Beyond Aesthetics: Alice Rawsthorn on How Design Can Solve Global Challenges

To kick off our Solutions season – where we explore how to address today’s most pressing challenges – I’m joined by Alice Rawsthorn, an award-winning design critic, acclaimed author, and co-founder of Design Emergency, an initiative investigating design’s role in shaping a better future.

In this episode, Alice talks about how design is evolving beyond aesthetics to become a force for systemic change, tackling issues like climate change, inequality, and humanitarian crises. She shares compelling examples of design initiatives that influence policy, social structures, and everyday life, emphasizing the need for collaboration, inclusivity, and empathy in shaping the future.

Join us as we discuss how design can move beyond form to function as a driver of meaningful change.

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Transcript

Alice Rawsthorn (00:03.47)
I don't think design has ever been confined to aesthetics. Whether it's the war in Ukraine, the tragic humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, disruptive technologies, the refugee crisis, whatever, design enables me to explore them. One project that I'm really excited about and very committed to, which is Democracy Next.

Moritz Gaudlitz (00:29.07)
Design has always been about problem solving. From the shape of our cities to the objects we use daily, it influences how we live, work and interact. But today's challenges, climate crisis, inequality, technological disruption, war, demand more than just aesthetic innovation. They call for systemic change. Beyond products and spaces, major design festivals like the Design Week in Milan, the London Design Festival and other independent initiatives.

are increasingly addressing design as a tool for social and environmental transformation. At the same time, as political power shifts globally, funding for solution-based design is being cut, making it even more challenging to implement meaningful change. So how can design move beyond form to become a force for real impact?

Moritz Gaudlitz (01:16.162)
Welcome to another episode of the Culture Shifts Podcast. I'm Moritz Gaudlitz and today I'm speaking with Alice Rawsthorn. Alice is an award-winning design critic, acclaimed author and co-founder of Design Emergency, an initiative exploring how design can help build a better future. Based in London, she has spent decades researching design's role in solving systemic and political challenges. Her book, Hello World! Where Design Meets Life, introduced a wider audience to the power of design in shaping the world around us.

Through her writing, public speaking and global collaborations, continues to document and redefine the impact of design on our life. Hi Alice, thank you so much for joining the podcast. How are you?

Good, thank you very much for inviting me.

Great to have you. To start with something current, what's a design driven solution or initiative that has recently caught your attention as a powerful response to today's challenges and problems maybe we live in?

Well, there are so many to choose from, but one project that recently particularly moved me is a refugee camp in Al Mawassi in Gaza, which was designed specifically for people with disabilities who are, of course, vulnerable at all times, but exceptionally so in places as dangerous as Gaza. And the camp was designed and is now run by Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, one of the NGOs that's doing incredible work and unbelievably challenging.

Alice Rawsthorn (02:41.59)
and perilous places like this. Now, the camp's designed to provide emergency shelter for 400 people, all with disabilities, and it has specially designed accessible toilets and showers with wider doorways and lots of grab rails to facilitate entry and departure, while the paths around the camp were designed from the outset to avoid any uneven terrain and they're regularly cleared of any...

rubble or litter, making them much easier to navigate for people in wheelchairs or who are adapting to using prosthetics. And the Palestinian Red Crescent has built a smaller camp for 100 people with disabilities, also in Gaza, in Deir al-Bala showing the same sensitivity in its design. And for me, it's impossible not to be moved by design projects like this, which are very quietly and gently making the lives of very vulnerable people just a little less unbearable.

That's a really great example. Thank you so much for introducing this. It's interesting because if I think about design, I'm always thinking about objects, about my daily life, about the things that I'm confronted with. But in your case, in your work, in what you just said, design and architecture are and become more and more about solving problems. And if we look at today's crisis, climate change, inequality, wars, technological disruption, they all demand new approaches. So also the example that you gave is a very good example.

But how can design move beyond just aesthetics to create real systemic change?

Well, I don't think design has ever been confined to aesthetics. It's simply that that's a stereotypical way of perceiving it in the industrial age when it was primarily used as a stylistic.

