open-ended

#19 Josie Wells is an award-winning journalist and founder of Footnotes and Indexes, a New York-based book club that aims to initiate personal growth and foster critical thinking through works by Black writers. Making academia accessible, her accompanying online newsletter provides space for people to address social issues and dig deeper into Black culture and Black feminism.  

Started in January 2020, the Footnotes and Indexes book club and newsletter combine text with music, videos, and documentaries to move seamlessly between history and modern contemporary pop culture. In response to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Josie also created a free introductory online masterclass on Black feminism, which has been transformative for those who joined in from around the world.

In this Open/Ended conversation, Josie speaks with us about the origins of Black feminism / and the transformative effect of great writers such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Bell Hooks in her own life.

Jaz O’Hara founded The Worldwide Tribe in 2015 after a life-changing visit to the refugee camp in Calais, known as ‘The Jungle’, and a subsequent Facebook post that went viral. The Worldwide Tribe uses creative storytelling to amplify human perspectives of displaced people within the refugee crisis, inspiring a global community and leaving a legacy of positive, social change.

Jaz and her team have provided essential support in camps across Europe and the Middle East. Alongside coordinating food, clothing, and shelter, they organise larger projects such as installing wifi for refugee camps in France and Greece and supporting search and rescue teams for distressed migrants in the Mediterranean.

In this Open/Ended conversation, Jaz talks with Suhair Khan about the scale of displacement due to climate change, war, and the pandemic / changing the dehumanising language used for those who are displaced / and technology's power to nurture human relations.

Blaze Lightfoot Jones-Yellin is an afro-indigenous urbanist whose practice and teaching has largely focused on environmental justice and community-centric design in New York. He is also a professor at the Sustainability and Environmental Justice department at CUNY John Jay.

Throughout his career, Blaze has helped create equitable communities by blending human and environment-centred design; always bringing community voices to the forefront of city revitalization projects. He has supported the recovery of communities in Far Rockaway after Superstorm Sandy and has worked on The Lowline - the world’s first underground park, in New York City. In all of this work, he has driven the philosophy that designing for equity is good in the long run for both residents and developers. 

In this Open/Ended conversation, Blaze speaks with us about climate migration / building inclusive and resilient urban communities / empowering the local / and how there is no going back following this pandemic.

Dr Julia King is an architectural designer who works on sanitation and housing in the context of megacities and rapid urbanisation in the UK and India; both countries in which she was raised. She has a special interest in unpacking urban micro-cultures and her practice centres on participatory design.

Julia is also a Research Fellow at LSE Cities, where she teaches on the Cities Masters Programme; exploring the political, economic and cultural organisations of the major urban centres. Alongside this, she directs LSE Cities apprenticeship programme for City Design; upskilling and actively involving young adults in key decision making about public spaces in London.

Julia reflects on the pandemic in the context of cities in our Open/Ended conversation. We speak with her about structural changes vs individuals impact / Covid-19's inflaming existing inequalities / the necessity of a new culture of care and compassion / and the urgency for collective action. 

This week’s Open/Ended conversation features Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a multidisciplinary artist who examines the relationship between humans and nature through exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation, and biodiversity. Using artificial intelligence and virtual reality as primary means of expression, much of her practice-led research has focused on the human desire to ‘better’ the world.

At present, she is working on a new permanent artwork commissioned by the Eden Project in Cornwall and funded by the Garfield Weston Foundation, with additional partners Gaia Art Foundation. By taking part in a national project to save endangered species of pollinator insects, Daisy’s artwork, developed in dialogue with horticulturists, scientists and consultants, seeks to help us understand the vital roles of indigenous plants and their pollinators.

In this Open/Ended conversation, we speak with Daisy about empathy for non-humans, hierarchies in nature, and experimenting with technology to visualise possible futures.

Website:
daisyginsberg.com 

edenproject.com

openended-design.org
 

Sertaç Taşdelen is an Istanbul-based tech entrepreneur who has spent the last 10 years bringing artificial intelligence to the worlds of spirituality and fortune-telling. As co-founder and CEO of Binnaz and Faladdin, two psychic apps, and Iyilik Paylaş, an online donation platform, Sertaç was not always an entrepreneur. He was based in Singapore when he left his job as a management consultant to being a tech startup founder — one of the first with a lens entirely on mysticism.

Sertaç’s first venture was inspired by his mother, whose traditional Turkish coffee cup readings sparked the idea for an online marketplace of fortune-tellers. Today, Faladdin is the Number 1 app in Turkey and has been downloaded by more than 25 million people across the globe with 1.2 million daily active users.

Coming from the mixture of ‘Fal’, meaning fortune, and the tale of ‘Aladdin’, the Faladdin business is imaginative, fun, and full of personality. Through a series of early startup bootstrapping marketing appearances, Sertaç himself is the now hugely well-known face of the brand.

In this Open/Ended conversation, we speak with Sertaç on running a tech business about people’s hopes and fortunes. We talk about data privacy, personal creative freedom versus big money VC investments, and the outcomes of a positive mindset. Today, Sertaç is an example of using the power of culture and tradition in a global marketplace, and of leaning into the power of optimism.

