I'm Minami Fukaya, and I'm studying design at Digital Hollywood. For Ars Electronica 2026 in Linz, my role is the editorial design that takes the ZINE app's archive—already edited into pages by the editorial team working on the ground in Linz—and translates it into a real, physical magazine.
In a foreign city I'm visiting for the first time, working with a ZINE that emerges from two different points of view—AI and human—how do you bring that onto the printed page? I have to build that design from scratch.
I've put together a base plan, working through the grid design to a certain point. But partway through, I realized on my own that the grid wasn't going to be enough.
Behind every article is a process: something the app generated, that a person then edits into shape. And the person doing the editing carries hesitation with them—choices made only after real deliberation. Which fragment to keep, which to let go. Where to trust the machine's output, and where to switch over to your own judgment. There's no single correct answer to any of it. And this isn't a challenge anyone has attempted before.
Normally, I think hesitation is something that gets erased from the finished piece. A clean result is one where the marks of editing don't show.
But this time, what I want to leave on the page might be the opposite.
The precariousness, the instability, of the moment a person paused in front of an AI's fragments—I want to leave that as a trace, built into the design itself.
I don't know yet what form that will take. A wavering line. Uneven white space. A typeface that isn't quite settled. What I do know is this: somewhere on the page, I want a reader to be able to feel it—someone hesitated, right here.
I'm moving forward with my heart racing.
