Podcast: Peter Bil’ak, Works That Work
As I write this I’m packing my bags, ready to fly back to London after a brilliant few days at EDCH in Munich. If you’d like a glimpse of the presentations and conversations from Europe’s biggest editorial design conference you can read our summaries of day one and day two, and day three will be up on the blog tomorrow morning. And in the meantime you can listen to the podcast below to hear from the man who kicked it all off on Thursday morning.
Peter Biľak is the editor and publisher of Works That Work, the design magazine that isn’t quite a design magazine. Peter is fascinated by the way that things work, and his magazine takes a detailed look at the often improvised structures and systems that shape the world. That might mean displaying the homemade inventions that helped ordinary people endure the siege of Sarajevo, or it could be an interview with the King of Bhutan about the country’s Gross National Happiness measures. And he builds his own systems and structures too, creating an innovative social distribution mechanism to help turn his readers into distributors.
He speaks about his thinking behind all this in the podcast below, and also explains why he has decided to give himself just two more issues of the magazine before he ceases publishing. I love his ambition and the freshness of his thinking, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. If you want to hear more from the best independent publishers, you can find all our previous episodes on Soundcloud and iTunes – follow us while you’re there and we’ll deliver new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
