He has interviewed more than 200 people, but in the almost 30 years that he has been publishing in
El País Semanal
Anatxu Zabalbeascoa (Barcelona, 56 years old) had never faced the radio.
Or to a
podcast
, which was what was proposed in January by the director of Prisa Audio, María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros, and Eugenio Viñas, director of formats in the same company, in view of the world design capital that Valencia holds in 2022. “There are many ways to do design, but a
podcast
It accompanies you, it is with you, you can take it anywhere, return to it whenever you want and, even if you throw stones at me on my roof, you don't even have to make the effort to read it”.
Zabalbeascoa commented on it on September 19 at the Ágora València, where most events in the capital take place, the same day the first episode of
La Gran D
was presented , which is the title of this eight-episode
podcast
of half an hour each, available from every Monday.
A moment of the presentation in Valencia.
'La Gran D' can be heard on the Podium Podcast website and app, producer of its eight episodes, as well as on Spotify, Podimo, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, iVoox and Google Podcast.Nerea Coll
The first two have already been released and denote the need for someone to deal with this issue in this way: someone specialized, not a man sitting in a
gamer chair,
who spoke in Spanish about design and not only for students and professionals in the sector. .
The Big D
is designed so that no one gets lost in the speech or encounters a succession of banalities, according to Zabalbeascoa: "The idea is that, in just four hours, you can have a clear idea in your head of what the design".
Design
is not just a chair whose price reaches four digits, or the remodeling of a historic building, but an emergency protocol, parking meters, the administrative system that manages
online
traffic tickets, a sex and dating app.
“They are respirators, a fork or the way to distribute to people traveling on a train.
All of these are design decisions”, defends Zabalbeascoa.
She also says that the eight episodes are not ordered chronologically: what she and the team have proposed is a design story, one with its own approach not limited to the Spanish sphere.
Here it is possible to see that the opposite terms, the things that are defined by opposition such as the classic and the modern, form and function, crafts and industry, far from being contradictory, end up complementing each other, and it is the trajectory of design itself that which is explained to the listener.
The 'La Gran D' podcast has a graphic image developed by Valencian creatives from Agencia Player.
It does so with statements from the design and architecture curator of the MoMA in New York, Paola Antonelli.
Or with those of Miguel Milá, Philippe Starck, Antoni Arola and the writer Deyan Sudjic –current director of the London Design Museum–, apart from references from Valencia including Javier Mariscal, the architect Juli Capella and Inma Bermúdez, to the that has been awarded this week the 2022 National Design Award. For those who need to review the Decalogue of the Milanese Bruno Munari, in
La Gran D
It is next to that of the German Dieter Rams, author of the most emblematic Braun appliances.
There is even an episode that emphasizes that the same object can appear in several places at the same time.
This is how his presenter defends it: “There is as much prejudice in thinking that good design is not in the supermarket as in thinking that an everyday thing cannot enter the museum.
The prejudice is the same, and it benefits no one.”
Zabalbeascoa dedicated another half hour to women, the great forgotten in this sector, by Lola Castelló, a pioneer in national design, citing examples such as Aino, Alvar Aalto's partner: "In 1937, in his Finnish pavilion for the Paris Exposition Aino was left out of the catalogue, did not appear in any of the credits despite being his partner, an architect long before him and the director of Artek, the company that manufactures Aalto's furniture.
And the same thing happened to the wife of Charles Eames, Ray Eames, or to the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray, who not only seized his most famous house – Villa E-1027 – Le Corbusier, but also changed her sexuality”, recalls the journalist.
“They decided to make her bi, and today she is listed as a lesbian designer.
That her sexuality matters?
She matters very little
The journalist Anatxu Zabalbeascoa is the presenter of 'La gran D'. Nerea Coll
Anecdotes and curiosities are not lacking in
La Gran D
either , many of them historical and told by the designer Nacho Lavernia.
As soon as the first episode begins, he already mentions why the pocket watch became a wristwatch or which brand was responsible for removing the battery from the mixer from the plastic cup to add it to the utensil itself.
They are changes that in this podcast they describe as typological, which is the same as in an interview with Zabalbeascoa in 2015, the designer Patricia Urquiola -another of the participants of
La Gran D-
predicts what will happen to mobile phones.
According to the Asturian, the future of
smartphones
It will be like earrings or contact lenses, we will not realize that we are wearing them.
It seems something very crazy, and for some almost as unthinkable as if years ago they had been told that radio was going to experience a new splendor, with an
online
and on-demand format.
