Applied Human Rights
We are all born diverse. A journey.
My name is Talia Radford, a Spanish born, British bred and Viennese based designer. A sometime-writer, mother-of-two, and silent owner of Vienna's most beautiful Würstelstand.
Arts illustrate our humanity
My earliest memory is watching Band-Aid live on TV as a toddler. The images of famine-hit Ethiopia impregnated into my mind and I was left weeping and wondering aloud why the world is so unjust and why people have to suffer, just as Freddie Mercury took the stage. (It also made me a life-long Queen fan, as a side effect). My favorite cartoon hero was Captain Planet. At 12, Maya Angelou's Caged Bird autobiography impressed an insight into racial inequality. As a teen, I was witness to sexual and gender insecurities through underground musical performances, poetry readings in the park, and parades thanks to the London queer community my brother is a part of. As a young adult, a traveling band from Amsterdam introduced me to the squatter movement and the realities of housing security. Art lays witness to the continuing struggles around gender, race, rights, and privilege at the same time celebrating its life, strength, and thriving culture.
Curiosity turns to profession
These are some of the vignettes that have led me to lean towards addressing social and environmental issues in my work as a designer. During my time studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and later during my independent practice at taliaYstudio, my research and design work has spanned a curve ranging from drinking water security and the impact of the education of girls in Nepal; from applying product design to introduce complex technologies fresh out the lab to a wide audience, to providing design services to NGO´s that their service may reach a designated audience; from writing critical pieces for design magazines on the role of what design can do to organizing design hackathons to create design-led proposals for example for the 2015 refugee crisis. My practice and my interests focus on people's relationships with themselves, one another, and with their surroundings. Applied design anthropology, if you will.
It was after an interview I did with Killian Kleinschmidt for a piece for online magazine Dezeen, that I understood the critical role that design, architecture, arts, and culture can take in the temporary-permanent pop-up cities that are refugee camps. In early 2016 I was about to embark on a self-initiated open-ended research trip when I was surprised by family planning matters and had to permanently postpone this work. My first stop would have been as a volunteer at or around Moria Camp in Greece, with a second stop planned in Jordan.
We all live in this material world
But it has left a lingering feeling that my work is not done here. As we are already seeing, natural and man-made catastrophes such as climate change and superbug pandemics respectively are the catalyst for one of the 21st century's biggest challenges - a significant increase in migration. The challenge however isn´t the movement of people in and of itself, but more the resources to support the concentrated shifts in demand - demand for food, water, shelter, demand for a voice, for dignity, to be seen and heard, demand for choice, demand for life, demand for education and work, demand to honor one’s origins and demand to a right to one's future, demand for identity. In short, demand for one's humanity.
Creativity crafts futures
For me, the question remains whether design in all its facets - from the creativity of design thinking methodologies to its intrinsic use as a medium of communication and a catalyst for change, an enabler of economies through trade and of advancement through the implementation of technologies - can lay the groundwork towards a human future that is already radically changing faster than we currently care to adapt to.
My motivation to participate in the Vienna Masters of Applied Human Rights is to embed my knowledge of design practice with deep dives into theoretical knowledge of human rights through the application of best practices, state of the art methodologies, and training and exchange from the teaching body of the institute, to help create a network of dedicated, committed and engaged professionals.
