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And as with every other area of life, you're not gonna get them if a privileged minority of one gender, one geography, one ethnicity dominate design.
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We really do need to convince everyone that they can become designers and that they'll be welcomed into the design community.
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Welcome to this third episode of What Shapes, a podcast by Three Days of Design, where we explore how design can shape our world.
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Our guest today is the award-winning design critic and author Alice Wawthorne.
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Alice has spent much of her career exploring how design can be a political, cultural, social, ecological, and scientific force for a fairer world.
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Together with Paula Antonelli, she also hosts one of my absolute favorite podcasts, Design Emergency.
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Now, very rarely have I met someone as knowledgeable and eloquent a storyteller as Alice.
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So I invite you to sit back and enjoy as we explore past, present, and future design signals as a force for good.
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My name is Veronica D'Asouza.
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Thank you for listening.
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Are you ready?
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I'm so happy to have you here.
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Thank you so much.
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Oh, well, thank you so much for inviting me.
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Tell me if there is that one moment when you first fell in love with design.
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Um, I don't think there was one moment, and fell in love maybe wouldn't be the right way to describe it, but I sort of grew up with design as an elemental part of my life without knowing what it was or even hearing the word, because my father was a an engineer and my mum was an art teacher, and so they were both very dexterous, very creative, although they'd never have used the adjective.
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So they were constantly making, repairing, and restoring things.
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And tragically, I did not inherit their dexterous skills.
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My brother did, happily for him.
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Um but what my mum did in particular was give me a lot of confidence in my visual sensibility to recognize the importance of sort of being at one with your surroundings, what you're wearing, how you're engaging with people, what you're doing, um, and enjoying it.
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What has shaped kind of your motivation to focus on design as a force for social, ecological, and you know, political movements?
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Well, I don't have a conventional background for a design writer, most of whom are academics, historians, or indeed practicing designers.
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Um I was a journalist, a conventional journalist, writing about economics, politics, corporate affairs, um for the first half of my career.
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So when I graduated, I went on the Times training scheme.
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I then worked for the Financial Times for 18 years, um, and including a stint as a foreign correspondent in Paris, and I then pioneered the paper's coverage of the creative industries.
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Um but I then decided I wanted to focus on one subject that I could develop a sort of uh a degree of expertise in, and so I could really use it as a sort of lens for analyzing what was going on around it, and I picked design, which I had discovered by accident uh when I was a student at Cambridge.
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I did law for the first part of my degree and then art history.
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The art history course was disappointingly conservative, but the saving grace was the incredible art history library, which was full of wonderful books.
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So I spent little time focusing on the course and a lot of time reading books in the library and also reading the international cultural journals that it had subscriptions to.
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And this included the Italian design journals like uh Domus and Avatare under the then editorship of Alessandro Mendini.
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And whilst Mendini's vision of design is slightly different to mine, I'm eternally grateful to him for introducing me to design as a cultural phenomenon.
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Because there was very little discussion about it in the UK at the time, as this richly contextualized discipline that was absolutely aligned with all the other things that I was obsessed by at the time.
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So fashion, film, politics, um it and being introduced to design in that very contextualized way, I think, meant that I always saw it slightly differently than had I studied design history in the conventional academic way.
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One thing I I noticed you talk about uh the dreamers, uh the rebels and the renegades as uh you know almost um aligning design sometimes with activism, maybe also in opposition or at least different from mainstream design.
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So what is mainstream to you and what is this dreamy rebelly renegade design?
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Well, I'm fascinated by politics.
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I always have been, even as a teenager, and feminism has been a hugely important part of my life.
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And one of the reasons why I chose to specialise in design was because it's a ubiquitous force that's absolutely embedded within every other area of our lives, and so it actually gives me license to write about whatever I'm interested in through the prism of design, and so naturally that would extend to political causes I was passionate about, like feminism and activism in general.
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The design history of activism is also extraordinary.
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Um, so whether you look at the Shakers in the 18th century when they construct redesigned and reconstructed an entire community to that was in keeping with their religious beliefs and also their sense of social and community responsibility, or um one of my favourite British examples is the incredible visual identity of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century, when Sylvia Pankhurst, who was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union, which was the principal activist movement for the suffragettes at that time, and the one that actually drove the violence campaign that really did rattle the British government into giving women the vote.
