Design Emergency

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.

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Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Claudia and her work on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes ofDesign Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Claudia, are forging positive change.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

Our world is becoming ever more fragile, as more and more migrants across the planet from the country to booming cities, and as more and more refugees are displaced from their homes to makeshift emergency villages that become permanent and expand uncontrollably. What can architecture do to address this? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder Paola Antonelli interviews the Italian-born, Somali architect Omar Degan about his work in using design to support vulnerable communities.

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Omar tells Paola how he and his team at DO Architecture and Design are focusing on specialize emergency architecture, and post-conflict reconstruction. Their work, in Mogadishu and beyond, reflects Omar's belief in using architecture as a tool for peace and progress in distressed areas. Following his post-graduate degree in Emergency Contexts and Developing Countries from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, Omar has specialized in developing culturally and historically relevant design solutions in fragile contexts. He co-founded FragilityLab in 2023 to focus on this and is currently at work on an expanded version of the United Nations guidelines for architecture in states of emergency.

You can find images of Omar and his work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Omar, are forging positive change.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

How can design help to heal fragile people, who have experienced abuse, poverty and oppression? In this episode, the Indian artist, activist and social designer Aqui Thami tells Design Emergency’s cofounder Alice Rawsthorn how she does this by designing new opportunities for healing and learning for vulnerable women and girls, for and trans and queer people.

Aqui has personally experienced violence and bigotry as a janjati, or indigenous artist, who was born in the Himalayas. She tells Alice how since moving to Mumbai on her own as a teenager, she has addressed this by designing and delivering safe spaces and other urgently needed resources for people living in Dharavi, which is one of India’s biggest and most densely populated slums.

As well as establishing Sister Library, South Asia’s first mobile, community-owned and run feminist library there, Aqui co-founded the Dharavi Art Room to provide art, design and craft classes for local women and children. She also pursues her activism by designing and printing zines and fly posters as part of the Bombay Underground publishing movement.

At a time when India, Mumbai and Dharavi are changing at frenzied speed, Aqui explains to Alice how she plans to continue to use design as an activist tool to empower her friends, neighbors and collaborators and to help them to preserve their communities.

Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Aqui and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Aqui, are at the forefront of positive change.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

As the climate emergency escalates, it is clear that the solutions we need are those that can be applied at scale. The materials scientist Veena Sahajwalla is at the forefront as she is already designing and delivering such solutions. In this episode, Veena tells Design Emergency’s cofounder, Paola Antonelli, how she is recycling huge quantities of abandoned tyres, clothing and other waste into new materials.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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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.

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Fernando’s interest in Mexico’s ecosystems has led him to find new ways of transforming natural materials such as corn husks into laminated marquetry used for wall coverings, lighting, and furniture, always collaborating with local communities on their production. This allows him not only to create long term employment opportunities but to shed light on the economic and ecological challenges they face . 

Through his thoughtful, extensively researched projects, Fernando addresses pressing issues such as the environmental emergency, loss of biodiversity, community fragmentation, migration, and the adverse impact of global trade on local agriculture and food culture. By documenting these issues and celebrating the transformative power of design, he provides insights and potential solutions.

You’ll find more images of the projects described by Fernando in this episode on Design Emergency's IG grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and the others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Acast, and other podcast platforms.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

Magdalene Odundo has made some of the greatest pots of our time. In this episode of Design Emergency, she talks to our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, about how she discovered the joys and challenges of making ceramics and their symbolic value in expressing our cultural identities.

Born in Kenya in 1950, Magdalene spent her childhood there and in India before moving to the UK to study art in Cambridge, where she flung herself into student debates on identity politics. She then studied at what is now the University for the Creative Arts in the Surrey market town of Farnham and at the Royal College of Art in London. As well as being formally beautiful, Magdalene’s pots are rooted in her love of making and her understanding of the politics of her own identity, as Black African woman living in Europe, and her years of research into the ancient ceramic traditions of Africa, Asia and Central America.

Magdalene tells Alice how she draws on that research to reinterpret historic forms, finishes and firing processes in her pots that evoke the drama and fragility of dance. Her ceramics belong to the collections of major museums, including the British Museum and V&A in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and The Met in New York. Yet she still lives and works in the same place in Farnham, where, after years of dedicated teaching, she has become Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts.

Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Magdalene and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes when we will hear from other global leaders in different areas of design.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

Few people have more experience of disaster relief than the great Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari. In this episode, she tells Design Emergency’s cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how she has dedicated nearly 40 years to helping people throughout Pakistan to rebuild their lives and communities after earthquakes, floods and other devastating disasters.

Born in what is now Pakistan in 1941, Yasmeen became its first professional woman architect by starting a practice in Karachi. In 1980, she co-founded the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan to conserve the country’s historic architecture and quit her practice in 2000 to focus on that work. Five years later, when millions of people were killed or displaced by the horrific Kashmir earthquake, Yasmeen travelled to the region to help local communities with repair and reconstruction.

