Design Emergency

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.

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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.