1 episode
Design for Resilience Builders Collective
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- Arts
Design for Resilience is not a podcast just for professional designers. This a podcast for human beings, who may have forgotten that they are creative. We build our personal resilience by first remembering that we are all designers. We make language, sing songs, invent alphabets, share ideas, create images, build cities, and organize social systems. When we think of a murmuration of starlings, we are amazed at the way birds will fly together as a group, swirling around in the air as if they were one organism.
What does a murmuration of human beings look like? When we look around at the modern world, we can witness the way humans work together to build architecture that draws from various traditions and styles. Ideas, tools, and systems spread around the world. We do this with language, education, commerce, and politics. We can do this with technologies, such as the internal combustion engine. We are social creatures, and we have amplified our ability to travel and gather together with trains, planes, and automobiles.
But, now we have seen what can go wrong when we design without thinking about the possible consequences of our actions. If technology scales, accelerates, and amplifies our abilities and capacities as human beings, we need to think carefully about who we want to be. We are discovering that we can project our intentions into the world and build our own reality.
Design for resilience begins with an inward journey into who we are as human beings and thinking carefully about the future that we build for the generations to come.
Join us as we explore how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
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Design for Resilience – Trailer
The Bauhaus school of design offers us a story of resilience, how a group of artists and architects gathered in Weimar, Germany, just over one hundred years ago, after the end of World War I—in the midst of multiple systemic crises— and transformed the modern world. They had a vision to build the future together, and in many ways, they succeeded. They became the evangelists of modern architecture built with steel, glass, and concrete. In almost every modern city in the world, you can see these structures have changed the skylines.
However, we are also living with the unintended consequences of that vision. In some ways, it was because the vision was never fully realized because the school was shut down by the Nazis in 1933. However, the ideas lived on through the people who became the Bauhaus diaspora, scattered around the world, but carrying and spreading the ideals and vision of modernism wherever they went.
To practice design for resilience requires that we learn how to overcome adversity. We learn from our mistakes in the same way a baby learns to crawl and to walk. We fall down and we get back up again. Failure is a part of the process of learning.