Design Emergency: Recent Episodes
Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Welcome to Design Emergency, where the design curator Paola Antonelli and design critic Alice Rawsthorn will introduce you to the inspiring and ingenious designers whose success in tackling major challenges – from the climate emergency and refugee crisis, to ensuring that new technologies affect us positively, not negatively – gives us hope for the future.
Follow our Instagram @design.emergency to see images of all the design projects described in each episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can we make our lives fully accessible and inclusive? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn explores this challenge with Sinéad Burke, whose mission is to campaign for inclusion and accessibility for everyone, for disabled people in particular.
.
Having started out as a teacher in her native Ireland, Sinéad became increasingly involved in disability activism, determined to help fellow little people – she is who is 3 feet 5 inches tall - and everyone else in the 15% of the global population – more than 1 billion people – who lives with some form of disability.
.
She does so as founder of Tilting the Lens, a consultancy with an all-disabled team, which advises organisations including Chanel, Gucci, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix and the V&A on how to embrace inclusivity. Sinéad herself champions the urgent need to make society fair and accessible through her roles as a member of the Irish Council of State; a former Miss Alternative Ireland; and as the cover star of not one, but two issues of British Vogue.
.
We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of Sinéad and her work on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from more inspiring and ambitious global design leaders who are changing our lives for the better.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Controlling technology means controlling the world. While this statement rings painfully true today, it is as old as the idea of technology itself. In other words, as old as humanity. In this episode, Paola Antonelli interviews renowned researcher, author, and artist Kate Crawford, a leading voice on the social, ethical, and planetary implications of all technologies––artificial intelligence in particular. Kate uses art and information design to manifest histories and connections that would otherwise remain invisible because of their long time span and complexity.
The interview is centered around one of Kate’s latest collaborations with artist-researcher Vladan Joler, “Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025,” an ambitious 24-m (ca. 79 ft) long fresco that was conceived during the Covid pandemic, perfected in the isolation of a monastery in Montenegro, and is now traveling around the world, after an inauguration at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2023.
Kate describes Calculating Empires as a visual history of the present––after French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory––and shows how the dangerous intersection of technology and power we witness today has happened many times before. If we abandon our tendency towards short-termism, she believes, there is a lot we can learn from past experiences.
You can find images of Calculating Empire on Design Emergency’s Instagram platform, @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other important voices who, like Kate, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Controlling technology means controlling the world. While this statement rings painfully true today, it is as old as the idea of technology itself. In other words, as old as humanity. In this episode, Paola Antonelli interviews renowned researcher, author, and artist Kate Crawford, a leading voice on the social, ethical, and planetary implications of all technologies––artificial intelligence in particular. Kate uses art and information design to manifest histories and connections that would otherwise remain invisible because of their long time span and complexity.
The interview is centered around one of Kate’s latest collaborations with artist-researcher Vladan Joler, “Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025,” an ambitious 24-m (ca. 79 ft) long fresco that was conceived during the Covid pandemic, perfected in the isolation of a monastery in Montenegro, and is now traveling around the world, after an inauguration at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2023.
Kate describes Calculating Empires as a visual history of the present––after French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory––and shows how the dangerous intersection of technology and power we witness today has happened many times before. If we abandon our tendency towards short-termism, she believes, there is a lot we can learn from past experiences.
You can find images of Calculating Empire on Design Emergency’s Instagram platform, @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other important voices who, like Kate, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Design has played a critical role in championing, developing and defending workers’ rights throughout history. In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, cofounders Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, describe design’s impact on workers’ rights and on the constantly changing nature of work over the years.
.
As well as discussing the design of the symbols and actions – from the red flag, to the valiant Bryant & May Match Girls’ Strike in East London - with which workers have campaigned for fair pay and decent working conditions, Alice and Paola will describe model workplaces, like that of the French fashion designer, Madeleine Vionnet in early 20th century Paris, and an innovative digital design and skills workshop for young people in rural Kenya. They will also show how design can help to improve the plight of care workers and the “invisible workers” whose contributions to our lives are unfairly overlooked.
.
We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects described by Alice and Paola on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from more inspiring and ambitious global design leaders who are changing our lives for the better.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can design help us to address such a tragic, terrifying global emergency as the escalating refugee crisis? What are the priorities for the humanitarian design teams striving to assuage such a catastrophe? What have they learnt from their practical experience in terms of what works, and what doesn’t? In this episode of Design Emergency, Francesca Coloni, Chief of the Technical Support team in the Division of Resilience and Solutions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)shares her experience of 20 years working on the frontline of the refugee crisis with our co-founder, Alice Rawsthorn.
.
