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PODCAST

Soft Ratios Research

Each episode, Hoyd Breton — a designer at Soft Ratios Studio — rounds up the research on something he wants to understand, and two synthetic voices read it back and work it through, the way one mind argues with itself, ending on a question. No host, nothing performed — just the thinking, a subject at a time. A public record of one person teaching himself to look more carefully.

arts design

All Episodes

24:15

Baskets change what invention sees (on Ursula K. Le...

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/10/01

Why does invention look like a spear thrown forward, while the baskets, care, and repair that carry life disappear from the story?

en

22:59

Abundance moves the tollbooth (on creative bottlenecks)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/29

When usable first drafts become nearly free, does creative power spread, or move to whoever controls what happens after the draft?

en

26:13

Mould seams reveal who decides (on Ursula Franklin)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/24

A plan can coordinate many hands, but when reality breaks its rules, who gets to revise it, and who must carry the cost?

en

23:57

Memory walks backward (on Elise Boulding)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/21

What changes when peace is remembered as ordinary life, then traced backward until the institutions and first steps needed to sustain it appear?

en

18:15

Almost everything with almost nothing (on gnuhr)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/21

When a brand also runs a consultancy, is the shirt in your hand a product, or the proof it sells to the next client? On clothing as evidence.

en

28:39

Continuity learns to turn (on the 911)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/17

How does a sports car that breaks nearly every design rule end up looking exactly right for sixty years? On the honest shape of the 911.

en

19:52

Accountability signs its name (on Korea's...

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/15

In Korea the name in a website's footer can be sent to prison, so when is a name on a thing real answerability, and when is it just ink?

en

29:07

Keeping tests the clever idea (on Oki Sato and nendo)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/10

A jolt of delight that photographs perfectly gets you to pick a thing up — but is that design, or does the design wait in whether you keep it?

en

21:54

One point for courage (on grading risk)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/08

Can a grade reward creative risk without turning courage into a performance, or does real experimentation depend on being free to try again?

en

22:24

Distance, however close (on Walter Benjamin's aura)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/03

What if the aura of a painting was never a thing it owns, but a way of looking long enough that the thing looks back at you?

en

21:54

Silence can clarify or corrode (on the inner life)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/09/01

If more introspection can just as easily corrode as clarify, is the inner life a room to fill at all? On attention as a shape, not a volume.

en

19:57

Access was the product (on the Whole Earth Catalog)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/27

What were a million and a half people really buying from a catalog that sold them almost nothing but a way to point past itself?

en

26:14

Intimacy draws its own architecture (on The Poetics...

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/25

Why do architects treasure a book with no plans, no rules, nothing to build from? On the house you carry inside, not the one you drew.

en

26:49

Nothing left to take away (on John Pawson)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/21

Why does an empty white room look like the easiest thing in the world, when it may be the most expensive and hard-won thing in the house?

en

29:45

The newspaper that stood up (on Josef Albers)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/18

How can one crease make a newspaper stand, and when does using less reveal what paper can do instead of hiding the real cost?

en

20:58

The overlap belongs to both (on Language of Vision)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/13

If the same trick that hides a warship also makes a picture refuse to resolve, which half of the man who taught both is really him?

en

20:36

What the eye paints over (on Teju Cole's Blind Spot)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/11

Every eye is built with a blind spot the brain quietly paints over, so what if your clearest view of anything hides a hole you'll never find?

en

26:42

A theory of place turned against people (on broken...

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/06

A theory said fix the broken window to stop crime, so why did we spend forty years frisking the person standing near it instead?

en

22:25

The wound was always the first page (on Liu Cixin)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/08/04

Liu Cixin built the coldest sky in fiction as a warning to be kinder on the ground. Why did the world keep the hunter and lose the warning?

en

20:27

Why some images stay with us (on Roland Barthes and AI)

Soft Ratios Research ·

2026/07/30

Roland Barthes asked why some images become personal while others remain surface. AI makes that old question newly urgent for all of us.

en

45 results

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