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Sylvia Pankhurst was a painter.
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She had been an art student, she studied at the Royal College of Art, and so she was instructed by her mother to take charge of the visual identity of the WSPU when they were planning their biggest rally ever.
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Um it was in um Hyde Park in 1908.
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And Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, who was the biggest funder of the suffragettes, um, decided that they had to develop an identity that would be accessible to the working class women who were a huge part of the movement.
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That yes, there were a lot of wealthy and bourgeois women who were members of the WSPU and they could afford to buy broaches and badges and special scarves and so on.
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But there was a huge number of working class women who couldn't afford to buy souvenirs like that, and who would need to make their own sort of WSPU-friendly outfits for the big Hyde Park demonstration.
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So they decided they would have a colour-coded identity, and they decided on three colours: purple for dignity, green for freedom, and white for purity.
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And so the instructions to, I mean, hundreds of thousands of women rallied in Hyde Park for this demonstration, and instructions were sent to them beforehand telling them to uh wear white dresses.
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Because women, certainly in Britain, tended to wear white dresses for religious reasons to go to church for their confirmations for weddings or whatever, most women probably had a white dress or could borrow one, and to accessorize the dresses with, you know, if they could afford to buy purple and green ribbons, that would do the job.
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Or it could be, you know, strips of fabric, um, so they could fabricate their own hatbands or belts.
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And so um the impact of these women, all colour-coded from different parts of the country, arriving in Hyde Park, was absolutely extraordinary.
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They all had their banners in the colours.
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There was a special group of Indian suffragettes who were all proudly um in white saris with purple and green accessories.
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I think they were fairly wealthy Indian women because they had their saris specially made for the occasion.
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They were all carrying wooden elephants as a symbol of India.
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So there were beautiful photographs of them there.
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And um this colour code was adhered to from then onwards.
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And the WSPU ensured that because all its demonstrations were so carefully orchestrated, they were incredible manifestations of the power of design to represent a highly controversial at the time political movement, exactly as it wished to be portrayed, and to slowly but surely change um the political balance of power in their favour.
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And there are endless examples of this in design, which I have really enjoyed discovering over the years.
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Um, but also I enjoy the vernacular aspects of the design, people who'd never heard the word, let alone trained to be designers.
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Alice, you're such an incredible storyteller.
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Well, I wish I was.
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You know you are ridiculously class.
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I I I feel, you know, we could turn on a bonfire and just I would just sit here and listen to you.
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Very often you you tell stories about designers that history has sometimes left out.
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So who tends to get written out and why?
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And is there something we can all become more aware of today to make sure that we are giving voice to more people?
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Well, unfortunately it's a sad and boring answer to the question, which is all the usual suspects have been written out.
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So women, queer and trans women, um people with disabilities, um, um, people of colour because of their heritage, their religion, um, their ethnicity, and design unfortunately has been a sort of white boys' club, a cis male boys' club, um for a very long time, and principally with the probable exception of Japan, conducted in the global north.
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Now that has changed radically in recent years.
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We have more um women designers, more designers of colours, more trans designers, uh, people doing incredible work in terms of design and disability.
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And um so there has been meaningful change, but still not enough.
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And I think the bottom line is if you believe in design, if you believe it's one of the most useful tools at our disposal to ensure that we adapt to political, cultural, social, ecological, scientific, technological change to ensure that they affect our lives for better rather than worse, it stands to reason that we need the best possible designers.
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And as with every other area of life, you're not gonna get them if a privileged minority of one gender, one geography, one ethnicity dominate design.
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So we really do need to convince everyone that they can become designers and that they'll be welcomed into the design community.
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And it's no coincidence that, you know, this doesn't just apply to design, it applies to art, to literature, to engineering, to sort of every sphere of life.
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The more diverse and inclusive any of these fields are, the higher quality the outcome is likely to be.
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So we all suffer because of prejudice and bigotry.
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What is kind of your general temperature of where we are in that recognition?
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Is it something we need to keep on fighting for, or do you feel like it's now kind of been cemented in the design world that we are on the right trajectory?
