# data[].attributes.body
"Each of the practitioners spoke about how they became interested in traditional crafts, the challenges they faced in combining them with design and how they managed the sense of responsibility for heritage and the livelihood of others when working in this space."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
three designers working with crafts have shared their experiences of trying to preserve and revive traditional practices at a panel at Design Doha that can now be viewed on Dezeen.

Held as part of Design Doha's talks event, the Design Doha Forum, the panel was titled Crafting Futures: Models for the Revival and Innovation of Traditional Crafts.

Each of the participants represented a different model for engaging with crafts communities: Jovana Zhang runs the Róng Design Library, which catalogues and preserves crafts practices in China; Adrian Pepe is an artist whose work is focused on wool and is represented in Design Doha's main exhibition, Arab Design Now; and Sara Ouhaddou is one of four Moroccan designers on an exchange programme to work with crafts in Qatar, also through Design Doha.

The panel was moderated by Gwen Farrelly, curator of Design Doha Exchange.

Each of the practitioners spoke about how they became interested in traditional crafts, the challenges they faced in combining them with design and how they managed the sense of responsibility for heritage and the livelihood of others when working in this space.

Pepe said that he had become drawn to craft as an antidote to being at art school, where he felt there was a severe disassociation between the two.

"It was all very abstract and conceptual, and I think I was lacking a way of engaging with my surroundings by engaging through my dexterity with my body," he said. "This is where I started to see that the only moments in which you could do that were in pre-industrial modes of production.

"As you imprint your body onto the matter, it alchemises the matter into something," he continued. "This is where I became super intrigued."

The final piece of the puzzle came when Pepe discovered Awassi sheep, a breed with a "rich history" in the region that had been used not just for milk, meat and wool, but also to make all kinds of objects.

Yet, he found it was a challenge to locate people who still practised any of these crafts, as he said there is "less and less of a generational handover". Often, he finds himself trying to "reanimate" a practice from a written record.

He said that while he often engages and collaborates with traditional craftspeople, it's important for him to engage in "the meditative act" of the craft process itself.

"I was just in Jaipur and I was reading about Gandhi and cotton spinning and this idea of the meditative act of spinning as an act of resistance, which I thought was so beautiful," said Pepe.

"I think that there is so much power in engaging with that physicality because you can enter a trance state through repetition for endless hours."

For Serbian-born Zhang, her interest in craft began with her family, who were all artisans.

She studied design in Serbia and Italy, but her focus turned to China when she met her partner, Lei Zhang. They moved to China in 2010 and set up their studio, PINWU Design, with the idea of collaborating with craftspeople.

She said their challenge has been figuring out their methodology, which had been developed over many years. A turning point came in their first project when they undertook a residency with a craftsman in a village to learn the ancient technique of making paper umbrellas, thinking they could improve on the ancient design.

"How silly," she said. "It's absolutely impossible [to improve on it]. This is something that you can't do."

Zhang said this one craft involved around 70 steps, including cutting the bamboo, understanding it, "marking it, slicing it, making bones, making paper prints, glueing".

"We tried bending it and slicing other kinds of bamboo or fabricated materials," she said. "All these things failed very badly. But [through] what we did, we picked up a few parts of this craft and created one chair."

The chair they created is an example of craft processes being remixed to make something new - an approach that Zhang and her colleagues have come to call "future tradition".

Zhang's studio founded the Róng Design Library in 2015 and now, alongside her team, they dedicate one year to researching a single material and its use across Chinese crafts. A Chinese artist is then invited to spend a period of time in residence at the Library, making work in response to the team's findings, and this final show then tours abroad.

The Róng Design Library also hosts residencies for international artists, creating a hub of activity and knowledge exchange around crafts.

Ouhaddou, who was born in France to Moroccan immigrants, moved to her family's homeland in 2013 with the idea of "finding her own Morocco", and has since worked with local artisans in different fields.

She said that her challenge was almost an inverse one, where past traditions were being lost within crafts communities because of a lack of education about the value and importance of crafts and craft knowledge. Ouhaddou embarked on a mission to share this rapidly disappearing knowledge and to empower artisans to take control of their crafts.

She gave the example of how craftspeople are disassociated from the materials they use, citing it as an area where knowledge had been lost and had to be revived.

"[Nowadays] everything is imported," she said. "They don't know where it comes from. The knowledge of what you have and how you can work with that is so important for your own heritage."

Ouhaddou also spoke about her sense of responsibility towards the communities she works with, who she felt could be left vulnerable if her designs stopped selling at a profit.

"That's something I think a lot about - like if tomorrow I don't sell anything anymore, what happens?" she said. "So the way I try to answer the question is that okay, if everything stopped, what did I leave you so you can go on without me?"

Sometimes, the reality of a project doesn't match Ouhaddou's expectations. She said that when she introduced a traditional form of embroidery to a classroom of 30 girls, only three proved to be interested.

However, she worked with the three for several years and developed a meaningful collaboration directed by the group. Eventually, one of the three girls went on to open a factory using her skills.

"Then the project is over," said Ouhaddou. "Because one among the 30 is now completely autonomous. They need her more than she needs me."

The Crafting Futures panel took place on Sunday 25 February at the M7 cultural centre in Doha, Qatar. The region's attention to craft emerged as a major theme during Design Doha, which was held for the first time in 2024 and will be a biennial event.

For more information, visit the Design Doha website.
Partnership content This article was written by Dezeen for Design Doha as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reviving traditional crafts is a way of "engaging with your surroundings" say Design Doha panellists

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Three designers working with crafts have shared their experiences of trying to preserve and revive traditional practices at a panel at Design Doha that can now be viewed on Dezeen.

# data[].attributes.headline
“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” 

# data[].attributes.subject
“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” 

# data[].attributes.body
“For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience - taking things slowly for a novice like me - that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. "The difficulty is, people do not realise," Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour's leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. "We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives."

It's January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky's theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: "Oh fuuuuu-!"

"If you put me to a wall," he continues, "and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10." By "remaining timeline", Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences - AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of "Ooh, look at that!" smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture "an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us", in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to.

Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?

A long way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. "Write down 'beautiful' in your notebook," encourages Hilton, 31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and how - centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrialising England resisted advances in the textile industry that were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence - he came to sympathise with its modern reimagining.

"Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe three definitions," says Hilton. "Older people will sometimes say, 'Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I'm such a luddite!' And what they mean is, they haven't been able to keep pace with technological change." Then there are the people who actively reject modern devices and appliances, he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be called that) as well. "But, in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would definitely describe myself as one."

'Technological development is shaped by money and power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power,' says artist Molly Crabapple. Photograph: Timothy O'Connell/The Guardian

Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn't about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. "To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn't mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we've rolled out some tech doesn't mean we've rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life."

Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. "For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses."

Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain. Lorry drivers have their mileage minutely tracked, their rest hours questioned. Desk workers may sit in front of cameras that snap pictures at random intervals, ensuring attendance and attention. You could call these workplace efficiencies. You could call them gross affronts. Guess which the luddites would argue. Labour rights go to the very historical core of this movement.

Hilton called his podcast The Ned Ludd Radio Hour to honour a man who might have lived about 250 years ago or might never have lived at all. As Hilton has explained on his show, Ned Ludd is thought to have been a textile worker living in the English Midlands in the late 1770s. It's said he smashed a few weaving machines after being flogged for his idleness on the job. Something about the smashing might have resonated with his peers. As Hilton has explained: "Within a few decades, the veracity of Ludd's identity would be lost for ever, but the name would live on. The luddites became an organised band of frame-breakers in the 1810s. They fought the Industrial Revolution... and they lost. They lost big time. In fact they lost so badly that the reality of their name became a victim of [obfuscation]."

The history of the luddite rebellion is taught in British schools - but confusedly, in a way that allowed for at least some of us, me included, to come away with an idea that to be a luddite is to be naive or else fearful and monk-ish. As Hilton walks me through from his kitchen to his lounge, a room busy with the interconnected equipment he uses to make his podcasts, he feels the need to apologise. By at least one definition of the word, "I live a very not-luddite life," Hilton says, gesturing helplessly at open laptop, wireless earbuds, towering mic. "My work is tech-based. I can't avoid it. I don't claim to be some person living in the woods. But I am anxious. I feel things fraying."

'My work is tech-based. I can't avoid it. But I am anxious. I feel things fraying,' says Nick Hilton, whose podcast is called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour. Photograph: Mark Chilvers/The Guardian

It is this premonition of a fraying that has brought others to a modern version of luddism. An academic called Jathan Sadowski was one of the first to knit together anxieties about our quickening tech revolution with the anxieties of those weavers who took a stand against the infringements of an earlier machine age. "Luddism is founded on a politics of refusal, which in reality just means having the right and ability to say no to things that directly impact upon your life," Sadowski tells me when we speak. "This should not be treated as an extreme stance, and yet in a culture that fetishises technology for its own sake, saying no to technology is unthinkable."

At least, that was the case until 2023 - a year in which ChatGPT (developed by a company called OpenAI), Bard (developed by Google) and other user-friendly AIs were embraced by the world. At the same time, image generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney wowed people with their simulacrum photos and graphic art. "They won't be replacing the prime minister with ChatGPT or the governor of the Bank of England with Bard," Hilton has said on his podcast. "They won't be swapping out Christopher Nolan for Dali or Martin Scorsese for Midjourney, but fat will be cut from the great labour steak."

There's a sense that this is now in the realm of the possible, to reject outright parts or uses of a technology without looking foolish

In January 2023, a display of AI-generated landscapes, projected on to the wall of a gallery in Vermont, was vandalised with the words "AI IS THEFT". Creative professionals were starting to feel exploited. Masses of uncredited, unpaid-for human work was being harvested from the internet and repurposed by clever generative AIs. In spring 2023, Crabapple organised an open letter that called for restrictions on this "vampirical" practice. There were more open letters including one that called for a six-month pause on the development of any new AIs.

There were instances of direct action, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek or halfway between. In Los Angeles, opponents of those omnipresent Ring camera doorbells distributed "Anti Ring" stickers to be gummed over the lenses of the devices. A group of San Franciscans calling themselves Safe Street Rebel started seizing traffic cones and placing them on the bonnets of the city's self-driving cars, a quick way of confusing the cars' sensors and rendering them inoperable. Brian Merchant, a writer who last year published Blood in the Machine, a history of luddism, appeared at an event with Safe Street Rebel in November 2023. In front of cheering Californians, he staged a "luddite tribunal", smashing devices the crowd deemed superfluous.

"There's a sense that this is now in the realm of the possible, to actually reject outright parts or uses of a technology without looking foolish," Merchant tells me. As we speak, he is preparing for another tribunal, this time at a bookshop called Page Against the Machine.

There are techno sceptic sceptics, of course, those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremonger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia bin of history, along with their 19th-century antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking - "if we want it", Bastani wrote. Last year, the Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening Standard that called pessimism about technology "irrational". Afolami advised the paper's readers in bold type: Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk described AI as the " most disruptive force in history ", something that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe for ill. "You're not selling this," joked Sunak at one point.

Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. "I think what we're risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose," Hilton says. The writer Riley Quinn broadly agrees. Quinn is part of an Anglo-American collective, TrashFuture, that produces a popular podcast of the same name. We chat after a recording session one day. They riff and tease each other, taking a gloomy but wry and funny view of these things. Watch out, says Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as "synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations' ... I don't think it's unthinking backlash or King Canute fighting against the tide [to point that out]." One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. "Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are," he says.

skip past newsletter promotion

Sign up to Inside Saturday

The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion

Wisecracking on the brink, the TrashFuture gang have no time for the brisk dismissal of groups like the neo-luddites, but neither are they all that keen to start an assault on the world's computer farms, delivering the pre-emptive blow to future AIs that Yudkowsky has called for in print. They enjoy themselves, the TrashFuture lot, ridiculing his op-ed. When I ask Yudkowsky about it, he says he came at the writing in a rush, working to a tight deadline. He stands by everything he wrote, except maybe the part about the nukes. "I would pick more careful phrasing now," he says, smiling.

