Podcasts about design emergency

What is a good working life in the 21st century? And how do we get there? In the latest episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, explores these issues with the pioneering social designer and social activist Hilary Cottam, who conducted five years of intensive research into how we could – and should – redesign all aspects of work, for her new book, The Work We Need: A 21st Century Reimagining..Hilary traveled throughout the UK and US – from the post-industrial cities of Barnsley and Grimsby in northern England, to Palo Alto, the tech capital of the US – to discover what workers and their employers thought of the logistics of their working lives, and how they can be redesigned to make them fit for purpose. Hilary also tells Alice how the “new industrialists”, the new generation of business leaders who recognise the urgent need for radical change, are already making progress...We hope you'll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Hilary describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at the forefront of 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.

One of the deepest, most often overlooked emergencies in the design world is the erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems—and the continued exclusion of Indigenous voices from the platforms where futures are imagined. Why is it an emergency? Because plurality, intended as the active celebration of diversity, is not just a matter of common sense and respect, but also a matter of survival. Native cultures that have developed deep wisdom about the environment over centuries can offer powerful suggestions on how to deal with the climate crisis that global ignorance has precipitated.In this episode of Design Emergency, we speak with Sadie Red Wing, a Dakota Lakota graphic designer, researcher, and educator and a citizen of the Spirit Lake Nation from the Great Plains in the United States. Her work bridges graphic design, advocacy––especially related to visual sovereignty––information systems, and cultural preservation. She reminds us that typography, layout, and even color theory are not neutral, but carry deep histories—and that these visual systems can either perpetuate colonization or become tools of liberation.You can find images related to Sadie's 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 Sadie, 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.

To kick off our Solutions season – where we explore how to address today's most pressing challenges – I'm joined by Alice Rawsthorn, an award-winning design critic, acclaimed author, and co-founder of Design Emergency, an initiative investigating design's role in shaping a better future.In this episode, Alice talks about how design is evolving beyond aesthetics to become a force for systemic change, tackling issues like climate change, inequality, and humanitarian crises. She shares compelling examples of design initiatives that influence policy, social structures, and everyday life, emphasizing the need for collaboration, inclusivity, and empathy in shaping the future.Join us as we discuss how design can move beyond form to function as a driver of meaningful change.Subscribe to the Culture Shifts Podcast on your favorite platform, and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, or visit cultureshifts.net to stay connected.

Who are the Hidden Heroines of Design, the gifted, resourceful and determined women who have achieved so much in design, yet have never been given the recognition they so richly deserve? And why, do so many women, and people who are queer, trans or of colour, still find it so much harder to fulfil their design ambitions than their white cis-male peers?.To celebrate International Women's Day 2025, our cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, have each identified three Hidden Heroines of Design who have either been unfairly forgotten, or never fully acknowledged for their achievements. They include: a ceramicist who explored her cultural identity as a Chinese immigrant through her pots; a pioneering designer of social housing; the most influential female architect in 20th century India; and the woman who co-designed the first official US rape kit..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 these 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.

As the global water crisis and climate emergency intensify, how can design help us to tackle the devastating food shortages, storm surges, rising sea-levels and other problems we face? On this episode of Design Emergency, the Australian designer, ecologist and activist, Julia Watson, tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn how indigenous communities in remote parts of our planet have developed ancient, nature-based design solutions to these threats..Julia shares examples of how natural water systems, many of them designed centuries ago, are already helping us to protect and replenish our dwindling water supplies, as well as to grow urgently needed crops on floating meadows and farms, and to establish natural fishing systems..Many of these projects are described in Julia's forthcoming book, Lo-TEK: Water, which will be published by Taschen in June as a follow-up to Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, one of Design Emergency's favourite design books of recent years. In Lo-TEK: Water, Julia also explains how these traditional design solutions are being adapted to function on the vast scale we need to tackle the global water crisis, while stressing the importance of ensuring that the rights of the local communities who conceived them are always fully respected and protected..We hope you'll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects described Julia on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who, like Julia, are using their knowledge and skills to work to build a better future..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.