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Um keep on fighting, um, whilst acknowledging that genuine progress has been made.
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And um one of the things that really gives me sort of hope for the future is, you know, the evolution of the continent of Africa is obviously going to be key to it.
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It has the fastest expanding population on our planet at a time when in most other regions, obviously including Europe, populations are actually going into decline rather than increasing.
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Um, it also has extraordinary natural resources, which because of colonialism have been denied to the countries that rightfully own them.
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Um that post-independence has changed significantly.
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Um, obviously, it's still a problematic area, but there has been some improvement.
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And you also have a growing awareness of the importance of architecture and design within those countries, and a growing number of African architects and designers who were born and brought up in the region, are choosing to practice in the region, some who were actually born and brought up elsewhere, but have returned to the region to practice.
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And uh, certainly in terms of gender, it's much more diverse.
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There are a number of African architects and designers, male architects and designers who are now leading the fight, which is fantastic.
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So people like Diabedo Francis Carrey in architecture, um the Femi Marcus Bello in industrial design, they're doing extraordinary work, which receives a lot of attention.
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And that has changed in the global north is also impacting very positively in all sorts of different ways in the global south.
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But there are also a significant number of African women designers and architects who are emerging or have already emerged.
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So if you think of people like uh Dominique Petitfoy in Ghana and Leslie Locko, also in Ghana, as founder of the Africa Features Institute, um, of Toshin Oshino in Nigeria, of Mariam Kamara in Niger, of um Sumi Sumaya Valley in uh South Africa.
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I mean, the late Doreen Dengo, very sadly, she died far too soon, but she did extraordinary work, not only as a practitioner, but as a teacher, a curator, and an advocate in Uganda.
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So these are women emerging very early in the overall process and you know, speaking so powerfully, producing such extraordinary work, I think that's incredibly encouraging.
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We're in the middle of so many crises right now.
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Um, and together with Paola Antonilli, you've started this incredible podcast, written a book about design emergency.
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What have you learned through these last six years of looking through all these projects, listening to people talk about what they're using design to do?
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Paula and I began Design Emergency um during the pandemic.
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And during lockdown, as with all our friends, we were zooming and we were chatting and talking about how at a very early stage we were suddenly getting good news stories of design innovations that had been developed specifically to help us to address COVID.
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And up until then, um the world's leading scientists had no idea what it was, how to treat it, how to stop it.
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And that was still the case at that time.
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But designers, architects, engineers from many different genres were already developing practical solutions to help us to deal with it.
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And they were very rare good news stories for the media, so they got a lot of attention.
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And because they were pragmatic responses to a situation that everyone was familiar with, right?
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This deadly um pandemic uh with you know no apparent uh deterrent, people understood the problem, and so they were also readier to sort of be inspired by the solution.
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And we felt this could be a game changer for design, and it could encourage uh the general public and politicians to take it much more seriously.
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So we identified the 10 designers we felt were global leaders in the pandemic, um, all responsible for different innovations, and tracked them down and interviewed them.
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And after 10 weeks, um, we were building a huge following for design emergency.
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I mean, we'd given no thought as to how many people would actually follow it, so we were overwhelmed uh by the number who did.
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And we decided that really what we wanted to do was aim for the end game because both of us had really devoted most of our careers, writing in my case, curating Empowers on design, to trying to encourage people to take it seriously as a social, cultural, political, ecological, and scientific tool.
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And we felt that this could be a great way of doing it.
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And so then we focused on the global design leaders in design generally in different areas of design, and we've stuck to that format ever since.
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Short answer to your question is it's limitless.
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I mean, I have learnt so much, and I can also say that it felt like a privilege and a pleasure in the middle of this terrible, tragic global pandemic, to be constantly hearing about, you know, new projects, new developments, new ideas, new experiments.
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And it really did make me more cheerful, more optimistic, more convinced that we could crack this.
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And it's been wonderful to follow those people through.
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One thing that tends to run through many of the examples you talk about and, you know, the work that occupies you is empathy.
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Designing with empathy.
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How can we have more of that in the world we have today?
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Have you found any kind of metrical ingredients or recipe for how we can apply that?