Alice Rawsthorn (04:24.662)
and promotional tool, a way of designing products we manufactured at lower cost, in standardised sizes and so on. But design is a complex and elusive phenomenon. It's adopted lots of different meanings at different times throughout history and in different contexts, and that's left it prone to muddles, misunderstandings and cliches. Yet in all its many guises, I believe it has always had one elemental role, and that's as the one...

you mentioned. It's an agent of change that we can use to interpret changes of any type, whether they're social, political, economic, scientific, technological, cultural, environmental, whatever, to ensure that they'll affect us positively rather than negatively. And design has been doing this for millennia. And design has a very rich and laudable history of responding to emergencies. So just a couple of examples are during the terrible plague, the Black Death in 17th century Europe.

A French doctor, Charles de Lorme, designed the capacious clothing which was worn by his colleagues in treating it. They were known as plague doctors, which was effectively the first personal protective equipment. Or in the 19th century, there was incredible work by information designers like John Hawkesworth in exposing the evils of the transatlantic slave trade in early data visualisations.

and Florence Nightingale, the great British social reformer, also used data visualization to persuade the British government to support her proposals to radically redesign military hospitals in the Crimea. And then for centuries, design has had a hugely important role in countless activist movements for workers' rights, women's rights, the people of colour, the LGBTQIA plus community, and to protect our environment. But all of this work and that of the

unsung design ingenuity of indigenous communities in remote parts of the world who've developed ancient nature-based design solutions to defend themselves against extreme weather, famine, drought and other threats, paved the way towards the current explosion of interest, energy and activity in deploying design to tackle contemporary challenges from the climate emergency and refugee crisis to threats to democracy and social justice. So I don't think

Alice Rawsthorn (06:41.762)
design's overall role has changed, think perceptions of the application of that role have changed radically.

Thank you so much. So would you say that design always gives solutions to problems or can also cause problems?

Both intelligent, sensitive, responsible design can of course produce constructive and sustainable and ethically sound solutions to very complex problems of all types. Every sloppily designed project is a major setback and can cause huge problems.

You just mentioned the word sloppy designs. We talk a lot about good designs and maybe also bad design, but what factors, functionality, accessibility, ethics should we prioritize today for design?

We need to prioritise absolutely all of them. Every design challenge is distinctive and it's defined by different objectives and different constraints, but no design project can ever be considered to be truly worthwhile if it isn't fully functional. I would include accessibility in functionality or if we have any reason to doubt its ethics.

Moritz Gaudlitz (07:45.614)
Fantastic. You mentioned before in your insights, the word design and emergency, these two words together. You started a platform, you have a podcast, you wrote a book together with Paolo Antonelli, architect, and at MoMA in New York. Design Emergency, this platform, explores how design is tackling global crisis. In what way have the conversations that you have on this platform, in your book, in your podcast, and also with your guests in your podcast, I'm very happy that I'm interviewing...

I'm someone who also runs a podcast. is always very nice. How did they shift your perspective on what makes a solution truly work and what is an emergency in terms of design?

Well, one of the wonderful things about writing about design is that you have the opportunity to talk in depth to extraordinary designers, engineers, architects, coders, makers, whatever, about their work. So the more you speak to them, the more you learn.

about it. And when Tara and I launched Design Emergency about five years ago, which seems unbelievable because it kind of feels like five weeks ago, we decided at the outset that we would discuss practical design projects on the grounds that the arguments would be more persuasive, particularly to people outside the design community, if we could provide proof of impact. I we talk about conceptual and hyper-experimental projects as well, but you really need that.

to have currency. And for the same reason, we decided the interviews would be much more compelling and realistic if we asked the interviews not just about what had worked, but what hadn't worked and how they'd responded to those problems and what they'd learned from them. Now, this was particularly enlightening in my interview with Francesca Coloni, who's an Italian structural engineer who worked commercially for the first few years of her career, but

Alice Rawsthorn (09:31.81)
felt she wanted to do something more meaningful and spent 20 years working on the frontline of the global refugee crisis, initially for Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross and then UNHCR. And since 2021, Francesca has been chief of the technical support team of the UNHCR's Division of Resilience and Solutions, so an extraordinary job title, which essentially means head of design. Now, I was struck from the outset by Francesca's passion for her work.

