Design Emergency

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 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...

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 exti...

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 Citizens...

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...

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 Des...

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 de...

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 exp...

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 archite...

Infrastructure is one of the most important areas of design, but is mostly ignored – until it goes horribly wrong. At a time when global investment in developing new forms of infrastructure is soaring, Alice and Paola discuss why it is so important to improve the design quality of the data networks, energy and water supplies, transport and sanitation systems and other aspects of infrastructure, wh...

What is a good working life in the 21st century? And how do we get there? In the latest episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, explores these issues with the pioneering social designer and social activist Hilary Cottam, who conducted five years of intensive research into how we could – and should – redesign all aspects of work, for her new book, The Work We Need: A 21st Centu...

One of the deepest, most often overlooked emergencies in the design world is the erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems—and the continued exclusion of Indigenous voices from the platforms where futures are imagined. Why is it an emergency? Because plurality, intended as the active celebration of diversity, is not just a matter of common sense and respect, but also a matter of survival. Native cul...

Who are the Hidden Heroines of Design, the gifted, resourceful and determined women who have achieved so much in design, yet have never been given the recognition they so richly deserve? And why, do so many women, and people who are queer, trans or of colour, still find it so much harder to fulfil their design ambitions than their white cis-male peers? . To celebrate International Women’s Day 2025...

As the global water crisis and climate emergency intensify, how can design help us to tackle the devastating food shortages, storm surges, rising sea-levels and other problems we face? On this episode of Design Emergency, the Australian designer, ecologist and activist, Julia Watson, tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn how indigenous communities in remote parts of our planet have developed ancien...

Coral are tough clients, as Pirjo Haikola knows well. The Finnish designer is renowned for her work on coral reef conservation and ocean biodiversity. Now based at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, North Queensland, right by the Great Barrier Reef, Pirjo is also a skilled diver. Spending significant time observing and documenting marine life firsthand has given her a u...

How can design help to defend and strengthen our human rights? And the rights of other species with whom we share our planet? At a time when rights and freedoms are under threat all over the world, Design Emergency’s cofounders, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, are marking Human Rights Day 2024 with a special episode on practical ways in which design is helping to protect our rights in excepti...

How can design help to make our failing prisons fit for purpose? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, discusses the design deficiencies of one of the most troubled areas of many societies, our prison systems, and what can be done to make them rehabilitative rather than brutalizing, with the British criminologist, Yvonne Jewkes. . Yvonne, who is Professor of Criminol...

Why should we care about data? Not only because “data is the new oil,” as British mathematician Clive Humby famously said in 2006, but also because data sets can contain the values, culture, and future of communities and society. In other words, data is us. Domestic Data Streamers, a design studio based in Barcelona since 2013, has worked to redefine how we engage with data, moving from visualizat...

How can architecture help us to address the escalating climate emergency? There are many ways it can do so: from ensuring that new buildings are designed to radically reduce carbon emissions during construction, to doing the same in terms of how they will function. . The Swiss architect, Philippe Rahm, is at the forefront of this process through his experiments with what he calls climatic architec...

Things are not exactly looking up. While the climate emergency is undeniably advancing, however, a powerful cultural shift is also afoot––away from doomsday alarmism or resignation, and towards optimism. Despite being a wide-awake scientist, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is among those who are presenting to the world the constructive, energetic, even joyful side of the fight for climate justice. Ayana i...

As architecture and construction are two of the biggest sources of carbon emissions on our planet, what can architects do to change this? In this episode of Design Emergency, the US architect, Jeanne Gang, tells our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn how she and her colleagues at Studio Gang in Chicago are designing new ways of reusing and repurposing existing buildings, as an ecologically responsible alte...

Visions of future worlds by storytellers of all kinds––filmmakers, writers, designers, and other artists––play an important role in our evolution. Whether they are utopias or dystopias, visual or verbal, they invite us to imagine what we could make of ourselves and of our planet, for good and for bad. Australian architect Liam Young is among the most respected and effective contemporary speculativ...

How can we make our lives fully accessible and inclusive? In this episode of Design Emergency, our cofounder Alice Rawsthorn explores this challenge with Sinéad Burke, whose mission is to campaign for inclusion and accessibility for everyone, for disabled people in particular. . Having started out as a teacher in her native Ireland, Sinéad became increasingly involved in disability activism, deter...

Controlling technology means controlling the world. While this statement rings painfully true today, it is as old as the idea of technology itself. In other words, as old as humanity. In this episode, Paola Antonelli interviews renowned researcher, author, and artist Kate Crawford, a leading voice on the social, ethical, and planetary implications of all technologies––artificial intelligence in pa...

Design has played a critical role in championing, developing and defending workers’ rights throughout history. In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, cofounders Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn, describe design’s impact on workers’ rights and on the constantly changing nature of work over the years. . As well as discussing the design of the symbols and actions – from the red flag, to the...