Francesca explains how she and her UNHCR colleagues are determined to address the refugee crisis sensitively and flexibly by applying human-centred design solutions to meet the diverse needs of the millions of people forced to flee their homes in different places, while being as ecologically sustainable as possible. She also describes how UNHCR has developed bespoke strategies to best support refugees in the recent crises in Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Ukraine and elsewhere, and how it hopes to empower refugees to fulfil their potential, economically and culturally, to benefit their host countries in the future.
.
Thank you for joining us. You can find images of the impact of the refugee crisis on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like the remarkable Francesca Coloni, are forging positive change.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode devoted to tradition as a source and a force to build a better future, Paola Antonelli speaks with Jordanian-Palestinian architect Abeer Seikaly, whose interdisciplinary work is centered around acts of memory––her own, her family’s, and her people’s. Her research draws from ancestral Arab knowledge––particularly the textile weaving craft of Bedouin women in the Jordanian section of the Badia desert––and wields tradition as a social technology for cultural empowerment.
Abeer discusses with Paola the lessons she has learned and how she has translated them in her design work and in the cultural landscape of Jordan, where she co-founded the biennial Amman Design Week. An avid diarist and archivist, Abeer continues to “read backwards while writing forwards” (her words) to explore and interrogate cultural narratives and themes in her work and teaching, underscoring her commitment to memory, resilience, and empowerment through design.
You can find images of Abeer’s work on Design Emergency’s Instagram platform, @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Abeer, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Who are the Hidden Heroines of Design, the gifted and ambitious women who have achieved so much in design, yet have never been given the recognition they so richly deserved? And why, at a time when there is widespread recognition of the need to ensure that every aspect of our lives is as divers and inclusive as possible, do so many women still find it much, much tougher to realise their design ambitions than their cis-male peers or, to be specific, their white cis-male peers?
.
In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, our cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, each identify three talented women designers who have either been unfairly forgotten, or never fully acknowledged for their achivements. Among them are the designers of one of the world’s most popular board games and the first car specifically designed for women; the woman who transformed Chinese consumer culture in the 1980s; a legendary trans pioneer of video game design; a network of Palestinian women who are sustaining their rich artisanal history through their embroidery; and the dynamic editor-in-chief of Vogue Philippines, who is using the magazine to articulate her vision of her country’s new Philippine identity.
.
We hope you will enjoy hearing their stories. You can find images of the work of our Hidden Heroines of Design on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like those remarkable women, are forging positive change.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hiro Ozaki, aka Sputniko! (her high-school nickname) is a designer / multimedia artist / musician / educator / entrepreneur whose unique and multi-pronged career exemplifies a new, promising course for design and its transformative role for society.
Hiro has gone from imagining future scenarios––richly described with stills and movies starring gifted young heroines and their fantastical objects, set to catchy J-pop music with explanatory lyrics––to launching a highly successful company that might soon go through an IPO in Japan. Tellingly, the company, called Care, still upholds the topics that Hiro highlighted with her early speculations, especially issues related to gender and reproduction.
Japanese and British, Hiro grew up between the two countries, studying math and computer sciences in London at Imperial College and then moving up a few blocks to the Royal College of Art. There, she enrolled in the Design Interactions program, where celebrated designers and theoreticians Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby taught Design for Debate, a discipline whose output were not immediately “useful” objects, but rather meditative, harrowing, always incisive object-based scenarios that reflected on the role of technology and science in our lives to come.
In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, Hiro talks to Paola Antonelli about her trajectory from speculative designer and pop star to entrepreneur. You can find images of Sputniko! and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Hiro, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can we make productive use of the unfinished buildings that litter our towns, cities and landscapes? In this episode of Design Emergency, Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip, founders of Limbo Accra, a spatial design studio based in Ghana and the US, tell our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn about their mission to ensure that we make the most of the possibilities to reimagine, rebuild and reuse the thousands of concrete relics, which were abandoned before construction was completed.
.
Unfinished buildings are a largely ignored, yet wasteful and damaging aspect of architecture and construction. Dominique, who was born in the US and is of Ghanaian and Haitian heritage, and Emil, who is Danish, recognised the scale of the problem after moving to Ghana in 2018 to open a studio in the capital, Accra. They explain to Alice how, having noticed the large number of abandoned, incomplete buildings in the city they have focused Limbo Accra on designing new ways to reinvent them.
.
Having started by transforming an abandoned site into a Ghana’s first public skatepark, Limbo Accra began a long term research project to identify unfinished buildings throughout Ghana, and to compile a digital archive of them and the possibilities of completing their construction. This research is now being extended across West Africa and, eventually, to the rest of the continent.
.