Coral are tough clients, as Pirjo Haikola knows well. The Finnish designer is renowned for her work on coral reef conservation and ocean biodiversity. Now based at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, North Queensland, right by the Great Barrier Reef, Pirjo is also a skilled diver. Spending significant time observing and documenting marine life firsthand has given her a unique perspective on the delicate dynamics of ocean ecosystems, and allows her to ground her designs in the realities of the underwater environment, ensuring they are not only innovative but also ecologically sensitive and impactful.In this episode of Design Emergency, Pirjo discusses with Paola several of her projects, which integrate scientific research with creative methodologies and advanced manufacturing techniques to develop practical, design-driven solutions to the urgent challenges posed by climate change. Whether it's developing tools for coral propagation in Australia or Mexico, studying the sea urchin population off the coast near Melbourne, or exploring sustainable materials inspired by marine ecosystems, her work celebrates design and demostrates what it can do in service of the planet.You can find images related to Pirjo's 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 Pirjo, 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.

How can design help to defend and strengthen our human rights? And the rights of other species with whom we share our planet? At a time when rights and freedoms are under threat all over the world, Design Emergency's cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, are marking Human Rights Day 2024 with a special episode on practical ways in which design is helping to protect our rights in exceptionally vulnerable places..From an emergency treatment centre for people with disabilities in Gaza and a shelter for isolated elderly seniors in Ukraine, to floating sanitation systems to help Bangladeshi communities cope with severe flooding during monsoon season, and a project to help Sudanese refugees arriving in Chad to build sustainable homes in a traditional style for the region, all the projects discussed by Paola and Alice have already had positive impacts on human rights. Though they also share a cautionary tale of how-not-to-design a post-conflict reconstruction programme in a desolate area of Afghanistan haunted by years of war and poverty..We hope you'll find this episode interesting. You can find images of the projects described by Paola and Alice on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at the forefront of 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.

S04E04 Odwieczny spór funkcja czy forma. W czwartym odcinku podcastu rozmawiamy o tym, co jest ważniejsze w projektowaniu: forma dzieła czy jego funkcja i jej konsekwencje. Brzmi to trochę jak dyskusja o pierwszeństwie jajka czy kury. Jednak każdy praktyk i teoretyk projektowania stanął w swoim życiu przed tym dylematem. Razem z moją gościnią, Kasią Andrzejczyk-Briks, stwierdzamy, co oczywiste, że jedno nie istnieje bez drugiego oraz że z biegiem lat z fanatyczek funkcjonalizmu stałyśmy się jednak eklektyczkami. Moja rozmówczyni jest historyczką sztuki, kuratorką i wykładowczynią historii sztuki i designu w School of Form w Warszawie i Collegium da Vinci w Poznaniu. Kasia specjalizuje się też w analizie trendów i sygnałów zmian. Jest trenerką i współtwórczynią programu Dostępny Design, popularyzującego wiedzę o uniwersalnym designie i dostępności. W rozmowie nie zabrakło nawiązania do MSN-u oraz do naszej młodzieńczej fascynacji Bauhausem! Dobrego słuchania! Menu wiedzy:  książki o zagadnieniu funkcji i formy:  R. Arnheim, “Dynamika formy architektonicznej”, Wydawnictwo Officyna, 2016 E.H Gombrich “Zmysł porządku o psychologii sztuki dekoracyjnej”, universitas, 2009 W. Rybczyński, “Jak działa architektura. Przybornik humanisty”, Karakter, 2014 podcast o trendach: "Design Emergency", Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn

How can design help to make our failing prisons fit for purpose? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, discusses the design deficiencies of one of the most troubled areas of many societies, our prison systems, and what can be done to make them rehabilitative rather than brutalizing, with the British criminologist, Yvonne Jewkes..Yvonne, who is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath, where she also teaches in the School of Architecture, has visited over a hundred prisons worldwide to assess why they are failing, how they can be improved, and what role design can play in that process. She has also advised on the design of new correctional facilities in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand..In her recently published book, An Architecture of Hope, Yvonne explores the challenges confronting our overcrowded, underfunded, often understaffed prisons, while drawing on her research and practical experience to assess: “What we can do to make prisoners feel like people again, rather than like prisoners?”.We hope you'll enjoy this episode. You can find images of Yvonne and the prisons she refers to in her interview on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other inspiring global design leaders who, like Yvonne, are tackling complex challenges and 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.

