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.

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.

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.