When the idea of doing a radio show about design came up, what I liked about it was that I personally don’t have a very strong aesthetic sense or bias, quite honestly. I was the sort of person who went on architecture tours and noticed the design details and then my friend in college gave me this book, The Design of Everyday Things and I was like, “Oh yeah, this is great.” I mean I studied to be a scientist before I got into journalism-and even now I rarely use journalism as a noun to describe myself. So it’s funny - and it completely makes sense that you described yourself as a journalist but I, for some reason, just always assumed that you were a designer. And that common sense doesn’t really change all that much and it doesn’t evolve all that much. I would still stand by the early stuff because I was explaining it through the lens of a person new to design recognizing the common sense of good design. ![]() One of the things I love about design is that a lot of it is common sense There’s a way that the stories work, they sort of come back to fundamental principles of how we explain and make the world a better place.Īnd so in a way I would say that I certainly know a lot more, but one of the things that’s pretty interesting is that I can stand by a lot of the early stuff even though I’m smarter now. I mean this is one of the great joys of being a journalist-you get to become a little expert on something for about four to six weeks and then put it out in the world. Has your understanding of design evolved along with the show? ![]() And so in that sense it’s become more narrative and story driven over time. Whereas when you’re doing 25 minutes there better be a character and a story and things that sort of keep things going. I used to just kind of cover a topic or a subject and the show was so short, when it’s four minutes long you can say, “Hey, here’s a thing. We probably tend to be even more narrative focused than we used to be. I had a really strong concept of what I wanted the show to be and it still holds true to that. Originally it was just me and then it was a couple of us, and now there’s nine of us, so it is necessary that the show evolves to include the voices of all those people. It’s certainly evolved in the scope of what the show is, especially since we added people to the team. ![]() Has your understanding of the show and design as a whole evolved over the past seven years since you started? I think that we learn a lot about ourselves through the things we make, and that’s kind of the point of the show. It was very purposeful that designers found the show first and enjoyed it and I do think it is a show about design ultimately.īut we take a pretty broad view of what design means to the world and we use that to sort of shape the way we tell all kinds of human narratives. Well, the only thing I would say that might be a little bit different than that is that I’m looking at the world through the lens of design using narrative. Would you describe 99% Invisible as being about the narrative of design?
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