and also by the constant conflict that really defined it between idealism, her determination and that of her colleagues to design resources to enable refugees to lead safer, fairer, more productive lives while they're seeking asylum, with the compromises that were forced upon them by the extreme urgency of the alarming increase in the number of refugees worldwide. Now, for example, one of Francesca's key motivations for her work is she wants

the world's refugee settlements to be designed and delivered sustainably. But again and again, the sheer numbers of refugees pouring into refugee camps, she said several thousand every night when she was working in the Zaatari camp in Jordan, frequently stops them from practicing the sustainable policies that they want to. So for example, she was determined not to use the UNHCR's plastic sheets in emergency shelters.

and ended up doing so because thousands of people were coming in every night and they desperately needed shelter and they had no other materials. And the ultimate compromise is that the UNHCR has long recognised that refugee camps are not fit for purpose, they're not an efficient solution.

the problem they're supposed to address. And in 2014, it announced plans to phase them out and explained why, what its misgivings were. But those plans have been completely stymied by the escalating numbers and still absorb the bulk of the UNHCR's budget. So Francesca is a truly remarkable, very courageous and compassionate woman, completely committed to what she does and in a position of seniority, which enables her to generate positive change. So speaking to her as a designer about all

Alice Rawsthorn (11:41.978)
the very real and completely understandable compromises and constraints she has to work with has been very interesting and those have been many of the most valuable lessons for me in design emergency.

Thank you. I mean, also listening to your podcast and following the platform, if it's on social media or on the website or even the book, you realize that design is something very, very political and not just aesthetic, like what we talked about in the beginning also, that it's way more, that it's a tool to solve problems. Can you share an example apart from the one that you just gave me, what was great, where design...

nowadays or even in the past, has directly influenced or could influence policy or even governments and society at scale.

Well, an excellent example of this is the work of the Dutch architect Jan Willem Petersen, who I first wrote about in my book, Hello World, Where Design Meets Life. And when I was writing the next book, I hadn't heard much about Jan's work for a while. So I contacted him to see what he was doing, because he was so dynamic and ambitious and bold in the way he tackled his work. I was surprised that everything had gone quiet. And I discovered exactly what a powerful and important

political impact his work had done. Now, when Jan graduated from the Architectural Association here in London, he returned to Amsterdam and he set up, I mean, it was really a one-man band, but he called it Specialist Operations Staff himself. As an immersive design research agency, an immersive design using design as a tool to investigate complex challenges and to identify possible solutions has become...

Alice Rawsthorn (13:18.432)
extremely popular recently because of the work of groups like Forensic Architecture, Forma Fantasma, Menomik and so on. And Jan decided he wanted to conduct an immersive design research project into the efficacy of what was called Task Force Arisgan. This was a massive, very expensive post-conflict reconstruction project funded by the Dutch and Australian governments to build schools, roads, mosques, factories, hospitals, even an airport.

in Erzgan, which is a remote war-torn region of Afghanistan. And the post-conflict reconstruction project was completed just before the most recent Taliban takeover. So Yan traveled around the region talking to local communities to identify whether the new infrastructure was fit for purpose. In other words, whether it was money well spent. And he had chosen Erzgan because he suspected that this would not be the case. But the reality of the situation

appalled even him, it far exceeded his worst expectations. Only 20 % of the projects were fully functional and this was 18 months to two years after completion and were actually fit for purpose. The other 80 % had either been abandoned completely or needed major repair and the principal reason for this was their design flaws, specifically the failure of the Western designers.

to study the local climate, geography and culture. And typically post-conflict reconstructions like this are assessed by development economists and government auditors who are obviously very well equipped to identify any issues in their own fields, but may very well miss the design flaws that Jan immediately identified. Now his research report was presented to the Dutch parliament and then to the United Nations.

and he was subsequently invited to advise the Dutch Army on post-conflict reconstruction as many of these projects are delivered by the military and also to run five years of courses on post-conflict reconstruction to all the new officer recruits at the Dutch Royal Military Academy to make sure that they would begin their career as army officers, far better briefed on the issues at hand and he is also a regular advisor to NATO.

Alice Rawsthorn (15:28.726)
and UN habitat, all of which is proof of how an inspiring and resourceful design project can drive positive change sustainably at scale with medium and long-term political impact.

Thank you. You have spoken on countless panels and conferences, published books written extensively for newspapers, magazines, New York Times, et cetera, for years, for a really long time. How has communication approach or your communication approach changed over, let's say, the last five years? You just mentioned that five years feel like yesterday. How have they changed?