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Intelligent and responsible designers have to be empathic because they have to interpret how their work, whatever design discipline it comes from, whatever its objectives are, how their work will be used, and if it's not empathic, people, if they're consumers, will decide not to engage with it in future.
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Um and if it is uh a societal um project, a project with sort of pan-societal impact, it it's highly unlikely to fulfill its designated function.
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Um but one of the things that always does appeal to me to designers is how empathic they are.
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And actually that was uh something that was lovely about the New Zealand COVID public information campaign, because um it was always quite compact in terms of its use of language, but it would always very gently suggest ways that the general public could help others in the fight against COVID.
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So people weren't made to feel like sort of passive recipients of important information.
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The notion was that, you know, for example, if they greeted people with a an elbow bump, that that would be a a healthy, risk-free way of doing so, and a way of cheering up and engaging with um their fellow civilians.
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So I always thought that was a beautiful example, a very simple one of empathy that really could have made a significant difference to people at that terrible time.
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If we look into a crystal ball, which of course is impossible, but we make an experiment, you know, ten years from now, what do you hope that we have achieved within design to maybe make more of us participate in kind of using design for these different ecological, social, political purposes?
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Well, I think that process is well underway, and you can gauge that by the level of interest from major international institutions, um, NGOs, whether it's the United Nations and its many agencies, the Red Cross, uh Messen sans frontier, and so on, and also by um individual national and regional governments who are increasingly um taking design seriously and really embedding it in policy making.
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So, for example, um the pioneering British social designer Hilary Cotton, who began by um prototyping different ways of designing the provision of care for the elderly by local councils through their social service departments.
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Um, she's now advising the British government on its policy for uplands, which are the higher parts of Britain which tend to be relatively economically deprived, uh, rural, often very remote regions, and is also doing work for the government on housing.
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Now that's being replicated in many other countries, and that uh process will continue to accelerate.
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Um I don't know what the world is going to be like in ten years' time, but I'm confident that designers will be radically engaging with it and coming up with imaginative and genius and purposeful and on-point solutions to the problems.
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Um I f dread and fear that we will still be struggling to combat the climate emergency, um, which is obviously a major challenge for design now, as is um attempting to address the tragic refugee crisis, which continues to um escalate.
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I mean, um the proliferation of of wars, conflicts is terrifying.
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Um also the the withdrawal of of USAI and other US government funding for um a lot of NGOs has we're we've really yet to see the negative impact that that will have.
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But you know, we are seeing it with the Ebola outbreak, for example, where there just aren't vaccines to get people the um no educational tools, there are no longer the same aid workers on the ground ready to spring in and uh make an immediate difference, so we don't know what the cost of that will be.
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So I s I would like to think that the concerns of today will not be the concerns of ten years' time, but I think um that would be ludicrously over-optimistic.
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But I am confident that designers will have developed more imaginative, more sophisticated, more resourceful ways of dealing with them.
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Thank you so much, Alice.
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It was wonderful to have you.
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Uh well, thank you for your questions, and thanks for inviting me.
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And as with every other area of life, you're not gonna get them if a privileged minority of one gender, one geography, one ethnicity dominate design.
00:00:13.599 --> 00:00:22.239
We really do need to convince everyone that they can become designers and that they'll be welcomed into the design community.
00:00:24.559 --> 00:00:34.479
Welcome to this third episode of What Shapes, a podcast by Three Days of Design, where we explore how design can shape our world.
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Our guest today is the award-winning design critic and author Alice Wawthorne.
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Alice has spent much of her career exploring how design can be a political, cultural, social, ecological, and scientific force for a fairer world.
00:00:51.280 --> 00:00:59.039
Together with Paula Antonelli, she also hosts one of my absolute favorite podcasts, Design Emergency.
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Now, very rarely have I met someone as knowledgeable and eloquent a storyteller as Alice.
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So I invite you to sit back and enjoy as we explore past, present, and future design signals as a force for good.
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My name is Veronica D'Asouza.
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Thank you for listening.
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Are you ready?
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I'm so happy to have you here.
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Thank you so much.
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Oh, well, thank you so much for inviting me.
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Tell me if there is that one moment when you first fell in love with design.
