Thought Starters

The Pod is going on tour for London Design Festival! First stop: The Brompton Design District.

Today we met Sevra Davis of The Design Museum and Seetal Solanki of Ma-tt-er, a research design studio that explores the past, present and future of materials. Tune in for an invigorating chat about strange new materials, and how we can nudge them into mainstream use.

The Pod is going on tour for London Design Festival! First stop: The Brompton Design District.

Today we met Johanna Agerman Ross, curator of contemporary design at the V and Tetsuo Mukai of the research and design and research consultancy, Workshop for Potential Design.

Tune in for an invigorating chat about how we display design in museums, how we can learn to appreciate past objects in new ways, and the challenges of curation.

The Pod is going on tour for London Design Festival! First stop: The Brompton Design District.

Today we met architect and furniture designer Kelechi Odu of Oparanze Collective and Sophie Thomas of communications design studio Thomas Matthews. Tune in for an invigorating chat about the reuse of materials in design, enjoyable ways to tackle not-so-enjoyable subject matter (such as pollution), and: is London too clean?

Spiritland founder Paul Noble Southbank Centre's Bengi Unsal

​​​​​The art world can be uninviting, and the sheer number of galleries can feel overwhelming. One solution: the internet. ​​​​​Counter Editions is a platform selling prints and multiples by leading international artists. Director Robert Diament joins us in the Pod, along with actor and art collector Russell Tovey. ​

​Some of the most esteemed and enduring brands are those that build in their customers an emotional connection – they give us more than just practical function. A few of those them seemingly manage to create own worlds, and come to represent a lifestyle and system of values, too. ​One such brand is Rapha, the cycling sportswear company founded in 2004 – now with a global following, thanks to a biannual magazine, the international Rapha Cycling Club, its in-store cafes, and a 2007 collaboration with Paul Smith. ​Graphic identity and art direction has played a huge part in keeping this all coherent and consistent – and adding to or changing any part of the brand is delicate business. ​In discussion today: Jack Saunders and Paul Barnes, two people who are helping to nudge and navigate Rapha into a new iteration.

​​​​Does the world need another chair? It’s a question often asked in the design world, mostly by industry journalists who have a hard time getting excited about countless new four-legged additions to furniture showrooms from Milan to Mexico City. ​​​What is far more intriguing are the experiments in how we make, not necessarily what we make. From explorations of new materials, to developing circular economics, companies small and large are investing in finding new ways to create. ​​​Our guests today: Jane Withers, a design consultant, curator, and writer, who is also behind the Brompton Design District, and Brent Dzekciorius, whose company DZEK creates original architectural materials and products in collaboration with designers.​ You'll have seen the terrazzo he did with Max Lamb – big beautiful specks of copper, blue and green on white.

​​​It's possible your social media feeds have been completely flooded with dispatches from the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The international architecture exhibition has just launched, and will take over the coastal city with national pavilions, individual architects and curators exploring themes that have ranged from cities and society – or, in the case of this year: free space.​ ​​​Today's guests run Neiheiser Argyros, the international multi-disciplinary architecture practice behind this year’s Greek pavilion. Their interpretation of “free space” explores communal spaces of several universities around the world, inspired by Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens. ​​​We invited Xristina Argyros and Ryan Neiheiser to join us in the Pod, just before Venice.

​For a fashion brand, success takes many forms.Commercial success is an obvious one. But then there’s cultural impact. And now too, it’s about an online following. Often the audience that lends a brand its relevance aren’t always the most active consumers. Today we talk about just that, fashion that is more than just clothing, it’s also a message. ​A little about our guests: ​Eden Loweth is one-half of the design duo that founded Art School, a fashion collective that is embracing and celebrating non-binary, gender-fluid clothing. ​Nathalie Khan teaches fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion. Nathalie writes often on the impact of technology on both the catwalk and the fashion image.

​​Sustainability is a word that gets frequently thrown around, but what, exactly, does it mean? Today on Thought Starters, Caroline Till of FranklinTill and Carole Collet, founder of the Material Futures master’s programme at Central Saint Martins talk about what sustainability means for the rapidly changing world of fashion and design.