Why should we care about data? Not only because “data is the new oil,” as British mathematician Clive Humby famously said in 2006, but also because data sets can contain the values, culture, and future of communities and society. In other words, data is us. Domestic Data Streamers, a design studio based in Barcelona since 2013, has worked to redefine how we engage with data, moving from visualization through diagrams and other graphic tools to actual data interaction and performance. In this episode, Paola Antonelli speaks with founding partner and director Pau Garcia and creative and research director Marta Handenawer.With a background not only in design, but also in theater and improvisation, the founding members of DDS have set out to make complex information more human and accessible, evolving traditional data visualization into data experiences. They believe that data can move people emotionally, not just inform them, and they thus use every tool at their disposal––from analog, hands-on installations to generative AI––to make them come alive.Among their most remarkable projects is Synthetic Memories, “a public service for reconstructing lost or undocumented memories using AI” that not only allows citizens to see their remembrances in photographs or videos that never existed, but also to file them along those of family members, neighbors, or compatriots to form a collective archive. In the case of survivors, refugees, and migrants, it can be a way to document a past life for future generations and make sure cultures are not entirely lost.You can find images of Domestic Data Streamers' 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 Pau, Marta, and their colleagues 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.

How can architecture help us to address the escalating climate emergency? There are many ways it can do so: from ensuring that new buildings are designed to radically reduce carbon emissions during construction, to doing the same in terms of how they will function..The Swiss architect, Philippe Rahm, is at the forefront of this process through his experiments with what he calls climatic architecture, the theme – and title - of his latest book. In this episode of Design Emergency, Philippe tells our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn how he developed the concept of climatic architecture and is putting it into practice..Born in Switzerland, Philippe studied architecture there and in France, where he runs Philippe Rahm Architectes, which he founded ten years ago in Paris. His mission is to enable buildings to become more ecologically responsible by aligning them with their locations and climates to make the most of the light, humidity and other natural phenomena in order to minimise the use of fossil fuels in heating or cooling them..Philippe tells Alice how these principles have been applied to completed and ongoing projects including: Central Park in the Taiwanese city of Taichung, the entrance to Maison de la Radio et de la Musique in Paris, and, working in collaboration with OMA, the Scalo Farini project to redevelop two disused railway yards in Milan..We hope you'll enjoy this episode. You can find images of Philippe and his work on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other inspiring 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 on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Things are not exactly looking up. While the climate emergency is undeniably advancing, however, a powerful cultural shift is also afoot––away from doomsday alarmism or resignation, and towards optimism. Despite being a wide-awake scientist, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is among those who are presenting to the world the constructive, energetic, even joyful side of the fight for climate justice.Ayana is a marine biologist; the founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank dedicated to addressing climate issues in coastal cities; a frequent advisor on environmental policy and strategy to governmental agencies, foundations, and multinational corporations; and an author. Her most recent book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, is based on 30+ interviews in which she pokes scientists, designers, curators, and policy experts with that hard question, arm-wrestling them into optimism. Ayana's reliance on design and art, of particular relevance for Design Emergency, shows how instrumental these attitudes are if we want to imagine a better future for all, and then will it into being. In the book as well as in Climate Futurism, an exhibition she curated at Pioneer Works in New York, she paints a picture in which humanity successfully tackles climate challenges, offering actionable insights and highlighting the potential for a just and sustainable world.You can find images related to Ayana's 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 Liam, 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.

Growing up in Milan, Paola Antonelli was surrounded by design and became aware of its importance when she noticed things that weren't well designed. For nearly 30 years Antonelli—an architect, author, editor and podcaster—has been the Design Curator at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. A long-time inspiration for us at COOL HUNTING, we were excited to sit down with her to talk about her perspective on design, what's exciting her now, current and future MoMA exhibitions, her Design Emergency podcast and her work running the Research and Development department focusing on discourse around life's moments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paola_Antonelli https://www.moma.org/about/senior-staff/paola-antonelli http://momarnd.moma.org/salons/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-emergency/id1655108265 Photo by Marton Perkaki Discover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com. This episode was produced by Rob Schulte. Design Tangents is presented by Genesis.

