Erika Barbieri is the co-founder and creative director of OlssønBarbieri, a design studio in Oslo. The studio's ethos is built almost entirely around one idea: that packaging can be a portal into much bigger conversations about food. She and her partner Henrik met in design school in Florence, moved to Oslo in 2005, and spent years finding their footing before officially committing to the studio in 2012. In this episode, Erika talks about how for her, good packaging design lives at the inters...
Sep 30
50 min
Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts, the founder of the social strategy agency Warm Robots, and the Huffington Post once called her the "Oprah of LinkedIn." She built that reputation kind of by accident. She started posting a daily video on LinkedIn as a way to push her introverted self to speak on camera. She then went on to post 800 consecutive daily videos between 2017 and 2019, long before AI made that kind of output easy. In this conversation, Goldie takes us ba...
Sep 16
52 min
Five years ago, Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong started a design studio because a friend joked that they should—and because Gabby was, by her own admission, extremely burnt out and looking for a way out of her work situation. Those aren't good reasons to start a company, and yet SUPER KEEN is succeeding by most metrics. They complete 20 to 35 projects a year, have found a work-life balance that works for them, and have built a reputation for delivering solid design and strategy work. In thi...
Sep 2
51 min
Valentina D'Efilippo is equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. That tension has shaped nearly two decades of work translating dense, unwieldy datasets into visual stories: flowers standing in for a century of wars, a dandelion holding the shape of the #MeToo movement on Twitter. A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a profession—pairing her with data journalist James Ball on The Infographic History of...
Aug 19
54 min
Edel Rodriguez refuses to be small or quiet. He’s the illustrator behind some of the most recognizable political images of the last decade. That 2016 cover for TIME Magazine, the one of Donald Trump melting down: that was Edel. The Der Spiegel cover of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty. Also Edel. At this point, he's produced more than 300 images of a single, very orange, subject. As a kid who grew up in a country where saying the wrong thing about the wrong leader was dangerous, Edel has...
Aug 5
42 min
This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Temi Coker. A Dallas based designer, photographer and the multidisciplinary artist behind Coker Studio. Temi’s client list includes Adobe, Apple, Google, HBO, Peloton and The Oscars. But almost none of it started with a client brief, it started with a self assigned poster a day challenge in 2016 made for no one but himself. And it led Temi to a belief that you should be making creative work just to make it. In this conversation, we ...
Jul 22
46 min
This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Dalit Shalom. Dalit is the Director of Product Design at The New York Times where she oversees the creation of new formats, spaces and tools that advance the future of storytelling. She also leads Design and Strategy for various work streams for the company's AI initiates, having previously focused on trust and credibility by developing features that clarify Times journalism for its readers. An educator as well as a practitioner, Da...
Jun 3
1 hr 13 min
This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Kenjiro Kirton. Ken is the co-founder and creative director of HATO, the London- and Hong Kong-based publishing house, design studio and concept store known for its playful, research-driven approach to culture, branding and digital experiences. His work moves fluidly between publishing, interaction, retail, and storytelling, often blurring the line between design practice and everyday life. In this conversation, we talk about what happens...
May 20
50 min
This week on the DesignThinkers Podcast, I’m joined by Ariane Spanier, a Berlin-based designer whose work sits at the intersection of typography, culture, and editorial design. Ariane has built a practice working closely with cultural institutions—museums, publications, and artists—where design isn’t just about communication, but about interpretation. She’s also the creative director and co-editor of Fukt, an annual magazine dedicated to contemporary drawing, known for its experimental and of...
May 6
48 min
This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Dee Miller. Director of Product Strategy and Insights for Product Equity at Adobe. Dee is a researcher and innovation leader, working at the intersection of technology, design, and equity. She's focused on turning real world insights, into products that are more accessible, usable, and culturally relevant. In this conversation, we unpack what inclusive design actually looks like in practice, and why it's not just about complianc...
Apr 22
50 min
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