple.com).
This visibility and impact can make us targets for harassment, disinformation, and coordinated attempts to undermine our credibility (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-against-crime-and-credibility) especially when our teaching challenges entrenched interests. Regime strategists in-turn systematically PUSH us into surveillance and into harms way and then create shared behavior maps and fake insurance plans to secure budgets for activist payloads (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/exposing-activist-payloads-in-fake) so nobody has to ask what designers actually do for work.
This getting this story out required AI-assistance but it was 20 years in the making of being subjected to constant guardianship abuse, reputational warfare, engineered and ideological https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/the-persistence-of-infrastructuression (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten), gag orders (http://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/a-call-to-lift-the-gag-order-on-design ) https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/the-persistence-of-infrastructures-in-exile-the-forgotten), ritual silencing and enduring persistent enslavement, infrastructure failures ( https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/the-persistence-of-infrastructure ) and containment practice to get it out.
The idea that someone else can swoop in years later and claim they now control how I talk about my own work doesn’t hold water.
My role is documented (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten).
The designs were for internal use, not for public branding ( https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten), and that’s what secures my ground (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgottenhttps://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten)
I can, and will defend my authorship. My slides weren’t a commercial label, they were a storytelling device. History can’t be rewritten by paperwork filed after the fact by a group of developers trying to make Apple’s history and Steve’s legacy appear ideologically unfit or impure. Our work was real, it happened, and no trademark claim can erase it.
Design Educators like me need your help, anybody who tries to speak up about it are being incarcerated (and worse).
This is my story (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/), and I'm not the only one speaking out about it (Read The System Protects Itself And Punishes Those Who Speak: https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/design-educators-in-exile-the-forgotten).
Please read the article in the comments that I worked extremely hard on, I’m not asking for signups or pay, I don’t need your bitcoin and am not giving out wallet addresses.
The Routine of Behavioral Mapping: How Union Activists Reframed Design Work Into Silence (https://skeuomorphicdesign.substack.com/p/the-routine-of-behavioral-mapping)
This is the story of how institutional neglect (not markets) have sent Design Educators into Exile to understand the financial motivations behind people who devote their entire livelihoods to flattening designers into archetypes to replace the Language of Work.
Published: August 24, 2025 | All rights reserved. The skeuomorphic design newsletter is protected under U.S. and international laws governing free speech and journalism.
This is the story they didn’t want to get out.
