Today we are happy to announce Sight Unseen’s first-ever guest editor series. In what we hope will become an annual tradition, for the next four weeks we’ll be handing over the reins, for one week each, to four different curators and practitioners in design and the arts, popping our heads up only every Saturday to bring you our weekly Selects column. Though the seeds for this initiative were sown long ago — we recently turned 10, and the idea of de-centering ourselves and stepping outside our normal flow was suddenly highly compelling — we officially began planning this series in earnest earlier this summer. At the time, we, like most people, had begun a course of self-examination and realized that the call to use our platform for something beyond ourselves was long past due. We hoped a guest editor series would be an exciting way to increase the diversity of our coverage, in terms of race, gender, geography, discipline, and point of view.

The four editors we chose to curate our stories for the next four weeks represent an interesting and multidisciplinary swath of the design world. Our first editor — the Brooklyn-based Thai-American furniture designer Robert Sukrachand, who grew up bouncing between Boston and Bangkok — had already been using the power of his Instagram to ask thoughtful questions about issues in design like decolonization, Eurocentrism, and the rehabilitation of craft. His essay and chosen subjects will address all of these and more. Our second editor is Yoko Choy: Born in Hong Kong and based in Amsterdam, Choy serves as the China editor at Wallpaper and will be using her week to explore the burgeoning independent design scene in her native country. Third will be Fiorella Valdesolo, who first caught our attention as editor of the late, great Gather Magazine; it deftly married food with design, so perhaps it’s no surprise that her week will delve into the power of interconnectedness and how we relate to one another. Our last editor team is Ed Be and Jared Blake of Lichen NYC, the Brooklyn-based interior design incubator and vintage purveyor. The goal of their shop is to democratize design and to make visible the unknown, and their week will follow suit.

We hope you follow along, comment, question, and enjoy!