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Um, I don't think there was one moment, and fell in love maybe wouldn't be the right way to describe it, but I sort of grew up with design as an elemental part of my life without knowing what it was or even hearing the word, because my father was a an engineer and my mum was an art teacher, and so they were both very dexterous, very creative, although they'd never have used the adjective.
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So they were constantly making, repairing, and restoring things.
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And tragically, I did not inherit their dexterous skills.
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My brother did, happily for him.
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Um but what my mum did in particular was give me a lot of confidence in my visual sensibility to recognize the importance of sort of being at one with your surroundings, what you're wearing, how you're engaging with people, what you're doing, um, and enjoying it.
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What has shaped kind of your motivation to focus on design as a force for social, ecological, and you know, political movements?
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Well, I don't have a conventional background for a design writer, most of whom are academics, historians, or indeed practicing designers.
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Um I was a journalist, a conventional journalist, writing about economics, politics, corporate affairs, um for the first half of my career.
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So when I graduated, I went on the Times training scheme.
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I then worked for the Financial Times for 18 years, um, and including a stint as a foreign correspondent in Paris, and I then pioneered the paper's coverage of the creative industries.
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Um but I then decided I wanted to focus on one subject that I could develop a sort of uh a degree of expertise in, and so I could really use it as a sort of lens for analyzing what was going on around it, and I picked design, which I had discovered by accident uh when I was a student at Cambridge.
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I did law for the first part of my degree and then art history.
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The art history course was disappointingly conservative, but the saving grace was the incredible art history library, which was full of wonderful books.
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So I spent little time focusing on the course and a lot of time reading books in the library and also reading the international cultural journals that it had subscriptions to.
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And this included the Italian design journals like uh Domus and Avatare under the then editorship of Alessandro Mendini.
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And whilst Mendini's vision of design is slightly different to mine, I'm eternally grateful to him for introducing me to design as a cultural phenomenon.
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Because there was very little discussion about it in the UK at the time, as this richly contextualized discipline that was absolutely aligned with all the other things that I was obsessed by at the time.
00:04:46.639 --> 00:05:04.639
So fashion, film, politics, um it and being introduced to design in that very contextualized way, I think, meant that I always saw it slightly differently than had I studied design history in the conventional academic way.
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One thing I I noticed you talk about uh the dreamers, uh the rebels and the renegades as uh you know almost um aligning design sometimes with activism, maybe also in opposition or at least different from mainstream design.
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So what is mainstream to you and what is this dreamy rebelly renegade design?
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Well, I'm fascinated by politics.
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I always have been, even as a teenager, and feminism has been a hugely important part of my life.
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And one of the reasons why I chose to specialise in design was because it's a ubiquitous force that's absolutely embedded within every other area of our lives, and so it actually gives me license to write about whatever I'm interested in through the prism of design, and so naturally that would extend to political causes I was passionate about, like feminism and activism in general.
00:06:08.879 --> 00:06:12.319
The design history of activism is also extraordinary.
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Um, so whether you look at the Shakers in the 18th century when they construct redesigned and reconstructed an entire community to that was in keeping with their religious beliefs and also their sense of social and community responsibility, or um one of my favourite British examples is the incredible visual identity of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century, when Sylvia Pankhurst, who was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union, which was the principal activist movement for the suffragettes at that time, and the one that actually drove the violence campaign that really did rattle the British government into giving women the vote.
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Sylvia Pankhurst was a painter.
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She had been an art student, she studied at the Royal College of Art, and so she was instructed by her mother to take charge of the visual identity of the WSPU when they were planning their biggest rally ever.
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Um it was in um Hyde Park in 1908.
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And Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, who was the biggest funder of the suffragettes, um, decided that they had to develop an identity that would be accessible to the working class women who were a huge part of the movement.
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That yes, there were a lot of wealthy and bourgeois women who were members of the WSPU and they could afford to buy broaches and badges and special scarves and so on.
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But there was a huge number of working class women who couldn't afford to buy souvenirs like that, and who would need to make their own sort of WSPU-friendly outfits for the big Hyde Park demonstration.
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So they decided they would have a colour-coded identity, and they decided on three colours: purple for dignity, green for freedom, and white for purity.
