"Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and then we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come" -- Denis Diderot & Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Encyclopedie

During the summer of 2015, I had the pleasure of working on Platform 8: An Index of Design & Research under Zaneta Hong (Harvard GSD Faculty Editor & Lecturer in Landscape) and alongside fellow student editors Alexander Louis Cassini and Mikhail Thomas Grinwald. Structured as an encyclopedic survey in which entries are presented alphabetically, rather than hierarchically, Platform 8 documents both scholarly discourse and material production as concomitant artifacts of contemporary practice, design education, and academic research. In keeping with the indexical approach of the publication, both text and image are presented as portraits of pedagogies, processes, and products of design. Platform 8 was awarded one of the winners in Design Observer/American Institute of Graphic Arts Top Books for 2015.