Lately I've been wrestling with techno-pessimism myself. At least once a day I throw aside my phone, disgusted with my reliance on it, rebellion that might last as long as 15 minutes before I go crawling back. My kids, observing closely, have become accustomed to an idea that shopping is done by scowling at a screen, that purchases come by van, and impractically fast. I'm a freelance writer. Of course I feel the creep of my AI replacement, somewhere over my shoulder for now, but getting nearer.

We boast at each other online and we seem to have stopped feeling squeamish about it. We mug for each other and we pout. I'm convinced we tell each other too much and capture too much, keeping digital evidence of more things than the average human psyche can stand to know. There are not so many secrets between lovers, friends, colleagues, rivals; some useful middle ground has shrank away and, with it, a comfortable zone of ignorance. Receipts of our deeds are time-stamped and archived. Ambiguity - lovely ambiguity - has got lost somewhere between the zeros and the ones.

Maybe luddism is the answer. As far as I can make out, talking to all these people, it isn't about refusing advancement, instead it's an act of wondering: are we still advancing our relish of the world? How queasy or unreal or threatened do we need to feel before we stop seeing these conveniences as convenient? The author Zadie Smith has joked in the past that we gave ourselves to tech too cheaply in the first instance, all for the pleasure, really, of being a moving dot on a useful digital map. Now bosses can track their workers' every keystroke. Telemarketing firms put out sales calls with AI-generated voices that mimic former employees who have been let go. A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.

There is no cloud. There are vast datacentres sucking up water, electricity and rare-earth metals, literally boiling up the planet

"That's a one-in-six chance of catastrophe," says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master's student. "That's Russian-roulette odds." I meet Stewart, who is 28, outside the London headquarters of Google's AI division. In what I would consider a pretty strange comms effort, Google has just commissioned some outdoor art to ease public fears about the current pace of machine learning. It's a confusing display. One of the artworks depicts a vista of lush green hills, cosy lakeside houses - and, behind all this, a vast smoking mushroom cloud. "Scientists are using AI to create more stable and efficient [nuclear] fusion reactors," an info panel reads. Cool?

It's the stuff of dread for Stewart. He has taken part in protests against AI development, at one point unfurling a banner outside this Google building that called for a pause on the work going on inside. Not a lot of people joined him on that protest. Stewart understands. AIs, invisible and decentralised, swarming between datacentres that are spread around the world, are hard to conceptualise as possible threats, at least when compared with issues such as the climate crisis or animal welfare, the visceral effects of which can be seen and felt. "It doesn'talways keep me up at night," Stewart says of the latent danger he perceives. "I don't personally feel anxiety on a day-to-day basis. And that's part of the problem. Me, with all of my resources and education - I still struggle to form an emotional connection to this problem." Last year, he published a blogpost that pondered next steps, listing "occupation of AI offices", "performative vandalism of AI offices" and even "sabotage of AI computing infrastructure" as possible forms of resistance.

Edward Ongweso Jr believes neo-luddites need to 'make the system scream' as the original luddites did. Photograph: Timothy O'Connell/The Guardian

Ongweso, in New York, moots the idea of computational sabotage, too. He doesn't think this will be easy, nor likely, unless employees inside the datacentres that feed and sustain AIs begin to feel that their own jobs or freedoms are under threat. "For instance, if people became concerned about algorithms being deployed to justify lay-offs, or if they became concerned about algorithmic surveillance," Ongweso speculates. However, as the TrashFuture gang are quick to point out, even if some of these centres are sabotaged, the information they store is fluid, multiple, surely backed-up elsewhere. "These things have become so abstract," says Quinn, "their physical manifestations are so far from so many people."

Are we doomed? Or is there hope? Will this generation of protesters be remembered in 200 years' time for their interventions - or will there simply be no one to do the remembering by then? The new luddites I speak to come at these questions with varying degrees of optimism or catastrophising.

Crabapple, the artist who took a stand against image generators, believes it should be possible for all of us to reckon more frankly with the dirty underbelly of clean-seeming tech. Take this nice idea of the digital cloud, she says. We chat about the cloud as though it's neutral, immutable, something benign. After all, it's a cloud. "But there's no fucking cloud," says Crabapple, "there's other people's computers. There are vast datacentres that are sucking up water and electricity and rare-earth metals, literally boiling up the planet ... For me, what luddite success would look like would be a societal shift where we ask ourselves, 'Why are we burning our planet? Making our lives shittier? Getting rid of every last bit of our autonomy and privacy just to make a few guys rich?' Then maybe started doing something about this legislatively."

Ongweso would start with legislation too. He'd be happy with something on a small, achievable, symbolic scale, something that prepared the way for more expansive laws in future. "Moves to pre-empt and limit the ability of AI to troll the internet and take copyrighted work, to train its model on already generated work by writers and artists - that feels possible right now, and something that could be a stairway to a series of victories."

What would the others have us do? Stewart, the soldier turned grad student, wants a moratorium on the development of AIs until we understand them better - until those Russian-roulette-like odds improve. Yudkowsky would have us freeze everything today, this instant. "You could say that nobody's allowed to train something more powerful than GPT-4," he suggests. "Humanity could decide not to die and it would not be that hard."

Quinn, milder, a middle-grounder, pitches the notion that we stop making ourselves so giddy and grateful about every new piece of hardware and software that's dreamed up. "There is constantly a demand for deference," he says, "a demand that you say the world is lovely because you can type buttons on your iPhone and get a Starbucks coffee. You're made to feel you're not allowed to criticise, and you must say thank you, or else the brilliant geniuses who create these things might not create any more. And won't you be sorry then." Sadowski concurs. "Technology is far too important to be thought of as just a grab-bag of neat gadgets, and it's far too powerful to be left in the hands of billionaire executives and venture capitalists," he says. "Luddites want technology - the future - to work for all of us."

Hilton, who is about to record another episode of his luddite radio hour, says: "Classical luddism was a failure. But it has obviously endured, because it continues to exert this pull. The smashed loom is an image that has stuck itself within history. Maybe it's remembered as a symbolic gesture. Maybe it's remembered as a gesture in anger. But it is remembered." What might be the defining gesture of this era? Letters, legislation, vandalised Ring cameras, airstrikes? "The historical luddites tried to make the system scream," says Ongweso. "That catalysed later change. It's part of the new luddite project to try to figure out how to do the same."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Humanity's remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50': meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future - is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?

# data[].attributes.body
created by fresh and engaging designers at Parsons in NY these podcast talk about 3 material sections - plastics, hemp, and mycelium and make accessible and is focused on cultural impact -

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our podcast explores the intersection of peoples lives with the materials that surround us.

# data[].attributes.headline
Richard Sennett on writing instructions, from 'The Craftsman'.

# data[].attributes.subject
Richard Sennett on writing instructions, from 'The Craftsman'.

# data[].attributes.body
Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly complex. But beneath the surface, it can be beautifully simple. In 'Nuts and Bolts', award-winning engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An ambitious but accessible book exploring how seven simple engineering inventions from the pump to the spring have shaped our world, by the engineer who designed the Shard. Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly complex. But beneath the surface, it can be beautifully simple.
In Nuts and Bolts, award-winning engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

Tracing the surprising journeys of each invention through the millennia, Roma reveals how handmade Roman nails led to modern skyscrapers, how the potter's wheel enabled space exploration, and how humble lenses helped her conceive a child against the odds.

She invites us to marvel at these small but perfectly formed inventions, sharing the stories of the remarkable, and often unknown, scientists and engineers who made them possible. The nuts and bolts that make up our world may be tiny, and are often hidden, but they've changed our lives in dramatic ways.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Check out this great listen on Audible.com. An ambitious but accessible book exploring how seven simple engineering inventions from the pump to the spring have shaped our world, by the engineer who designed the Shard. Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly co...

# data[].attributes.headline
Spaces of encounter and story telling to shape our public spaces.

# data[].attributes.subject
Spaces of encounter and story telling to shape our public spaces.

# data[].attributes.body
What do you think?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Montréal-based art and design studio, Daily tous les jours, co-founded by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat in 2010, recently unveiled Daydreamer, a new sculptural series of illuminated, slowly rotating public benches, accompanied by gentle music.

Conceived to create a ritual around a moment of pause in the urban realm, Daydreamer stimulates imagination and relaxation, and like much of the studio's work, encourages a communal, synced up experience in a shared, calming soundscape.

Inspired by the motion of the rocking horse and the carousel, the Daydreamer benches play different music scores that create harmonies with each other. As a set, Daydreamer acts as a sculptural musical instrument that anyone can play. Each Daydreamer bench sings with a different voice in a polyphonic choir.

The first edition of the Daydreamer installation has been custom-tailored for the city of South Bend, Indiana, USA. Playing a significant part in the redesign of Plaza Park, the interactive urban furniture set features as a permanent installation and consists of three revolving long benches, each accommodating up to four people.

Finished in white oak and a powder-coated aluminium arch, with integrated LED lights, when the public sits on the benches, and starts pushing them, the mechanism inside each bench's pivot centre ensures the motion is a slow, rocking one. Simultaneously, music is triggered through a technical sync, merging analog and digital movements.
Photography by Qure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Canadian art studio Daily tous les jours unveils sculptural series Daydreamer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Montréal-based art and design studio, Daily tous les jours, co-founded by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat in 2010, recently unveiled Daydreamer, a new sculptural series of illuminated, slowly rotating public benches, accompanied by gentle music.

# data[].attributes.body
Is this just a new landscape for those with too much money to play?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"It's actually a lot simpler than you think." It's a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I'm on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.

Hilton is many things - a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they've done so to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.

Yet in the past year she's become a surreal figurehead in the NFT scene: a world flush with crypto dollars and high on a promise to transform the worlds of art and commerce. When we speak, Hilton has just returned from a bitcoin conference in Miami, where customers paid up to $25,000 for VIP tables at the opening party to watch her DJ in a pair of diamanté-encrusted headphones. "NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that is redeemable for a digital piece of art," she explains. "You can have it on your computer server or your phone. I have these screens in my house where I display them."

Sure enough, at Hilton's Beverly Hills mansion there are screens displaying NFTs she made in collaboration with the digital artist Blake Kathryn. These include a video of a chihuahua on top of a rotating ionic column (a tribute to her deceased pet Tinkerbell) and an animated self-portrait of Hilton as a sparkling CGI Barbie floating in the clouds, a piece she's called Iconic Crypto Queen, and which she sold in April for more than $1m.

Hilton first started investing in cryptocurrency in 2016. "I became friends with the founders of Ethereum," she says. (Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which the majority of NFTs are traded.) Since then she's thrown herself into collecting crypto art, and owns more than 150 NFTs.

To advocates of the NFT, the technology offers a revolutionary new way of selling art, and of circumventing snooty cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to a crypto future seems as square as the 19th-century Parisian art world's disdain for impressionism. In this context, the relevance of Hilton's brand to the NFT movement makes sense. Pink, jewel-encrusted, and openly motivated by being as rich and famous as humanly possible, she's a far cry from the type of person whose work is typically exhibited in blue-chip galleries or hung in booths at art fairs.

Yet Hilton's endorsement may also be ammunition for those who view the NFT as just another depressing example of the speculative logic of finance monopolising taste. To detractors, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT marketplace is a home for morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art.

While most of us are still trying to remember what "fungible" means, a battle is under way to define how NFTs are understood. Are they a vital cultural product that tells us something profound about digital consumerism? Or are they just the latest cynical way to make absurd amounts of money?

motley crew of celebrities have tried their hand at selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and John Cleese. In July, it was estimated that sales of NFTs in the first half of 2021 rose by more than $2bn (£1.47bn) - a trend that prompted Christie's and Sotheby's to host their own NFT auctions and that is credited with driving contemporary art sales to an all-time high. But only a tiny proportion of the proceeds of art NFTs have ended up in the bank accounts of the galleries that have, in addition to auction houses, traditionally taken the lion's share of art-market profits.

