Vic Parsons

The team behind Disegno: A Quarterly Journal of Design is proud to announce Design Reviewed, a new biannual publication devoted to experiential writing around design and its users. Each issue of Design Reviewed contains ten essays in which writers get hands-on with design and its various manifestations in the world. The texts are not qualitative assessments of their subjects, but rather personal reflections on design and the contexts in which it operates. This issue is structured around ten different forms of design output: technology, ecology, media, object, body, system, interface, policy, space and phenomena. While these categories are not exhaustive, they aim to provide a structuring principle for a discipline that is increasingly diffuse and varied. In contrast to Disegno s journal format, Design Reviewed is a smaller, more book-like publication, which takes its cue from publications such as field guides, jotters and technical manuals. It is a publication designed to be portable and handy, with a cream dust jacket to help protect it during journeys. While Disegno will be reserved for long-form reporting, in-depth interviews, and emerging project stories, Design Reviewed will be a space for reflection on design as its users experience it

In the 1980's, Canada's blood collection and distribution system, once considered a model around the world, went off the rails. What occurred was a disastrous chain of events that still reverberates to this day for the thousands whose lives were changed forever by the system's failure. Vic Parsons examines the causes of what many have called the most significant public health issue in our country's history and outlines the failure of The Red Cross and the various levels of government implicated in what was a very preventable tragedy. The price of which cost taxpayers over $10 billion dollars, and many others their lives. This book also forms the backbone of an 8 part series being funded jointly by CBC Canada and Sundance TV that will air early 2019. This is not old wine in new bottles. The issue of blood collection and distribution continues to this day in Canada, the US, the UK and Australia. The public policy debates remain current as companies wishing to open pay-for-blood-services now operate in one province and are being blocked in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. The UK is re-opening hearings this fall into the tainted blood collection issue as successive governments have failed to deal with the aftermath. It remains one of the most topical health issues today.