The elegant Alice Twemlow is a design writer, curator, and critic based in New York City. A long-time voice within the graphic design community, she has directed several conferences for the AIGA and is the author of What is Graphic Design For? (Rotovision, 2006) and StyleCity New York (Thames & Hudson, 2005).

As the Chair of Design Criticism (D-Crit), an MFA program she co-founded with Steven Heller, she is at the forefront of design education. Always with her fingers in many pots, Alice is also a doctoral candidate in Graphic Design History at the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum History of Design in London. Base was happy to sneak a few moments of her time this summer to learn more about her work and impressions of the design community at-large, and to catch up on life after the inaugural year of one of the world’s first graduate programs in critical design thought.

The following interview was contributed by Amelia Black, a student of Twemlow’s in the D-Crit program at SVA.