design

Welcome to Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to futurological thinkers brought to you by Future Human and the V&A. We seek out people who are reimagining innovation in their field and ask them to apply their intelligence to emerging trends.

Anab Jain and Jon Arden are the directors of Superflux, a design consultancy and research lab based in India and the UK. The work of Superflux focuses on how emerging technologies are changing our everyday life and environment, with the ambition of helping companies make these tools more accessible.

They describe how breakthroughs in synthetic biology are informing their work, from gene sequencing projects that seek to identify the alleles that determine human intelligence to DARPA’s efforts to create ‘natural drones’ by hacking the brains of bees. 

How can designers shape the way advanced technologies are experienced and understood by the general public? And will their role grow increasingly redundant at a time when products can be designed anywhere in the world, and then manufactured locally and cheaply at great speed? Presented by Ben Beaumont Thomas. 

Future Human Visionaries #11 — Superflux on biologically inspired design

Temple Dogs

AI is now increasingly playing a role in many parts of our lives, and the workplace is no exception. AI is now being used by employers to help them to recruit new staff and by jobseekers in their applications. But AI is also now present when we work. It’s used by employers to manage their employees, from monitoring what they are doing during the day, to what they post on social media. 

To talk about the rise of AI in the workplace, and what it means for workers and employers, in August 2025, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University. Professor Ajunwa is also the Founding Director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University School of Law. Her research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance of workplace technologies. 

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Luke Digweed.  

Further reading and resources
•	Ajunwa, Ifeoma, A.I. and Captured Capital (June 30, 2024). 134 Yale L. J. Forum (2025).
•	Ajunwa, Ifeoma, Artificial Intelligence, Afrofuturism, and Economic Justice, 112 Geo. L.J. 1267 (2024). (November 01, 2023). Georgetown Law Journal, volume 112, pg 1267, 
•	Ajunwa, I., (2023). The quantified worker: law and technology in the modern workplace. Cambridge University Press. 
•	Ajunwa, Ifeoma, Automated Video Interviewing as the New Phrenology (July 19, 2021). 36 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 101 (2022).
•	Does ‘Bossware’ Boost Worker Productivity? It’s Far From Clear – Wall Street Journal Tech Briefing
•	Protecting Employees’ Health Data – New York Times - 27 March 2016

Take the Ballpark Listener survey and enter the prize draw for £250 in vouchers!

The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 1 November 2025. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
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LSE: The Ballpark | AI and the workplace with Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa

Exploring the reasons people might find themselves with problematic levels of debt, the options open to those in financial trouble and how bankruptcy laws could be used more impactfully to the benefit of both individuals and society; this month we revisit an episode from 2023 which asks, “Do we always need to pay our debts?” 

It's a question that has come back into focus recently as the UK continues to grapple with elevated interest rates and the lingering effects of inflation, putting increasing pressure on household budgets and reigniting debates around debt and repayment. 

Jess Winterstein talks to: Dr Joseph Spooner, Associate Professor in the LSE Law School and author of Bankruptcy: the case for relief in an economy of debt, and Sara Williams, founder of debt advisory website Debt Camel. https://debtcamel.co.uk/

LSE iQ is a university podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. We’re keen to find out more about our audience so we can better tailor our content to suit your interests. With this in mind, we would be grateful if you could please take the time to fill out this short survey and share your feedback.

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=_epnVXfnpUKRu5RA_UO4k9i3ygPzxbNDuStfrFFNRBNUMzYxS1BITDlHTkdYMVhaVE9LRDhNQkxaVC4u

Do we need to pay our debts?

The LSE Phelan US Centre's regular podcast, The Ballpark, will be 10 years old in 2026. Ahead of our anniversary, and after more than 140 episodes speaking to academic experts on topics from across the social sciences, we'd like to find out what you think about the podcast with a listener survey.  

It only takes 10-15 minutes, and you'll have the chance to enter a prize draw to win £250 in vouchers.  

The Ballpark brings academic commentary to a wide audience, including to students, policymakers and a global community of academics. Recent highlights include The US’ changing relationship with NATO and Europe with Dr Celeste Wallander and an ongoing mini-series on AI and the US covering topics including AI’s effects on the workplace and the US-China AI race. 

Fill in our listener survey, here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1  

Voucher prize draw terms and conditions are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/united-states/the-ballpark/ballpark-listener-survey-prize-terms-conditions-2025  

Thanks for listening! 

Take our Ballpark podcast survey and you could win £250 in vouchers!

To talk about social media and politics, and how AI can help spread – or tackle – disinformation, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Dr Josephine Lukito, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. Her research specializes in malicious political language in the public sphere, focusing on cross-platform flows of messages and frames about global economic and political issues. 