Thank you for listening. You can find images of Dominique, Emil and their work at Limbo Accra on our Instagram grid @design.emergency and https://www.limboaccra.online/. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like them, are forging positive change.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
“Investigative visual journalism is a fairly new discipline that combines traditional investigative reporting techniques with digital forensic and spatial analysis of evidence,” says Anjali Singhvi, senior staff editor for spatial investigations at The New York Times in this Design Emergency podcast interview with our cofounder, Paola Antonelli. “It involves using a lot of open-source visual materials such as photos, videos, data, drawings, architectural plans, to explain complex stories and to reconstruct news events.”
.
In this episode, Anjali tells Paola how she has drawn on her background in architecture, and the journalistic skills she has honed at The New York Times, to pioneer its use of the rapidly expanding field of using spatial investigations to uncover the truth about tragedies, disasters and human rights abuses. She also describes how she and her colleagues communicate their findings to readers using story-boarding, 3-D modelling and data visualization techniques to present clear, precise and compelling analyses of horrific events such as the impact of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and a horrific fire in a Bronx apartment building that killed 17 people. “The goal,” says Anjali, “is to hold the people in power accountable and to give our readers the greater visual understanding of a news event.”
.
Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Anjali and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What could - and should - our future look like? Olalekan Jeyifous is committed to designing irresistible visions of a future in which humanity makes the best out of its many mistakes and thrives within the strictures of its self-inflicted handicaps. By doing so, he has had a remarkable effect on the architecture world - and beyond.
From the Venice Architecture Biennale, where he won the Silver Lion in 2023, to the Museum of Modern Art, his work always delights and puzzles. Could these really be our futures? In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, Olalekan tells our cofounder, Paola Antonelli, his idea of utopia and the role of speculation in guiding us towards positive change.
Nigerian-born and Brooklyn-based, Olalekan puts his architectural training to good use and imagines our old cities reframed on new systems of communication, transportation, occupation, and exchange. He describes them all in rich visual detail with immersive collages, videos, objects, and even VR experiences. The characters in his tableaus are often smiling, gregarious, in charge of their destinies, imaginary and yet familiar. His communities are strong, and his economies an enticing mix of informality and creatively structures.
You can find images of Olalekan and his work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Olalekan Jeyifous, are helping us to envisage and, to build, better futures.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
At a time when democracy is under threat in many places, what can design do to defend it? How can it help to reinvent our democractic systems and make them fit for purpose? In this episode, author and activist, Claudia Chwalisz tells Design Emergency’s cofounder Alice Rawsthorn why and how she is leading a global campaign to redesign democracy as founder and CEO of the international non-profit research and action institute, DemocracyNext.
Born in Canada to a Polish family, Claudia has devoted the last decade to re-imagining democracy, first through her work at the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and, for the past year, with her colleagues and collaborators at DemocracyNext. Claudia explains how DemocracyNext is championing citizens assemblies as inclusive and deliberative forms of decision making, like those that debated the legalisation of abortion and same sex marriage in Ireland, and assisted dying in France. She discusses the role of sortition (randomly selecting decision-makers by lottery) to making our democratic systems fairer, and describes why design is a crucial tool in this process.
.
Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Claudia and her work on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes ofDesign Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Claudia, are forging positive change.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Our world is becoming ever more fragile, as more and more migrants across the planet from the country to booming cities, and as more and more refugees are displaced from their homes to makeshift emergency villages that become permanent and expand uncontrollably. What can architecture do to address this? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder Paola Antonelli interviews the Italian-born, Somali architect Omar Degan about his work in using design to support vulnerable communities.
.
Omar tells Paola how he and his team at DO Architecture and Design are focusing on specialize emergency architecture, and post-conflict reconstruction. Their work, in Mogadishu and beyond, reflects Omar's belief in using architecture as a tool for peace and progress in distressed areas. Following his post-graduate degree in Emergency Contexts and Developing Countries from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, Omar has specialized in developing culturally and historically relevant design solutions in fragile contexts. He co-founded FragilityLab in 2023 to focus on this and is currently at work on an expanded version of the United Nations guidelines for architecture in states of emergency.
You can find images of Omar and his work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Omar, are forging positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can design help to heal fragile people, who have experienced abuse, poverty and oppression? In this episode, the Indian artist, activist and social designer Aqui Thami tells Design Emergency’s cofounder Alice Rawsthorn how she does this by designing new opportunities for healing and learning for vulnerable women and girls, for and trans and queer people.
Aqui has personally experienced violence and bigotry as a janjati, or indigenous artist, who was born in the Himalayas. She tells Alice how since moving to Mumbai on her own as a teenager, she has addressed this by designing and delivering safe spaces and other urgently needed resources for people living in Dharavi, which is one of India’s biggest and most densely populated slums.
As well as establishing Sister Library, South Asia’s first mobile, community-owned and run feminist library there, Aqui co-founded the Dharavi Art Room to provide art, design and craft classes for local women and children. She also pursues her activism by designing and printing zines and fly posters as part of the Bombay Underground publishing movement.
