How the Insights 2025 Design Lecture Series brings design down to an everyday, human level

Design isn’t just relegated to the world of graphic design or fashion — it’s the makeup of our everyday lives.

“‘Design’ is such a common term that we use pretty casually, but design is also a discipline, and what we do as designers — whether you’re an architect who’s designing buildings or landscape architect or product designer — any form of design essentially plays a critical role in shaping our world,” University of Minnesota’s College of Design Dean Prasad Boradkar said.

Walker Art Center’s Insights 2025 Design Lecture Series offers Minnesotans a chance to zoom into the world of design through a series of lectures this month. This year, the annual series, a collaboration with AIGA Minnesota, an association for professional designers of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, focuses on themes of shopkeeping and world-making through design, among others.

Lecturers come to Minneapolis from Amsterdam, Utah, Philadelphia and just down the street in the Uptown neighborhood. Some work with big brands, like creative director Zeynep Orbay and design collaborative Actual Source, while others run their own spaces, for example Yowie and Odd Mart.

“Whether it’s Odd Mart...dealing with the world of comics, which is kind of a world-making enterprise, to Shannon Maldonado of Yowie, who has created a boutique hotel and coffee shop on South Street in Philly, we’re in this moment of AI and the algorithm,” said Mark Owens, Walker’s design director. “I think encountering spaces wherein singular creative intelligence has created a space is very refreshing.”

The series kicked off last week with Yowie’s Maldonado, who transitioned from being a fashion designer in New York to owning her own boutique store and, now, Yowie hotel in Philadelphia. She was inspired to start her own business in part after working with the now-defunct 77kids, American Eagle’s kids brand.

“I got to see a brand go from ideation to death, and all that went with that,” Maldonado said. “It was a really fascinating thing to be a part of. It had very high highs and low lows, but I learned a lot, and that made me think ‘What would it be like if I started a space or a brand?’”

In 2018, she quit her full-time job and did just that. Maldonado, who is Black, opened the boutique retail store Yowie. It took off, reaching new heights in 2020, and she stood in solidarity with other Black-owned businesses and creatives following the killing of George Floyd. The boutique eventually transformed into the 13-room Yowie Hotel that she designed and co-owns. Unlike the bland uniformity of chain hotels, everything in each room is unique and for sale.

She came to the Twin Cities last week, just a few months before the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and during a creatively and politically very different time in the United States under the Trump administration.

“It’s a weird time in culture and politics,” she said. “I think a lot of those measures [that were enacted during George Floyd] are being pulled back or canceled.

“At times it feels like that time was a fever dream, especially as a small business — there was so much support...that just is not there at this point.”

The lecture on March 26 will be presented by Minneapolis’ Odd Mart founder Brad McGinty and other local creatives. Founded in 2023, Odd Mart is known for comics, illustrations, zines, vintage goods and a weekly art market. McGinty, known for his small business GLORP Gum, “the only gum that comes with a free T-shirt,” wanted to get back to offline and real-world things.

He also was seeking community.

“I’m from Atlanta and I’ve lived here for 13 years now, but I still don’t know a lot of people,” he said. “Everyone I am bringing with me to talk at the event I met through the markets that we started having here, and they’ve all become important to the store in their own way.”

The Walker, too, has a history of design-oriented retail space that Owens hopes visitors will think of when they come to the lecture series. The Idea House Project I and II, originally launched during the post-World War II period, was one of the first design shops in a museum in America. It wasn’t until November 2023 that Idea House 3 opened, the brainchild of Asli Altay, the Walker’s director of design programming, and Felice Clark, the Walker’s director of business development.

“The Walker has always been a place where you can encounter design as a person off the street — it was always very democratic in that way,” Owens said.

With all of these things under the umbrella of design, the idea of design can start to feel abstract perhaps because it’s so all-encompassing.

Samantha Sather, a professor of graphic design at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, noted that design is actually quite simple: Its ultimate function is to solve a problem.

“I’m a big fan of Bauhaus, form following function and function being the most important thing,” she said.

Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.

When: March 12, 19 and 26 at 7 p.m.

Cost: $10-$24 for lectures, free for online workshops on March 29 & April 5.

Info: walkerart.org or 612-375-7600.