In March, the crypto firm Injective Protocol paid $95,000 for Morons, a physical artwork by Banksy depicting an auctioneer selling a framed picture bearing the words: "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit." They then burned the picture before selling a digital token of the work for $380,000. The event was a marketing ploy, designed to stoke outrage, drum up publicity and turn a profit. Yet the symbolism was potent: digital art is here to replace its physical forebear, and its coming supremacy should be reflected by a higher price tag.

In essence, an NFT is a digital certificate of ownership, almost always bought and sold using cryptocurrency, to which any digital file - a jpeg image file, a video, a song - can be attached. That Hilton is able to display Iconic Crypto Queen in her home, despite having sold it, is part of the NFT's appeal - and the challenge it poses to the established business model for trading and accessing art. With a simple Google search, anybody can find and download the file associated with an NFT for nothing, and store it on their phone or computer, but only the owner has the right to sell it. Each NFT is unique, and all transactions are logged on the blockchain, a type of database invented in 2008 for the purpose of recording the movement of cryptocurrency.

Unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites. Crucially, in contrast to the contemporary art world, there is no "vetting" of collectors - a practice intended to stop the most speculative buyers flipping artworks by quickly reselling them at a profit. Anybody can buy an NFT, and prices, so often a thing of mystery in high-end commercial galleries, are listed as a matter of public record. Every time an NFT is resold, its creator also makes a profit - an inbuilt royalty system missing from the physical art world, where artists often feel as if they have been shafted when their work is resold on the secondary market.

A model for trading and sharing art, built on the principles of financial transparency, royalties and easy access for all may sound egalitarian. The reality has been rather different. As soon as it became apparent that almost anything digital could be labelled as art and sold, the circus rolled into town.

In March, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a collage of previous artworks by a 40-year-old American named Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold for $69.3m at Christie's New York. After that, Kate Moss sold a gif of herself for more than $17,000. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sold an image of the first ever tweet for $2.9m. A Brooklyn film director managed to sell an audio file of his own farts for $85. Dominic Cummings even threatened to use the technology against Boris Johnson, by releasing what he said was evidence of government malpractice in the form of an NFT.

Along the way, the market became gratuitously inflated. Bidders at the top end included Vignesh Sundaresan, a blockchain entrepreneur who bought Beeple's $69m NFT. A considerable number of small-time enthusiasts were also buying at the affordable end of the market, keen to celebrate the technology by investing in blockchain art. It didn't take long before the bubble burst. By May, daily sales of NFTs had dropped by 60%. Crypto art's reputation has also taken a knock because of its awful environmental track record. (The annual energy consumption of Ethereum is estimated to equal that of Iceland.)

Despite this, advocates still believe NFTs can mount a challenge to the monopoly on trading art held by commercial galleries, and even create a future where physical artworks are replaced by their digital counterparts. As Hilton puts it: "There are paintings out there that are $100m or more, but if you think about it, it's really just canvas with paint."

n the beginning, before the circus pitched up, there were nerds. Inevitably, because this is the internet, there were also cats. CryptoKitties, to be precise, is an online game launched in 2017, enabling players to trade and "breed" unique cartoon felines, sold as NFTs, using blockchain technology. Although the first NFT was created by a man named Kevin McCoy in 2014, CryptoKitties attracted attention and money, with some cats trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars. During 2020, as cryptocurrencies boomed and the pandemic accelerated our transformation into a species of screen-obsessed zombies, interest in NFTs rapidly picked up pace. As a consequence, the value of work by a relatively small number of artists already on the scene rocketed.

Among them was Trevor Jones, a 51-year-old painter who lives in Edinburgh. You've probably never heard of Jones, but he's the most successful NFT artist working in the UK. He started making NFTs in 2019. "Five years ago, I was struggling to pay the mortgage," he tells me. "I went from having to borrow money from friends to pay the bills to making $4m in a day."

Jones has made a name for himself combining painting with digital technology, often producing pastiches of famous artworks with a crypto twist. In 2020, Bitcoin Bull - an animated painting of a Picasso-inspired bull, decorated with bitcoin logos and Twitter birds - was bought by a prominent crypto collector named Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for $55,555.55.

Jones is warm, unguarded, and stunned by his rapid ascent. "I grew up in a little logging community," he says of his childhood in western Canada, a place he describes as "rough". "When I was 25, a friend of mine ended up getting into a fight at a bar and was killed." He left soon after, eventually settling in Edinburgh, where he worked at the city's Hard Rock Cafe as a waiter and later as a manager.

Jones tells me about the mental health crisis he suffered in his early 30s. "My girlfriend and I broke up and it kind of all came crashing down. At that point, it sounds cliched, but I decided I needed to find something to save me."

He set his heart on becoming an artist and "begged" his way on to an art foundation course at Leith School of Art, which he followed with a degree at the University of Edinburgh.

I look at life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple - like the world thinks about before Jesus Christ and after. Beeple is kind of my Jesus

Things began to look up for Jones in 2012, when he had the idea of incorporating QR codes into his art, painting the scannable barcodes in Mondrian-like colours on canvas. Scanning the paintings takes viewers through to an online gallery, where anybody can upload their work. "People were laughing at me at the time," he says. While gallery audiences turned their noses up, he gained a new following online, one that would turn out to have deep pockets.

In 2019, Jones began working with animators to turn his paintings into short videos that he sold as NFTs. Among his most successful works is Bitcoin Angel, an NFT based on Bernini's baroque masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which he sold in 2020 for the equivalent of more than $3m (all of Jones's NFTs are bought using cryptocurrency). In Bernini's marble sculpture, a nun has been stabbed in the heart by an angel with a spear. She leans backwards, overcome by the sublime ecstasy of being penetrated by a heavenly body. When the arrow pierces the heart of Jones's nun, she bleeds bitcoin.

To sell Bitcoin Angel, Jones used a website called Nifty Gateway, one of a number of online auction sites designed for trading NFTs that are now flooded with aspiring crypto artists. I dedicated an afternoon to scrolling through the lots, each one flashing and jiggling in the hope of attracting the attention of collectors. I saw gifs of muffins transforming into dogs, spinning trainers, sycophantic portraits of Elon Musk and an abundance of naked, big-boobed cyborgs. The art critic Dean Kissick described the male-dominated NFT scene as "Etsy for guys", and on this evidence it's easy to see why. Aside from the headline-grabbing sales, Nifty Gateway provides a platform for aspirational entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who practise their craft on computers rather than knotting macrame plant hangers.

While those - like Jones - who successfully rode the NFT wave were busy counting their crypto dollars, over the past year the conventional art world has suffered a decline. During the pandemic, with audiences unable to physically attend exhibitions and fairs, art dealers have struggled to make online viewing rooms interesting or lucrative. As a consequence, global sales of art fell by 22%. To rub salt in that wound, millions of crypto dollars were exchanging hands for a natively digital art form. "The technology is designed against the existing art world," says Noah Davis, a specialist at Christie's New York. "It's an art form that doesn't need a gallery."

It was Davis who helped to sell Beeple's $69m NFT, the first piece of crypto art ever listed by a major auction house. He views his own impact as pivotal: "I introduced NFTs to the Christie's audience and thereby the world," he says. The artwork was sold during an online auction in March that took two weeks to close. Bidding opened at $100, and within an hour that figure had risen to $1m - the result of a vast number of bids all happening digitally. "I've never seen anything so spectacular. You can't bid that quickly at auction unless you just shout out: 'A million bucks,'" Davis says, "and that's impossible to do online. So all that bidding had to happen in increments and manually.

What can a commercial gallery do for me? I sell an NFT, and three minutes later I've got the money in my digital wallet

"I look at my life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple," he adds. "The same way the world thinks about before Jesus Christ and after. Beeple is kind of my Jesus."

In the months since, Christie's has continued to cash in on NFTs. In May, it achieved $16.9m for nine pixellated cartoon characters from the CryptoPunks series, early examples of NFT art that have become sought-after collectibles. Christie's has also attempted to unite the crypto and modern art markets. This spring, it hosted a sale of digital artworks made by Andy Warhol in the 1980s. The images, which had been recovered from floppy disks and transformed into NFTs, include drawings, made on the artist's Commodore Amiga computer, of bananas, flowers, and of a Campbell's soup can that alone sold for more than $1m.

In general, the commercial gallery world has been understandably cagey about adopting technology designed to circumvent it. Behind the scenes, however, a number of galleries have attempted to woo Jones. He has declined their advances. "What can a commercial gallery do for me?" he asks. "Having a gallery exhibition before, I worked a year creating paintings, I paid for all the framing, the overheads for the studio. I had the paintings delivered to the commercial gallery. I may or may not sell, the gallery takes 45 to 55% commission, and they might pay out a month, six weeks, two months later." And now? "I sell something and three minutes later I've got the money in my digital wallet."

t times, the divide between the two art worlds seems more profound than a difference in business model: it's an all-out culture clash. "Few of these cyber-millionaires could tell the back of a Rembrandt from the front," wrote art critic Waldemar Januszczak. "There is no challenge whatsoever in NFT art," conceptual art collector Pedro Barbosa told the New York Times, arguing that the ideas behind NFTs are often derivative, having "already been explored by artists like Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Duchamp". David Hockney branded NFTs "silly little things" for "crooks and swindlers" - a curious accusation from an artist happy to embrace and monetise novel digital technology. Since 2009, Hockney has been doing a roaring trade in souped-up iPhone and iPad drawings.

Jones tells me that the crypto faithful, who, like Hilton, ardently believe that NFTs are the future of art, now use the dusty epithet "the legacy art world" to refer to their physical rivals.

As a painter, Jones is unusual among NFT artists. On occasion, this has allowed him the opportunity to sell the original painting on which an NFT is based, as well as the NFT. Pulling off this kind of double sale, however, must be handled carefully. Charging more for a painting than an NFT, and thus valuing physical art more highly than digital art, could provoke the ire of the crypto crowd.When Jones sold Bitcoin Bull to Rodriguez-Fraile, he also sold the original painting to the second-place bidder. In order not to offend his fans, he priced the painting at $55,000 - $555.55 less than the NFT.

A handful of established contemporary artists, notably those who have form when it comes to explicitly courting headlines and extreme wealth, have tried their hand at making NFTs - most prominently Damien Hirst, who released the project The Currency in July. Hirst put 10,000 NFTs up for sale, each corresponding to a unique spot painting, for $2,000 a piece. But there is a catch: after two months, the collector must decide if they wish to keep the NFT or the physical art work. Whichever one they don't choose will be destroyed, forcing the owner to gamble on which version will be more valuable in the future.

The most shocking aspect of the NFT to the art intelligentsia is its brazen entanglement with finance. Trading art has always been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the Art Mating Ritual - attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting as Bohemians and renegades. Yet with the NFT, the distinction between art and asset seems to have disappeared. In place of the curated exhibition is the auction website; symbols of the market have seeped into the aesthetic language of the art itself. Prices, not ideas, dominate.

Despite the promise of "art for everyone", the final destination of the NFT might not actually be art. Art may simply be a useful way to advertise the possibilities of a new technology. "I've done everything from fashion, fragrances to endorsements," Paris Hilton says, adding that NFTs are another way for "fans to have a piece of me". As well as working with the rapper Ice Cube, Jones recently made an NFT for the whisky company Macallan, to be auctioned alongside a very expensive cask of scotch. This, it seems, is a taste of where NFTs may be heading: not a radical new model for trading art, but a digital marketing bauble.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of the NFT's assault on the art market will be the questions it forces us to ask about the nature of art, and what it is that we want from it. How should art be traded and viewed? Who gets to ascribe value to art? Is there a moral or aesthetic code by which artists are expected to work, and who has elected themselves to define it? And why would anybody part with their money in exchange for a digital fart? Then there's the biggest question: is there a meaningful difference between an artwork and an asset? The answer, perhaps, is not always - but if we want art to be more than a tool for prettifying finance and flogging merch, then it's an ideal worth holding on to.

