Design Matters

Santiago Carrasquilla is a Colombian-born director, designer, and founder of Art Camp, a multidisciplinary creative studio known for blending hand-drawn illustration, 3D animation, live action, and emerging technology to create work rooted in human emotion. He joins to discuss his global upbringing, creative evolution, and the relentless drive and optimism behind a career devoted to making work that truly moves people.

Timothy Snyder is a leading historian of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and political conflict, and the author of more than a dozen books, including Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, and, most recently, Unfreedom. He has spent his career using the past to help us see and understand the present with clarity, and joins to discuss how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us.

Ada Limón—24th U.S. Poet Laureate and author of seven poetry books, including The Carrying and Bright Dead Things—joins to discuss her new book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, her childhood between two homes, her deep sensitivity to the natural world, and how poetry became a way to make sense of life’s strangeness, loss, and love.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the bestselling author of The Chronology of Water, Reading the Waves, and The Big M, and a writer whose work blurs genre to explore themes of memory, embodiment, grief, and transformation. She joins to discuss her childhood, her early life as a competitive swimmer, the film adaptation of The Chronology of Water directed by Kristen Stewart, and how storytelling can reshape the narratives we carry.

Jack Schlossberg—writer, lawyer, political correspondent, and the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy—joins live at the On Air Fest to discuss political legacy, internet culture, and the future of Democratic leadership. With humor and candor, he reflects on growing up in a historic political family, the power and peril of social media, the spread of misinformation, and why authenticity and risk-taking are essential to reaching a new generation of voters.

Kim Hastreiter—co-founder and longtime editor of Paper magazine—joins to reflect on a life at the center of downtown New York’s art, fashion, and nightlife, from scrappy newsprint beginnings to the cover that “broke the internet.” She also discusses her memoir, Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, and why artists must document culture before it’s rewritten.

C. Thi Nguyen—philosopher, professor, and author of Games: Agency as Art—joins to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and how metrics, from grades to likes, quietly reshape what we value and who we become. Together, they explore games as “libraries of agency,” the allure of scoring systems, and the vital question: Is this the game you really want to be playing?

Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, composer, and novelist whose work has reshaped contemporary American theater. The co-creator of In the Heights and author of Water by the Spoonful, she has consistently explored identity, family, and belonging across theater, music, memoir, and now fiction in her new book, The White Hot.

Chris Duffy—comedian, writer, and host of the TED podcast How to Be a Better Human—joins to discuss how humor shaped his path from teaching and improv to podcasting and television. Together, they explore why laughing more isn’t about being funny, but about attention, vulnerability, and connection, and how humor helps us stay human.

Ruth Ann Harnisch is an investor, philanthropist, social activist, media producer, and founder of Harnisch Foundation, which supports work that breaks down barriers to equality and opportunity. She joins CreativeMornings live to reflect on her path from teen broadcaster to first female anchor, and how finding her voice in inequitable newsrooms shaped everything that followed.

Brian Chesky is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, a company that began with airbeds and grew into a worldwide community built on trust and belonging. He joins to discuss how imagination and design shaped his path from art school to entrepreneurship, and what it means to design the world you want to live in.

For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits excerpts from her most memorable interviews. Featuring Jason Reynolds, Marina Abramović, Chris Ware, Richard Saul Wurman, Rick Rubin, and Roxane Gay, this episode gathers voices that challenged, surprised, and have continued to evolve in meaning over time.