Crafting Human™ Podcast

Crafting Human™ Ep. 12 | Feel Your Way: Will Ayers on Haptics, Imperfection & What Design Forgets

The use of signs is disappearing. Cars are already driving themselves, and soon navigation may be something we stop looking at altogether. For nearly a decade, Will Ayers, founder of Found, has been rethinking wayfinding and environmental graphics, building identity systems for some of the most recognizable spaces in tech and beyond across the world. His newest venture explores a haptic software technology that communicates directional wayfinding through touch alone. A tap on your right shoulder means right, a tap on your left means left. No screen. No voice. No shared language required. In this episode of Crafting Human, we sit down to talk about what it means to design for a world where the visual infrastructure of cities begins to fall away, why intentional imperfection might be the antidote to a world starting to look the same everywhere, and how touch, the oldest interface we have, could become the most human technology left. The conversation moves through: * Why every glass tower in every city is starting to look the same and what craft can do about it * The case for intentional imperfection in an era of algorithmic sameness * How Will uses AI as a creative collaborator without handing over his judgment * Why the difference between precision and perfection matters more than ever * What design education must teach to equip the next generation to stay adaptable * The quiet radicalism of building technology that helps people feel more oriented, not less This is a conversation for anyone paying attention to how the built world is changing and wondering what gets lost, and what might be recovered, in the shift.

Crafting Human™ Episode 11 | Working with Nature to Regenerate Failing Systems

Imagine a world where developers and communities are not at odds but sitting on the same side of the table, where a city addresses its housing shortage by restoring its wetlands instead of paving them, and where the place you live is one you truly know and feel a real sense of connection and belonging. In this episode of Crafting Human™, I sit down with Bill Reed, a pioneer of regenerative development, principal of Regenesis Group, and one of the founding voices behind the LEED Green Building movement. He shares what regeneration actually means and how it is already taking shape in the world around us. Along the way, he points to a few ideas worth paying attention to: Whole-system thinking that moves things forward. Bill shares what becomes possible when we stop solving problems in isolation and begin working with the patterns of living systems, and why that shift opens up outcomes that fragmented approaches rarely reach. A more enduring motivator than fear. Love of place, it turns out, is far more sustaining than scarcity or guilt. We talk about what happens when communities organize around what they care about, rather than what they are pushing against. Developers and residents on the same side.   Bill shares examples where both groups arrive at outcomes neither could have imagined alone. Communities gain more than expected, developers achieve fair returns, and the land itself is left healthier. These projects often move through approval eighteen months faster than conventional ones, and at a lower cost. Reconnecting to the places we live. Bill shares why he believes place, not nation or state, is the scale where meaningful change actually happens, where people can care for something, and in turn, be shaped by it. This is a conversation about what it looks like to design and build for a more human, more connected world, one where places are known and loved, where competing interests find harmony instead of settling for compromise, and where building the future feels less like resistance and more like belonging. If you've been looking for evidence that another way of living and working is not only possible, but already happening, this episode is for you.

Crafting Human™ Episode 9 | The Art of Caring: Why Investing in Artists Is a Social Strategy

There are people in the world quietly doing something extraordinary: building systems of care around artists, the human beings who make culture possible. Kathy Treat is one of them. In 2008, Kathy founded the Speranza Foundation, which was born from her life experience where her musician friends were her lifeline during one of the hardest periods of her life. A  weekend recording session at a house on a country road showed her what became possible when artists were given time, space, and genuine care, and ultimately empowered to become more fully who they are. That experience became the Lincoln City Fellowship: a living model built on the deeply held conviction that artists are not peripheral to society, but essential to it. Joining her is Joey Borgogna, Executive Director of Speranza, who describes the artist's greatest gift to culture as "the audacity to create in the midst of destruction — and still choose to find the beauty." In this conversation we explore what it looks like to reimagine patronage from the ground up. And we explore why the investment in the person is always the investment in the work and how  artists, through their daily practice of curiosity, empathy, and sitting with uncomfortable questions & in uncertainty model something the rest of us urgently need. Joey shares a raw and honest story illustrating how the mindset and approach to life between two artists from opposite sides of the world's most fractured conflict formed a bridge toward each other, rather than away, creating genuine love and friendship and a ripple effect in their respective communities.   This is a conversation about care as strategy, and about people and humanity, before product. And it’s about why supporting artists and creatives may be one of the most generative, enduring, far-reaching investments we can make in the world right now.

