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Design Emergency: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Welcome to Design Emergency, where the design curator Paola Antonelli and design critic Alice Rawsthorn will introduce you to the inspiring and ingenious designers whose success in tackling major challenges – from the climate emergency and refugee crisis, to ensuring that new technologies affect us positively, not negatively – gives us hope for the future.
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- 1 weeks ago31 min
Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn on Information Design
In this new episode of Design Emergency, our cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, explore the rapidly expanding field of information design at a time when it is an increasingly powerful force in our lives. They do so by identifying some of their favourite examples of information design: past, present and future..The emergence of data visualization has transformed information design in recent years. Yet information design continues to come in many different forms: from statistical diagrams, maps and signage systems, to scientific visualization, animated narratives and, even, gestures..Among the examples chosen by Alice and Paola are: the pie charts with which the 19th century health reformer, Florence Nightingale, convinced the British government to fund the design and construction of new clinics and hospitals; and the compelling visual and statistical analyses of different aspects of African-American life in the early 20th century by the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois..They also discuss Harry Beck's famous 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground; New Zealand’s inspiring Covid-19 public information campaign; and the pioneering data visualisations produced by the researchers and artists Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler to trace technology’s impact on our lives in the last 500 years and the social, political, economic and ecological implications of artificial intelligence..We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Alice and Paola discuss on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who are in the forefront of forging positive change..Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts..Recording and editing by Spiritland Creative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 8, 202630 min
David Chipperfield on Architecture’s Priorities
What are the most important challenges for architecture today? And what will they be in the future? One of the most influential architects of our time, David Chipperfield, talks to our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, about the urgent need to respond to architecture’s new priorities from an environmental and societal perspective, and the importance of securing public and political support for that process.David grew up on a farm in south-west England and worked for Britain’s architectural grandees, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, before opening his own practice in London in 1985. David Chipperfield Architects (DCA) now has offices in Berlin, Milan, Santiago da Compostela, Shanghai as well as London.DCA is responsible for many memorable buildings – from the Neues Museum in Berlin, to the Royal Academy in London and San Michele Cemetery in Venice. Current works in progress include the Nobel Center in Stockholm, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and an ambitious project for the London School of Economics to repurpose and reuse a 1950s building. David also tells Alice how he works on very different scales at Fundación RIA, the non-profit foundation he has established in Santiago da Compostela to experiment with environmental, economic, social and cultural projects in the Galician region of north-west Spain. We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects David describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who are in the forefront of forging positive change. Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Recording and editing by Spiritland Creative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Jun 16, 202632 min
Francis Kéré
Francis Kéré, architect, educator, builder, and one of the most compelling advocates for architecture as a force for dignity, participation, and social transformation. Kéré’s architecture begins with people and for a building to exist, it has to traverse a process of listening, learning, and designing and fabricating together with the public it is meant for.Born in Gando, Burkina Faso, and based in Berlin, Kéré first came to international attention through a school he designed for his home village while still a student, in 2001. Built with local materials and the participation of the community, the project demonstrated that architecture could be elegant, climate-responsive, and socially transformative. Since then, his work has expanded from schools and clinics to national assemblies, memorials, museums, and cultural institutions around the world. In 2022, he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor in his field.In this conversation with Paola Antonelli, Kéré reflects on his new book, Building Stories, which foregrounds sketches, conversations, memories, and acts of collective making rather than finished masterpieces. Together, they discuss participation, local knowledge, democracy, and architecture's capacity to create dignity, agency, and belonging.You can find images related to this interview on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. 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.
- May 20, 202633 min
On Crafts
In this episode of Design Emergency, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli explore how craft has evolved into a powerful force for social, cultural, and environmental change. Design, art, and craft have had a long, complex relationship. For most of human history they were inseparable: the objects people made — textiles, sculptures, tools, paintings, ceramics, furniture — belonged to the same continuum of human creativity, skill, and material knowledge. Industrialization disrupted that balance, introducing divisions between art, design, and crafts, while often relegating crafts to the margins as decorative, domestic, and secondary to industrial production. Yet in recent years, amid ecological crisis, technological anxiety, and a growing desire for more meaningful forms of making, craft has returned with renewed urgency and visibility. Through a series of parables spanning continents and generations, Alice and Paola uncover remarkable examples of crafts as catalysts for social and cultural change: Ethel Mairet’s radical weaving experiments in 19th century England; Ruth Clement Bond’s quilting initiatives among African American communities in the American South; Fernando Laposse’s collaborations with farming communities in Mexico; and Theaster Gates’s transformation of neighborhoods and communities in Chicago through repair, making, and collective labor.Set against a backdrop of environmental crisis, technological acceleration, and renewed interest in material knowledge, the episode celebrates the re-emergence of crafts as a critical language for thinking about identity, ecology, community, and the future of making.You can find images related to the projects and people discussed in this episode on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency, when we will hear from other global design leaders who, through their work and ideas, are helping to shape 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.