Growing up in Milan, Paola Antonelli was surrounded by design and became aware of its importance when she noticed things that weren't well designed. For nearly 30 years Antonelli—an architect, author, editor and podcaster—has been the Design Curator at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. A long-time inspiration for us at COOL HUNTING, we were excited to sit down with her to talk about her perspective on design, what's exciting her now, current and future MoMA exhibitions, her Design Emergency podcast and her work running the Research and Development department focusing on discourse around life's moments.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paola_Antonellihttps://www.moma.org/about/senior-staff/paola-antonellihttp://momarnd.moma.org/salons/https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-emergency/id1655108265Photo by Marton PerkakiDiscover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com.This episode was produced by Rob Schulte.Design Tangents is presented by Genesis.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As architecture and construction are two of the biggest sources of carbon emissions on our planet, what can architects do to change this? In this episode of Design Emergency, the US architect, Jeanne Gang, tells our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn how she and her colleagues at Studio Gang in Chicago are designing new ways of reusing and repurposing existing buildings, as an ecologically responsible alternative to building new ones, through a process she calls “architectural grafting”..Jeanne is a prolific and ingenious architect whose work at Studio Gang includes: the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and the Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Among Jeanne's projects currently being designed or under construction, are the new US Embassy in Brasilia and the Global Terminal at Chicago O'Hare Airport..She describes the defining theme of her practice as being to make “architecture that strengthens kinship among people, their communities and the natural world”. All Jeanne's work is steeped in her research at Studio Gang, including an experimental project to protect the one billion-plus birds that die in the US each year after crashing into high-rise buildings, and as a Professor in Practice at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where her teaching focuses on the theories of reuse and resilience that she explores in her latest book, The Art of Architectural Grafting..We hope you'll enjoy this episode. You can find images of Jeanne 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 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.

Visions of future worlds by storytellers of all kinds––filmmakers, writers, designers, and other artists––play an important role in our evolution. Whether they are utopias or dystopias, visual or verbal, they invite us to imagine what we could make of ourselves and of our planet, for good and for bad. Australian architect Liam Young is among the most respected and effective contemporary speculative designers and world-builders, focusing on the imagination of better worlds in which humankind recognizes its place and responsibility within nature––climate fiction.The climate crisis is real, and real ideas and solutions need to be implemented with urgency. The citizens of the world need awareness to pressure the powers that be and demand action, and even engineers and scientists need inspiration. However far-off they may seem, Liam's visions are based on current and available technologies, which he studies in depth to mine their positive attributes and attenuate their dangers.Liam, who is based in Los Angeles and often collaborates with Hollywood productions as world-builder, discusses his personal practice, which explores the intersections of technology, culture, and the environment to create immersive narratives that envision alternative futures. By delving into two of his epic works––Planet City and The Great Endeavor––he explains how world building can shape our understanding of potential realities and inspire solutions to contemporary global challenges.You can find images of Liam's 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 Liam, 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.

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.

Growing up in Milan, Paola Antonelli was surrounded by design and became aware of its importance when she noticed things that weren't well designed. For nearly 30 years Antonelli—an architect, author, editor and podcaster—has been the Design Curator at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. A long-time inspiration for us at COOL HUNTING, we were excited to sit down with her to talk about her perspective on design, what's exciting her now, current and future MoMA exhibitions, her Design Emergency podcast and her work running the Research and Development department focusing on discourse around life's moments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paola_Antonelli https://www.moma.org/about/senior-staff/paola-antonelli http://momarnd.moma.org/salons/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-emergency/id1655108265 Photo by Marton Perkaki Discover more shows from SURROUND at surroundpodcasts.com. This episode was produced by Rob Schulte. Design Tangents is presented by Genesis.

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.