Rosanna McLaughlin is editor of The White Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'I went from having to borrow money to making $4m in a day': how NFTs are shaking up the art world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"It's actually a lot simpler than you think." It's a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I'm on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs. Hilton is many things - a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights.

# data[].attributes.body
please read and let us know what you think

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Art is based on personal perception, taste and our own unique connection to the work.

We created this space for contemplation, a place for art and stories of greatness to be understood through the words of the community visiting WSWF.

Delve into the minds of individuals and read their interpretation and insights on twelve key themes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art is based on personal perception, taste and our own unique connection to the work. We created this space for contemplation, a place for art and stories of greatness to be understood through the words of the community visiting WSWF. Delve into the minds of individuals and read their interpretation and insights on twelve key themes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Dare To Repair: How We Broke the Future - Episode 1

# data[].attributes.subject
Dare To Repair: How We Broke the Future - Episode 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - Scientifically..., Dare To Repair: How We Broke the Future - Episode 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why electronic gadgets don’t last as long as they used to and why repairing them is hard.

# data[].attributes.body
This is amazing!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Alternative Limb Project was founded by Sophie de Oliveira Barata, using the unique medium of prosthetics to create highly stylised wearable art pieces.

# data[].attributes.headline
People with dyslexia have skills that we need, says GCHQUK surveillance agency says it has long valued neuro-diverse analysts – including Alan Turing

# data[].attributes.subject
People with dyslexia have skills that we need, says GCHQUK surveillance agency says it has long valued neuro-diverse analysts – including Alan Turing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Apprentices on GCHQ's scheme are four times more likely to have dyslexia than those on other organisations' programmes, the agency has said, the result of a drive to recruit those whose brains process information differently.

GCHQ says those with dyslexia have valuable skills spotting patterns that others miss - a key area the spy agency wants to encourage as it pivots away from dead letter drops and bugging towards high-tech cybersecurity and data analysis.

"We're looking for people who can see something that's out of place in a bigger picture, who have good visual awareness and can spot anomalies," said Jo Cavan, the director of strategy, policy and engagement at GCHQ.

"If they're sifting through large amounts of data from a large number of sources to prevent a terrorist attack or a serious organised criminal, skills such as pattern recognition are key. A lot of dyslexic colleagues have those strengths."

Cavan said that the agency has valued neurodiversity during its 100-year existence, with the second world war code-breaker Alan Turing its best known employee with dyslexia. However, the shift to online defence and security prompted by the government's integrated review in March will make dyslexic thinking skills an even bigger feature of GCHQ's future, she said.

Cavan's comments coincided with a vodcast produced by the Made by Dyslexia charity, which aims to reframe how dyslexia is understood in education and employment as a strength rather than a weakness.

Charlotte, a data analyst at GCHQ, said her dyslexic thinking had helped in her career, although she had also benefited from working in a supportive environment that understood the challenges her condition poses.

"I'm often looking through a lot of data and I find that my dyslexia helps me to see the bigger picture and spot patterns that aren't always obvious to everyone else around me. I also find that my approach to finding solutions is very different. I often think quite fast and outside of the box," she said.

To encourage dyslexic people to apply, GCHQ actively promotes itself as a neurodiverse employer and offers adjustments to its recruitment process, such as allowing people to bring mind maps or have extra time, as well as introducing awareness training for managers and peer support groups.

The apprenticeship scheme is especially attractive to people with dyslexia, since many "don't feel they can thrive in a traditional education environment", said Cavan.

According to Kate Griggs, the chief executive of Made by Dyslexia, GCHQ is a good example of how employers can take advantage of the distinctive ways people with dyslexia process information, an understanding she said was "hit and miss" across industries.

"The main reason that we have a problem is that a lot of things we measure in education and in employment use standardised tests which have been the same for decades. Dyslexic people don't have standardised minds; we process information differently, which is hugely valuable once we get into the workforce," she said.

A report produced by the charity with the consultancy EY suggested that some of the thinking skills people with dyslexia tend to be especially strong in include complex problem-solving, empathy, communication and critical thinking. These are becoming increasingly valued in workplaces as AI and machine-learning mean that more routine tasks are automated, the authors said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
People with dyslexia have skills that we need, says GCHQ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Apprentices on GCHQ's scheme are four times more likely to have dyslexia than those on other organisations' programmes, the agency has said, the result of a drive to recruit those whose brains process information differently.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Material-Making-Transformation-Nick-Kary/dp/1603589325/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=material+nick+kary&qid=1619626664&sr=8-1
- Alice Anderson

# data[].attributes.headline
“It is plurality that defines us”: a Brazilian design guide

# data[].attributes.subject
“It is plurality that defines us”: a Brazilian design guide

# data[].attributes.body
razilian design guide

As part of our series exploring countries’ design cultures, we explore how Brazil’s politics of the past and present are affecting design, and how young designers are forging their own visual culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"To be a designer in Brazil nowadays is to be a survivalist," says Fabiano Higashi, head of art at Wieden+Kennedy São Paulo.

A tough combination of poverty and gentrification, far right-wing leadership and cultural repression has made it so, he says. As a result, studios are struggling often, and designers are turning to tech companies and non-creative agencies for work.

It's a hard set of circumstances in which to be creative, he admits, especially when the government's harsh and prejudiced stances on women, the LGBTQ+ community, coronavirus pandemic and more "make Trump look like a good president". Some parts of the industry are in "dire straits". But while challenging, Higashi says it's exactly this kind of environment that creative genius often comes from.

"Periods of repression are terrible, but at the same time they're fertile ground for art and creativity - people look for ways to manifest themselves, protest, scream and appear," he says.

"Those who want to work within barriers and those who want to break them"

Despite a turbulent political history and more recent challenges, still Higashi is clear that creativity exists in Brazil in a big way. It's right there on the streets, in fact. "If you look at where Brazilian visual art and design is today, part of it is happening on the streets - literally," he says. "There's a huge graffiti scene in cities like São Paulo and Belo Horizonte."

This can be seen as a direct response to and rebellion against what Higashi calls the gentrification of art. He says it's often the case that good art and design is shipped out to "galleries and foreign studios that are inaccessible to regular Brazilians". On the streets, everyone can see everything.

Beyond those who take to the streets to share their creativity, Higashi says designers largely fall into two categories in Brazil: "Those who want to work within barriers and those who want to break them". "The first group are seeking to organise the chaos we live in - they're UX designers, design coaches, influencers, behaviourists, and fintechs and start-ups are desperate to hire these people," he says.

"The other group is the rebel alliance - they're unsatisfied and need to speak about their insecurities and sensibilities," he continues. "Every work they do is a manifesto and an attempt at disruption and nowadays, I consider myself more a part of the second group."

"University environments specifically dedicated to art and architecture"

Brazil's design industry hasn't always been tested in the way it currently is, Higashi says. In the 20 th century, he says there were many famous designers who contributed to the country's "very solid" creative culture.

"We had the likes of Tarsila [a painter], Sergio Rodrigues [an architect], Rogério Duarte [an architect], Lina Bo Bardi [an Italian-born Brazillian architect] and Nieyemer [an architect], to name just a few we can be proud of," he says. "We definitely see the work of these folk echoing in today's Brazilian design."

Architects make up a large part of Brazil's design history because design as a singular educational discipline is a very new arrival in the country, according to Jaygo Bloom, BA Art and Design program director at Escola Britânica de Artes Criativas in São Paulo.

"The installation of the first undergraduate design courses in Brazil was a long process that started in 1962 with university environments specifically dedicated to art and architecture," he says, adding that it was many decades later that most universities then split design disciplines into their own courses away from architecture and art.

Bloom explains that European institutions like the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design had a big influence on how architecture - and thus design - formed as an educational pathway. Ulm School of Design in particular had an effect, he says, since the country's first architecture course at São Paulo State University (USP) modelled its curriculum on that created by Ulm co-founder Max Bill.

"It is vitally important our young designers recognise the history of marginality with their culture"

But while European design institutions were hugely influential in setting up the country's design education system, such connection has its ramifications for the industry, Bloom says. "In the first half of the 20 th century, the idea of projecting the image of a 'modern day' Brazil was the driving force behind all art, architecture, literature and design," he says.

When European modernism reached Brazilian shores, many young creatives were "seduced into following this kind of aesthetic" because it felt so new, Bloom continues. Some of his students now, he says, question how they can bring cultural aspects of Brazil into their design work, without relying on stereotypes like carnival and football.

"It is vitally important our young designers recognise the history of marginality with their culture and question the use of the idealised images belonging to a culture wanting to be European, and examine what it is that makes Brazil so special, so different and unlike any other country," says Bloom.

"Enhancing Brazilian identity with each piece"

As designers continue to embrace Brazil's creative culture more than ever, Bloom says it's an exciting period for the country in this respect. And this is a sentiment echoed by Ana Cristina Schneider, project coordinator for Sindicato das Indústrias do Mobiliário de Bento Gonçalves (Sindmóveis), an advocacy organization for the Brazil's furniture designers and makers.

"In the last decade, Brazilian work has been distinguishing itself in the world precisely through the absorption of elements that are unique - from native wood species, to cultural elements such as northeastern lace and southern wool, and including cultural immersion in the creative process," says Schneider. "It is precisely this plurality that defines us."

As with so many other countries sustainability is one of the main drivers of the industry in Brazil, according to Schneider, and this again helps keep designers in touch with heritage craft and practices. The country is home to a plethora of natural materials, fibres and dyes and these are often paired with sustainably sourced secondary materials like recycled aluminium and reforested wood, she adds.

Artisanal handicrafts are incorporated into many pieces, Schneider continues, thereby "enhancing Brazilian identity with each piece". And as Bloom adds, these pieces often contribute to the "flourishing" independent designers market scene.

"I can't even imagine how fertile and revolutionary that is going to be"

When it comes to the fortunes of designers, it's a mixed bag for Brazil. While Higashi, Bloom and Schneider all say there is hope to be found for the profession and its practitioners as they continue to forge their own creative culture, embrace old traditions and resist political pressure, there is no doubt it is a hard job.

That said, those Design Week spoke to were still positive about what is to come. "Both knowledge and technology are abundantly accessible and Gen Z and the so-called Alpha-Gen were born surrounded by creative tools that weren't available to my generation," says Higashi, who adds that the coming maturity of tech like AR and VR will provide even more opportunities. "I can't even measure how fertile and revolutionary that going to be for everyone that loves design and creative possibilities."

Looking to the future, Bloom ends: "It is vital that our current generation of designers learn to stand against injustice, and learn how to make a positive contribution to society and the economy. And it is as important that they come to understand what drives them and what injustices motivate them personally."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"It is plurality that defines us": a Brazilian design guide | Design Week

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"To be a designer in Brazil nowadays is to be a survivalist," says Fabiano Higashi, head of art at Wieden+Kennedy São Paulo. A tough combination of poverty and gentrification, far right-wing leadership and cultural repression has made it so, he says.

# data[].attributes.body
Artificial Intelligence + Music

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grimes x Endel — AI Lullaby (Official Video)

# data[].attributes.body
The WHO hosts this discussion between researchers, practitioners and policy makers to ask the question: what is the verifiable evidence that art heals? What does that mean? What are the implications for health care and the arts community?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Moderated by Dr Alexander Van Tulleken , British doctor and TV presenter, with Helen Chatterjee , professor of biology at University College London (UCL); Dr Daisy Fancourt , associate professor, psychobiology and epidemiology, UCL; Harold Offeh , artist and participant in the Hospital Rooms ;...

