The Design Comedy

A beleaguered Parsons professor finds himself amid a creative hellscape as he ventures toward the root of design's evil

Design is a hellmouth of disappointment and a harrowing pit of professional failure. In this paraphrase of Dante's Divine Comedy, Otto von Busch, a pitiful design professor, searches for the design workshop at Parsons. Proving inaccessible, the lost professor falls into despair. However, a recently fired workshop technician, Virgil, appears to know the way. They descend the crumbling corridors of design's collapse, through the ruins and anguish of broken promises, failed research, self-absorbed design theorists and hypocritical designers, to the very nadir of design's inferno. With augmented illustrations of Dore's famous engravings and allusions to insider knowledge woven throughout the rhyming verse, this ambitious and ultra-creative project will provide levity for even the most tortured designer. Otto von Busch is a designer and Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design in New York.