At a time when India, Mumbai and Dharavi are changing at frenzied speed, Aqui explains to Alice how she plans to continue to use design as an activist tool to empower her friends, neighbors and collaborators and to help them to preserve their communities.
Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Aqui and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Aqui, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As the climate emergency escalates, it is clear that the solutions we need are those that can be applied at scale. The materials scientist Veena Sahajwalla is at the forefront as she is already designing and delivering such solutions. In this episode, Veena tells Design Emergency’s cofounder, Paola Antonelli, how she is recycling huge quantities of abandoned tyres, clothing and other waste into new materials.
.
Born in India, where she was the only woman on her university engineering course, Veena then studied in Canada and the US, and is now based in Australia, where she is Professor of Materials Science at the University of New South Wales and founding director of its SMART Centre for Materials Research and Technology. Dubbed “the rubbish cop” by her daughter for her obsession with reusing and recycling waste at home, her work is devoted to developing new ways of transforming waste into new raw materials to decarbonise industrial production.
.
Veena explains to Paola how she has invented a polymer injection technology, Green Steel, which has already recycled millions rubber tyres to replace coal in steel production. She also describes how she and her colleagues have developed a process of recycling clothes and glass into Green Ceramics for use in construction and interiors, and a new type of local micro-recycling hubs. All of which, Veena sees as being important steps towards a zero-waste circular economy.
.
Thank you for listening. You will find images of projects described by Veena on our IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Amazon, Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future interviews with other global design leaders who are forging positive change.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, the Mexican designer Fernando Laposse talks with our cofounder Paola Antonelli about his practice, which focuses on the culture and the materials of non-urban communities, especially in his native Mexico. After studying product design, Fernando has focused his practice on working with rural communities in Mexico to develop new design materials from locally grown plant fibers, such as sisal, loofah and corn leaves, using processes that are steeped in the traditions of those places.
.
Fernando’s interest in Mexico’s ecosystems has led him to find new ways of transforming natural materials such as corn husks into laminated marquetry used for wall coverings, lighting, and furniture, always collaborating with local communities on their production. This allows him not only to create long term employment opportunities but to shed light on the economic and ecological challenges they face .
Through his thoughtful, extensively researched projects, Fernando addresses pressing issues such as the environmental emergency, loss of biodiversity, community fragmentation, migration, and the adverse impact of global trade on local agriculture and food culture. By documenting these issues and celebrating the transformative power of design, he provides insights and potential solutions.
You’ll find more images of the projects described by Fernando in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Magdalene Odundo has made some of the greatest pots of our time. In this episode of Design Emergency, she talks to our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, about how she discovered the joys and challenges of making ceramics and their symbolic value in expressing our cultural identities.
Born in Kenya in 1950, Magdalene spent her childhood there and in India before moving to the UK to study art in Cambridge, where she flung herself into student debates on identity politics. She then studied at what is now the University for the Creative Arts in the Surrey market town of Farnham and at the Royal College of Art in London. As well as being formally beautiful, Magdalene’s pots are rooted in her love of making and her understanding of the politics of her own identity, as Black African woman living in Europe, and her years of research into the ancient ceramic traditions of Africa, Asia and Central America.
Magdalene tells Alice how she draws on that research to reinterpret historic forms, finishes and firing processes in her pots that evoke the drama and fragility of dance. Her ceramics belong to the collections of major museums, including the British Museum and V&A in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and The Met in New York. Yet she still lives and works in the same place in Farnham, where, after years of dedicated teaching, she has become Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts.
Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Magdalene and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes when we will hear from other global leaders in different areas of design.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Few people have more experience of disaster relief than the great Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari.
In this episode, she tells Design Emergency’s cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how she has dedicated nearly 40 years to helping people throughout Pakistan to rebuild their lives and communities after earthquakes, floods and other devastating disasters.
Born in what is now Pakistan in 1941, Yasmeen became its first professional woman architect by starting a practice in Karachi. In 1980, she co-founded the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan to conserve the country’s historic architecture and quit her practice in 2000 to focus on that work.
Five years later, when millions of people were killed or displaced by the horrific Kashmir earthquake, Yasmeen travelled to the region to help local communities with repair and reconstruction.
She tells Alice what she learnt from that experience and her subsequent work in disaster relief, why the conventional aid system has failed, and how she is developing a “humanistic humanitarian” model of helping people to help themselves and then helping others to do the same.
Yasmeen also describes how the world’s architectural practices could help to train the humanitarian architects of the future, as well as her current plans to build a million ecologically sustainable homes on floodplains across Pakistan and to design a floating village.