The discussion covers how social media and AI are influencing political communication, disinformation, and election strategies in the US and globally and about the evolving role of platforms, algorithms, and AI tools in shaping elections and democratic governance.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.  

Further reading and resources
•	Lukito, J., & Pevehouse, J. C. (2022). Competing for attention on Twitter during the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential debates. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 20(2), 125–138. 
•	Rodarte, A. K., & Lukito, J. (2024). Does Social Media Level the Political Field or Reinforce Existing Inequalities? Cartographies of the 2022 Brazilian Election. Political Communication, 42(3), 382–404. 
•	Lukito, J., Lee, T., Martin, Z., Glover, K., Hu, A., & Cui, Z. (2023). Connective action in Myanmar: a mixed-method analysis of Spring Revolution. Information, Communication & Society, 27(7), 1422–1440. 
•	Candidata - https://www.candidata24.org/ 

Take the Ballpark Listener survey and enter the prize draw for £250 in vouchers!

The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 1 November 2025. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
•	Voucher prize draw terms and conditions are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/united-states/the-ballpark/ballpark-listener-survey-prize-terms-conditions-2025 

LSE: The Ballpark | AI, social media, and political disinformation with Dr Josephine Lukito

In August 2025, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization held its 25th annual summit in Tianjin, China, with the country’s leader Xi Jinping, hosting representatives from more than 20 countries including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi. The absence of the United States in this gathering of global leaders may tell us about how China is competing with the US and building its own global order.

To discuss China’s strategic competition with the US, and how it is evolving under the Trump administration, in September 2025, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Professor Evan Medeiros, the Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations at Georgetown University.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.  

Further reading and resources

•	“China and Russia Will Not Be Split”, Michael McFaul and Evan S. Medeiros, Foreign Affairs, 4 April 2025
•	Medeiros, E. S., & Polk, A. (2025). China’s New Economic Weapons. The Washington Quarterly, 48(1), 99–123. 
•	“U.S.-China Relations for the 2030s: Toward a Realistic Scenario for Coexistence”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”, 17 October 2024
•	“The Delusion of Peak China”, Evan S. Medeiros, Foreign Affairs, 24 April 2024

Take the Ballpark Listener survey and enter the prize draw for £250 in vouchers!

The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 1 November 2025. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
•	Voucher prize draw terms and conditions are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/united-states/the-ballpark/ballpark-listener-survey-prize-terms-conditions-2025 


LSE: The Ballpark | US-China strategic competition with Professor Evan Medeiros

Will artificial intelligence cause huge unemployment? Will it free us from working? Will it replace us? In this special edition of LSE iQ, Sophie Mallett sits down with Professor Judy Wajcman, LSE’s Emeritus Professor of Sociology and one of the world’s leading voices on technology and society. Together, they explore one of the biggest questions of our time: what does artificial intelligence really mean for the future of work? 
 
In this wide-ranging conversation, Judy shares what really saves people time, talks about the fear of job replacement, and warns of the dangers of letting the most powerful tech companies design the future 
From Silicon Valley boardrooms to everyday lives, Judy challenges us to think differently about progress, productivity, and what we truly value as work. 
Contributors: Judy Wacjman  
Research links:  
From connection to optimisation 
How Silicon Valley sets time 
Feminism confronts AI: the gender relations of digitalisation 
LSE iQ is a university podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. 


Will AI free us from work?

The last three decades have seen China’s economic rise. Alongside this, China has become much more influential on the global stage, emerging as a competitor to the United States in many arenas, including as a technology and innovation leader. China has accomplished all this while continuing to be an authoritarian state, which is at odds with many conventional ideas about the relationship between autocracies and technology. 

To discuss China’s technological rise in the context of its autocratic government, in October 2025 the Phelan US Centre spoke to Dr Jennifer Lind, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and a leading expert on the international relations of East Asia, about her new book, Autocracy 2.0 How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.  

Further reading and resources

•	Autocracy 2.0 How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny by Jennifer Lind (Cornell University Press, 2025)
•	Jennifer Lind and Michael Mastanduno. Hard Then, Harder Now: CoCom’s Lessons and the Challenge of Crafting Effective Export Controls Against China - Texas National Security Review (2025)
•	Blue Blaze on Substack

Take the Ballpark Listener survey and enter the prize draw for £250 in vouchers!

The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 1 November 2025. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
•	Voucher prize draw terms and conditions are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/united-states/the-ballpark/ballpark-listener-survey-prize-terms-conditions-2025 

LSE: The Ballpark | Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny with Dr Jennifer Lind

As long as there has been photographic and video imagery, there have been manipulated videos and photos. But only in the last decade or so have the public become aware of what are known as “deepfakes”, computer or AI generated fake images, often of celebrities. The spread of deepfake imagery raises questions about truth and authenticity online – can we still trust what we see on screen?

