BBC Radio 4 LW

The Sympathy of Things

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Amica Dall and Giles Smith look at our relationship with the material world.

Amica Dall and Giles Smith use the contemporary craft movement to look at our changing relationship with labour, value and the material world.

The Sympathy of Things: Part 1

Part 1 BBC Radio 4 - The Sympathy of Things, Part 1

In this two-part series, Turner Prize-winning architectural collective Assemble explore the designed and manufactured world. 

Together with an ensemble of guests, friends and accomplices, Amica Dall and Giles Smith argue that mass production has upended our relationship to the material world, and explain how the advent of digital technologies will do so again - but not in the way you think. 

The series is an argument for observing our material world better and for understanding the way we make objects, and objects, in turn, make us.

Taking on the task as enthusiastic amateurs, Amica and Giles journey through factory floors, workshops and ivory towers, criss-crossing the country, learning to make radio as they unearth a rich, centuries-long history of thinking about making - from the Arts and Crafts movement and the design philosophy of machine age mass production to cutting edge digital pioneers.

You'll hear from the professor and best selling author Richard Sennett, Marcus Engman, head of Design at IKEA, and a host of other people actively engage in thinking about and actually making the stuff that we live with everyday. 

Episode one starts with an exploration of the extraordinary, complex processes that go into the most mundane of things - from the humble toilet to your standard Argos toaster - thinking about the role that understanding how things are made plays in how we understand our place in the world, and our relationships to each other.


An SPG production for BBC Radio 4

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