Thank you for joining us. You’ll find images of the projects Yasmeen describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency.
Please join us for future episodes when we will hear from more global design leaders who, like the remarkable Yasmeen Lari, are at the forefront of positive change.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As the climate emergency intensifies, how can design help us to repair and revive our ecosystems?
In this episode, Design Emergency’s cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, hears how the Jordanian architect Deema Assaf is using her design skills to develop new solutions to the severe ecological threats facing her country by reviving the beautiful forests, which once flourished throughout Jordan, but disappeared centuries ago leaving most of its land as desert.
.
Jordan is one of the world’s driest countries. Years of drought have left it with desert on 75% of its land and forests on just 1%. Deema, who practiced landscape architecture for ten years after graduating from the University of Jordan, was so concerned that in 2018 she founded the TAYYŪN research studio in Amman to develop ways of regenerating Jordan’s arid land by turning it back into forests of native trees.
.
Deema tells us how she cultivated her first forest five years ago, and how she and her colleagues are currently planting their fifth forest in Jordan.
To support this work, they have embarked on a major research project to compile a database of native Jordanian trees and plants, as well as harvesting their seeds, and running community programmes to encourage more people to help their efforts to revitalise Jordan’s stricken ecology.
.
Thank you for joining us for Alice’s interview with Deema Assaf. You’ll find images of the projects Deema describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms.
Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from more design leaders who, like Deema, are tackling the major challenges of our time.
.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Paola Antonelli speaks with French social designer Gabriel Fontana, whose practice, based in Paris and Rotterdam, focuses on sports.
Sports and society are deeply entangled. Practicing or following sports leads to occasions of socialization that can help shape better individuals, reinforce bonds, and overcome differences, and help bring to the surface many of the ills of society, offering the opportunity to address them and evolve collectively.
Children get their first brush with the elation of successful team work and the searing wound of exclusion when they are in school. “Dominant ideas regarding gender, ethnicity, physical ability and sexuality are reproduced in sport and physical education,” Gabriel explains. “Research shows that girls, children with disabilities, children with a bi-cultural background and LGBTQIA+ children are marginalized and often excluded in PE.”
Gabriel has designed a new game called Multiform in collaboration with philosopher Nathanja van den Heuvel and sport teachers and pupils in schools in Rotterdam and Paris. Children don transformable outfits and are prompted by the referee to change team several times during the game, with the three teams changing size and composition in evolving asymmetry and diversity.
“This way, students experience what it means to be a majority or a minority and are challenged to develop collaborative strategies.”
By redesigning the idea of collaboration and competition, and promoting a healthier relationship with them, Gabriel aims to strengthen sport’s ability to influence society and build a better world.
You’ll find images of the projects described by Gabriel in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms.
Thank you for listening.
Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other design leaders who, like Gabriel Fontana, are helping to build a better world in different fields and different parts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can design protect us from violence? What can it do to identify new forms of violence, and old ones? Alert us to their dangers? Shield us from them? Repair the damage they cause? And prevent repetitions?
In this episode, Design Emergency’s cofounders, curator Paola Antonelli and author Alice Rawsthorn, discuss one of design’s most important roles:
defending us from violence.
Paola and Alice discuss how design has done this throughout history, while noting that our vulnerability to violence is escalating at a time when our lives are increasingly turbulent, and violence is evolving at unprecedented speed with ever more ominous consequences.
As well as considering how violence affects us in the form of wars, bigotry, the climate emergency, refugee crisis and abuses of technology, they identify ingenious design responses to those threats. From women’s safe spaces in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and heartening symbols of collective pride like the rainbow flag, to an app that helps people to find safe routes through Indian cities, Paola and Alice describe how thoughtful and innovative design can – and does – empower us.
Thank you for joining Paola and Alice’s conversation on Design and Violence. You’ll find images of the projects they describe on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms.
Please join us for future episodes when we will interview more global design leaders at the forefront of forging positive change.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Having discovered the joys of gardening while selling Christmas trees at a garden centre, Piet Oudolf has become one of the most influential plantsmen and garden designers of our time.
In this episode of Design Emergency, he tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how his years of research into plants and their behaviour and love of wild gardens have revived obscure species and transformed our expectations of gardens and landscapes. Piet spoke to Alice from Hummelo in the eastern Netherlands where he lives, works and, together with his wife Anja, has established a living laboratory of plants to study for use in his designs, including those for Chicago’s Millennium Park; Belle Isle in Detroit; and his most famous project, the High Line, the public garden on a disused elevated railroad in
Manhattan which is visited by millions of people every year and has inspired scores of similar projects worldwide.
