Publishing in Public

Publishing in Public was a class I developed and taught at The New School during the Spring 2026 semester. It also functioned as an experimental publication distributed weekly (...ish) across Instagram stories and LinkedIn posts. In short, it was a class about sharing creative work publicly and making it legible to others.

The class was about sharing creative work publicly and making it legible to others. It started out being about publications and how they connect with their audiences, but it ended up being more about the realities of being a working creative (of any discipline) in this moment. Like, how do you do the work you believe in and also make money.

The class was structured around three main themes: audience, curation and taste, and distribution. Understanding these ideas on a personal level is applicable to any creative output, whether it’s design, creative coding, or performing arts.

Practitioners of any discipline can reflect on how to distribute their work in a way that matches the content. I think it’s easy for people to feel pressured to post A LOT or that there is a formula to follow for getting people to pay attention to what you have to say. Having a defined point of view was always important in design careers, but even more so today.

This class showed that there are many options and avenues for this, and it’s more important to think about what you’d like to see in the world and what production model best suits that. I also wanted students to see that there are more options than what you see on Instagram or at a zine fair. That’s the upside of being a designer — with a clear idea, a bit of technical literacy, and a little consistency, it’s possible to put your beautiful ideas out into the world! Design is power 8-)

I’m Nika Simovich Fisher and I work as an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons. I also work as a writer and a designer, and a lot of my work has to do with what makes things feel believable.

“Authenticity” is a word no one has any patience for, but there are so many things vying for our attention right now that having specific, focused work coming from a recognizable perspective, creates a lot of value. Even if said authentic output is performative (I'd argue they aren't separate ideas).

Working at a liberal arts institution is a luxury because I get to work with so many talented students who bring thoughtful ideas and humanities-based research to their projects. Using online platforms and social media to share that work feels empowering, allowing academic interests to reach wider audiences and have a life beyond the institution. Especially when the value of higher education is changing nationwide and locally.

Yes! Paul Soulellis gave a fascinating talk and workshop called “Making Public” in 2015. Even though it’s over a decade old now, his ideas on “posting” being publishing still hit.

There is also a book called Publishing Through Digital Networks by Hyun Go which is about similar topics and came out earlier this year.

My class was different because it was hands-on. It functioned as both a
seminar and a workshop. Bringing in guest speakers—practitioners working across art, design, technology, media, and culture—was important because I wanted students to see how a personal point of view, combined with a deep engagement with technology, can develop into a long-term creative practice rather than simply lead to a first job.

I also wanted to show students that there isn't a single path to a creative career. As someone recently told me, some careers are like scrolls and others are more like collages. Seeing that a “collage” is possible gives students permission to think more expansively about who they are as people and makers, and to pursue the kinds of work they genuinely want to engage with.

Lastly, we were lucky to partner with Index Space (Thank you Elie Andersen!) to give students a real “publication” to work on, providing opportunities for research and actual experience.

I learned a lot from our speakers and was inspired by all of their practices. Each person had a very custom set of interests and was looking to ways to share their insights in ways that felt interesting to themselves, even if working in house.

I was inspired by the different opinions people came in with. For example, Maxwell Neely-Cohen wasn’t too keen on Substack and thought it flattened individuality. On the other hand, writer Delia Cai loved Substack and was an early adopter of getting into people’s inboxes and used that as a way to connect with more people.

I was interested that the guests were mostly positive about AI. Most shared that it was useful in some ways and didn’t replace human curation or voice.

Lastly, I learned that I really don’t like sticking to a schedule, even one set up by myself! Any time things feel like a chore that I have to do, I tend to put them off… but the good news is, since I set the rules, I removed the pressure and got things done in my own time. That’s how I prefer to work!

As much as I loved sharing my dispatches on LinkedIn and Instagram stories, I wanted to have a more centralized and permanent home for them. I don’t think they make too much sense as a book, since they’ll likely be out of date as soon as it’s printed, but having a special place on the internet feels in line with the themes of the class.

Anyone looking for insights about distributing creative work in 2026, design educators looking for classes exploring media and tech literacy, designers thinking about what design education can look like in the present day, students looking for insights from professionals working in media

Maybe not as a stand alone class. It felt special as a one-off thing, though I’d love to bring in more guests. I’ll take what we learned this semester and apply it to other classes I’m teaching.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in this class:

Elie Andersen and Index Space for being our class partner and “client” for the final project

Guest speakers:
Elie Andersen,
Jane Seidel,
Maxwell Neely-Cohen,
Delia Cai,
Daisy Alioto,
Lisa Cheng Smith

The students who participated in the class. This was an elective and it was a class I had the most fun teaching, thank you for your insights and hard work this semester!

Natasha Lennard for your support in having me run this elective in CPCJ at The New School

The New School for providing a space for humanities meets design classes, and for the funding to support publishing this project.

My research assistant, Emily Yao, who helped with early design approaches for this project

Everyone who watched my IG stories and read my LinkedIn posts

And to Kirby for providing a free license for this website, hell yeah!