To discuss deepfakes, and the idea of trust and authenticity in the digital sphere more broadly, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Dr Gili Vidan, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University’s Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.

Further reading and resources

•	Robert Chesney & Danielle K. Citron, Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security,107 California Law Review 1753 (2019).
•	Habgood-Coote, Joshua (2023). Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse. Synthese 201 (3):1-23.

Take the Ballpark Listener survey and enter the prize draw for £250 in vouchers!

The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 1 November 2025. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
•	Voucher prize draw terms and conditions are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/united-states/the-ballpark/ballpark-listener-survey-prize-terms-conditions-2025 

LSE: The Ballpark | AI and deepfakes with Dr Gili Vidan

It seems every week we hear a new report of a cyber-attack. Recent examples include the hacks on Marks and Spencer's, Jaguar Land Rover, and the Co-op, all causing massive economic disruption.    

While these attacks seem to have come from cyber criminals working within the UK rather than other nation states, they highlight the destruction that cyber-attacks can wreak. What if those attacks were on our critical infrastructure? Our national grid? Our water supply? Is the UK prepared? 

Charlotte Kelloway meets former Director of Operations and Intelligence for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Nigel Inkster, who discusses when a cyber-attack could constitute a declaration of war.  

She also talks to former Director Cyber in the Foreign Office and Associate Dean for Strategic Development at the LSE School of Public Policy Professor Alexander Evans about what the UK is doing defensively and offensively to prevent cyber-attacks.  

Dr Lauren Sukin from Nuffield College at the University of Oxford explains why there is a lack of regulation in the cyberwar space and explores if depictions of cyberwar in the media are realistic.  

Contributors: Professor Alexander Evans, Dr Lauren Sukin, Nigel Inkster    

Research links:  

Lauren Sukin: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027231153580  

Nigel Inkster: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Decoupling-Struggle-Technological-Supremacy/dp/1787383830  

LSE iQ is a university podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Will the next World War be a cyberwar?

In this podcast interview with Debbie Millman, legendary graphic designer Massimo Vignelli, best-known for creating the iconic New York City subway map, discusses intellectual elegance, education, love, the pitfalls of marketing, and his long career in design.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Image: Painting of Massimo Vignelli by Jessica Helfand after a photograph by Beatriz Cifuentes.

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Massimo Vignelli

Aaron Draplin is the force powering Draplin Design Compay (http://draplin.com) in Portland, Oregon. Having made a name for himself with stand-out work for snowboarding companies and their like, he’s now courting more mainstream clients including Coal Headwear, Union Binding Co., Richmond Fontaine, Field Notes, Esquire, Nike, Wired, Timberline, Chunklet, Red Wing, Incase, Giro, Cobra Dogs, Megafaun, Ford Motor Co., Hughes Entertainment, Chuck Prophet, and even the Obama Administration. Born in the Midwest, and a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art, Draplin has become an important voice in the world of graphic design while maintaining a sense of humor.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Aaron Draplin

Karl Heiselman is the CEO of Wolff Olins (http://www.wolffolins.com) and the driving force behind the company’s ambition for clients and optimism for the world. He leads the global business by shaping its strategy for growth and encouraging excellence in its creative work. With over 20 years of branding and design experience, Heiselman has helped create game-changing work for Wolff Olins’s clients including (RED), Skype, GE, PwC, Unicef, Current TV, New York City and Mercedes-Benz. He has expanded the company’s capabilities to include product development, brand-centric innovation and creatively led business strategy. Trained as a designer, Heiselman firmly believes in the value of creativity to drive positive business and social impact. Prior to joining Wolff Olins, Heiselman founded the San Francisco–based design studio The Farm, where his clients included Apple, American Express, FedEx, Swatch and HP. Heiselman attended the Rhode Island School of Design and studied graphic and industrial design.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Karl Heiselman

Scott Stowell is the proprietor of Open. Before starting Open, Scott was the art director of Benetton's Colors magazine in Rome and a senior designer at M&Co. New York. Before that, he received a BFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design. A former vice president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Scott also writes and lectures about design and teaches at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts. In 2008, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum named Scott the winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/desig…lman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Scott Stowell

Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates. Bierut's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs.  (04.08.05)

On Design Observer: http://observermedia.designobserver.com/audio/michael-bierut/8937/

On iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Michael Bierut

Future Human illuminates radical change, telling the stories of the thinkers, innovators and entrepreneurs who are reshaping life in the 21st century. Presented by Jack Gwilym Roberts with Ben Beaumont-Thomas.

Future Human Visionaries #11 — Superflux on biologically inspired design

The Future Human Podcast

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