The great garden designers of the past were renowned for creating visual spectacles and designed their planting schemes accordingly. But Piet is a leader of the New Perennial movement whose designs are determined by how plants evolve and respond to one another, often using wildflowers, grasses, long forgotten local species and those dismissed as weeds in naturalistic planting schemes that are designed to last year after year.
Thank you for joining us for Alice’s interview with the great Piet Oudolf. You’ll find images of the gardens he describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency.
And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms.
Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other global design leaders who, like Piet, are helping to forge positive change.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The award-winning visual and information designer, Frederica Fragapane returns to Design Emergency.
She talks to Paola Antonelli about balancing her work, ensuring she is collaborating on projects that have educational goals and want to inspire and bring awareness to various topics.
They discuss the work she made in 2022 to express solidarity with the activists in Iran who were protesting against the murder of Mahsa Amini after her detention by the so-called morality police and the oppression of women throughout the country.
Frederica also tells us about her piece Land Defenders, which has just entered the MOMA collection.
Thank you for listening. You’ll find images of the projects described n this episode on our Instagram @design.emergency.
Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other design leaders who, like Frederica, are helping to build a better world.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for information.
What are design’s role and responsibilities in horrific wars like Vladimir Putin’s illegal. conflict in Ukraine? How can designers help their countries during – and after – such terrible tragedies? In this episode, Alice Rawsthorn talks with a designer who is confronting all those challenges – and more – the Ukrainian architect and interior designer, Slava Balbek.
.
As founder of Balbek Bureau in Kyiv, Slava runs one of Ukraine’s leading architecture and design groups. When Alice first interviewed him for Design Emergency in March 2022, a few weeks after Putin’s invasion, Slava and his colleagues were already running a community kitchen and delivery hub to support the local community in Kyiv and had launched a design proposal to build temporary housing for refugees returning to Ukraine after the war ends.
.
Those projects have since accelerated, and construction has begun on a refugee settlement in Buca, near Kyiv. Slava describes how a 3D-printed school, designed by Balbek Bureau in Lviv, is also under construction, and the plans for a project designed to protect Ukraine’s beloved historic monuments during the conflict. He also discusses the challenges of running an architecture and design agency during such a brutal war, and how he juggles those
demands with his personal responsibilities as a military volunteer in the Ukrainian army. A few days after this Design Emergency interview, Slava returned to duty on the frontline.
.
Thank you for listening to Slava’s account of designing in a war zone. You’ll find images of the projects he describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency.
And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms.
Please join us for future episodes when we’ll interview other design leaders who, like Slava, are helping to forge positive change. Slava Ukraini.
.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can we develop safe, sustainable ways of designing, making and building? In this episode, Alice Rawsthorn talks to Julia Watson, the designer, academic and activist whose years of research into the ancient nature-based technologies and sacred landscapes created by indigenous communities in remote parts of our planet promise to produce ingenious solutions to the devastating damage caused by the climate emergency.
Raised in Australia and based in the US, Julia spent 20 years researching the diverse ways in which isolated communities have drawn on ancient wisdom and readily available natural materials to design ecologically responsible ways of living. Among them are the 6,000 year- old floating islands where the Ma’dan community dwells in Iraq’s southern wetlands; and the living root bridges that defend the Khasi people against horrific floods in northern India.
Julia describes how having shared her research in the book Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, she is now designing systems and protocols to enable nature-based technologies to be deployed on larger scales in other places, while ensuring that the communities who conceived them are fairly paid.
Thank you for listening. You’ll find images of the projects described by Julia in this episode on our Instagram @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other design leaders who, like Julia, are helping to build a better world.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Design has always been a man’s world. A white cis-man’s world to be precise. Thankfully, there have always been gifted and inspiring exceptions who have overcome the obstacles to make important contributions to design. This episode of the Design Emergency podcast celebrates some of the incredible women who have done so, as our co-founders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn pay tribute to the Hidden Heroines of Design.
.
In this episode you’ll hear the stories of seven exceptionally talented and determined women whose courage, skills and resilience enabled them to defy gender bias by developing remarkable design innovations that have changed millions of people's lives for the better. Among them are Letitia Mumford Geer, a US nurse who patented the design of the one-handed medical syringe in 1896, and Ann Macbeth, a British embroiderer who empowered working class women to use needlework to learn new skills and forms of self-expression in the early 1900s.
Others include Colette Boccara, one of the most prolific industrial designers in late 20th century Brazil, and Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to practice architecture in Pakistan who has devoted the second half of her career to designing emergency housing and other forms of humanitarian support for the victims of floods and earthquakes.
All of our Hidden Heroines of Design faced daunting challenges to achieve their goals, as have equally accomplished designers who are trans, queer, of colour or don’t conform to the white cis-male archetype for another reason. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing how they overcame them.
.
