Thought Starters

​Alex de Rijke is one of the founders of London architecture practice dRMM. They're currently up for the prestigious RIBA Stirling prize for their work on the new Hastings Pier. The winner will be announced in just a few days on Oct 31. In the meantime, Alex and Lee Mallett, urbanist and director of Urbik, joined us in The Pod. They discuss Hastings Pier and ask why it can be so difficult difficult to compel people to let you build anything interesting.

​Today we hear from two creative Londoners about their partnership at the Ace Hotel.

​Laura Houseley is a writer and consultant specialising in contemporary design, and the founder of the influential Modern Design Review magazine. ​Vickie Hayward is head of culture and programming for Atelier Ace, the in-house creative team at the Ace Hotel. ​On the agenda: This year's Ready Made Go installation, how the Ace Hotel uses design to create spaces let you do what you’d like; and Laura’s process in putting together a magazine.

​Two young women at the top of their game talk about junior-level staff – and how the creative industries don’t always encourage them to their full potential. ​Dior Bediako is the founder of Pepper Your Talk, a platform for young fashion creatives. Her new project The Junior Network has created a community of fashion professionals at the beginning of their careers, with events and resources to propel them forwards. ​Mercedes Benson is an independent social media marketing socialist, who has worked for Google, Adidas and Puma. Her community-based platform SocialFixt encourages entry-level black, Asian and minority talent into the creative industries. ​Also on the agenda: tokenism, the experience of recent graduates and why we should all be learning from our junior colleagues.

​It's a universal truth that hospitals can be depressing places. They certainly don't have to be, at least in their design. ​That's exactly what we talk about in this episode of Thought Starters. ​Dr. Nick Rhodes is a psychiatrist by trade, but runs a charity called The Nightingale Project that helps improve health services through art and music. He recently commissioned Camille Walala to paint a mural at the Park Royal Mental Health Centre. If you're dealing with depressed people, he asks, why treat them in depressing places? ​Similarly, Clara Gaggero Westaway looks at the emotional side of the devices used in health care. She talks about one recent project where her practice, Special Projects, rethought the experience of monitoring blood pressure. The resulting device was designed to be less stressful to use, and in turn, more accurate in its results.

​The mismatched lifespan of hardware versus software, why startups need better product marketing and how science fiction drives innovation: all in this episode of Thought Starters. ​In the Pod at White City Place, we meet Matt Webb, who runs accelerator programs for esteemed digital agency R/GA, and Jon Marshall, design director at MAP, an industrial design consultancy he co-founded with Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby.​

​Two women at the helm of two creative businesses talk about just that: running a business, and running a business while being female. Joining in us The Pod at White City Place: Danielle Pender and Sabine Zetteler. ​In 2013, Danielle founded Riposte, self-described as a “smart magazine for women”. And, it is. Now on its 8th issue, Riposte has featured an impressively diverse range of women including: Thought Starters alumna Nelly Ben Hayoun, writer and activist Gloria Steinem and Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi. ​Sabine Zetteler is the founder and co-director of Zetteler Creative publicity, which she started in 2012. Her clients range from young, rising talent, to established industry stalwarts – all, however, share her humanist, optimistic worldview. Some current and past clients include illustrator and artist Camille Walala, paper merchants extraordinaire G . F Smith, and Design and Architecture Norway.

​ In this episode, we learn that making champagne and making a magazine isn’t all that different. We also learn what happens when you bring a legendary east London drag queen to rural France. ​ Our guests: The Gourmand founder David Lane and Adam Saletti, co-owner of Selavy Champagne.

​ If you flip through issues of bi-annual food and culture magazine The Gourmand, you can find an interview with the Cookie Monster or a photo feature of hot dogs posing with actual dogs. David is also creative director of Lane & Associates creative agency and, since last October, an art director with Frieze, the art fair and its associated publications. ​ Adam is the former publisher of magazines like The Gentlewoman and Luncheon. In June 2016, he helped create Selavy, described as “a hand-crafted queer champagne made from organically grown grapes on the mountain of Bonneil, France.” ​ One the agenda: why food is such a common topic for a magazine, building Champagne’s outside the box branding, and whether The Gourmand and Selavy are part of a trend or the start of era in food journalist and branding.

​On this episode of Thought Starters, we talk about archives. Joining us, Tory Turk, the head archivist at the Hyman Archive, the world’s largest magazine archive, and Carl Williams of Carl Williams Rare Books. ​They discuss the importance of digitising our archived history and why it’s sometimes okay to buy fakes.

​Two architecture writers: one looking at inner city marvels, the other at the Green Belt. Together in the Pod, they look at the similarities and differences in their work - and what it means to be creative in London today. ​Tom Dyckhoff is a historian, journalist and broadcaster. He wrote and presented the primetime documentary TV series The Secret Life of Buildings, and recently published The Age of Spectacle: Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City – the story of how architecture became obsessed with the flashy, the monumental and the ostentatious. ​John Grindrod has also just published a book called Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt. It explores the tensions between conservationists and developers, town and country, politicians and people, NIMBYs and the forces of progress. His previous book, Concretopia, is on the architecture of post-war British reconstruction.

​ In this episode of Thought Starters: a tech founder and a Google exec talk about diversity. ​ In 2014, Pip Jamieson moved to London from her native Australia to found The Dots, a social network that has in many ways liberated the creative industry from the more corporate LinkedIn. The visually-driven platform connects creatives with careers at some of the world’s leading companies. ​Nishma Robb is the head of ads marketing for Google and YouTube in the UK and Ireland, and she’s the chair of Women@Google UK – an organisation that champions women who are working with technology around the world.