Norman Foster Foundation

Ben Vickers, Chief Technology Officer at the Serpentine Galleries in London, attempts to understand through his work how systems of distribution, both human and other, come to affect our personal perception of reality. Vickers is an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery, a non-profit project currently based in Athens and a new kind of social space designed to serve the local communities of towns or small cities throughout Europe in solving key social and infrastructural problems. In this podcast, Ben Vickers raises the question of ‘are the starting points or the genesis point for a monastery still relevant now?’ Vickers uncovers how unMonastery aims to challenge existing dependency chains and economic fictions by exploring the arising issues of our time and addressing the challenge of technology in our lives today. Relying on the timeless concept of the monastery, Ben Vickers argues for the application of rules around the use and making of technology and infrastructures. This leads him to question the transformation of the everyday life of an individual existing in society without any possibility to exit. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Iulia Cistelecan, student from the London School of Architecture, was awarded the 2020 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship for her project ‘Life Between Shelters: Refugee camps of today becoming cities of tomorrow.’ Iulia’s project will examine the role that architecture can play in transforming today’s refugee camps into sustainable communities. In this podcast, Iulia Cistelecan shares her project’s plan as she will travel to four refugee camps across Africa, Western Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia: Bidibidi (Uganda), Zaatari (Jordan), Shatila (Lebanon) and Kutupalong (Bangladesh). She explores the topic of spaces between shelters with a focus on the transition from temporary refugee camps to sustainable cities, highlighting the importance of educational and social infrastructure in building community growth and resilience. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Diébédo Francis Kéré, Architect Burkinabé, established the Kéré Foundation parallel to his studies and founded in 2005 Kéré Architecture. His architectural practice has been recognized nationally and internationally thanks to Kéré’s pioneering of a communal approach to design and his commitment to sustainable materials as well as modes of construction through his development of innovative construction strategies that combine traditional building techniques and materials. In this podcast, Francis Kéré explores how participation can bring quality into informal settlements. Kéré defines Africa as concerned with abundant opportunities, economic capacities and a huge potential for Architectural growth. Francis Kéré express his hope and belief in the work of governments and informal settlements as partners, considering the settlements as participants to cities and catalysts for development as part of the community. Kéré concludes with the importance of the role of communities in the development of societies of the future as the representative of people’s needs. The city of the future being defined as a city dedicated to the people. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Mary Lou Jepsen, a technical executive, and inventor in the fields of display, imaging, and computer hardware founded OpenWater in 2016, a startup working on fMRI-type imaging of the body using holographic, infrared techniques. With this project, Jepsen focused on devising a new generation of imaging technologies, with high resolution and low costs, enabling medical diagnoses and treatments, and a new era of fluid and affordable brain-to-computer communications. In this podcast, Mary Lou Jepsen explains the idea behind Open Water, highlighting the need to use technologies to build better, faster, and cheaper solutions in healthcare that allow diagnosis without opening the body or brain. With this new form of technology, Mary Lou Jepsen recognizes the opportunity of such development democratizing healthcare and enabling to communicate with thought alone. Jepsen continues by developing how this innovation seems to be the inevitable future of communication emerging from our understanding of the human brain. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Luis Bettencourt, Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago, creates in his research new urban theories explaining how cities thrive and the challenges they face. He focuses on understanding the role of innovation and technological change as a driver of economic growth and human development in cities around the world and throughout history. In this podcast, Luis Bettencourt highlights the social essence of cities, looking at space as a platform. Bettencourt perceives slums as a result of fast-growing cities, at the center of research for better understanding cities and human development. Luis Bettencourt describes the city of the future as even bigger than the big cities of today, more complex, more interconnected, more diverse, with an even greater excitement and harnessing change for the benefit of people and of the environment. He advises not to look at cities or urban environments as problems but to look at what they do well. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Urban practitioner Celine D’Cruz is one of the founding members of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resources Centers (SPARC), working in over 60 Indian cities and towns to build the capacity of urban poor organizations to address issues of urban poverty. She is also one of the founding members of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a movement of the urban poor that has supported thousands in building new housing and sanitation facilities in many cities in Asia and Africa. In this podcast, Celine D’Cruz highlights the role of communities in architecture as well as the challenge raised by the informal settlements in cities. Exploring the question of how to formalize informality, D’Cruz argues for the involvement of governments to embrace and include informality as an opportunity, contributing to the city’s economy. She understands the importance of inclusion and including the most underprivileged and issued from informal settlements, unifying the formal and informal through design and community. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Amber Case is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds. Case founded CyborgCamp, unconferences about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. In this podcast, Amber Case emphasises the importance of organizing spaces along with the noise around us. Taking the Japanese and United-States systems for example, she calls attention to the role of technology and futurism in architecture as well as to the impact of reverberation on individuals in our society. Case concludes by highlighting the power of a good design and the importance of developing with your mind and your body in order to develop a feeling of physical and emotional awareness. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

David Moinina Sengeh, born and raised in Sierra Leone, with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab., tells the story of his experience as Chief Innovation Officer at the Government of Sierra-Leone and Research Scientist at IBM Africa, where he leads a healthcare team for implementing AI-enabled systems for treatment and management of disease in Africa. In this podcast, David Moinina Sengeh talks about the importance of technology as part of our education and health system. From his experience as first Chief Innovation Officer at the Government of Sierra-Leone, he argues the need for bringing together science, technology and innovation to address national development priorities across all sectors and industries, opening the possibility for an innovation ecosystem in society and for young people to have the opportunity of learning state-of -the-art analytics and computational thinking. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org/

Mercedes Bidart -27-year-old city planner from Argentina graduated with a master’s from MIT- tells the story of her experience as a young entrepreneur, Co-Founder and CEO of Quipu Market, a digital marketplace for micro-businesses in low-income communities of Latin America. In this podcast, Mercedes elaborates on the developments of Quipu as a trading platform enabling communities to visualize the local economy to then work together to transform it. Focusing on putting technology in the hands of the users, Quipu answers the need for trading in informal settlements by providing them with a platform for their own economy therefore not only changing the status quo and the way people are transacting but also changing their everyday dynamics and creating circular economies. #NFFStories is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org/

In the fifth #NFFStories podcast, Adrian Bowyer, Founder and Director of RepRap Ltd., develops his experience as academic body member of the 2019 Robotics Atelier and his seminar presented during the week-long event on the reasoning behind technology copying itself. Bowyer's project consists in creating humanity’s first general purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine, and his company researches self-replicating open-source 3D printing. RepRap printer takes the form of a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of the printer are made from plastic and the printer prints those parts, RepRap self replicates by making a kit of itself. RepRap is about making self-replicating machines, and making them freely available for the benefit of everyone. #NFFStories is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future.