Thank you for listening. You’ll find images of the projects described in this episode - and the others - on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will interview more remarkable design leaders who are helping to forge positive change in different fields and different parts of our planet.
.
Design Emergency podcast
Presented by Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn
Graphic design by Studio Frith
Recording by Spiritland Productions
Hosted by Acast.
See acast.com/privacy for information
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Paola Antonelli interviews Sissel Tolaas, the Berlin-based Norwegian artist, chemist, and researcher who has dedicated her life to exploring smell in all its facets and expressions. With a background in chemistry and linguistics, Tolaas has developed an interdisciplinary practice that spans the fields of art, science, and technology, with a particular focus on olfactory communication and the role of smell in human experience.
Over the course of her career, Tolaas has conducted extensive research on the human sense of smell, exploring everything from the molecular structure of odors to the cultural and social contexts in which they are produced and perceived. She has created a vast scent archive comprising thousands of smells from around the world, and has used these smells to create a range of olfactory installations, products, and artworks that challenge our perceptions of scent and our relationship with the world around us.
Tolaas' work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and she has collaborated with a wide range of individuals and organizations, from perfumers and fashion designers to scientists and architects. Through her work, she has sought to expand our understanding of the role of smell in human life and to promote the idea that smell is not just a sensory experience, but a powerful tool for communication, memory, and identity.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Alice Rawsthorn interviews Nifemi Marcus-Bello, the Nigerian designer who is at the forefront of the dynamic new design culture now emerging in West Africa. Nifemi describes how he draws on his research into West African design and making – past and present – to develop new objects that reflect the region’s cultural identity.
.
Born in Nigeria, Nifemi was brought up there and in Zambia, before moving to the UK to study industrial design in Leeds. After completing his master’s degree in 2013, he returned to Lagos and worked for the architect Kunlé Adeyemi there and then for MASS Design Group in Rwanda, before opening his own studio in the city in 2017.
Nifemi has since designed objects that are steeped in West Africa’s rich culture of making and improvisational design. Most are inspired by the vernacular products he sees in daily use on the streets of Nigeria and its neighbours, including Lagos water carts and Beninese bamboo blinds. His work is also influenced by historic West African artefacts, such as ancient Benin bronzes and 19 th century Igbo sculpture. Nifemi then collaborates with skilled local makers on fabricating his objects, which are smart, resonant, and engaging.
At a thrilling time for designers throughout Africa, when many designers from the African diaspora are moving there, Nifemi’s conversation with Alice paints a vivid and realistic picture of their impact on our youngest, most rapidly urbanising continent.
You’ll find images of the projects described by Nifemi in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms.
Thank you for listening. Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other design leaders who, like Nifemi Marcus-Bello, are helping to build a better world in different fields and different parts of our planet.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Formafantasma is a design studio founded in 2009 by Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, with offices in Milan and in Rotterdam. Their practice is based on research, and their deep investigations into the ecological, historical, political, and social forces shaping the discipline of design today inform not only their critical and influential exhibitions and academic inquiry, but also the exquisite objects they have produced for commercial manufacturers of global renown.
In this episode, Simone and Andrea discuss with Paola Antonelli their use of design as a lens to and understand the world, and their reliance on the formal elegance of objects as Trojan horses to unveil unethical practices and exploitative systems of extraction that are entangled with design and production - exposing them so they can be dismantled.
Three projects in particular, supported by solid, publicly available research and culminating in exhibitions, illustrate their approach. Ore Streams (National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne, 2017, and Triennale di Milano, 2019) focused on electronic waste, while Cambio (Serpentine, London, 2020) examined the global ecology of timber. Oltre Terra, which will open in May 2023 at the National Museum in Oslo, studies the systems of extraction and production of wool, and therefore the complex relationship between animals, humans, and the environment.
You’ll find images of the projects Simone and Andrea describe in this interview on our Instagram feed @design.emergency. Thank you for listening!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Alice Rawsthorn interviews Fabrizio Urettini, the Italian art director, who has devoted the last six years to designing and delivering a remarkably imaginative and effective response to one of our biggest global challenges - the escalating refugee crisis. Helped by friends and fellow designers, Fabrizio has founded and run the Talking Hands workshops in the northern Italian city of Treviso where asylum seekers and migrants living temporarily in the area can learn design and making skills.
.
Fabrizio tells Alice how hundreds of refugees and migrants have participated in the programme since he opened Talking Hands in a derelict army barracks in 2016. They have designed and made furniture, toys, and clothing for sale online and in local craft markets, and collaborated with nearby manufacturers and artisans, while learning new skills or enhancing old ones that could eventually help them to secure paid employment. As well as enabling asylum seekers and migrants to use their time in Treviso productively, Talking Hands runs language and literacy classes for them, and has had a significant impact on changing local perceptions of refugees.
