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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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- 2 weeks ago33 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.
- Sep 9, 202525 min
Maya Bird-Murphy on Architecture and Communities
How can we empower more people, particularly young people from disinvested communities, to engage with architecture, and to use it as a tool to improve their daily lives and future prospects? Maya Bird-Murphy, the Chicago-based architect and educator, tells Alice Rawsthorn how she is addressing this through the Mobile Makers programme of youth workshops and community engagement projects..Maya describes how she launched Mobile Makers as a non-profit in 2017 and drove a retrofitted mail truck around Chicago to deliver after-school programmes, summer camps and field trips. Mobile Makers now operates from a permanent space in Humboldt Park, Chicago, and has launched programmes in Boston, Massachusetts and Aspen, Colorado. At a time of growing interest in socially engaged architecture and design, particularly among young designers, Maya describes the pros and cons of running a non-profit, and her plans to create a network of architects and social designers who are committed to developing radically new ways of working..We hope you’ll enjoy this episode . You can find images of the projects Maya 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Jul 22, 202536 min
David Gissen on the Architecture of Disability
Architecture’s traditional approach to disability revolves around “fixing problems” by securing adaptations that will allow disabled people to access the ideal world of full biocapacity. Architect and scholar David Gissen wants to “shift the conversation about disability away from a focus on the problems of a disabled user and their problems engaging with rooms and bathrooms and sidewalks,” he explains, and toward the acknowledgment that weakness and impairment are woven into human and natural history.In his 2023 book The Architecture of Disability and in this conversation with Paola, David explores how disability can be seen as a lens through which to reinterpret architecture itself. Access is not enough. Gissen doesn’t ask how we can include disabled people in the built environment; he asks how the built environment might be reimagined entirely if we began with disability as a starting point and used it as a generative lens for a better future––for all bodies.You can find images related to this interview 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, like David, are at the forefront of 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.
- Jul 1, 202538 min
Tosin Oshinówò on Designing Africa’s Future
In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, the Nigerian architect, Tosin Oshinówò, tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how design and architecture can help to forge a fairer, safer, more sustainable future for Africa..One of the gifted young architects at the forefront of forging radical change in across the African continent, Tosin was born in Lagos and returned there after studying architecture and design in London and Madrid, to establish her practice, Oshinówò Studio. In her interview with Alice, Tosin describes how she has combined commercial projects with humanitarian endeavours, including a collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to design a resettlement village for displaced people returning to the Borno region after being forced to leave there by the Boko Haram insurgency.. As chief curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023 and as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University for the past year, Tosin has shared her vision of Africa’s future. She recently won a Special Mention at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennal for an installation based on her Loeb Fellowship research into the flourishing informal economy of markets in Lagos, which, she believes, could be scaled up to provide a sustainable local solution to Nigeria’s need for design and architectural innovation. .We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Tosin describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at 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.
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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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