The exhibition "Design Emergency" at the Vitrina Gallery at the Holon Institute of Technology – HIT, depicts that exactly: How Israel's industrial design community – as individuals as well as in the framework of the various academic institutions – came together in a vast volunteer effort after the October 7th attacks, to meet specific needs of Israel's security forces and the home front – be it producing supplemental pouches and pockets for battle vests, or special covers for hospital stretchers. The second component of the exhibition focusses on visual communications and the significant awareness campaigns that were launched, some having international impact, including posters of the hostages, videos and other messaging material. Vitrina Gallery curator Dr. Dalia Manor, spoke to KAN reporter Naomi Segal about the exhibition and why it was important to cast light on this unique undertaking. (Photo: Vest with dedicated drone pouch. Ofer Zick)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Data visualization is one of the most precious applications of design for social and political purposes, and a powerful tool for journalists and historians. In this episode, Anjali Singhvi, senior staff editor for spatial investigations at The New York Times, discusses with Paola how she deploys design in her reporting practice to highlight facts, resolve ambiguous narrations, and provide readers with the tools to uncover truth. In her work, Anjali unravels details and reconstructs events both recent––a fatal fire in the Bronx, for instance, or apartment building collapses in southern Turkey or on the Florida coast––and past, as she and her team did in 2023 by giving a first comprehensive visual account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1923. An expert in forensic 3D reconstructions of crime scenes and digital investigations, Anjali is keen to explain her background, the role of investigative visual journalism, and to describe a typical New York Times investigation––the process and the research involved, from journalists and institutions to citizen reporting and user-generated data. You can find images of Anjali's 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 Anjali, 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.

Olalekan Jeyifous' 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 have 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 and the Sharjah Biennial, his work never ceases to delight and puzzle. Could these really be the futures we are heading for? In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, Olalekan explains to Paola his idea of utopia and the role of speculation in guiding our behaviors 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 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, his economies a mix of informal and creatively structured. His work has been described with many florid labels––from architectural utopianism to speculative world-building and eco-fiction, by way of Afrofuturism and retrofuturism.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, 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.

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 Chwalisz, 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Urban fragility arises when authorities fail to provide basic services, rupturing the social contract. Legitimacy, authority, and the capacity of institutions decline, hindering functions like security, infrastructure, and access to essentials. As more and more migrants around the world move from the country to booming cities, and as more and more refugees are displaced from their home to makeshift emergency villages that become permanent and expand uncontrollably, fragility has become a wicked problem.What can architecture do? We explore this question in Design Emergency co- founder Paola Antonelli's interview with Italian-born, Somali architect Omar Degan, founder of DO Architecture and Design. Omar and his team specialize insustainability, emergency architecture, and post-conflict reconstruction. His work, in Mogadishu and beyond, reflects his belief in using architecture as a tool for peace and development in distressed areas.Following his post-graduate degree in Emergency Contexts and Developing Countries from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, Omar decided to focus on culturally and historically relevant solutions in fragile contexts globally. He co-founded FragilityLab in 2023, aiming to promote peace and development through architecture and he 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 at theforefront 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 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. 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 by Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information 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 ArtInstitute 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.

Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, where she also serves as the founding Director of Research and Development. She has been described as "one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries in the world" by TIME magazine. In this interview Paola talks about her vision of what design is. She believes that design touches every aspect of society, and that design has a civic responsibility towards humanity and the planet. “Design is the enzyme that makes progress happen”. Her biggest ambition is to enhance people's awareness of design and to make sure the world understands that design is not only cute chairs, sleek products, and fetching logos. But objects are not irrelevant, the controversial acquisition of the @ sign to the MoMA collection shows that collecting is not about ownership per se, since the sign belongs to everyone.     We talk about some of the more impactful exhibitions she has organized at MoMA and the 40-plus Salons that she has organized, that will not only inform the museum and its program, but also inspire the wider conversation in the world outside. The Salons are available on-line and new Salons can be enjoyed through the museum's live streaming. Paola also explains the vision behind the Instagram/podcast based project Design Emergency together with design critic Alice Rawsthorn. On a more personal note, we also talk about curiosity and adventure as major driving forces in her life, her passion for traveling and love for New York. We also get Paola's take on how AI and Refik Anadol's work “Unsupervised” have influenced her perspective on MoMA's collection. Paola Antonelli © 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Peter Ross  

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.

How can design help us to make the most of the benefits of playing and following sports regardless of our differences? In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, our cofounder Paola Antonelli interviews the French social designer Gabriel Fontana who is designing new types of sports and sports equipment intended to make the experience as inclusive and empowering as possible..Gabriel, whose practice is based in Paris and Rotterdam, focuses his work on schools, where most of us are introduced to sport as a competitive form of team work. As Gabriel explains: “Dominant ideas regarding gender, ethnicity, physical ability and sexuality are reproduced in sport and physical education. Research shows that girls, children with disabilities, children with bi-cultural backgrounds and LGBTQIA+ children are marginalised and often excluded in PE.” To address this, Gabriel has designed a new game, Multiform, in collaboration with philosopher Nathanja van den Heuvel and sport teachers and students in Rotterdam and Paris. Children wear transformable outfits and are prompted by the referee to change team several times during the game to ensure that the three teams constantly change their size, composition and diversity. “This way,” says Gabriel, "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 to forge a healthier relationship with them, Gabriel hopes to create collective ways for young people to use sports to overcome their differences, reinforce their bonds and become better individuals.You can find images of the projects described by Gabriel on Design Emergency's IG grid. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms. Join us for future episodes featuring other global design leaders who are fostering 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 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.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.

