Design Emergency

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.

Sinéad Burke, a disability activist and advocate for inclusivity, discusses the importance of accessible design. She shares her journey and the challenges faced by disabled individuals. The podcast explores the need for systemic change, co-designing with marginalized communities, and technology's role in accessibility.

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.

Architect Abeer Seikaly discusses drawing inspiration from ancestral Arab knowledge, weaving tradition into design work, and co-founding Amman Design Week. She emphasizes memory, resilience, and empowerment through design, reflecting on childhood experiences and emotional connections in traditional desert traditions. The podcast explores her unique approach to archiving and crafting cultural connections with Bedouin women, highlighting the importance of preserving cultural heritage in modern design challenges.

Who are the Hidden Heroines of Design, the gifted and ambitious women who have achieved so much in design, yet have never been given the recognition they so richly deserved? And why, at a time when there is widespread recognition of the need to ensure that every aspect of our lives is as divers and inclusive as possible, do so many women still find it much, much tougher to realise their design ambitions than their cis-male peers or, to be specific, their white cis-male peers?.In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, our cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, each identify three talented women designers who have either been unfairly forgotten, or never fully acknowledged for their achivements. Among them are the designers of one of the world’s most popular board games and the first car specifically designed for women; the woman who transformed Chinese consumer culture in the 1980s; a legendary trans pioneer of video game design; a network of Palestinian women who are sustaining their rich artisanal history through their embroidery; and the dynamic editor-in-chief of Vogue Philippines, who is using the magazine to articulate her vision of her country’s new Philippine identity..We hope you will enjoy hearing their stories. You can find images of the work of our Hidden Heroines of Design on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like those remarkable women, are forging positive change..Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hiro Ozaki, aka Sputniko! (her high-school nickname) is a designer / multimedia artist / musician / educator / entrepreneur whose unique and multi-pronged career exemplifies a new, promising course for design and its transformative role for society. Hiro has gone from imagining future scenarios––richly described with stills and movies starring gifted young heroines and their fantastical objects, set to catchy J-pop music with explanatory lyrics––to launching a highly successful company that might soon go through an IPO in Japan. Tellingly, the company, called Care, still upholds the topics that Hiro highlighted with her early speculations, especially issues related to gender and reproduction.Japanese and British, Hiro grew up between the two countries, studying math and computer sciences in London at Imperial College and then moving up a few blocks to the Royal College of Art. There, she enrolled in the Design Interactions program, where celebrated designers and theoreticians Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby taught Design for Debate, a discipline whose output were not immediately “useful” objects, but rather meditative, harrowing, always incisive object-based scenarios that reflected on the role of technology and science in our lives to come.In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, Hiro talks to Paola Antonelli about her trajectory from speculative designer and pop star to entrepreneur. You can find images of Sputniko! and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Hiro, are at the forefront of positive change.Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can we make productive use of the unfinished buildings that litter our towns, cities and landscapes? In this episode of Design Emergency, Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip, founders of Limbo Accra, a spatial design studio based in Ghana and the US, tell our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn about their mission to ensure that we make the most of the possibilities to reimagine, rebuild and reuse the thousands of concrete relics, which were abandoned before construction was completed..Unfinished buildings are a largely ignored, yet wasteful and damaging aspect of architecture and construction. Dominique, who was born in the US and is of Ghanaian and Haitian heritage, and Emil, who is Danish, recognised the scale of the problem after moving to Ghana in 2018 to open a studio in the capital, Accra. They explain to Alice how, having noticed the large number of abandoned, incomplete buildings in the city they have focused Limbo Accra on designing new ways to reinvent them. .Having started by transforming an abandoned site into a Ghana’s first public skatepark, Limbo Accra began a long term research project to identify unfinished buildings throughout Ghana, and to compile a digital archive of them and the possibilities of completing their construction. This research is now being extended across West Africa and, eventually, to the rest of the continent..Thank you for listening. You can find images of Dominique, Emil and their work at Limbo Accra on our Instagram grid @design.emergency and https://www.limboaccra.online/. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like them, are forging positive change..Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Investigative visual journalism is a fairly new discipline that combines traditional investigative reporting techniques with digital forensic and spatial analysis of evidence,” says Anjali Singhvi, senior staff editor for spatial investigations at The New York Times in this Design Emergency podcast interview with our cofounder, Paola Antonelli. “It involves using a lot of open-source visual materials such as photos, videos, data, drawings, architectural plans, to explain complex stories and to reconstruct news events.”.In this episode, Anjali tells Paola how she has drawn on her background in architecture, and the journalistic skills she has honed at The New York Times, to pioneer its use of the rapidly expanding field of using spatial investigations to uncover the truth about tragedies, disasters and human rights abuses. She also describes how she and her colleagues communicate their findings to readers using story-boarding, 3-D modelling and data visualization techniques to present clear, precise and compelling analyses of horrific events such as the impact of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and a horrific fire in a Bronx apartment building that killed 17 people. “The goal,” says Anjali, “is to hold the people in power accountable and to give our readers the greater visual understanding of a news event.”.Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Anjali and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms.Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.