In this episode of Design Emergency podcast, the Nigerian architect, Tosin Oshinówò, tells our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, how design and architecture can help to forge a fairer, safer, more sustainable future for Africa.

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One of the gifted young architects at the forefront of forging radical change in across the African continent, Tosin was born in Lagos and returned there after studying architecture and design in London and Madrid, to establish her practice, Oshinówò Studio. In her interview with Alice, Tosin describes how she has combined commercial projects with humanitarian endeavours, including a collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to design a resettlement village for displaced people returning to the Borno region after being forced to leave there by the Boko Haram insurgency.

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As chief curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023 and as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University for the past year, Tosin has shared her vision of Africa’s future. She recently won a Special Mention at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennal for an installation based on her Loeb Fellowship research into the flourishing informal economy of markets in Lagos, which, she believes, could be scaled up to provide a sustainable local solution to Nigeria’s need for design and architectural innovation.

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We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Tosin describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at the forefront of forging positive change.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Recording and editing by Spiritland Creative.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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From Joseph Bazalgette’s epic mid-19th century sewage system for London and Massimo Vignelli’s wildly controversial diagrammatic New York subway map, to Kate Crawford’s pioneering work in charting the social and environmental damage caused by the new genre of gigantic data centres and the Sponge City natural flood defence strategy designed by Turenscape in China, Alice and Paola debate the pros and cons of infrastructure design at different times and in very different places.

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We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Alice and Paola describe on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at the forefront of forging positive change.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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Hilary traveled throughout the UK and US – from the post-industrial cities of Barnsley and Grimsby in northern England, to Palo Alto, the tech capital of the US – to discover what workers and their employers thought of the logistics of their working lives, and how they can be redesigned to make them fit for purpose. Hilary also tells Alice how the “new industrialists”, the new generation of business leaders who recognise the urgent need for radical change, are already making progress..

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We hope you’ll enjoy this episode. You can find images of the projects Hilary describes on our Instagram @design.emergency. Please join us for future episodes of Design Emergency when we will hear from inspiring global design leaders whose work is at the forefront of forging positive change.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.