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 at the forefront of 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.

At this turbulent, often terrifying time, we urgently need to understand what is happening in our world, and what the consequences will be. How can design help us to do so? In this episode of Design Emergency, Paola Antonelli talks with Federica Fragapane, the Italian information designer who is at the forefront of using data visualization, which involves analysing huge quantities of complex data and interpreting it in digital imagery, to expose the damage caused by human rights abuses, climate crimes and other threats.Federica explains the importance of visualizing contentious social, political and ecological issues: from the murder of climate activists in Brazil, to police brutality against women's rights campaigners in Iran. She also stresses the need to do so accurately and persuasively, in order to ensure that they will engage as many people as possible, and will be memorable and meaningful to them. By doing so, Federica uses design as an activist tool to expose the truth about the causes and impact of abuses of power in the hope of preventing repetitions.Thank you for listening. You'll find images of the projects Federica 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 global design leaders who, like Federica, are helping to build a better future.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 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.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.

Today, we have planned something extraordinary for you. We finished the last season with a little riddle and asked our audience to guess who was the Special Legal Design Santa in our season finale. We received some answers, thank you for those, and the promised prize was drawn. Our lucky winner is Elif Yildirim, a lawyer and legal design student from Turkey and we invited Elif to plan and co-host an episode with us and what an episode it turned out to be!  Alice Rawsthorn, a British Design Critic and author joined us to discuss about design as an attitude and how it can be incorporated into law. Alice talks about why great design is a human right and explains how we understand design and its potential in different fields of life and what is the level of importance to incorporate design into our responses in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. We also talk about how design, or design thinking, has increasingly gained popularity in different fields of professions, and law is just one of the examples. Alice explains if there are some “red flags” in this development. -- Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice's weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design's potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the Democracy Next research and action institute as well as a member of the UK government's Honors Committee for arts and Media. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast andmin research platform that investigates design's role in forging a fairer future. Ayşe Elif Yıldırım is a lawyer and academic and most recently a Visual Communication Design student. After traveling and living in many countries of Europe, she is now based in Ankara, Turkey. She has several academic degrees in different fields of law, most recently she was granted her Ph.D. degree with distinction for her doctoral research conducted under the scholarship of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the field of Business and Human Rights. Always being interested in interdisciplinary fields of work that combine two distinct ways of thinking, Elif is now focusing on Legal Design and how we can use it to solve complex challenges we are facing in our contemporary world.

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 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.Presented by Paola Antonelli and Alice RawsthornGraphic design by Studio FrithRecording by Spiritland Productions 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 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 global design leaders in different fields and different parts of our planet. 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.

We're off! Our interviewee for this first episode of the Design Emergency podcast is the 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.

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 progress in using design to forge positive change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Design is an agent of change which can help us make sense of what is happening and turn it to our advantage. Design has done this long before word has been invented to describe it.”How can we approach an everyday challenge as a design project? How can people use design for activism? What is the potential of design as a tool for societal change? How can people working as professional designers work with all of us as co-designers of the future?In her optimistic keynote session, Alice Rawsthorn describes multiple examples from her books “Design Emergency” and “Design as an Attitude'' that illustrate design as a way to respond to unforeseen circumstances and illustrate human tragedy. If design is being used responsively, empathically and intelligently, it can be a catalyst for positive change, reconstruct our lives and spark hope.One of her most recent examples is a group of graphic designers that are hacking road signs in the Ukraine to disrupt transportation - and world community awareness - of war. They repurposed highway signs to mislead Russian soldiers by showing the only destination as “the Hague” - the seat of the International Court of Crimes against humanity. 

