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.