.
At a time when more than 100 million people, a historic record, have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict or oppression to seek asylum elsewhere in the global refugee crisis, Talking Hands demonstrates how designers and other creatives can help to foster positive change by empowering them to build productive lives in their new countries.
.
You’ll find images of the projects described by Fabrizio in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms. Thank you for listening. Please join us for future episodes when we will interview other design leaders who, like Fabrizio, are helping to build a better world in different fields and different parts of our planet.
Hosted by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Totaling several billions of tons a year worldwide, agricultural waste––produced by raising plants and animals, and including stalks, husks, hulls, and manure––is both a problem and an opportunity. In this interview with Design Emergency co-founder Paola Antonelli, Ghanaian-Filipino architectural scientist, designer, and entrepreneur Mae-ling Lokko discusses the many effective and elegant ways she has devised to transform agrowaste into building materials that continue the cycle of life as opposed to interrupting it––and redistribute value along the way.
Agriculture harks back to roughly 12-15,000 years ago, when our ancestors abandoned their peripatetic hunting-and-foraging life and settled down, beginning to mold the world to their needs and wants. The more sophisticated tools required to cultivate the land and the spatial planning required to establish those settlements point to design’s centrality in establishing this new era, and therefore also in unleashing the rampant colonization and exploitation of the planet which we now call the Anthropocene.
Be as it may, design can now also play a central role in mitigating its negative effects, Mae-ling Lokko suggests in this episode. As the founder of Willow Technologies in Accra, Ghana, a company which upcycles agricultural waste into affordable bio-based building materials and water quality-treatment applications, she is actively demonstrating the viability of a new, wholesome model of design and entrepreneurship.
You’ll find images of the projects Mae-ling describes in this interview on our Instagram feed @design.emergency. Thank you for listening!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
One of design’s most important – and inspiring – roles throughout history has been to champion human rights. At a time when those rights are under threat in so many parts of our planet, we – Design Emergency’s co-founders, design curator Paola Antonelli and design critic Alice Rawsthorn – decided to host a special episode to discuss design’s record in helping to defend and strengthen human rights, and to prevent abuses of them.
We’ve searched for design interventions in diverse areas of those rights, as defined by the United Nations as “rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.” In this Design Emergency Human Rights Special, we consider design’s power to raise awareness of crucial causes, including Black Lives Matter and the protests in Iran against abuses of women’s rights. We also explore the complex politics of the design of human rights symbolism: from the Red Cross and Red Crescent; to China’s fiercely contentious reinvention of the China Aid program.
And we look at the design successes and failures in one of the greatest human rights challenges of our time, the escalating refugee crisis. Why has the design of refugee camps and shelters proved so problematic? And why are new solutions developed by the architect Marina Tabassum and her team in Bangladesh and the mostly self-taught designers and builders of the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda proving so effective? Finally, we ask how, as the climate emergency deepens, design can broaden its focus from “human” rights to include those of all the other species with whom we share our planet.
You’ll find images of the projects we describe in this Design Emergency Human Rights Special on our Instagram @design.emergency. Thank you for listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re off!
Our very special interviewee for this first episode of the Design Emergency podcast is the brilliant Ghanaian-British architect, David Adjaye. As well as designing some of the most compelling buildings of recent years, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., David is at the forefront of the development of Africa’s dynamic architecture scene. In this interview with Design Emergency’s co-founder, Alice Rawsthorn, he discusses the challenges and opportunities of designing responsibly in the vast, complex, and intensely eclectic African continent.
David – Sir David, as he is now – was born in Tanzania to Ghanian parents. The family lived in several countries during his childhood as his father was a diplomat, eventually settling in London where David studied architecture and founded his practice. Beginning by designing friends’ houses, he moved on to cultural spaces including the NMAAHC and the soon to be completed Studio Museum in Harlem. Since 2000, he has conducted a personal research project into Africa’s rich, but often ignored architectural heritage. David and his family are now based in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, where he leads a studio of over a hundred, mostly young, West African architects working on landmark commissions including the National Cathedral of Ghana and the Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City. Tune in to hear him discussing those projects, and architecture’s role in forging positive change in Africa.
You’ll find images of the projects David describes in this interview on our Instagram @design.emergency. You can also follow his research into African architecture on his Instagram @adjaye_visual_sketchbook, and find out more about his work at Adjaye Associates on its Instagram @adjayeassociates and its website www.adjaye.com. Thank you for listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Design Emergency is a collaboration between the curator, Paola Antonelli, and writer, Alice Rawsthorn, to explore design’s potential to help us to build a better future. On this podcast, you will hear from the designers, architects, engineers, and others, who, we believe, are at the forefront of innovation in using design to forge positive change.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.