# data[].attributes.headline
Heath Ceramics: The Making of a California Classic

# data[].attributes.subject
Heath Ceramics: The Making of a California Classic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Artbound" looks at the dinnerware of Heath Ceramics and a design that has stood the test of time since the company began in the late 1940's. Through the writings of Edith Heath, the founder and designer of Heath Ceramics and voiced by renowned chef Nancy Silverton, this episode explores the groundbreaking work of a woman who created a classic of American design.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Heath Ceramics: The Making of a California Classic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Artbound" looks at the dinnerware of Heath Ceramics and a design that has stood the test of time since the company began in the late 1940's. Through the writings of Edith Heath, the founder and designer of Heath Ceramics and voiced by renowned chef Nancy Silverton, this episode explores the groundbreaking work of a woman who created a classic of American design.

# data[].attributes.headline
Mingei: Japanese Folk Craft                                   

# data[].attributes.subject
Mingei: Japanese Folk Craft                                   

# data[].attributes.body
bit of a stilted format but.....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mingei: Japanese Folk Craft - DESIGN TALKS plus | NHK WORLD-JAPAN On Demand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Mingei movement began in 1926 but still has an enormous impact on Japanese product design today. As we all re-evaluate our lifestyles in the midst of a pandemic, explore how Mingei helped shape the design of ordinary items around Japan. Guest Takaki Takao runs a craftwork shop in Fukuoka and explores what lies ahead for our everyday lives.

# data[].attributes.body
Something quite different but still nonetheless very interesting!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why the World’s Best Mathematicians Are Hoarding Chalk

# data[].attributes.headline
The art dealer, the £10m Benin Bronze and the Holocaust

# data[].attributes.subject
The art dealer, the £10m Benin Bronze and the Holocaust

# data[].attributes.body
Extraordinary story of the effects of colonialism and more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Countless historic artefacts were looted from around the world during the colonial era and taken to Europe but there is now a growing campaign to return them. Among the most famous are the Benin Bronzes seized from modern-day Nigeria. Barnaby Phillips finds out about one family's dilemma.

One morning in April 2016, a woman walked into Barclays Bank on London's exclusive Park Lane, to retrieve a mysterious object that had been locked in the vaults for 63 years.

Attendants ushered her downstairs. Three men waited upstairs, perched anxiously on an uncomfortable sofa, watching customers go about their business.

Twenty minutes later the woman appeared, carrying something covered in an old dishcloth. She unwrapped it, and everyone gasped.

A youthful face cast in bronze or brass stared out at them. He had a beaded collar around his neck and a gourd on his head.

The men, an art dealer called Lance Entwistle and two experts from the auctioneers Woolley and Wallis, recognised it as an early Benin Bronze head, perhaps depicting an oba, or king, from the 16th Century.

It was in near-immaculate condition, with the dark grey patina of old bronze, much like a contemporary piece from the Italian Renaissance. They suspected it was worth millions of pounds. The bank staff quickly led them into a panelled room, where they placed the head on a table.

The woman who went down into the vaults is a daughter of an art dealer called Ernest Ohly, who died in 2008.

I have chosen to call her Frieda and not reveal her married name to protect her privacy.

Ernest's father, William Ohly, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany and was prominent in London's mid-century art scene.

William Ohly lived "at the nexus of culture, society and artists", says Entwistle.

His "Primitive Art" exhibitions attracted collectors, socialites, and artists such as Jacob Epstein, Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

He died in 1955. Ernest Ohly inherited his love of art, but was a more reserved character.

"A very, very difficult man to know. He didn't let anything out. You did not know what he was thinking," said Entwistle.

Ernest Ohly's death provoked a ripple of excitement at the lucrative top end of the ethnographic art world. He was rumoured to have an extensive collection. His statues from Polynesia and masks from West Africa were auctioned in 2011 and 2013. And that, dealers assumed, was that.

But his children knew otherwise. In old age, he had told them he had one more sculpture. It was in a Barclays safe box and not to be sold, he specified, unless there was another Holocaust.

In 2016 matters were taken out of the children's hands. Barclays on Park Lane was closing its safe boxes; it told customers to collect their belongings.

I met Lance Entwistle in 2019, in his library lined with books on African sculpture. His website said his company has been "leading tribal art dealers for over 40 years".

"Tribal art" is a term that Western museums now avoid, but is still common in the world of auctions and private sales.

I was bowled over. It was beautiful, moving and its emergence from obscurity was so exciting"

Entwistle has rarely been to Africa, and never to Nigeria, but he's well connected. The British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York have all bought pieces from him.

I asked him how he had felt when Frieda pulled the cloth away from the Benin Bronze head in the bank.

"I was bowled over," he said. "It was beautiful, moving, and its emergence from obscurity was so exciting. I'm very used to being told about a Benin head, a Benin plaque, a Benin horse and rider. Generally I'm not excited because 99 times out of 100 they're fake, and often the remaining 1% has been stolen."

Provenance is everything in Entwistle's world. This time, thanks to the Ernest Ohly connection, he was confident he was dealing with a bona fide piece.

He told Frieda the Benin Bronze head was significant and unusual, and convinced her to take it home in a taxi, to her terraced house in Tooting, south London.

The Benin Bronzes were brought to Europe in the spring of 1897, the loot of British soldiers and sailors who conquered the West African kingdom of Benin, in modern day Nigeria's Edo state.

Although they are called Benin Bronzes, they are actually thousands of brass and bronze castings and ivory carvings. When some were displayed in the British Museum that autumn, they caused a sensation.

Africans, the British believed at the time, did not possess skills to produce pieces of such sophistication or beauty. Nor were they supposed to have much history.

But the bronzes - some portrayed Portuguese visitors in medieval armour - were evidently hundreds of years old.

They were our documents, our archives, the 'photographs' of our kings. When they were taken our history was exhumed"

Benin had been denigrated in British newspapers as a place of savagery, a "City of Blood". Now those newspapers described the Bronzes as "surprising", "remarkable" and admitted they were "baffled".

Some of these bronzes are still owned by descendants of those who pillaged Benin, while others have passed from owner to owner.

Victor Ehikhamenor, an artist from Edo state, told me the bronzes were not made only for aesthetic enjoyment.

"They were our documents, our archives, the 'photographs' of our kings. When they were taken our history was exhumed."

But as their value in the West has increased, they've also become prestige investments, held by the wealthy and reclusive.

London auction sales tell the story. In 1953, Sotheby's sold a Benin Bronze head for £5,500. The price raised eyebrows; the previous record for a Benin head was £780.

In 1968 Christie's sold a Benin head for £21,000. (It had been discovered months earlier by a policeman who was pottering around his neighbour's greenhouse and noticed something interesting amidst the plants).

In the 1970s, "Tribal Art" prices soared, and Benin Bronzes led the way. And so it went on, all the way to 2007 when Sotheby's in New York sold a Benin head for $4.7m (£2.35m).

Entwistle kept an eye on that 2007 sale. The buyer, whose identity was not publicly revealed, was one of his trusted clients.

Nine years later, presented by Frieda with the challenge of selling Ernest Ohly's head, Lance knew where to turn.

"It was the first client I offered it to, which is what you want, there was no need to shop around," he said.

There was only a minor haggle over price. The client, Entwistle insisted, was motivated by his love of African art.

"He will never sell, in my view." Whoever he is, wherever he is, he paid another world record fee.

The "Ohly head", as Entwistle calls it, was sold for £10m - a figure not previously disclosed.

If you envisaged the woman who sold the world's most expensive Benin Bronze, you might not come up with Frieda.

We met in the Tate Modern gallery, overlooking the Thames. She had travelled from Tooting by underground. She is a grandmother, with grey close-cropped hair and glasses. She used to work in children's nurseries, but is retired.

"My family is riddled with secrets," she said. "My father refused to speak about his Jewish ancestry."

She did her own research on relatives who were killed in Nazi concentration camps. Ernest Ohly was haunted, "paranoid", says Frieda, by the prospect of another catastrophe engulfing the Jews.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust - and, according to the Jewish Claims Conference, the Nazis seized an estimated 650,000 artworks and religious items from Jews and other victims.

Ernest Ohly distrusted strangers and lived in a world of cash and secret objects. He kept a suitcase of £50 notes under the bed.

"Ernie the Dealer" was the family nickname. The children grew up surrounded by art. But by the end he was tired of life.

His house was chaotic, his Persian rugs infested with moths. The family found the suitcase of banknotes but discovered they were no longer legal tender.

Ernest Ohly may have let things slide, but he had been a formidable collector.

"He and my grandfather never went to Africa or the South Pacific, but got their knowledge from being around objects," said Freida.

"There was a whole group of European dealers in London, in the 1940s through to the 1970s."

The British Empire was ending, and the deaths of its last administrators and soldiers brought rich pickings.

"I never understood why my father was so interested in reading obituary pages. The Telegraph, the Times, really studying them. If they were Foreign Office, armed forces, anything to do with Empire, he wrote to the widows."

Ernest Ohly listed his buys in ledger books. That's how Entwistle found what he was looking for: "Benin Bronze head... Dec 51, £230" from Glendining's - a London auctioneers where he also bought coins and stamps.

In today's money, that is just over £7,000. In other words, a substantial purchase. But Ernest Ohly knew what he was doing. He had a steal. He put the head in the safe box in 1953, and it stayed there until 2016.

"It was like a lump of gold," said Frieda. The windfall was not quite as large as it might have been.

Ernest Ohly's affairs were a mess, and the taxman took a substantial amount. Still, Frieda says, she can sleep easy now. The Benin head bought care for her family, and property for her children.

Frieda is married to a man of Caribbean descent - and her son is a journalist.

A few years ago he wrote an article about how the Edo - the people of the Benin Kingdom - tried to stop the sale at Sotheby's of a Benin ivory mask.

In fact, although he did not know this, it was a mask that his great-grandfather, William Ohly, displayed at his gallery in 1947.

The article described Edo outrage that the family who owned the mask - relatives of a British official who looted it in 1897 - should profit from what they regarded as theft and a war crime.

Frieda is too intelligent and sensitive not to appreciate the layers of irony behind her story. She had followed the arguments about whether the Benin Bronzes should be returned to Nigeria.

Britain has laws to enable the return of art looted by the Nazis, but there is no similar legislation to cover its own colonial period.

"Part of me will always feel guilty for not giving it to the Nigerians... It's a murky past, tied up with colonialism and exploitation."

Her voice trailed off.

"But that's in the past, lots of governments aren't stable and things have been destroyed. I'm afraid I took the decision to sell. I stand by it. I wanted my family to be secure."

Frieda is not the only owner of Benin Bronzes who has wrestled with their conscience in recent years.

Mark Walker, a doctor from Wales, returned two Bronzes which had been taken by his grandfather, an officer on the 1897 expedition.

He received a hero's welcome in Benin City.

Others are hesitant. In an imposing west London mansion block I met an elderly woman whose grandfather also looted Bronzes in 1897.

Ten, or even five years ago, it would not have been difficult to get somebody in her position to talk. But today the owners of Benin Bronzes are cautious, and I agreed to hide this woman's identity.

She showed me two brass oro "prophecy birds". I asked if they made her feel uncomfortable.

"I've felt misgivings, considerations that crossed my mind... Maybe misgivings is too strong a word. I don't feel like giving them anything." There was a long silence.

"You know," she said, "one bumbles along for 77 years, and suddenly this has become a sensitive subject. It never was before."

Frieda and I left the Tate and were walking along the Thames.

I was about to say goodbye. Unprompted, she returned to the Benin Bronzes.

Sometimes, she said, she wished her father had sold that head when he was still alive.

A dilemma would have been taken out of her hands.

"It was difficult for me," she said again. "Part of me felt we should have given it back." Then she was gone.

