Deem Journal was founded in 2019 by three Black creatives who saw a disconnect in the way people talk about design. Nu Goteh, a Liberian-born refugee turned multidisciplinary designer, had co-founded the strategy and design studio Room for Magic with Alice Grandoit-Šutka, an anthropologist and cultural researcher raised in New York. Marquise Stillwell, founder of the New York-based design consultancy Openbox, proposed the idea of a publication. What they built together is a Los Angeles-based biannual print journal and online platform that positions design not as an industry of objects and outputs but as a social practice — the process of adding value to communities.
The premise challenges everything mainstream design media takes for granted. Where most publications assess the fidelity and aesthetics of finished products, Deem asks who the design serves, whose voices shaped it, and what happens to the community around it. The first issue, subtitled “Designing for Dignity,” opened with an interview with activist and writer adrienne maree brown and featured a food writer profiling Brooklyn’s oldest aquaponics garden alongside a conversation with USC architecture dean Milton S. F. Curry. Subsequent issues have explored education, equity, climate, and institutional design — always through long-form writing, always with contributors who might not identify as designers but whose work is fundamentally design.
The journal has earned the AIA New York Chapter’s New Perspectives Award and a grant from the Graham Foundation. Six issues in, it has been profiled by Fortune, Wallpaper\*, AIGA’s Eye on Design, and The Architect’s Newspaper. Stillwell once compared Deem’s mission to the role hip-hop magazines played in the 1990s — giving a community permission to see itself represented and to stand forward in its gifts. That comparison is not casual. Deem is doing for design what those magazines did for music: insisting that the most powerful work is being made by people the establishment has not yet noticed.
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