On this special episode of Design Matters, we take a look back at 2021, revel in the collective brilliance of Catherine Opie, Ethan Hawke, Randa Jarrar, Nick Offerman, and Susan Orlean.
Randa Jarrar:
What happened after was the police came, they asked me some questions.
Ethan Hawke:
While I was doing that, I was living like I was making a million dollars a year making movies.
Susan Orlean:
I was really drunk and I was in bed with my phone next to me, which is never a good idea.
Speaker:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.
Speaker:
For 17 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, to mark the end of 2021, we’re going to hear moments from some of the best interviews Debbie did in the past year.
Catherine Opie:
Judy practiced on chicken thighs before she practiced on my body.
Nick Offerman:
It’s a fun harmless prank. I mean, we always then put the tables back together.
Debbie Millman:
When I started Design Matters 17 years ago, I primarily interviewed designers and visual artists, but over the years, while still keeping up with designers and artists, I also interviewed playwrights musicians, writers, actors, activists, and even the occasional scientist, pretty much anyone living and designing a creative life.
Debbie Millman:
We did a lot of interviews in 2021, most of them remotely because of COVID. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was worried about creating the same intimacy I had in the studio with my guests on Zoom. Initially, I was really worried, but in the nearly two years we’ve been recording the podcast this way, I’m just happy we can still make this show despite the occasional technological snafus. I’m also happy to say that a few of this year’s interviews even made it in to my upcoming book about the podcast, Why Design Matters: Conversations With the World’s Most Creative People. The book will be released to the world in 2022.
Debbie Millman:
Now, without further ado, here are excerpts of some of our favorite episodes of 2021. First up, writer, Randa Jarrar. She writes fiction, but her latest book is a memoir called Love is an Ex-Country. It’s a series of essays about joy, queerness, kink, race, love, and domestic violence. At one point in our conversation last March, I asked her to read one particular scene from her book.
Randa Jarrar:
When I was 16, I snuck out of the Connecticut basement to see a boy. I was dating a 17-year-old aspiring DJ. He and his friends picked me up from the dead end of our street. They took me to clubs, we ate at a diner, and then we went to a river. He and I kissed and touched each other for hours. When he dropped me off at home, all the lights in the house were on even though it was dawn. We knew I’d been caught. He offered to let me stay the night at his house. He said his mother would be upset, but that she would understand. He said he was worried about me going in.
Randa Jarrar:
To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t go with him, why I didn’t choose snuggling next to someone who cared for me over punishment. I had never slept next to anyone I was attracted to before. I said no and I kissed him good night. I snuck back in through the basement as usual, took off my clothes and put on the nightie I’d left down there behind the sofa bed. The sounds of my father’s and mother’s feet thundering down the stairs, and then it began, like rain lashing at a window, like a flood, like a doll cut up into five distinct pieces, legs, arms, head, like a cardboard box with a sword through it, like a fist, like a magnifying glass over something in large print, like a clap. My body covered in red marks.
Randa Jarrar:
My father slapped me, pulled my hair, punched my arms, which I hid my face behind. I was on my period, I bled and bled. My mother did nothing, always did nothing. I said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” His one hand held both my small hands and his other hand knocked me against the side of my face, like a heavy bookshelf falling on my cheek. I ran upstairs. I wanted to emerge from underground. He ran after me. I ran out. I ran in a circle around our house, he ran in a circle around our house. No one called the police. Our neighbors on all sides were white. I was screaming. Not a single neighbor tried to help. My face was red and my tears covered my face.
Randa Jarrar:
My father commanded me to go back inside. I don’t know why I did. We were back in the basement. He was kicking me, he was on top of me, he was slapping me. Afterward, he and my mother sat on the cheap corner love seat and explained to me what life was, that there were rules, that I was a whore. They left calmly, now that all my father’s energy had flashed out of him like fire, had burned me.
Randa Jarrar:
I waited a few minutes, maybe 20, then I ran. I opened the basement door to the backyard and ran up the concrete stairs down the street. I was in my nightie. I could have changed into my clothes, laced my shoes on, but I didn’t want to change anything, didn’t want to alter in any way the scene of the crime, which was my body.
Randa Jarrar:
I ran down another street, all the way to the bottom, to a payphone I used to use to call my friends. The payphone was dead. I ran across the street to the hotel where my parents let guests stay when there was no room at our house, the fancy hotel. I ran to the front desk, I asked the woman there to call the police. She appeared inconvenience. She called the police and said that a guest had been assaulted. I corrected her and said I was not a guest. I corrected her and said, “I ran to the closest place where I knew people would have to help me.”
Debbie Millman:
It’s just an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of writing. It’s so vivid, it’s so intense. What happened after that?
Randa Jarrar:
Thank you. What happened after was the police came, they asked me some question, but there was definitely racist undertones, like, “Oh, your dad’s Arab. This is not going to be good for him.” I knew that in that, maybe not city, but in that town, people were beating women constantly. I mean, there are also stories of murders that took place in Connecticut in that particular town where women were murdered, but they just happened to have been murdered by white men. There was this really weird-
Debbie Millman:
So they were out partying?
Randa Jarrar:
Yeah. There was this weird thing, where I wanted to protect my family, but I also really didn’t want my dad to hit me again. It worked. I mean, he never hit me again after that, because I think he knew that if I called the police again, he would go to jail.
Debbie Millman:
You did have to go to court, he had to go to court.
Randa Jarrar:
Yeah, he did have to go to court. It took me until after to realize that I actually wasn’t on trial, that he was the one that had to go to court, but I was a minor so I was with my family. I remember the social worker basically slut shamed me and told me, “Well, what your dad did might have been wrong, but you really don’t want to be running around with boys late at night.” There was an assault on all sides, I felt. I feel like women and people in this country, they just don’t have protection. There’s no real safety.