Battle for the Benin Bronzes:

A collection of intricately made brass and bronze sculptures and plaques from the palace of Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi

Created by specialist guilds working for the royal court

The plaques provide a historical record of the Kingdom of Benin, including the first contact with Portuguese emissaries

Many of the pieces were made for ancestral altars of past kings and queen mothers

The term "Benin Bronzes" is also used to refer to artefacts made from ivory, leather, coral and wood

In February 1897, the British launched a punitive expedition against the kingdom after seven British officials and traders were killed

Benin City was overrun; British forces looted the Royal Palace, which was burnt down. The oba, or king, was sent into exile

Museums in Europe have agreed to lend on rotation some of their bronzes to a new museum to be built in Benin City more than six decades after Nigeria's independence

Barnaby Phillips is a former BBC Nigeria correspondent. His book Loot; Britain and the Benin Bronzes will be published on 1 April.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The art dealer, the £10m Benin Bronze and the Holocaust

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Countless historic artefacts were looted from around the world during the colonial era and taken to Europe but there is now a growing campaign to return them. Among the most famous are the Benin Bronzes seized from modern-day Nigeria. Barnaby Phillips finds out about one family's dilemma.

# data[].attributes.body
Dieter Rams: Principles of Good Design

# data[].attributes.headline
How early humans' quest for food stoked the flames of evolution

# data[].attributes.subject
How early humans' quest for food stoked the flames of evolution

# data[].attributes.body
'Having a portfolio of tools that they could use to find tasty things to eat gave our ancestors the confidence to explore new environments, knowing they would be able to find food, whatever the season threw at them. “It really allows our ancestors to move out into the world and do new things.”'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Human evolution and exploration of the world were shaped by a hunger for tasty food - "a quest for deliciousness" - according to two leading academics.

Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.

Some of the most significant inventions early humans made, such as stone tools and the controlled use of fire, were also partly driven by their pursuit of flavour and a preference for food they considered delicious, according to the new hypothesis.

"This key moment when we decide whether or not to use fire has, at its core, just the tastiness of food and the pleasure it provides. That is the moment in which our ancestors confront a choice between cooking things and not cooking things," said Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. "And they chose flavour."

Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food - and that's why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.

Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.

"Having a big brain becomes less costly when you free up more calories from your food by cooking it," said Dunn, who co-wrote Delicious: The Evolution of Flavour and How it Made Us Human with Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist.

However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. "Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens."

Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. "In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we've needed to eat in the past," said Dunn.

In particular, people who evolved a preference for complex aromas are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage, because the smell of cooked meat, for example, is much more complex than that of raw meat. "Meat goes from having tens of aromas to having hundreds of different aroma compounds," said Dunn.

Prehistoric woolly mammoth hunters. Photograph: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy

This predilection for more complex aromas made early humans more likely to turn their noses up at old, rotten meat, which often has "really simple smells". "They would have been less likely to eat that food," said Dunn. "Retronasal olfaction is a super-important part of our flavour system."

The legacy of humanity's remarkable preference for food which has a multitude of aroma compounds is reflected in "high food culture" today, Dunn says. "It's a food culture that really caters for our ability to appreciate these complexities of aroma. We've made this very expensive kind of cuisine that somehow fits into our ancient sensory ability."

Similarly, our proclivity for sour-tasting food and fermented beverages like beer and wine may stem from the evolutionary advantage that eating sour food and drink gave our ancestors.

"Most mammals have sour taste receptors," said Dunn. "But in almost all of them, with very few exceptions, the sour taste is aversive - so most primates and other mammals, in general, will, if they taste something sour, spit it out. They don't like it."

Humans are among the few species that like sour, he says, another notable exception being pigs.

At some point, he thinks, humans' and pigs' sour taste receptors evolved to reward them if they found and ate decomposing food that tasted sour, especially if it also tasted a little sweet - because that is how acidic bacteria tastes. And that, in turn, is a sign that the food is fermenting, not putrefying.

"The acid produced by the bacteria kills off the pathogens in the rotten food. So we think that the sour taste on our tongue, and the way we appreciate it, actually may have served our ancestors as a kind of pH strip to know which of these fermented foods was safe," said Dunn.

Human ancestors who were able to accurately identify rotting food that was actually fermenting, and therefore OK to eat, would have had an evolutionary advantage over others, he argues. If they also figured out how to safely ferment food to eat over winter, they further increased their food supply.

The negative consequence of this is that fermented, alcoholic fruit juice, a sort of "proto wine", would also have tasted good - and that probably led to horrific hangovers.

"At some point, our ancestors evolved a version of the gene that produces the enzyme that breaks down alcohol in our bodies, which is 40 times faster than that of other primates," added Dunn. "And so that really made our ancestors much more able to get the calories out of these fermented drinks, and it would also probably have lessened the extent to which they had hangovers every day from drinking."

Flavour also drove humanity to innovate and explore, Dunn says. He thinks one reason our ancestors were inspired to begin using tools was to get hold of otherwise inaccessible food that tasted delicious: "If you look at what chimpanzees use tools to get, it's almost always really delicious things, like honey."

Having a portfolio of tools that they could use to find tasty things to eatgave our ancestors the confidence to explore new environments, knowing they would be able to find food, whatever the season threw at them. "It really allows our ancestors to move out into the world and do new things."

Still Life with a Turkey Pie, by Pieter Claesz, 1627. Photograph: FineArt/Alamy

Stone tools in particular "fast-forward" the ability of humans to find delicious food. "Once they can hunt, using spears, they have access to this whole world of foods that were not available to them before."

At this point, Dunn thinks humanity's pursuit of tasty food started to have terrible consequences for other species. "We know that humans around the world hunted species to extinction, once they figured out how to hunt really effectively."

Dunn strongly suspects that the mammals that first went extinct were the most delicious ones. "From what we were able to reconstruct, it looks like the mammoths, mastodons and giant sloths all would have been unusually tasty."

To replicate the eating habits of prehistoric humans, the book, published later this month, details how one scientist dropped a horse who had just died into a pond and assessed how it fermented over time. "He would sample some meat to see if it was safe to eat. He described it as delicious - a little bit like a blue cheese," said Dunn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How early humans' quest for food stoked the flames of evolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Human evolution and exploration of the world were shaped by a hunger for tasty food - "a quest for deliciousness" - according to two leading academics. Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.

# data[].attributes.headline
A lot of really interesting content here including a warning from literature, and from history. Stephen Fry and Nick Baker discuss E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella, ‘The Machine Stops’, which envisages a physical world changed, if not destroyed by technology. But what happens when that technology breaks down

# data[].attributes.subject
A lot of really interesting content here including a warning from literature, and from history. Stephen Fry and Nick Baker discuss E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella, ‘The Machine Stops’, which envisages a physical world changed, if not destroyed by technology. But what happens when that technology breaks down

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 Extra - Hardware, Software, Anywhere - Available now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Available episodes of Hardware, Software, Anywhere

# data[].attributes.body
Exploring how life appeared  on earth and how it might appear and evolve on other worlds.
Chapter two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThDYazipjSI
Chapter one:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LIFE BEYOND:  Chapter 1. Alien life, deep time, and our place in cosmic history (4K)

# data[].attributes.body
I found this absolutely fascinating

An exploration of the evolution, and lasting impact, of a visionary urban design: the Manhattan street grid. From 2014.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Map That Made Manhattan - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

# data[].attributes.headline
László Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures), 1923 by Dr. Elizabeth Otto and Dr. Steven Zucker for Smart History

# data[].attributes.subject
László Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures), 1923 by Dr. Elizabeth Otto and Dr. Steven Zucker for Smart History

# data[].attributes.body
With this work  László Mohioly-Nagy aimed at dissolving what Walter Gropius called 'the arrogant distinction between the craftsman and the artist'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures), 1923

# data[].attributes.body
- Raymond Moreno 1st Year

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The true story of how a data company in '60s America invented the future we now live in.

# data[].attributes.body
Dieter Rams: Principles of Good Design

In his 50+ years of product design, Dieter Rams has left an indelible mark on the field with his iconic work at Braun and Vitsœ. The objects Dieter has designed have touched the lives of millions of people who have owned a Braun coffeemaker or stereo, an Oral-B toothbrush, or a Vitsœ 606 shelving system. Or any of the hundreds of other products Dieter has designed or overseen. This film is a documentary portrait by Gary Hustwit following one of the most influential designers alive. Gary interviews Dieter about his life and work, as he ruminates on consumerism, sustainability, and the future of design.

This film was created by Gary Hustwit. We are pleased to offer this documentary in our library.

# data[].attributes.body
some extraordinary things going on- e.g. drones and robots that fix wind turbines!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - 39 Ways to Save the Planet - Available now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Available episodes of 39 Ways to Save the Planet

# data[].attributes.body
I really like how this takes account of the slightly disregarded highly beneficial aspects of trees

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

# data[].attributes.headline
The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design

# data[].attributes.subject
The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'Let's face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful," writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object's long history. Not all sitting, of course. For people who use wheelchairs, they're an elegant and crucial technology. And sitting itself is not the culprit; any unchanging, repetitive motion or posture fails to give the body the variation it needs. But Cranz, writing primarily for an audience of ambulatory readers in industrialised and therefore sedentary societies, is one of many researchers who have been saying for decades that chairs are a major cause of pain and disability.

Sitting for hours and hours can weaken your back and core muscles, pinch the nerves of your rear end and constrain the flow of blood that your body needs for peak energy and attention. Most people's bodies are largely unsuited to extended periods in these structures. Extensive research confirms that sitting in chairs is correlated, Cranz notes, with "back pain of all sorts, fatigue, varicose veins, stress and problems with the diaphragm, circulation, digestion, elimination and general body development". There is growing evidence that relentlessly sedentary jobs - in some, such as bus driving and forklift operating, bodies are literally strapped to chairs - are harmful enough to shorten life expectancy.

For most of human history, a mix of postures was the norm for a body meeting the world. Squatting has been as natural a posture as sitting for daily tasks, and lying down was a conventional pose for eating in some ancient cultures. So why has sitting in chairs persisted in so many modern cultures? As with all material objects, Cranz reminds us, function tells only part of the story. The other part, always, is culture - the inherited and sometimes arbitrary ways that things have always been done, and therefore continue as common practice. "Biology, physiology and anatomy have less to do with our chairs than pharaohs, kings and executives," she writes.

One kind of historical chair, called the "klismos" by historians, developed primarily as a historical expression of status. Setting a body higher than and apart from other people, in an individual structure with rigid, flat planes - a throne, if you will - evolved as a way of recognising an individual's power, with the earliest known models dating to ancient Egypt and south-eastern Europe. Their use as an expression of authority continued throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the endurance of this symbolism lives on as metaphor in many contemporary leadership titles; to chair the committee or the department, or to sit in the designated "director's chair" on a film set, is still to hold a seat of power.

In the centuries prior to western industrialisation, stools or benches were common household furnishings, but chairs were special-occasion objects, usually the exclusive property of the wealthy and powerful. The era of mass manufacturing in the 19th century, and the rapid social and economic changes that came with it, brought chairs into daily life for the first time. Industrial jobs, with their repetitive tasks, required a seated posture, and the high demand for chairs that this created in turn made them available and affordable to middle-class people in Europe and the US.

"Chair-and-table culture," Cranz writes, has become fully entrenched in many parts of the world since then. Modern interior designers have done their part to perpetuate chairs as a fashionable and practical norm, reinventing the form again and again in its aesthetics, though not nearly enough in its ergonomics. Chairs are four-legged creatures with anatomical backs and bottoms, familiar to humans because they stand up, almost like animals, beckoning us with their lifelike structures to sit down. Cranz notes that they appeal to humans, and perhaps especially designers, with this blend of the "architectonic and the anthropomorphic": they are structurally interesting and an echo of the body itself.

But while they remind us of the human form, chairs rarely do much to actually support it. For instance, many chair designs feature big, soft cushions that seem to indicate comfort, but in ergonomics, the consensus contradicts this padded aesthetic. Cranz writes that "an overpadded chair forces the sit bones to rock in the padding rather than make contact with a stable surface, thereby forcing the flesh in the butt and thighs to bear weight".