Well, the technology of communication has changed radically throughout my career and so as a writer and a communicator I've constantly had to adapt to that and that's a challenge I really relish so it adds significantly to my enjoyment of my work and I consider myself incredibly lucky to write about design. It's a field I'm passionate about, as you say I've written about it for a long time.

and I'm exceptionally lucky to have done so at a time when design itself and perceptions of it have changed fundamentally, as have the tools of communication. And I began my career in elite legacy media and print journalism in that era, working for the Financial Times for 16 years, where I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs.

and as a foreign correspondent in Paris, I then decided to specialise by focusing on a subject that really intrigued me to build a body of knowledge about it in a singular voice. And I chose design because it fulfilled all those criteria. And I also felt it was generally misunderstood and under-communicated. And I wrote a weekly design column for the New York Times for over a decade. Now, I've always loved the challenge of adapting my way of working and to sharing ideas on new platforms.

Alice Rawsthorn (17:15.088)
from social media. This is talking to your question of the changes in the last five years. I think I became involved with, in a serious way, with social media probably 12 or 15 years ago, but really focused on it as a medium of communication and an interesting and expressive one 10 years ago when I started my Instagram feed.

And I've loved experimenting with Instagram and other platforms and also with public speaking and podcasting. It's been great to have the opportunity to try them all out. For example, when we started Design Emergency, which was right at the start of the COVID pandemic, we conducted weekly interviews on Instagram Live, which was great fun and incredibly convenient, literally from your phone. And I loved being an

old school legacy media journalist in the print era. It was full of challenges and opportunities and I really enjoyed grappling with them. But I sometimes wonder whether without the fundamental shifts in technology, I might have become a little bored and maybe moved on to something else. So for me, they've been incredible catalysts, which have just renewed my enthusiasm and enabled me to try new things.

Also here I have a question to add on because you shifted from maybe politics a bit more like being a journalist for the Financial Times and then you decided to write about or to focus about design. If I look at your career, if I look at your work and if I look also at the understanding of design that you have and the knowledge, it's basically everything or it could be basically everything. Like design seems to me that it can be everything.

Yeah, that's why as a writer it particularly appealed to me because it's the reason I became a journalist, because I'm incredibly curious about lots of different things and the world we live in now and how it will be in the near and far future. And design is a very convenient conduit for me to explore anything that interests me. So whether it's the war in Ukraine, the tragic humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, disruptive technologies.

Alice Rawsthorn (19:18.356)
refugee crisis, whatever, design enables me to explore them. But I was very lucky in that I had a very traditional training as a journalist. I began after I left university as a graduate trainee on the Times and then went to the Financial Times. And people often ask me sort of what sort of design critic I am. And in many ways, I think I still behave like a foreign correspondent.

It's just that rather than looking at and analysing a country as I did when I was Paris correspondent, namely France, for the FT, I'm analysing a discipline and following the routes that it takes me on.

Fantastic, thank you. We talked about the changes of communications and your work and beyond your writing, podcasting, you collaborate with a wide range of organizations, nonprofits, cultural institutions, policymakers. Can you give us some insights into the kinds of projects you're involved in, let's say this year? And if we can already talk about this, what impact they aim to have, even if impact probably will be measured afterwards.

So I've done a lot of pro bono work for the visual arts and political causes that particularly interest me as a trustee, chair, and advisory board member since my late 20s. And I think I was part of that generation of women who hit their late 20s at a time when a lot of nonprofit and NGO boards realized that they were full of men, full of white men in fact, and they needed to bring in some women. And initially I would always worry that I had been...

given these opportunities in a tokenistic way. And then I thought, well, actually, this is a fantastic opportunity. If it's tokenistic, so what? I'm going to make the most of it anyway. So I'm going to talk about one project that I'm...

