Episódios
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 her, 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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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
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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.
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What could - and should - our future look like? Olalekan Jeyifous is committed to designing irresistible visions of a future in which humanity makes the best out of its many mistakes and thrives within the strictures of its self-inflicted handicaps. By doing so, he has had a remarkable effect on the architecture world - and beyond.
From the Venice Architecture Biennale, where he won the Silver Lion in 2023, to the Museum of Modern Art, his work always delights and puzzles. Could these really be our futures? In this episode of the Design Emergency podcast, Olalekan tells our cofounder, Paola Antonelli, his idea of utopia and the role of speculation in guiding us towards positive change.
Nigerian-born and Brooklyn-based, Olalekan puts his architectural training to good use and imagines our old cities reframed on new systems of communication, transportation, occupation, and exchange. He describes them all in rich visual detail with immersive collages, videos, objects, and even VR experiences. The characters in his tableaus are often smiling, gregarious, in charge of their destinies, imaginary and yet familiar. His communities are strong, and his economies an enticing mix of informality and creatively structures.
You can find images of Olalekan and his work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from other global design leaders who, like Olalekan Jeyifous, are helping us to envisage and, to build, better futures.
Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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