How can a nice cushioned chair that screams comfort be so ill-suited to most actual bodies? The real science of ergonomics, Cranz argues, should point designers toward chair design that supports and enables the body's need for movement, not stillness - with seats that angle downward in front, for example, and have a base that's flexible enough for the sitter to shift their body weight from leg to leg. But for the most part, these principles are ignored in favour of fashion and cheap manufacturing.

Chairs are generally not a response to the realities of the body, its natural evolution, or its needs over any extended period. Instead, the industrialised body has devolved in its needs and succumbed to chairs. "We design them," Cranz writes, repurposing a famous line of Winston Churchill's, "but once built, they shape us."

aturally, there have been plenty of attempts by designers to reinvent sitting. There are kneeling chairs, bouncing balls, perch-style stools with rounded bottoms to encourage shifts in weight and movement. There are flexibly designed chairs such as the Tripp Trapp for children, with pegs for adjusting the seat and leg supports to grow with a young body. Some offices have started to introduce standing desks. But at the average restaurant, in the ordinary classroom, and on trains, buses and aeroplanes, you'll still find chairs that are mostly at odds with any idea of comfort.

It's not just chairs, of course - so many of the products brought to market by the profession of industrial design were not created for many bodies. Instead, they were designed to be plentiful, novel rather than necessary, and cheap. One famous designer, Victor Papanek, memorably dubbed these bad designs a form of "do-it-yourself murder".

"Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell the gadgets to millions of people," he wrote in 1971. "Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly 1 million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed."

Papanek was calling out his entire profession when he wrote these words. Design for the Real World, his first book, was a fiercely argued polemic about the misguided operations of industrial design in the mid-20th century, a call for designers to question what Papanek witheringly referred to as "shroud design" - a preoccupation with the way things look on the outside, at the expense of how they should function and how robustly and sustainably they are made. He understood how the products with which we navigate daily life match (or fail to match) the bodies and tasks they are meant to conjoin as tools. He likened his peers' shirking of their responsibilities to "what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery, and concentrate exclusively on dermatology and cosmetics".

Papanek was responding to the heady early days of truly mass manufacturing in the aftermath of the second world war, when supply chains expanded to previously unimaginable scale, fuelled by an equally huge advertising industry. Papanek understood the job of product design to be an ambitious one - to "transform man's environment and tools and, by extension, man himself" - but he saw in the giddiness of postwar growth a moment when designers lost their way. An overwhelming cultural belief and investment in technology created a cultural appetite for whatever seemed shiny and new, and the industry now pandered to it.

The public's ready acceptance of these shiny new objects, whose lifespan was meant to last only until the next new thing arrived, created an allegiance among designers to what Papanek called "the dark twins of styling and obsolescence". Manufacturing for styling, amplified by advertising, resulted in an empty desire for unnecessary objects that became quickly unusable. And objects that were created purely for ephemeral desire, in turn, created a whole ethos of obsolescence - an accepted disposability that made for a dangerous neglect of safety standards, resulting in needless injury from common household objects. At the time of his writing, he claimed that 600 women annually lost a hand in injuries brought about by top-loading washing machines. When operating at its worst, design resulted in needless injury, but in its everyday mediocrity it also created conditions where objects were not in harmony with the needs of the people for whom they were designed.

As Papanek observed, there is a wide gulf between the people who use TV remotes, car dashboards and other everyday items, and the people who make the design decisions that bring those items into being, who are driven or constrained by motives other than ease of use. The bodiedness of people gets lost, especially in the sedentary workplace, where human labour is imagined not as flesh and muscles, but as measurable economic deliverables, organised by roles and tasks. Yet the work is carried out by bodies all the same, not just in chairs, but among the angular shapes of desks and copiers and countertops, alongside mechanical and digital machines. The passive as well as active physical requirements of our workdays tax our bodies, whether we bend repeatedly to harvest berries or sit still in a phone bank for hours on end.

Papanek was particularly barbed in his assessment of design's failure to allow for non-normative bodies. He called for a much closer focus on people and conditions whose needs were commonly written off by his design counterparts as "special": older people, people with disabilities, elementary school students, and any population considered beyond the scope of the middling mainstream. But as Papanek pointed out, we were all children once, and almost all of us become, in turn, adolescents, middle-aged people and older adults. If we combine all the "seemingly little minorities [and their] 'special' needs," he wrote, we discover that "we have designed for the majority after all".

ost-Papanek, designers continued to wrestle with the conundrum of chairs. In the late 70s, the office furniture giant Herman Miller commissioned independent designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick to look for opportunities in the furniture market, gaps that new products might fill and thereby expand the company's market share. In the course of their research, Stumpf and Chadwick, seasoned observers of humans and designed environments, noted one particular context in which chairs were creatively adapted but ill-suited to their sitters: older adults who spent a lot of their day sitting in La-Z-Boy recliners, watching TV or doing otherwise passive activities.

They noted that the recliner had even become a makeshift medical treatment chair; they witnessed it being used, for example, in a half-reclined state for people undergoing dialysis treatment. Despite the advantages of its variability in pitch and support structures, however, it was the wrong chair for many of the conditions that come with ageing. Older adults with weakened muscles had trouble getting in and out or reaching the lever for changing positions, and the deep padding, used for its presumed comfort, put people who sat for long periods at risk of bedsores.

Inspired by the spirit of the recliner, Stumpf and Chadwick reconsidered all of its traditional features and generated a prototype called the Sarah chair , which they pitched to Herman Miller in 1988. It had all the flexibility of a recliner and more - multiple ways to choose the pitch of the back, seat and arms, and a flexible footrest for changing positions more easily. They reduced the padding significantly, making a thinner and more breathable seat structure. The model was popular in-house as a chair with purpose - many Herman Miller staff could imagine it being useful for their grandparents, for example. But the mass-market appeal wasn't obvious at first, and the firm rejected the Sarah in its first iteration, only to revive the design a few years later.

For the second version, Stumpf and Chadwick imagined the ergonomic features of the chair with ageing still in mind, but also the body of the average office worker, commonly tethered for long stretches to a personal computer and keyboard. They got rid of the foam padding altogether, making the model's signature new aesthetic a cushionless seat of thick plastic webbing that would support the shapes of any body, not just an ageing one. The Aeron was a wild success, quickly taken up as a status symbol in high-end office environments like those in Silicon Valley.

Aeron chairs have become a canonical, if expensive, example of what's called "universal" design and its variants, barrier-free and inclusive design. This principle is what many people think of when they hear the words "disability" and "design" together. The logic of universalism goes like this: designers gain surprising and powerful insights from looking closely not at norms and averages - not at people whose experiences fall well inside the expected middle of a curve - but instead at people and scenarios at the margins of experience, so-called extreme users. Good designers, the thinking goes, will take a close look at unusual circumstances, places where products (or environments, or services) are full of friction for people with particular needs. There, in the margins of human experience, are clues to suboptimal conditions that may also affect people in the normative middle, though perhaps to a lesser degree.

In the case of disability, that would mean closely observing older adults and wheelchair users, and people on the autism spectrum, say, and then abstracting from those observations. What is working for these people, and what isn't, based on what they say or do, or what they don't say or do? Where might improvements be introduced to address those points of friction at the margins, the places where design isn't working? After a series of prototypes and testing, the process aims to make a more user-friendly, ergonomic, accessible product (or service, or environment) for all - in principle, at least, design "for everyone".

t wasn't Papanek who offered universal design to the world; it was disabled people whose long-held insights generated what became a set of principles that designers could follow. Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user and architect, is credited with introducing the term "universal design" to the public in 1985. In part, the coinage was strategic, recasting features of design that had been considered "special" as simply good design, resulting in products and buildings that were straightforwardly "usable by all people".

The universal design principles that Mace and others in the disability community generated read like an antidote not only to the preoccupation with "styling and obsolescence" that Papanek called out, but also to the "murderous" results of negligent design; they include principles such as "simple and intuitive use", "perceptible information", "low physical effort", and perhaps most important of all, "tolerance for error".

Universal design isn't restricted to high-end items such as the Aeron chair. If you go looking for kitchen tools in your average store, for example, you'll easily find the Oxo Good Grips line, with the familiar thick black pliable rubber handles that have just enough give to hold comfortably, and just enough sturdy resistance to offer leverage. The brand began with a vegetable peeler, an object so everyday as to be invisible - and that peeler originated, as design often does, in a complaint that inspired an idea.

In the late 80s, a woman named Betsey Farber was attempting to use a standard metal vegetable peeler in the holiday house she was renting with her husband, Sam, a retired entrepreneur. The tool was frustrating to use, especially because Betsey had arthritis. So, right there in the kitchen, Sam and Betsey started to sketch out ideas for a new version of a peeler. With further refinement, those ideas resulted in the now-ubiquitous Oxo design: fins on the sides elegantly indicate the place to put your thumb in order to optimise the mechanics of use, a visual cue for intuitive handling. When you hold the peeler against a carrot, it encourages you to apply just enough pressure to catch a ribbon of skin without cutting too deeply, and without a reckless amount of slip that would send both carrot and peeler flying from your hands.

Sam Farber came out of retirement and went to work on the peeler, and the idea that he and Betsey hatched was taken up in a partnership with a product design firm that went on to create the Good Grips line: can openers, salad tongs and other tools made for the subtle work of manual kitchen tasks. Thus went a now-classic universal design success story, which has taken its place in the canon alongside that of the Aeron chair, as inspiration to a generation of would-be practitioners.

There are other stories besides. Designer Marc Harrison was commissioned by Cuisinart in the late 70s to overhaul its commercial-grade food processor into a more consumer-friendly domestic model. The company didn't ask Harrison to address disability as a use case for its product, but Harrison's research and teaching at Rhode Island School of Design had included years of collaborative work on furniture for rehabilitation settings and wheelchair-accessible housing. Those experiences nourished the insights Harrison brought to the processor. He introduced things such as large-print, high-contrast lettering for the labels, and controls that flipped like paddles rather than requiring fiddly turning. These and other features were informed by usability principles Harrison had learned from looking closely at disability. This kind of commitment and imagination in design yields products and experiences that can make life better without you even noticing it.

Disability is the little-acknowledged heart of the innovation in many digital tools, too. The history of the telephone, for example, is tightly bound up with research on deafness. Alexander Graham Bell's work with deaf students and their teachers solidified his research on making speech visible, reducible to signals and therefore transmittable by electronic means. That research made telephone technology possible, but it also helped set in motion the standardisation of signal processing that was crucial to early computing.

In the US, perhaps the most hidden-in-plain-sight of examples of these innovations is the landmark change to media consumption that happened after disability activists fought for closed-captioning technology to be built into every standard television. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act, passed in the US in 1990, required the technology to be a standard part of the television manufacturing process, rather than an extra device attached alongside it. The battle to pass the legislation was difficult and protracted, in the face of resistance from within the communications industry about the perceived extra expense it would entail. But thanks to the economy of scale created by the legislation, the cost of adding this capacity to televisions is now so small that it is almost impossible to calculate. Meanwhile, closed captioning has become a standard feature of daily life. It's how you follow along with sports matches across a restaurant or airport terminal, and it's how you understand clips from an election debate on your laptop with the sound off, making it possible to multitask when your kids are in the next room trying to get to sleep.

t would be easy to conclude from these stories that universal design is dispatching "murderous" objects to the dustbin of history, and that it alone points the way to a more accessible future. Designing ergonomic objects that can be mass-produced and affordable enough to find their way into the hands of people who need them is an unassailable good. But disability scholars also point to the ironies created by the work that Mace and his ilk set in motion. One is that while the dominant model of universal design has disability at its centre, the very success of the innovations it generates tends to obscure their origin stories, as in the case of the Oxo peeler. That success makes many people overlook the barriers that still exist to an adaptive, flexible world for disabled people. Universal design also tends to stoke an unquestioned faith in the importance of products, attained by consumers, as the key to building a desirable world. A better product might be useful in the short term, but sometimes it's a better process, or a better system, that's needed to provide a long-term solution.