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And so the instructions to, I mean, hundreds of thousands of women rallied in Hyde Park for this demonstration, and instructions were sent to them beforehand telling them to uh wear white dresses.
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Because women, certainly in Britain, tended to wear white dresses for religious reasons to go to church for their confirmations for weddings or whatever, most women probably had a white dress or could borrow one, and to accessorize the dresses with, you know, if they could afford to buy purple and green ribbons, that would do the job.
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Or it could be, you know, strips of fabric, um, so they could fabricate their own hatbands or belts.
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And so um the impact of these women, all colour-coded from different parts of the country, arriving in Hyde Park, was absolutely extraordinary.
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They all had their banners in the colours.
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There was a special group of Indian suffragettes who were all proudly um in white saris with purple and green accessories.
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I think they were fairly wealthy Indian women because they had their saris specially made for the occasion.
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They were all carrying wooden elephants as a symbol of India.
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So there were beautiful photographs of them there.
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And um this colour code was adhered to from then onwards.
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And the WSPU ensured that because all its demonstrations were so carefully orchestrated, they were incredible manifestations of the power of design to represent a highly controversial at the time political movement, exactly as it wished to be portrayed, and to slowly but surely change um the political balance of power in their favour.
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And there are endless examples of this in design, which I have really enjoyed discovering over the years.
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Um, but also I enjoy the vernacular aspects of the design, people who'd never heard the word, let alone trained to be designers.
00:10:06.960 --> 00:10:09.519
Alice, you're such an incredible storyteller.
00:10:09.919 --> 00:10:10.559
Well, I wish I was.
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You know you are ridiculously class.
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I I I feel, you know, we could turn on a bonfire and just I would just sit here and listen to you.
00:10:17.039 --> 00:10:24.639
Very often you you tell stories about designers that history has sometimes left out.
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So who tends to get written out and why?
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And is there something we can all become more aware of today to make sure that we are giving voice to more people?
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Well, unfortunately it's a sad and boring answer to the question, which is all the usual suspects have been written out.
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So women, queer and trans women, um people with disabilities, um, um, people of colour because of their heritage, their religion, um, their ethnicity, and design unfortunately has been a sort of white boys' club, a cis male boys' club, um for a very long time, and principally with the probable exception of Japan, conducted in the global north.
00:11:18.159 --> 00:11:20.720
Now that has changed radically in recent years.
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We have more um women designers, more designers of colours, more trans designers, uh, people doing incredible work in terms of design and disability.
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And um so there has been meaningful change, but still not enough.
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And I think the bottom line is if you believe in design, if you believe it's one of the most useful tools at our disposal to ensure that we adapt to political, cultural, social, ecological, scientific, technological change to ensure that they affect our lives for better rather than worse, it stands to reason that we need the best possible designers.
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And as with every other area of life, you're not gonna get them if a privileged minority of one gender, one geography, one ethnicity dominate design.
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So we really do need to convince everyone that they can become designers and that they'll be welcomed into the design community.
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And it's no coincidence that, you know, this doesn't just apply to design, it applies to art, to literature, to engineering, to sort of every sphere of life.
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The more diverse and inclusive any of these fields are, the higher quality the outcome is likely to be.
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So we all suffer because of prejudice and bigotry.
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What is kind of your general temperature of where we are in that recognition?
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Is it something we need to keep on fighting for, or do you feel like it's now kind of been cemented in the design world that we are on the right trajectory?
00:12:59.679 --> 00:13:06.720
Um keep on fighting, um, whilst acknowledging that genuine progress has been made.
00:13:07.120 --> 00:13:17.600
And um one of the things that really gives me sort of hope for the future is, you know, the evolution of the continent of Africa is obviously going to be key to it.
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It has the fastest expanding population on our planet at a time when in most other regions, obviously including Europe, populations are actually going into decline rather than increasing.
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Um, it also has extraordinary natural resources, which because of colonialism have been denied to the countries that rightfully own them.
00:13:42.639 --> 00:13:46.960
Um that post-independence has changed significantly.
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Um, obviously, it's still a problematic area, but there has been some improvement.
00:13:51.840 --> 00:14:14.639
And you also have a growing awareness of the importance of architecture and design within those countries, and a growing number of African architects and designers who were born and brought up in the region, are choosing to practice in the region, some who were actually born and brought up elsewhere, but have returned to the region to practice.