- Apr 14, 202646 min
Irma Boom on the Future of Book Design
What is the future of the printed book? Does it have one? And, if so what will it consist of? Who better to answer this than the woman who is inconstestably the greatest book designer of our time, the brilliant Irma Boom. In this episode of Design Emergency, Irma tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, why the printed book is too important to join all the other analogue objects that have become extinct in the digital age.Irma has designed some of the most beautiful, intriguing, original and surprising books of our time by experimenting with new facets of book design: in terms of their functions, forms, tactility, scent, printing and papers. She tells Alice how she fell in love with book design as an art student in Amsterdam, and began her experiments as a junior designer at the Dutch government’s publishing and printing office in The Hague. Irma also describes some of her favourites of the centuries-old books that she collects as research tools in her Amsterdam studio, and has encountered through her research in historic libraries, including the Vatican’s.We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the books Irma describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who are in the forefront of forging positive change.Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.Recording and editing by Spiritland Creative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Mar 8, 202630 min
Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn celebrate the Hidden Heroines of Design on International Women’s Day 2026
Happy International Women’s Day! One of Alice and Paola’s favourite episodes of Design Emergency every year is the International Women’s Day Special in which they celebrate some of the incredible female designers, who, despite their talent and achievements, haven’t been given the recognition they richly deserve.Among them are the five Swedish women who founded and ran a School of Women’s Citizenship in the 1920s to teach newly enfranchised Swedish female voters compatriots how to become responsible citizens; Leona Chalmers, the pioneering US designer of an early version of the mass manufactured menstrual cup; Rosa Grena Kliass, the first woman who was registered to practice landscape architecture in Brazil; and the futuristic 1960s French fashion designer, Michele Rosier.As well as paying tribute to these remarkable women, Paloa and Alice explore why, despite their talent, intelligence, skills and sensitivity, they and other female designers have been unfairly forgotten or marginalised. Misogyny is the obvious explanation, but many of them have also faced challenges due to their ethnicity, geography, sexuality, religions and other factors.At this turbulent time, when we urgently need the best possible designers to address our increasingly complex problems, we’ll all suffer if these prejudices continue.We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the Hidden Heroines’ work that Alice and Paola describe on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who are in the forefront of forging positive change.Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.Recording and editing by Spiritland Productions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Feb 4, 202637 min
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley on Biotic Architecture
Architecture has long treated bacteria as an enemy to be controlled—dangerous foreign agents to be sealed out, sterilized, or erased. In their new book, We the Bacteria: Notes Toward a Biotic Architecture, architecture historians and curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley turn that assumption inside out (literally,) arguing that architecture should not be bent on shielding and isolating humans from their invisible partners through hygiene protocols, ventilation, materials, light, and other forms of management and control. Buildings should instead be shaped by microbes as they have been for centuries, and humans should reconsider their role as participants in a much larger biological collective.In this conversation with Paola, Beatriz and Mark explore how bacteria offer a radical lens through which to reinterpret architectural history and design practice. Rather than asking how architecture can protect us from microbes, We the Bacteria asks what it means to design for coexistence, and what political, ethical, and spatial fantasies are exposed when the dream of separation finally collapses.You can find images related to this interview on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. Please join us for past and future episodes of Design Emergency, where we continue to speak with designers, scholars, and thinkers who are reimagining what design is for—and who it is really designed with. 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.
- Oct 13, 202525 min
Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn celebrate Women in Tech on Ada Lovelace Day
Every year, the second Tuesday in October is designated as Ada Lovelace Day as a tribute to its namesake, Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and pioneering computer programmer who collaborated with Charles Babbage on the design of his remarkable mechanical computer, the Analytical Machine. To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2025, Alice and Paola are dedicating this special episode of Design Emergency to celebrating her achievements and those of other remarkable women who have honoured Ada’s legacy in different ways, making crucial contributions to the digital age. .Some of them have designed and delivered transformational advances in technology, such as Britain’s ingenious female code-breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II, Ida Holz, the Uruguayan computer scientist and engineer who pioneered the internet in Latin America, and Stacy Horn, who designed one of the first online communities in ECHO..Others have developed inspiring ways of improving existing systems: both by alerting us to new possibilities, and by identifying or defusing unexpected dangers, as the Chinese-born, US-based computer scientist Fei-Fei Li has done, and the Kenyan tech designer and activist, Juliana Rotich. While Jay-Ann Lopez, founder of the global network of Black Girl Gamers and new media pioneer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, are at the forefront of challenging stereotypes and championing diversity, inclusivity and equity within tech design, thereby helping to make it fitter for purpose and to realise its true potential. .We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Alice and Paola describe on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders who are in 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.
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About Design Emergency
Welcome to Design Emergency, where the design curator Paola Antonelli and design critic Alice Rawsthorn will introduce you to the inspiring and ingenious designers whose success in tackling major challenges – from the climate emergency and refugee crisis, to ensuring that new technologies affect us positively, not negatively – gives us hope for the future.
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