The Sympathy of Things is a new two part BBC Radio 4 programme, researched, written and presented by Amica Dall and Giles Smith (Experimental 7 Unit Masters and members of Assemble) and produced by Sean Glynn and David Waters from SGP Productions. The first episode aired yesterday and can be listened to here.

In the series Dall and Smith use the contemporary craft movement to look at our changing relationship with labour, value and the material world. It is made of a series of interconnected conversations with people involved in designing and producing the objects that make up our everyday material environment - things like toilets, toasters, door handles and pavements, and people who write, teach and think about design and manufacture.

The documentary is split into two parts. The first explores how mass production upended our relationship to the material world, and how its underlying commercial logic continues to have a very powerful influence on everything from policy agendas and taste to our intimate, unconscious relationships with the things we live in, on and among. In the second part, Dall and Smith talk to people who argue that the advent of digital technologies will up end our relationship to the material world again, but not in the way you might imagine, as it questions the easy distinctions we make between machines and people, the digital and the material, the local and the global.

Image credit: © Assemble, Armitage Shanks factory Staffordshire.