00:14:14.879 --> 00:14:17.840
And uh, certainly in terms of gender, it's much more diverse.
00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:24.080
There are a number of African architects and designers, male architects and designers who are now leading the fight, which is fantastic.
00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:35.840
So people like Diabedo Francis Carrey in architecture, um the Femi Marcus Bello in industrial design, they're doing extraordinary work, which receives a lot of attention.
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And that has changed in the global north is also impacting very positively in all sorts of different ways in the global south.
00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:54.720
But there are also a significant number of African women designers and architects who are emerging or have already emerged.
00:14:54.960 --> 00:15:19.440
So if you think of people like uh Dominique Petitfoy in Ghana and Leslie Locko, also in Ghana, as founder of the Africa Features Institute, um, of Toshin Oshino in Nigeria, of Mariam Kamara in Niger, of um Sumi Sumaya Valley in uh South Africa.
00:15:19.679 --> 00:15:32.399
I mean, the late Doreen Dengo, very sadly, she died far too soon, but she did extraordinary work, not only as a practitioner, but as a teacher, a curator, and an advocate in Uganda.
00:15:32.559 --> 00:15:46.639
So these are women emerging very early in the overall process and you know, speaking so powerfully, producing such extraordinary work, I think that's incredibly encouraging.
00:15:47.519 --> 00:15:52.080
We're in the middle of so many crises right now.
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Um, and together with Paola Antonilli, you've started this incredible podcast, written a book about design emergency.
00:16:01.279 --> 00:16:10.320
What have you learned through these last six years of looking through all these projects, listening to people talk about what they're using design to do?
00:16:10.639 --> 00:16:15.840
Paula and I began Design Emergency um during the pandemic.
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And during lockdown, as with all our friends, we were zooming and we were chatting and talking about how at a very early stage we were suddenly getting good news stories of design innovations that had been developed specifically to help us to address COVID.
00:16:34.960 --> 00:16:43.200
And up until then, um the world's leading scientists had no idea what it was, how to treat it, how to stop it.
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And that was still the case at that time.
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But designers, architects, engineers from many different genres were already developing practical solutions to help us to deal with it.
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And they were very rare good news stories for the media, so they got a lot of attention.
00:16:58.639 --> 00:17:04.400
And because they were pragmatic responses to a situation that everyone was familiar with, right?
00:17:04.640 --> 00:17:16.799
This deadly um pandemic uh with you know no apparent uh deterrent, people understood the problem, and so they were also readier to sort of be inspired by the solution.
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And we felt this could be a game changer for design, and it could encourage uh the general public and politicians to take it much more seriously.
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So we identified the 10 designers we felt were global leaders in the pandemic, um, all responsible for different innovations, and tracked them down and interviewed them.
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And after 10 weeks, um, we were building a huge following for design emergency.
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I mean, we'd given no thought as to how many people would actually follow it, so we were overwhelmed uh by the number who did.
00:17:51.759 --> 00:18:12.079
And we decided that really what we wanted to do was aim for the end game because both of us had really devoted most of our careers, writing in my case, curating Empowers on design, to trying to encourage people to take it seriously as a social, cultural, political, ecological, and scientific tool.
00:18:12.400 --> 00:18:16.720
And we felt that this could be a great way of doing it.
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And so then we focused on the global design leaders in design generally in different areas of design, and we've stuck to that format ever since.
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Short answer to your question is it's limitless.
00:18:28.880 --> 00:18:47.839
I mean, I have learnt so much, and I can also say that it felt like a privilege and a pleasure in the middle of this terrible, tragic global pandemic, to be constantly hearing about, you know, new projects, new developments, new ideas, new experiments.
00:18:48.079 --> 00:18:53.440
And it really did make me more cheerful, more optimistic, more convinced that we could crack this.
00:18:53.519 --> 00:18:56.799
And it's been wonderful to follow those people through.
00:18:57.279 --> 00:19:04.480
One thing that tends to run through many of the examples you talk about and, you know, the work that occupies you is empathy.
00:19:04.799 --> 00:19:06.480
Designing with empathy.