Alice Rawsthorn (20:58.828)
really excited about and very committed to, which is Democracy Next. And this is a non-profit research and action institute which is developing new ways to revitalise democracy by embedding individual citizens and decision-making and thereby design is absolutely central to its work. And it was set up four years ago by Claudia Svelec, a Polish-Canadian activist and author, who I met when she invited me to speak at a symposium she was organising on the future of democracy for the OECD, the Organisation of Economic

Cooperation and Development in Paris. And about a year later, Claudia decided to leave OECD to work independently by founding DemocraCy Next and invited me to join the International Advisory Board, which I was very happy to do. And it's been fascinating for me to see her building a terrific team at DemNext and to watch them in action, organising citizens' assemblies and other forms of sortition on a wide range of complex, often contentious...

political and local issues in different parts of the world, launching similar programs to test new ways of encouraging wider participation in urban planning, how to democratize museums, and much more. But guttingly, DemNext was contacted by a US NGO, which was the principal funder of its Citizens' Assemblies program, with the dreadful news that all its funding, this was the National Endowment for Democracy in the States, had been cut by Trump.

Musk and the Doge team's hatcheting of US aid. So this wholly unjustified sort of three steps away withdrawal of funding is obviously a serious problem for Democracy Next because it was a very substantial grant. Claudia and the team have responded admirably, they've secured enough money through emergency donations to continue planned projects, but it is a massive blow for them.

So for me, being involved with organisations like Democracy Next enables me to champion political causes I fervently believe in, but also to use different skills to the ones I use as a writer and as a communicator, and indeed to apply those skills to help as an advisor the executive team.

Alice Rawsthorn (23:02.188)
So I think it embeds you in the real world of real problems and also opportunities. Demnext has achieved so much and has done so with the highest standards of design. It's applied it so imaginatively and thoughtfully.

Very interesting. Thank you so much. You just mentioned the example of Demnext with the problem that it faced and also the solution maybe that it has. Can we say that maybe problems nowadays in the field of designs or generally in the world are caused by a few people and to have solutions we need more. We need platforms, need organizations and collaboration across disciplines. And my question for you would be how can designers or people that engage with design

work more effectively with policymakers, scientists, even businesses.

Well, the short answer is that they need to work as diligently, imaginatively, efficiently and responsibly as possible. But some general changes in design practice and design culture would help and I've identified five of them. One is interpreting design in its broadest sense as a process of change management and a series of skills to be applied on an anticipatory and intersectional basis to address the complex problems we've talked about. Two,

is to become more compassionate. In the industrial age, design tended to be defined by certainties, which made it plucky and optimistic, but also prone to arrogance. Empathy, which is a horribly overused word, which is a shame because it's a beautiful and very necessary quality, will be absolutely essential to design in future, not just empathy to fellow human beings, but all the species with whom we share our planet.

Alice Rawsthorn (24:39.744)
Three is that design urgently needs to become truly diverse and inclusive. If you believe in design, it stands to reason that society needs the best possible designers, but it's not going to get them unless they're drawn from every sphere, not just the white cis males from the global north, whose work dominates design museum collections and history books.

is becoming increasingly generous and open to forging true collaborations with specialists from other disciplines, as you alluded to in your question, and making the most of them as learning opportunities rather than new business graphs, which was how they tended to be perceived in the past, and doing the same to the people who use design and will be increasingly active in the design process in future.

And finally, accepting that as designers and design projects become more ambitious, the consequences of failure will escalate. Because just as every thoughtfully planned and executed design project represents a step forward, every ill-thought-out design flop risks being a major setback.

Thank you. you would say that failure here is not something that is good because you then can make it better. It's a setback.

Failure if a design project is delivered and doesn't work is a massive setback. But we all face failures of different degrees in everything we do. The essential thing is to use it constructively and learn from it.

Moritz Gaudlitz (26:03.214)
Thank so much, Alice. Before we come to the end, I would like to ask you last questions and we look a bit towards the future. What gives you hope looking ahead about the future of design as a tool for meaningful change? And which areas do you think will be affected first and which ones later?

Will all the incredible design projects I've described give me hope because they're all evidence of design's power to forge positive change in their very different ways? As for which areas will change first, that will be determined by whichever challenges have the greatest need of design's potential as an agent of change because design's priorities at any given time are all our priorities. And design's made great progress in establishing itself.

as a way of delivering ingenious solutions to complex problems in recent years, but we still have a long way to go before the archaic cliches of it as a styling and promotional tool are finally quashed. And that process won't be completed until design has proved its doubters to be wrong.

Thank you so much. I think that's it. This was a very good conversation. Thank you so much, Alice. And thank you for being part of our podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our podcast and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram or Substack and visit our website, cultureshifts.net.