Thomas Heatherwick

Yeah, actually I was thinking about that.

I met Demis Hassabi, Nobel Prize winner, and also I had a chat with Thomas Heatherwick as well.

And we were talking about how AI is going to radically change our industry.

And he actually said, interestingly, Thomas, he said that it's actually our role to define what AI should do for the everyday people.

We bring design into that as well, because you can't have those conversations in isolation, which some people do.

I listened to your podcast with Thomas Heatherwick, who we've worked with before, and been part of his Humanise campaign, and everything he says is absolutely right.

Our take on that often is you can't bring that into the conversation too late, because you can't talk about viability and then make certain design and cost assumptions and then be tackled through planning that you end up then with a different type of project.

And I think what we've found over years in Manchester is different people have come and gone, but there's been a consistent culture to how they behave and work with you.

It's interesting that there's a difference between, like, the Victorians building their brick houses that had texture.

I think Thomas Heatherwick writes really nicely about this in Humanize.

Where it talks about buildings that have texture, are interesting, and people want to live in them.

People now look at those old buildings that were built at scale, and they want to live in them.

And I just wanted to put one in as well.

I've just recently read this book by Thomas Heatherwick about buildings called Humanize.

It's about making beautiful buildings.

And I think that's really important.

It's true.

I will shoot off, but I do think that, you know, so Biro worked with Heatherwick that has this whole thesis around human eyes and we have a whole thesis around digitized to human eyes because ultimately society can't afford to have the either or.

Like, either it's a box, it's boring, it's inhumane, but it's deliverable in a budget, or it's beautiful, it's sculptural, it's, you know, Louis Vuitton kind, but it's unaffordable.

No, no, no, we want both.

Virgil Abloh is a studio.

Thomas Heatherwick ran a studio.

Ez Devlin runs a studio.

They don't run agencies.

And we've just mentioned a few on Twitter.

on this in terms of designers or architects or practitioners I'd say for example Thomas Heatherwick talks about the fabric of buildings and is interested in fashion and health you know how does architecture impact things and I think he's not a trained architect you know and he's doing it so I think it's pointing at things where you say well we have a lot in our history that says oh I went to I went to Senator Martin's and I'm Jarvis Cocker.

Or we've got the Sex Pistols.

I think that careers meant something hopeful and different in a trajectory.