She tells Alice what she learnt from that experience and her subsequent work in disaster relief, why the conventional aid system has failed, and how she is developing a “humanistic humanitarian” model of helping people to help themselves and then helping others to do the same. Yasmeen also describes how the world’s architectural practices could help to train the humanitarian architects of the future, as well as her current plans to build a million ecologically sustainable homes on floodplains across Pakistan and to design a floating village.

Thank you for joining us. You’ll find images of the projects Yasmeen describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes when we will hear from more global design leaders who, like the remarkable Yasmeen Lari, are at the forefront of positive change.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

As the climate emergency intensifies, how can design help us to repair and revive our ecosystems? In this episode, Design Emergency’s cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, hears how the Jordanian architect Deema Assaf is using her design skills to develop new solutions to the severe ecological threats facing her country by reviving the beautiful forests, which once flourished throughout Jordan, but disappeared centuries ago leaving most of its land as desert.

Jordan is one of the world’s driest countries. Years of drought have left it with desert on 75% of its land and forests on just 1%. Deema, who practiced landscape architecture for ten years after graduating from the University of Jordan, was so concerned that in 2018 she founded the TAYYŪN research studio in Amman to develop ways of regenerating Jordan’s arid land by turning it back into forests of native trees.

Deema tells us how she cultivated her first forest five years ago, and how she and her colleagues are currently planting their fifth forest in Jordan. To support this work, they have embarked on a major research project to compile a database of native Jordanian trees and plants, as well as harvesting their seeds, and running community programmes to encourage more people to help their efforts to revitalise Jordan’s stricken ecology.

Thank you for joining us for Alice’s interview with Deema Assaf. You’ll find images of the projects Deema describes on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from more design leaders who, like Deema, are tackling the major challenges of our time.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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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 Rawsthorn

Graphic design by Studio Frith

Recording by Spiritland Productions

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, our cofounder Paola Antonelli interviews Sissel Tolaas, the Berlin-based Norwegian artist, chemist, and researcher who has dedicated her life to exploring smell in all its facets and expressions. With a background in chemistry and linguistics, Sissel has developed an interdisciplinary practice that spans the fields of art, science, and technology, with a particular focus on olfactory communication and the role of smell in human experience.

Over the course of her career, Sissel has conducted extensive research on the human sense of smell, exploring everything from the molecular structure of odors to the cultural and social contexts in which they are produced and perceived. She has created a vast scent archive comprising thousands of smells from around the world, and has used these smells to create a range of olfactory installations, products, and artworks that challenge our perceptions of scent and our relationship with the world around us.

Sissel's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and she has collaborated with a wide range of individuals and organizations, from perfumers and fashion designers to scientists and architects. In ll her projects, she has sought to expand our understanding of the role of smell in human life and to promote the idea that smell is not just a sensory experience, but also a powerful tool for communication, memory, and identity.

Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Sissel 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, Acast and other podcast platforms.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

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

In this episode, our cofounder 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.

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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 an exciting 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.

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 do we need investigative design? In this episode, the Italian designers Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi tell our cofounder, Paola Antonelli, about their pioneering work in investigating design's impact on complex, often contentious areas of our lives, from the toxic, often illegal global trade in digital waste to the social, to the environmental devastation and exploitative employment practices associated with the timber industry.

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Having met as students, Simone and Andrea founded the design studio Formafantasma in the Dutch city of Eindhoven in 2009. It now has offices in Milan and in Rotterdam. Their practice is based on research, and their deep investigations into the ecological, historical, political, and social forces shaping design today. The outcome of their investigations is relayed through their exhibitions, research, teaching, and in the exquisite objects they design for commercial production worldwide.

In this episode, Simone and Andrea talk to Paola about their use of design as a lens to and understand the world, and how they deploy the formal elegance of objects as Trojan horses to unveil unethical practices and exploitative systems of extraction that are entangled with design and production - exposing them so they can be dismantled. 

Three projects in particular illustrate their approach. Ore Streams (National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne, 2017, and Triennale di Milano, 2019) focused on electronic waste, while Cambio (Serpentine, London, 2020) examined the global ecology of timber and Oltre Terra (National Museum in Oslo, 2023) studied the systems of extraction and production of wool, and therefore the complex relationship between animals, humans, and the environment. 

You can find images of the projects Simone and Andrea describe in this episode on our Instagram feed @design.emergency. Thank you for listening!

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 curb the human tragedy of the global refugee crisis? In this episode, our cofounder 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.

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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.

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 several billions of tons of agricultural waste produced each year worldwide - 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's cofounder Paola Antonelli, the 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!

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 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 can find images of the projects discussed by Alice and Paola in this episode on our Instagram at @design.emergency. Thank you for listening.

Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

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.

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.