Shinola Presents: Designing for the Future | Time & Space

For Detroit Month of Design, Shinola hosts a conversation between Periodicals and an incredible group of artists, designers, musicians, chefs, thinkers and cultural practitioners around the subject of time. Not simply how we measure it, but how we use it, what we choose to carry forward, and how our relationship to time shapes what we make next. 

Across three conversations, Time & Craft, Time & Systems, and Time & Place, this Designing for the Future conversation series considers time as an essential material for building what comes next. Craft looks at what can only be learned through repetition, mastery and patience, and how those skills evolve across generations. Systems considers innovation over time, asking how existing structures, technologies and ways of working can be reimagined to create new possibilities. Place explores how landscapes, homes, institutions and gathering spaces accumulate meaning, becoming cultural touchstones that can connect one generation to another. Together, these conversations probe the idea that designing for the future must explore what deserves to endure, what needs to evolve, and what conditions we create for new ideas and culture to take shape. 

In Detroit, a city with a deep relationship to making, invention, and reinvention, time offers a particularly rich way to think about the future. 

Shinola Presents: Designing for the Future | Time & Space

Some spaces seem to exist outside of time, while others become inseparable from a particular moment, gathering people, ideas and energy in ways that resonate long after it has passed. Time & Space brings together Ramdane Touhami, Isabella Burley, Romeo Okwara and Franklin Sirmans, whose work moves between landscapes, bookstores, homes, residencies and cultural institutions, to consider how spaces accumulate meaning through ritual, memory, community and repeated use. Their practices invite us to think about timelessness not as remaining unchanged, but as a space’s ability to continually generate new meaning across generations. Within Designing for the Future, the conversation asks us to consider not simply what the spaces of the future should look like, but what we hope will happen inside them: what makes people return, what allows a place to hold memory while continuing to change, and how we create spaces capable of producing cultural moments that might outlive us.

Ramdane Touhami (he/him)

Ramdane Touhami is a French-Moroccan creative director, designer, entrepreneur, and publisher known for his ability to reinvent heritage brands and craft strong visual identities rooted in culture and storytelling. Over the past three decades, he has worked across fashion, beauty, design, and print, building a career defined by independence and experimentation. 

Across all his work, Touhami moves between disciplines with precision and instinct, often reviving overlooked formats and forgotten techniques to speak to the present. 

Recognized with France's Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres honor in 2020, Touhami has inspired a young generation of entrepreneurs to prioritize craft over efficiency, authenticity over trends, and cultural specificity over global uniformity. 

Through every project, Ramdane strives to explore the intersection of aesthetics and politics, craft and communication, memory and invention. Going against an increasingly homogenized landscape, his ideology of “aesthetic deglobalization” honors local culture: Paris stores feature 18th-century carved cabinets, New York embraces Art Deco, Tokyo blends Zen minimalism with French aesthetics, and Milan integrates with local character. 

His work proves that placing culture at the center of commerce creates not just profitable businesses but meaningful institutions, and shows his belief in the power of design as the most effective form of language. Structured, emotional, and deeply engaged with the world.

Isabella Burley (she/her) 

Isabella Burley is a London and New York-based creative consultant and the founder of Climax Books, a concept bookstore

and cultural platform. Previously, she served as Chief Marketing Officer at Acne Studios and, from 2015 to 2021, as Editor-in-Chief of Dazed, becoming the title’s youngest-ever editor at the age of 24. Across her work, Burley has built a career around championing emerging creative talent and bringing together the worlds of fashion, art and publishing.

Romeo Okwara (he/him) 

Romeo Okwara, born in Lagos, Nigeria, received a BA from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana in 2016 and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 2026. Okwara spent 8 years playing in the NFL, 2 years with the New York Giants and his final 6 seasons playing for the Detroit Lions. 

Throughout his NFL career he was an avid photographer. His work has been exhibited in two solo exhibitions at Leica Store, New York, NY in 2019, Leica Store, Boston, MA in 2019, a group show at Leica 

Gallery LA, Los Angeles, CA in 2021 and a group show at Periodicals, Detroit, MI in 2024. He is also the founder of Middle Gray, a photography residency and studio located in Detroit’s Little Village. Romeo Okwara currently works and resides between Detroit and New York City.

Franklin Sirmans (he/him)

Franklin Sirmans, Sandra and Tony Tamer Director, has led the museum since fall 2015. Since coming to PAMM, he has overseen the acquisition of more than a thousand works of art by donation or purchase. Sirmans has pursued his vision of PAMM as “the people’s museum,” representing a Miami lens, by strengthening existing affiliate groups such as the PAMM Fund for Black Art and creating the International Women’s Committee and the Latin American and Latinx Art Fund. Sirmans has organized Toba Khedoori (2017) and he was co-curator of The World’s Game: Futbol and Contemporary Art (2018). Before his role as the Sandra and Tony Tamer Director at PAMM, Sirmans served as the department head and curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). 

He also served as the Artistic Director of the 2014 Prospect New Orleans biennial exhibition, P3: Notes for Now. As a curator, writer, and editor, Sirmans has established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary art. At LACMA, he curated Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada, as well as Fútbol: The Beautiful Game and oversaw major retrospectives by Glenn Ligon and Blinky Palermo. Previously, he organized exhibitions that originated at the Menil Collection such as Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964- 1966 and Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death? and NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, which traveled to MoMA PS1

and the Miami Art Museum. He is the former U.S. Editor of Flash Art and Editor-in-Chief of ArtAsiaPacific, and he has written and edited numerous artist and exhibition catalogues.