Design Emergency: How can design help us to build a better future?Join us for this special event celebrating the 2021/22 RSA Student Design Awards programme and the power of design to help us build a better future.The 2022 SDA keynote address will be delivered by award-winning design critic, author and co-founder of Design Emergency, Alice Rawsthorn.In her address, Alice will describe how she and MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli are using their research platform, Design Emergency, to explore the work of the global design leaders who are giving us hope by developing ingenious solutions to problems caused by the climate emergency, refugee crisis, abuses of technology and other complex challenges.Following the address, the RSA's chief impact officer Andrea Siodmok will present the 2022 awards, sharing an overview of each winning project, and inviting the people behind these inspiring ideas on stage to receive their awards.The RSA Student Design Awards is a global competition focused around a set of project briefs that challenge participants to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic issues through design thinking. Winners receive practical and financial support from the RSA and our partners, as well as the opportunity to join a remarkably diverse community of alumni.#RSAdesignBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/ueembDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsoff...

Via their Instagram page Design.Emergency Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli have brought designers together to tackle some of the worlds intractable problems.

Via their Instagram page Design.Emergency Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli have brought designers together to tackle some of the worlds intractable problems. Journalist Amy Odell discusses her biography of the fashion industry's most powerful influencer Anna Wintour. New Zealanders have kicked off a citizen historian fad thanks to a new book from Dr Christine Whybrew of Heritage NZ called How to Research Your House. It helps you discover the genealogy of your home and uncover secrets of its past. Toilet, loo, powder room, the toot; no matter what you call it you use it everyday. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset casts his eye over the design evolution of the public toilet.

There is perhaps no one on the planet with a bigger-picture view on the impact of design—in all of its manifestations—than Paola Antonelli. As the Museum of Modern Art's senior curator of architecture and design as well as its director of R&D, Antonelli consistently expands notions and definitions of what might be considered “design,” and shows how, in no uncertain terms, design connects to practically everything we see, touch, hear, taste, smell, and do. With great passion and energy, she is the ultimate clear-eyed booster of this wide-ranging realm she holds dear. Antonelli's most recent output—the book Design Emergency: Building a Better Future (Phaidon)—is not only an outgrowth of her prolific 28-year career at MoMA (during which she has worked on related projects including the 2005 exhibition “Safe: Design Takes on Risk,” the 2015 book Design and Violence, and the 2019 Triennale di Milano exhibition “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”), but also a result of the pandemic. During lockdown in spring 2020, Antonelli, together with the British design critic and writer Alice Rawsthorn, conceived and launched @designemergency on Instagram, a still-ongoing feed that highlights voices central to key global issues, all of them related to improving the world through design. The effort is yet another example of Antonelli's talent for synthesizing a vast array of provocative projects, designers, products, and ideas; bringing them to the forefront; and giving them much-needed attention. On this episode, Antonelli talks with Spencer about time as a frustration, the myth of speed, the importance of going with the flow, and the many design emergencies constantly taking place all around us.Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:Full transcript[04:15] Museum of Modern Art[04:15] @curiousoctopus[05:38] Objects of Design: From the Museum of Modern Art[06:09] “Machine Art”[12:54] “Humble Masterpieces”[15:44] “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design”[17:42] “Design and the Elastic Mind”[25:14] “Neri Oxman: Material Ecology”[29:34] Design Emergency[29:34] Alice Rawsthorn[33:43] @design.emergency[45:18] “Items: Is Fashion Modern?”[47:02] The 3,000-Year History of the Hoodie[51:03] “Safe: Design Takes On Risk”[01:04:45] Design and Violence

As one of the leading design curators in the world, MoMA's Paola Antonelli has consistently led the global conversation in her field. On this episode, Dan speaks with Antonelli about her new book with critic Alice Rawsthorn, “Design Emergency,” getting the job that would change the course of her life, and how design can truly build a better future. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, I speak with design legend Paola Antonelli, who has contributed her expertise to MoMA since 2014, serves as the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design and also Research and Development. We discuss her career and philosophy of design as power. For Antonelli, her “gift” as a creative is to lose herself in objects, in the process of understanding how they work, what's behind them, and their purpose. Antonelli sees a responsibility in sharing this gift with the world to empower people to make better decisions and take control of their lives. She is the co-host of Design Emergency and received the Smithsonian Institute's National Design Award in 2006, and in 2007 was named one of the “25 most incisive design visionaries” by Time Magazine.