Crafting Human™ Episode 10 | What Home Really Means with Sandra Fadayel

When the place that once represented home is no longer, what does it look like to build it again, and not just the walls and rooms, but the deeper foundations home provides: safety, identity, belonging? In this episode of Crafting Human, I sit down with my longtime friend and fellow Pratt alum Sandra Fadayel, founder of Inhabitat, a Dubai-based interior design studio whose mission reaches far beyond aesthetics. Sandra designs homes for global citizens and executives living across borders and cultures to create spaces that reflect who they truly are and evoke the familiarity of home. Sandra traces her design ethos and mission back to a defining moment in her youth, which was witnessing her grandmother return to the home in Palestine from which she was forcibly removed decades earlier. The experience planted a seed within her about the relationship between home and identity, one that would take years, and nine cities of her own, to fully understand. Her art practice, which includes large-scale abstract paintings and her latest collection, Unmapped, explores those same themes of borders, belonging, and identity,  deeply personal ideas woven through both her creative work and her life story. Together, we explore why people in crisis instinctively reach for objects that remind them who they are, why creativity requires room to breathe, and how inspiration often lives in the smallest moments like a slice of sky through a window or the bark of a tree on a morning walk. This is a conversation about what it truly means to create home and how to protect creativity in a life shaped by movement and change. New episodes of Crafting Human™ air every Thursday. Subscribe to the channel and join the Crafting Human creative community to stay connected.

Crafting Human™ Ep. 8 | Water Has a Superpower and It's Working on You Right Now: Jim Garland on Water’s Impact

Water has a superpower. You’ve felt it, even if you’ve never named it. “It distracts us just enough that it opens us, and our minds move along different channels. Like a daydream. Like when you relax and suddenly think of what’s really important without trying to.” These are words from Jim Garland, and he would know. He has spent over three decades shaping water into experience, with work spanning the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hearst Building, Longwood Gardens, and Water Tower Place in Chicago. He is one of the world’s leading water feature designers and the author of Fountain Safari, a 400-page exploration of how fountains have reflected civilization’s relationship with nature, beauty, and meaning from Imperial Rome to today. And yet, this conversation isn’t really about fountains. It’s about attention, presence, and what happens to the human mind and the sense of embodiment that occurs when it encounters water’s movement, sounds, and glimmers. Something deep within us, where instinct and memory live begins to stir and shape what we feel. And once you begin to notice it, you start to understand why we’re always drawn back to it. In this episode of Crafting Human, we explore: → The precision hidden inside beauty, how Bernini and his contemporaries crafted light, texture, and sound with extraordinary intentionality, and why "very little is left to chance" in the greatest fountains ever built → What the Trevi Fountain and a shivering fountain in Hong Kong teach us about the difference between craft and accident → Water as collaborator, why the best designers do not control water, they invite it, and what happens when you try to push it around too much → Eastern vs. Western water, a fundamental philosophical divide in how cultures give water meaning, and what it reveals about beauty itself → What makes a water feature soulful → The three books that shaped Jim’s thinking, Moby Dick, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Donald Judd’s art criticism This is a conversation for designers, architects, creative practitioners, and for anyone who has ever paused beside a fountain and felt, without knowing why, more like themselves. Crafting Human is a podcast about the people, practices, and philosophies behind extraordinary creative work, and what it means to make something that lasts. Fountain Safari by Jim Garland, available now: https://oroeditions.com/product/fountain-safari  Fluidity Design Consultants: https://www.fluidity-design.com/  Fluidity IG: https://www.instagram.com/fluidity_design_consultants/  Watch the full episode on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXlP1oS7kw4&t=53s