As regular listeners will know the idea behind the show is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist or architect about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. However, every once in a while I mix the format up a bit and talk to someone who has an overview of the design world. This is one of those occasions.

Paola Antonelli is senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as the institution’s founding director of Research and Development. 

Over more than 25 years at the museum, she’s curated shows such as: Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, Workspheres, and Design and the Elastic Mind. Most recently, she has been responsible for Broken Nature in Milan’s Triennale in 2019 and Neri Oxman: Material Ecology. 

She has lectured and given talks all over the world and picked up a fistful of awards, including 2020’s London Design Medal. 

In collaboration with writer Alice Rawsthorn, her latest project, entitled Design Emergency, is a series of interviews on Instagram, which investigate design’s importance during the pandemic.

In this episode we discuss: coping with the crisis at MoMA; why she co-created Design Emergency as the virus took hold; falling into curating; the importance of rejection; creating the museum’s first-ever website; and how computer code is as fragile as ceramics.

Find out more about MoMA here

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