open-ended – Details, episodes & analysis

Ego Obi (Google), Konstantina Palla (Spotify) & Samantha Niblett (Labour: Women in Tech) moderated by Suhair Khan 

Ego Obi, a senior Google executive who has had almost two decades at the forefront of building technologies and business around the world, and is currently completing a PhD on Ethics & AI. 

Samantha Niblett the Founder of Labour: Women in Tech, a not-for-profit political organisation. 

Konstantina Palla,  a machine learning researcher at Spotify, completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge, on the fairy tales of Machine Learning.

This conversation is part of Technology & Design Lab, in partnership with London Design Festival 2023. The mission is to connect visionary creatives and technologists, to catalyse, seed and build around new ideas. In this series, we are asking the question: “In an age of disruption and innovation: where do we go next?”

Hosted by open-ended & LabKO

Seetal Solanki (Ma-tt-er), & Chance Coughenour (Google Arts & Culture) moderated by Morgan Meaker 

Digitally preserving and democratising access to cultural heritage, Chance Coughenour coordinates cultural heritage preservation efforts on a global scale at Google Arts & Culture.

Seetal Solanki, Author of "Why Materials Matter" (Prestel, 2018),  is on a mission to transform our mindset around materials. Seetal is also the Founder and Director of Ma-tt-er.

Morgan Meaker, Senior editor at WIRED for European Business & Technology Journalist of the Year (2019, Words by Women Awards), uncovers the stories at the intersection of tech, human rights, and global affairs.

This conversation is part of Technology & Design Lab, in partnership with London Design Festival 2023. The mission is to connect visionary creatives and technologists, to catalyse, seed and build around new ideas. In this series, we are asking the question: “In an age of disruption and innovation: where do we go next?”

Hosted by open-ended & LabKO

We continue our planet focused season this week with curator Diana Campbell, who is committed to fostering a transnational art world. Championing socially engaged artistic practices of underrepresented artists and regions has earned her recognition on the annual ArtReviewPower100 list. 🏆

Since 2013, Diana has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit. It is the highest daily visited contemporary art exhibition in the world. She is also the Founding Artistic Director of BellasArtes Projects in the Philippines and curated Frieze Projects in London for 2018 and 2019. 

In this episode Diana speaks about how she ended up becoming one of the world’s leading contemporary art curators - from Dhaka to Frieze; and about culture in the time of a climate crisis. Stay tuned for her plans for Desert X in the Coachella Valley in 2023. 🌵🇧🇩🎨

This week’s open-ended conversation is with the versatile Shloka Nath, head of sustainability and policy at Tata Trusts in Mumbai. Shloka Nath is a thought leader focused on funding climate in India across business and society.At the center of her work as the co-founder and Acting CEO of the India Climate Collaborative, is the question of how climate can be funded in the broader ecosystem in India.In this episode, Shloka speaks about connecting with nature, the wildlife book that inspired her work on climate, and how art is a part of everything she does. 🌿🇮🇳🌦️We hope you enjoy this conversation 💥

This weeks conversation is with architect and teacher Hussam Dakkak. 

Hussam has been the founder and program director of the AA Jeddah Visiting School since 2015, which critically archives and studies Makkah, a city sacred to all Muslims and home to the holiest site in Islam, the Ka'aba. A historian and archivist, Hussam's work is political and sometimes subversive. 

He is a partner at Studio Bound, a design collaborative based between London and Saudi, and holds a masters in architecture from the Architectural Association in London. Most recently, Hussam curated the Saudi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Hussam gives Open/Ended an inside view into his Makkah project, his process of archiving social histories through research and storytelling, and much more. 📜✨⚒️

We hope you enjoy this conversation 💥

This weeks conversation is with Katie Patrick, an environmental engineer and software designer based in San Francisco. Katie works at the intersection of environmental behaviour, gamification, and technology, tackling complex environmental issues by applying data-driven game and behaviour-change techniques.Passionate about the power of gaming to save the planet, Katie is an author and podcast host, How to Save the World: How to make changing the world the greatest game ever played.She has collaborated with UNEP, NASA JPL, Goggle, Magic Leap, IES, Institute for the future, and Stanford. Katie’s now founded multiple climate-focused platforms and startups: 

🏞️ Urban Canopy, a map-based application that uses satellite imaging of urban heat islands and vegetation cover to encourage urban greening and cooling initiatives  

⚡Energy Lollipop, a Chrome extension and outdoor screen project that shows the electric grid's CO2 emissions in real-time for California. These days Katie is busy building a “Fitbit for the Planet”, to show people real-time data from sensors and satellites to teach them their environmental footprint – CO2, water, waste, pollution – just as a Fitbit shows the number of steps taken. ⚡🛰️ 🎮We hope you enjoy this conversation 💥

We kick off the new year with a conversation with multimedia artist Shezad Dawood, who works across the disciplines of painting, film, sculpture, performance, virtual reality and digital media. 

His work asks key questions of narrative, history, and embodiment, fusing artistic narratives with the issues of our time, challenging us to think about the future in new ways.

Shezad has had an epic couple of years. Some of his recent projects include co-producing the ‘Concert From Bangladesh’, a mixed-reality music concert, and creating The Terrarium, a VR experience that presents a world 300 years from now, where the Earth’s surface is 90% water.

Particularly passionate about climate change, he shares his thoughts about environment, technology, and his work across the South Asian subcontinent. 🎶 🐠🌊

We hope you enjoy this conversation 💡

This week’s Open/Ended conversation features Whitney Richardson, a creative visual strategist who uses technology, events and journalism to connect people around the world.

Over the last few years, Whitney has produced live events for The New York Times across Europe to address the most pressing stories of our time: climate change, gender, tech, and culture.

Whitney speaks about her work on one of the most ambitious live events in The New York Times's 170-year history, a series of 70+ virtual events on climate for the NYT Climate Hub at COP26 in Glasgow. 🌎🌲🎥 

We hope you enjoy this conversation.💡

To kick off Season 3, we are excited to welcome Anab Jain - designer, futurist and filmmaker.

As co-founder of Superflux, Anab leads a seminal design practice that is responsive to the challenges and opportunities of this era.

Anab and her team imagine and build future worlds for the present moment. They confront issues such as climate change and inequality, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and the future of work.

And they collaborate in surprising ways, they’re currently working on new narratives in Artificial Intelligence with organisations like Deepmind and Omidyar.

Anab is a dreamer, storyteller, and mythmaker, and her childhood in India has brought her on a remarkable journey.

We hope you enjoy this conversation.

#19 Josie Wells is an award-winning journalist and founder of Footnotes and Indexes, a New York-based book club that aims to initiate personal growth and foster critical thinking through works by Black writers. Making academia accessible, her accompanying online newsletter provides space for people to address social issues and dig deeper into Black culture and Black feminism.  

Started in January 2020, the Footnotes and Indexes book club and newsletter combine text with music, videos, and documentaries to move seamlessly between history and modern contemporary pop culture. In response to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Josie also created a free introductory online masterclass on Black feminism, which has been transformative for those who joined in from around the world.

In this Open/Ended conversation, Josie speaks with us about the origins of Black feminism / and the transformative effect of great writers such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Bell Hooks in her own life.