At Chelan Cafe: Susan Surface goes to the West Seattle diner almost every other day to eat, think, and work. She calls it “a pure diner,” with “perfect diner aesthetics” and “no bullshit.”

At Chelan Cafe: Susan Surface goes to the West Seattle diner almost every other day to eat, think, and work. She calls it “a pure diner,” with “perfect diner aesthetics” and “no bullshit.” KELLY O

The annual Seattle Design Festival is a two-week-long event that brings together architects and designers from around the city to celebrate “the ways design makes life better.” Usually, it’s a safely cohesive conference.

But this year’s event included a panel discussion called “Questioning Youth Incarceration” at Seattle Central Library’s auditorium on September 19. The idea was to delve into architecture’s role in locking people up, and the panel included people who don’t typically attend architecture and design conferences, let alone speak: two activists and educators with the protest movement that influenced the Seattle City Council and the King County Council to scale back the Children and Family Justice Center coming to Seattle next year, a young man who’d been incarcerated himself, and a law professor at the University of Washington named Angelica Chazaro.

At one point, Chazaro leaned into the mic and issued a direct challenge to the architects and builders of the county’s next juvenile jail: “I call on Integrus, Howard S. Wright, and HOK to turn down those contracts,” she boomed…

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...