Architect Carlo Ratti spoke to Dezeen in this Screentime conversation sponsored by Enscape as part of Virtual Design Festival.
Italian architect Ratti is the founder of international design and architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati and is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he directs the SENSEable City Lab.
In the discussion, Ratti discussed his work with Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs. Among Ratti's recent projects are two that focus on helping to fight the coronavirus and adapting to a post-pandemic world.
The shipping-container intensive care unit, CURA, designed by Ratti and Italo Rota, was built at a Turin hospital in March and can treat two patients.
Ratti spoke about about CURA, which admitted its first patient on 19 April, in the interview. He also discussed Pura-Case, a concept for a battery-powered wardrobe purifier that uses ozone to remove viruses and bacteria from clothes.
Previously, he's installed facial-recognition tech in a working train station in China to track visitors as part of the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen, and launched Scribit, a small robot that draws erasable images on vertical surfaces in marker pens.
Ratti was also featured in our launch video for Virtual Design Festival, in which he said that what we need to do today is use the crisis to rethink what we do, and to see how we can use our skills in order to contribute solutions.
Other creatives featured in our Screentime series include trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, architect Dong-Ping Wong, New York architecture practice SO-IL, The World Around curator Beatrice Galilee, filmmaker Gary Hustwit and British-Israeli architect Ron Arad.
This Screentime conversation is sponsored by Enscape, a virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for architectural design programme Autodesk Revit.
Virtual Design Festival is the world's first online design festival, taking place from 15 April to 30 June. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact us at virtualdesignfestival@dezeen.com.