What should the future look like? Inside the tech-funded program to create a new aesthetic

FastCompany: In late December, Stripe CEO and tech billionaire Patrick Collison and libertarian economist Tyler Cowen published a one-page website with the provocative title “ A Call for New Aesthetics .” In around 500 words, the two longtime collaborators outlined an informal grant program they were launching to fund artists and thinkers who want to define the aesthetic of the 21st century. The 20th century, they noted, was largely influenced by a design ethos that emerged from the Bauhaus school of modernist art, architecture, and craft that launched in Germany in 1919. In the 21st century, they argued, perhaps it’s time for something new.

Collison and Cowen offered no specifics on what that might look like. But for anyone with an idea for what shape a new aesthetic might take, they pledged to issue grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. And plenty of people had ideas. Hundreds of ideas poured in. “We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many,” Collison wrote on X . In May, Collison and Cowen announced that they had issued 28 grants , and the projects range widely. There are designers exploring new architectural styles and languages. There are publishers experimenting with bookmaking.

There are technologists examining the role of design in software, and the role of code in design. There are sculptors, painters, illustrators, YouTubers, hardware designers, and makers. One is “rethinking what personal computing should be when the software inside it can think.” Another is building a “silent, analog meditation timer.” Another wants to “depict the projected abstraction of life as perceived by life.” As the CEO of a $159 billion company, Collison can afford to sow these aesthetic seeds, and spurring cultural change has become something of a hobby for him.

Back in 2019, he and Cowen argued in The Atlantic for the development of “progress studies” to better understand how progress happens, and Stripe later acquired the ideas journal Works in Progress to further explore these concepts. Collison has also invested more directly in culture-shifting endeavors, including the blank-slate city-building project California Forever and the pro-housing group California YIMBY . The call for new aesthetics is a headier extension of these interests, and a much more open-ended brief.

To understand how Collison and Cowen’s provocation may translate into some new aesthetic movement—or multiple movements— Fast Company reached out to several grantees to learn about their work and what they plan to do with their grant money. (Collison and Cowen did not respond to an interview request.) [Photo: Claudio Divizia/Adobe Stock] The birth of an aesthetic Whatever comes from it, this is a novel attempt to create a new design movement. By sprinkling money with few strings attached, Collison and Cowen are taking a light-handed approach to spurring change. But they’re not the first to explicitly try to launch a new design movement.

Sarah Lichtman, chairperson of the Pratt Institute’s history of art and design department, says there have been times in the past when wealthy patrons have created the conditions for new design movements to emerge, or even launched new design styles directly. She points to Émile Tassel, a professor of descriptive geometry at the University of Brussels, who commissioned Belgian architect Victor Horta to design what is considered the first art nouveau building in 1893, spurring an architectural offshoot of a design movement that flourished for two decades. “Patrons have long been an important catalyst for design movements,” Lichtman says.

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This initiative represents a significant shift in brand strategy by funding cultural innovation, which could greatly influence future design movements and is highly relevant to brand strategy professionals.