Take, for example, the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a design created with paraplegic wheelchair users in parts of the world where accessible streets are rare. Amos Winter, director of the Global Engineering and Research Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), did years of trial-and-error field research with his team in Tanzania, Guatemala and India, in order to collaboratively design a chair with variable torque in driving, even in off-road terrain, using very simple technology. Depending on where you grab one of its extended handles, you get more or less mechanical advantage, just like switching gears on a bicycle, which makes uneven pavement or dirt roads much more navigable. A third wheel in front adds balance. "We failed a number of times," Winter has said. The design process "has to start and end with end users", he says. "These are the people who have to define the requirements of the technology, and give it the thumbs-up at the end."

Getting the seat, frame and handles in the right positions to be both comfortable and advantageous in their physics was an engineer's task of very fine designing and building. But the real ingenuity isn't in the mechanics; it's in the sustainable system for repair and maintenance. Many wheelchair companies make their chairs with their own proprietary parts, so even if they donate free chairs to people who need them, the parts are expensive to replace, and the chairs become unusable when they break. If a wheelchair is going to last in a rural area among populations who aren't rich, says Winter, "it has to be repairable using the local tools, materials and knowledge in those contexts". The Freedom Chair was made of globally standardised and affordable bicycle parts, so they can be repaired and replaced anywhere in the world.

"To make something cheap and simple and reliable often takes rigorous engineering," says Winter. "What is the solution that will give you the required performance for as little money and as little complexity as possible?" The Leveraged Freedom Chair was not a compromise; it wasn't a chair that was "good enough" for the people who use it. It was the right design for specific people in specific contexts, and it was designed to last.
Adapted from What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren, published by Riverhead Books

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'Let's face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful," writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object's long history. Not all sitting, of course. For people who use wheelchairs, they're an elegant and crucial technology.

# data[].attributes.headline
Shape-changing interfaces that leverage swarm and soft robots

# data[].attributes.subject
Shape-changing interfaces that leverage swarm and soft robots

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Computer Science, starting in Fall 2020. I am part of HCI Group at UCalgary.

I am actively looking for PhDs, masters, postdocs, or interns, who are interested in joining or collaborating with us, across disciplines (e.g., Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Material Science, Electrical Engineering, Architectural Design, and Computer Science). If you are interested, please feel free to send me an email. We could start from some possible collaborative projects. :)

My research interest lies on the intersection between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Robotics. During my PhD, I have developed novel shape-changing interfaces that leverage swarm and soft robots at various scales (i.e., from mm- to m-scale). My research explores how we can make the physical environment more adaptive with context-aware swarm robotic assistant that can be embedded into our everyday life.

Previously, I was a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Daniel Leithinger and Mark D. Gross in THING Lab and Human-Computer Interaction Group

Hooman Hedayati, Ryo Suzuki, Daniel Leithinger, Daniel Szafir

Hyunjoo Oh, Tung D. Ta, Ryo Suzuki, Mark D. Gross, Yoshihiro Kawahara, Lining Yao

Andrew Head, Elena Glassman, Gustavo Soares, Ryo Suzuki, Lucas Figueredo, Loris D'Antoni, Björn Hartmann (the first three authors equally contributed)

Reudismam Rolim, Gustavo Soares, Loris D'Antoni, Oleksandr Polozov, Sumit Gulwani, Rohit Gheyi, Ryo Suzuki, Björn Hartmann

Ryo Suzuki, Niloufar Salehi, Michelle S. Lam, Juan C. Marroquin, Michael S. Bernstein

[UIST '19 Doctoral Consortium]
Collective Shape-changing Interfaces
Ryo Suzuki,, Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST '19 Doctoral Consortium). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2951--2958.
[PDF]

[CHI EA '17]
Exploring the Design Space of Automatically Synthesized Hints for Introductory Programming Assignments
Ryo Suzuki, Gustavo Soares, Elena Glassman, Andrew Head, Loris D'Antoni, and Bjoern Hartmann,, Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2951--2958.
[PDF][Poster][DOI]

Program Committee: TEI 2021

Organizer: CHI 2021 (Social Media Chair), UIST 2016 (Web and Social Media Chair),

Review: CHI 2016--2020, UIST 2017--2019, SCF 2019, SIGGRAPH ETech 2019, IEEE VR 2020, GI 2020

Student Volunteer: UIST 2016, CHI 2017

Funding

Innovation Research Funding - Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in Japan, 2020 ( Title: Adaptive Physical Environments with Distributed Swarm Robots. , $30,000)

Adobe Gift Funding, 2019 ($5,000)

ACT-I Funding for Young Scholars - JST, 2018 ( Title: Dynamic Physical Interfaces, $30,000 and Mentorship Opportunity - My mentor: Takeo Igarashi)

Emerging Research Funding for AI and Interdisciplinary Research - Leave a Nest Foundation, 2018 ( Title: Programmable Architecture with Soft Inflatable Actuator, $5,000

KAKENHI Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research - JSPS, 2013-2015 ( Title: Network-based Diffusion Analysis for Online Community, $40,000)

Fellowship

CU Boulder Travel Grant, 2015-2020 ($500-$1,200 for each conference travel)

Nakajima Foundation Scholarship, 2015-2020 ($120,000 stipend for 5 years and 2 years tuition coverage)

JSPS Research Fellow DC1, 2013 ($72,000 stipend for 2 years)

JASSO Fellow, 2013 ( Total Exemption for Outstanding Students - $20,000 stipend for 2 years)

Tohso Fellowship, 2010 ($3,600)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ryo Suzuki | University of Calgary Assistant Professor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Computer Science , starting in Fall 2020. I am part of HCI Group at UCalgary. I am actively looking for PhDs, masters, postdocs, or interns, who are interested in joining or collaborating with us, across disciplines (e.g., Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Material Science, Electrical Engineering, Architectural Design, and Computer Science).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over three centuries, it has been ravaged by fire and the wrecking ball. But now the world's first factory will rise again from the ashes of its former self, repurposed as a new cathedral for the maker movement.

Amid huge interest in creating and refashioning things, Derby's Museum of Making, which opens this spring, is launching at an auspicious time.

"Look at how popular TV programmes like The Repair Shop are," said Tony Butler, executive director of Derby Museums. "Making resonates with the public."

The maker movement is a subculture that embraces and celebrates the physical act of creating something. Borrowing from traditional hobbies such as woodworking, textile design and metalwork, there is a strong emphasis on repurposing existing objects and finding fun and fulfilment in the act of creation.

Couple the huge interest in making with the UK's desire to understand its new post-Brexit role in the world while grappling with its colonial past and the climate crisis, and it may transpire that the museum is the attraction the country did not know it needed right now.

"We are really keen on putting forward the idea that every young person can be a maker," Butler said. "The challenges that we face in the 21stcentury, things like climate change and environmental loss, much of that will be mitigated by technology, engineering and ingenuity, and those are the kind of makers we need in the future."

The museum is located in Derby city centre on the site of a silk mill that opened in 1721 and whose claim to being the world's first factory lies in the fact that it was the first fully mechanised mill supplied by a single power source.

With £18m funding from the national lottery, local development agencies and the Arts Council, there are hopes that the museum, located in the Derwent Valley Mills Unesco World Heritage Site, will show how people can be attracted back into city centres in a post-Covid world.

Those behind the museum say there has been extensive consultation among the local community, with their feedback helping shaping its design. Volunteers even cleaned 11,000 bricks from the original factory to be repurposed in the new building.

"The site has changed since the first factory burned down," explained Hannah Fox, director of projects and programmes at the museum. "Bits of it have fallen down and there have been major disasters over 300 years of its life, but every single time something happened it was rebuilt by the city because it was so important."

The new building, designed by Bauman Lyon Architects, retains the original factory's Italianate tower, its arches and Grade I-listed gates but, in Fox's words it will be "a kind of mash-up of lots of different periods".

An impression of Derby's Museum of Making alongside a picture of the original silk mill taken in 1908, showing the now Grade I-listed iron gates. Composite: Derby Museum / The Creative Core

"We are redefining it for what it needs to be at this time, and that is a place that really tells a story and inspires people to see themselves as makers," Fox said.

Butler explained that an "entire culture" had emerged out of the worldwide maker movement. "It's not just lads with beards in their sheds in Shoreditch tinkering with old bikes. That whole culture of making resonates with someone, whether they're in San Francisco or London or Derby."

He said the new museum would explore the links between the factory in its first incarnation and the Derby of today, home to the likes of Rolls-Royce and Toyota. But it would also confront the relationship between the industrial revolution and today's problems, such as the devastating legacy of fossil fuels and the textile industry's reliance on slavery.

"The general, pervasive view of the industrial revolution in Britain is very much that of the 'great man' narrative," Butler said. "There's this idea that the industrial revolution was down to unique British exceptionalism. We want to acknowledge that innovation can be driven by individual revelation and genius, but the revolution also did rely, in the factory system's case, on a ready supply of workers and raw resources."

Almost all of the museum's 30,000 artefacts will be on display. "Most museums have the majority of their collections in store but this museum will have pretty much everything accessible to the public," Fox said. "They range from a huge engine donated by Rolls-Royce to a fantastic little engine run by a single human hair that was showcased at the Chicago World's Fair in the 1930s."

The museum will also return to the manufacturing roots of the original factory by making things - including exhibition displays that will be built on site and sold to other museums. "It will be a full workshop space for new businesses to prototype and manufacture things they want to take to market," Fox said. "It's a place of making in every sense."

A previous museum on the site closed in the mid 2000s. "Visitor numbers were dwindling," Butler explained. "It was to do with the way in which the narrative was framed as something that was inherently in the past. It meant fewer and fewer people were coming to visit the museum. It was seen as almost a paean or a longing for a lost industrial age. What we are trying to do with this museum is make it contemporary and relevant to the sorts of work in which people are engaged today."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Building a legacy: world's first factory rises again as a museum of making

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over three centuries, it has been ravaged by fire and the wrecking ball. But now the world's first factory will rise again from the ashes of its former self, repurposed as a new cathedral for the maker movement. Amid huge interest in creating and refashioning things, Derby's Museum of Making, which opens this spring, is launching at an auspicious time.

# data[].attributes.body
"Creative Procrastination"
and "Get Lost in Research" could be fatal to designers.

And it could be really painful:
🙁
Why I failed to make a great and convincing outcome?
I was so hard working !
That’s doesn’t make sense !
I don’t know where I made the mistake!
😱
That’s why I failed in last project.
Be aware and be careful to
"Fool yourself "
👍
This book could help you to analyze  and structure design steps. Always keep a clear mind in design process.

# data[].attributes.body
It's good know how can we learn from mistakes and don't be afraid of making mistakes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Material Matters with Grant Gibson - Podcast

# data[].attributes.subject
Material Matters with Grant Gibson - Podcast

# data[].attributes.body
The whole series is fascinating but in particular this episode was really amazing to me personally. She studied at Camberwell and I find her incredibly humble and talented. Junko Mori on Metal.

Podcast link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qkNkW3jAAngVDd6NmtMqM?si=NCqSRo5jRcmxWYvV5YwKBQ

Link to her website:
https://www.junkomori.com/

# data[].attributes.body
It's been a while since a film made such a visual and conceptual impact in my system.

# data[].attributes.headline
Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson

# data[].attributes.subject
Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson

# data[].attributes.body
Design which works in symbiosis with the environment, local, sustainable and resilient.

# data[].attributes.headline
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig 

# data[].attributes.subject
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig 

# data[].attributes.body
Michael Marriott says:

"I couldn’t put it down; poetic, brilliant summing up of how to live life proper and do things properly."