Shinola Presents: Designing for the Future | Time & Craft

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 & Craft 

Craft is inseparable from time. It takes time to learn a material, develop an instinct and repeat a gesture until it becomes intuitive, but craft also gives us a way to work with time: preserving what might disappear, carrying inherited knowledge forward and imagining what does not yet exist. Time & Craft brings together Jeff Mills, Akea Brionne, Charlie Mitchell, Maen Hammad and Dozie Kanu, practitioners whose work spans music, textiles, food, photography, skateboarding, sculpture and furniture, to consider craft as a bridge between what we inherit and what we create next. At a moment increasingly defined by speed, automation and efficiency, the conversation asks whether designing for the future might also require patience, repetition, improvisation and the accumulation of knowledge over time. What skills, rituals and ways of making are worth carrying forward, and how might they evolve to remain alive in the future?

Jeff Mills (he/him) 

Jeff Mills began his creative odyssey at Detroit radio stations WDRQ and WJLB throughout the 1980s under the moniker The Wizard. In the early 1990s, he formed the groundbreaking bands Final Cut and Underground Resistance. In 1992, he started his own record label, Axis Records, and has released over 200 imprints so far. As a world-renowned DJ, he continues to perform as a musician (percussion) in jazz units worldwide. 

Since 1999, his first film soundtrack on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Mills has made soundtracks for various silent movies, which led to working with classical orchestras on arrangements for his own repertoire such as The Blue Potential (2005) and Planets (2017). 

Mills also engages in creating art which has been exhibited at Pompidou Centre (Paris), Terada Warehouse (Tokyo) and Art Monte Carlo (Monaco) as well as artist residencies at Le Louvre in Paris and the Barbican Center in London. 

Mills was decorated in 2017 as an Officer, in recognition of his contribution to culture and the arts of France.

Akea Brionne (she/her) 

Akea Brionne is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the body as a living archive; a space where memory, ancestry, mythology, and lived experience converge. Working across textile, photography, film, and installation; she creates immersive works that explore embodied knowledge, ritual, and the ways that memory is carried through the body across generations. Brionne (b. 1996, New Orleans, LA) currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.

Charlie Mitchell (he/him) 

Charlie Mitchell is the James Beard Award-winning Executive Chef of Saga. 

A Detroit native, Chef Mitchell earned his stripes in the kitchens of the country's most celebrated restaurants including Eleven Madison Park,

Betony, Benu, Per Se, and Blue Hill. Before assuming his role at Saga, Chef Mitchell was Executive Chef at Clover Hill in Brooklyn Heights, where he made history as the first Black chef in New York City to earn a Michelin star. In 2022, Chef Mitchell won the Young Chef Award from the Michelin Guide; in 2024, he won the award of Best Chef in New York State from the James Beard Foundation. 

Chef Mitchell is committed to fostering mentorship and promoting diversity in the hospitality industry.

Maen Hammad 

Maen is a documentary photographer, writer, and researcher. Born in Palestine and raised in the suburbs of Michigan, he is currently based in Ramallah. Maen has exhibited his images internationally, and his work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Maen has had his thoughts and images published in TIME, Dazed, and the New Yorker. He was awarded the Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories Fellowship, selected for the Joop Swart Masterclass, and is the winner of the 2025 Eugene Smith Grant. 

He holds an MA in international affairs from the George Washington University. Besides Maen’s work in documentary photography, he is also a human rights researcher and campaigner.

Dozie Kanu 

Dozie Kanu (b. 1993, Houston, Texas) is a Nigerian-American artist whose practice moves between sculpture, installation, and design, examining the shifting boundary between utility and expression through the transformation of found and industrial materials. Working with discarded furniture, automotive components, metal, and architectural fragments, Kanu constructs objects that resist stable categorization, operating simultaneously as functional forms, sculptural propositions, and records of material history.