(Wellcome Collection. At once besotted with mechanical certainty and mesmerized by the scope of visual wonder before him, Galton thrilled to the notion of mathematical precision — the lockup on the photographic plate, the reckoning of the binomial curve — but appeared uninterested in actual details unless they could help reaffirm his suppositions about averages, about types, even about the photomechanical process itself.That Galton drew upon the language of statistical fact — and benefited from the presumed sovereignty of his own exalted social position — to become an evangelist for the camera is questionable in itself, but the fact that he viewed his composite photographs as plausible evidence for an unforgiving sociocultural rationale shifts the legacy of his scholarship into far more pernicious territory.At once driven by claims of biological determinism and supported by the authoritarian heft of British empiricism, Francis Galton pioneered an insidious form of human scrutiny that would come to be known as eugenics. I raised both of my children in my studio. JG: How did your interest in all things design first develop? Schuyler, Nina and Vivian Barad. Therein lies the challenge—and, I suspect, the fun.I have always been fascinated by portraiture, but over the years began to think more and more about everything from identity politics to surveillance systems, while also witnessing a seemingly limitless public appetite for selfies. I like hybrids and mashups, shifting the coordinates of what we look at and respond to, and reasserting our ability to see and hear and look and listen. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. ... Jessica Helfand … Not me!I think the most important thing is that you do your own work, always.

Podcast Interview: The Design of Business | The Business of Design with Michael Beirut and Jessica Helfand. In 1872, with the publication of "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," Charles Darwin went rogue. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners.© 2020 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc.Support our award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology.Subscribers get more award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology.Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at If evolution is seen as the study of unseen development, the camera provided the illusion of quantifiable benchmarks—an irresistible proposition for the advocates of eugenicsIn 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue. American photographer Nancy Burson has experimented with composite photography to merge black, Asian, and Caucasian faces against population statistics: Introduced in 2000, her Galton would have appreciated the speed of the software and the advantages of the algorithm — but what of the ethics of the very act of image capture and comparison, of the ethics of pictorial appropriation itself? Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. This month, artist, designer, and writer Jessica Helfand joins Caltech as the Winter 2020 artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences' Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which is administered jointly by the division and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens and was established in 2018 with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We did this before “design thinking” became part of the mainstream lingo, before design became a hot topic.