00:19:06.799 --> 00:19:10.559
How can we have more of that in the world we have today?
00:19:10.799 --> 00:19:16.640
Have you found any kind of metrical ingredients or recipe for how we can apply that?
00:19:17.359 --> 00:19:38.480
Intelligent and responsible designers have to be empathic because they have to interpret how their work, whatever design discipline it comes from, whatever its objectives are, how their work will be used, and if it's not empathic, people, if they're consumers, will decide not to engage with it in future.
00:19:38.960 --> 00:19:53.039
Um and if it is uh a societal um project, a project with sort of pan-societal impact, it it's highly unlikely to fulfill its designated function.
00:19:53.680 --> 00:19:59.279
Um but one of the things that always does appeal to me to designers is how empathic they are.
00:19:59.359 --> 00:20:21.279
And actually that was uh something that was lovely about the New Zealand COVID public information campaign, because um it was always quite compact in terms of its use of language, but it would always very gently suggest ways that the general public could help others in the fight against COVID.
00:20:21.440 --> 00:20:26.240
So people weren't made to feel like sort of passive recipients of important information.
00:20:26.640 --> 00:20:41.519
The notion was that, you know, for example, if they greeted people with a an elbow bump, that that would be a a healthy, risk-free way of doing so, and a way of cheering up and engaging with um their fellow civilians.
00:20:41.599 --> 00:20:50.559
So I always thought that was a beautiful example, a very simple one of empathy that really could have made a significant difference to people at that terrible time.
00:20:51.440 --> 00:21:10.799
If we look into a crystal ball, which of course is impossible, but we make an experiment, you know, ten years from now, what do you hope that we have achieved within design to maybe make more of us participate in kind of using design for these different ecological, social, political purposes?
00:21:11.119 --> 00:21:41.200
Well, I think that process is well underway, and you can gauge that by the level of interest from major international institutions, um, NGOs, whether it's the United Nations and its many agencies, the Red Cross, uh Messen sans frontier, and so on, and also by um individual national and regional governments who are increasingly um taking design seriously and really embedding it in policy making.
00:21:41.279 --> 00:21:57.920
So, for example, um the pioneering British social designer Hilary Cotton, who began by um prototyping different ways of designing the provision of care for the elderly by local councils through their social service departments.
00:21:58.079 --> 00:22:16.000
Um, she's now advising the British government on its policy for uplands, which are the higher parts of Britain which tend to be relatively economically deprived, uh, rural, often very remote regions, and is also doing work for the government on housing.
00:22:16.079 --> 00:22:24.160
Now that's being replicated in many other countries, and that uh process will continue to accelerate.
00:22:24.480 --> 00:22:41.200
Um I don't know what the world is going to be like in ten years' time, but I'm confident that designers will be radically engaging with it and coming up with imaginative and genius and purposeful and on-point solutions to the problems.
00:22:41.680 --> 00:23:01.759
Um I f dread and fear that we will still be struggling to combat the climate emergency, um, which is obviously a major challenge for design now, as is um attempting to address the tragic refugee crisis, which continues to um escalate.
00:23:01.920 --> 00:23:08.160
I mean, um the proliferation of of wars, conflicts is terrifying.
00:23:08.319 --> 00:23:22.559
Um also the the withdrawal of of USAI and other US government funding for um a lot of NGOs has we're we've really yet to see the negative impact that that will have.
00:23:22.720 --> 00:23:41.200
But you know, we are seeing it with the Ebola outbreak, for example, where there just aren't vaccines to get people the um no educational tools, there are no longer the same aid workers on the ground ready to spring in and uh make an immediate difference, so we don't know what the cost of that will be.
00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:53.279
So I s I would like to think that the concerns of today will not be the concerns of ten years' time, but I think um that would be ludicrously over-optimistic.
00:23:53.359 --> 00:24:01.519
But I am confident that designers will have developed more imaginative, more sophisticated, more resourceful ways of dealing with them.
00:24:02.160 --> 00:24:03.680
Thank you so much, Alice.
00:24:03.759 --> 00:24:05.119
It was wonderful to have you.
00:24:05.519 --> 00:24:08.799
Uh well, thank you for your questions, and thanks for inviting me.