Widharmika ‘Widhar’ Agung is founder and director of Indorelawan.org, Indonesia’s largest web-based volunteer matching network, which he founded in 2012 inspired by his own community-centric Balinese heritage. Indorelawan now has 180,000 volunteers who sign up and engage via the website and app, supporting 3000+ organisations with 6000+ activities, to help one of the world's largest and most diverse countries strengthen community action and build towards a brighter and more connected future.

For this Open/Ended conversation, Widhar joins us from his second office, the Jakarta headquarters of heritage batik fashion brand Iwan Tirta (where he has been CEO and navigated dressing world leaders and collaborations with Disney) to speak about impact investment as a way to preserve culture / craftsmanship in design / using technology to harness the power of community.

“Iwan Tirta is not about selling a product - it is about the pride of being Indonesian and about Indonesian craftsmanship.”

"All our secrets are revealed in the way we move."

Aparna Rao, part of the Indo-Danish art duo Pors & Rao, joins us from her studio based in Bangalore, India for this Open/Ended conversation. She and her collaborator Søren Pors work with objects and installations, often incorporating lifelike physical movement and responsive behaviours. Technology brings their sculptures to life, sensitively programmed to respond to their environment; you may glimpse behaviour patterns such as shyness, fatigue or quirky confidence and be puzzled by their captivating apparent consciousness. Aparna has worked for over a decade on building electro-mechanical systems and interactive installations, often investing several years into the development of artworks.

Based between Bangalore and Zurich, Pors and Rao have exhibited around the world, in memorable locations such as Shodoshima island, as part of the Setouchie Triennale 2016, and the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 in Kerala, India. Since March 2017, they have been in residence at Wyss Zurich (UZH + ETHZ) where they have set up their lab PATHOS (Poetic Animatronics Through Hands-On Systems). Their research here aims to address the hostilities encountered in robotics by creating a more user-friendly animatronics platform.

Growing up in a family of furniture makers, Aparna was surrounded by creators and three-dimensional design. She eventually abandoned her screen-centric work as a graphic designer and started to work with objects through code. Pors and Rao have been driven to create a usable browser-based interface that facilitates intuitive animation without having to code. The software and specialised set of motors compress months and years of production into just a few minutes.

She’s been working with several major tech companies on collaborative projects: Watch this space.

Open/Ended talking points:

• How do we programme Technology to appear emotional?
• An 18-year journey of making and learning to take your time
• Blurring the boundaries between Technology and Art 
• Animating a life-like gust of wind; the function of memories within art

#11 Esra'a Al Shafei on Platforming Marginalised Voices

Esra'a Al Shafei is a Bahraini human rights activist and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond; building communities that celebrate, protect and promote diversity and social justice.

Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, Esra’a and her team of remote-working women coders and techies across the Middle East and North Africa emerged during the Arab Spring in 2010-2012 with the crowd-sourcing news platform Crowdvoice.org. Since then, they have produced mould-breaking platforms such Ahwaa, an online space built to support and protect the Arab LGTBQ community, and Mideast Tunes, a platform in the Middle East that drives to empower underground bands, one which helped revolutionary bands like Mashrou’ Leila and Justina find new audiences.

Esra'a spends much of her time on initiatives with the unifying goals of freedom of expression and access to information, not just in the Middle East and North Africa but around the world. At the forefront of this is Migrant Rights, advancing the rights of migrant workers in the Middle East and often in direct confrontation with local governments and authorities in the region.

Open/Ended talking points:

What is a political act? How do we find our own voice and stand up for what matters to us and our own community?

Music, the role it plays in contemporary politics, and how singing in your native tongue can be an act of courage and activism.

The financial impact of the pandemic on Majal.org and non-profits around the world.

The lack of resources & fundraising challenges for women entrepreneurs and founders coming from the Global South

#10 Marquise Stillwell on Community through Design

Marquise Stillwell's work spans art, culture, film and the problems (and solutions) of design in the world’s major cities. He speaks about life as an editor, film producer, curator, philanthropist and increasingly, a voice for social justice.

In 2009 Marquise founded Openbox in New York City - bringing together designers, researchers, and urbanists working with human-centered design; with a particular focus on building more inclusive, equitable communities.

He also runs the film production company Opendox, and is the co-founder of Deem Journal; both platforms which explore lesser-known narratives through design and culture. (link to there youtube channels)

In our Open/Ended conversation we speak about:

• Thinking about a different kind of AI - 'Ancestral Intelligence'.
• Issue #1 of Deem Journal, 'Designing for Dignity'; created to ask proactive questions and raise the visibility of women and people of colour as creative problem solvers and thinkers.
• Opendox's newest documentary 'The New Bauhaus' reflecting on living creatively and across disciplines in the 21st century.
• Empathy as a muscle.

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Open/Ended is a diverse community of creative practitioners and technologists working across discipline