Debbie Millman:
And that was Randa Jarrar. She was talking about her 2021 memoir, Love is an Ex-Country.
Debbie Millman:
Next up, actor and writer, Ethan Hawke. When I spoke with him in March, he had just published his latest novel, A Bright Ray of Darkness, and his 2020 Showtime series about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, had been getting rave reviews. At one point in our conversation, I asked him about how his friend, the late great actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, made him realize he needed to work harder as an actor.
Ethan Hawke:
I watched Nobody’s Fool the other day, a Paul Newman movie, Robert Benton directed, really wonderful film. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays this small town deputy or something, it’s just kind of an idiot little part, but, oh, he probably has 10 lines in the movie. I was friends with him back then, he worked so hard on that park. “Who was that guy? What does he have is his pocket? How did he get the job? Why does he do this dumb thing? What’s this thing?” He was rigorous with his imagination.
Ethan Hawke:
I watched the movie, it’s years later, and he’s just so wonderful in it. When he started getting bigger parts, he applied the same rigor to every line he had. I had kind of a, “Let’s get through this scene. I’m really looking forward to that scene we’re going to shoot on Thursday,” attitude and I started seeing the possibilities of there’s a difference between the job of a leading man and the job of a character actor.
Ethan Hawke:
Fascinatingly enough, the job of the character actor is extremely challenging because you have to facilitate the story. You’ve got a job to do and that’s your only part, then you get laser focused about it. Then when you come back to a larger part, you see, oh, smaller stitches in the fabric, you see how to sew it tighter, you see how to help your scene partner, and that’s really the change for me.
Debbie Millman:
Despite the lesson you learned from Phillip Seymour Hoffman about working harder, you’ve also come to recognize that every time you tried to sell out, you fell on your ass. Your words, not mine.
Ethan Hawke:
I like these quotes you’re finding.
Debbie Millman:
I suspect that you’re talking about your first foray into television, which I want to talk about briefly before going into The Good Lord Bird, the Fox show, Exit Strategy. What happened with that show?
Ethan Hawke:
That was my midlife crisis. That was like I turned 40 and I felt like I had to quit being an artist and get a real job and hate it like everyone else.
Debbie Millman:
Why? Was it because of having so many children? Was it, I mean-
Ethan Hawke:
My wife was pregnant with my fourth kid and the economy had just dropped out in 2008. I’d spent a lot of the previous years falling back in love with the theater, the thing you asked me about Phil and smaller parts. I got really interested in that and I started doing smaller parts and some big Broadway. I did The Bridge Project, which we took Chekhov and Shakespeare all over the world. I did Coast of Utopia, which ran for a year, it’s a nine-hour play about Russian radicals, and Hurley Burley I’d done for almost a year. They’re all big ensemble pieces. I mean, some of those parts were big, some of them were small. While I was doing that, I was living like I was making a million dollars a year making movies, and I was having a lot of children.
Ethan Hawke:
You asked me earlier, when I was a kid, I was very, very fortunate. Dead Poet’s Society, I had this money, I got to do what I wanted to do. All of a sudden I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I wasn’t getting cast, younger actors were getting more parts. You start seeing the world and I just panicked. I love Antoine Fuqua and we had this idea, well, maybe we can, we can make a great cop show. What if we did? Wow.
Ethan Hawke:
I started bending my mind to, well, if Antoine would do it, maybe we could make this badass cop show and sneak one through. I don’t mean to knock that show or whatever, but they didn’t really let Antoine do what he wanted to do. The show never turned into the show that we had imagined it would be, and thank God it didn’t happen.
Debbie Millman:
You said that it ultimately resulted in your rebooting and revitalizing the next 10 years of your life. How?
Ethan Hawke:
I just started doing things I care … I have an amazing wife and she’s an amazing partner. She’s not a materialist. She’s like, “Don’t do that. What are we making the money for?” She sees very clearly the capitalist design, that this country gets motivated on the accumulation of wealth, the accumulation of possessions, that’s how we define success. We all just get on this treadmill and hate ourselves if we have to get off it and feel like we failed if we don’t have the school that we want or the house that we want. She just wasn’t buying into it and she’s like, “Let’s start making decisions based on love. That’s what you need to do.” I started doing things I cared about and then my career started going well again. It’s mysterious how that happens.
Debbie Millman:
Ethan Hawke. His latest novel is A Bright Ray of Darkness.
Debbie Millman:
In April, I spoke with the great non-fiction writer, Susan Orlean. We talked about how she became a writer for The New Yorker and about her books, including The Orchid Thief and The Library Book, but I couldn’t let her go without talking about a hilariously epic tweet storm from the summer of 2020, which got a lot of attention.
Susan Orlean:
You know, this was one of the strangest, funniest, most unexpected and unexpectable experiences of my life. I was really drunk and I was in bed with my phone next to me, which is never a good idea. Actually, I’m very anal about typos. I just hate having typos and misspelling. Just writing this as I did, it was in the dark and I was not correcting my typos and I made lots and lots of mistakes because I was sort of doing it blind. Then I fell asleep.
Susan Orlean:
I mean, there was a point where my husband came in and said that someone had gotten in touch with him and asked if my Twitter feed had been hacked. For some reason I was really irate. I thought, “Well, that’s outrageous. No, my Twitter feed hasn’t been hacked,” and then I shooed him away, “Leave me alone. I’m drunk and I want to be by myself in bed.”
Susan Orlean:
The only thing that I was embarrassed about was wondering if my neighbors, who were the owners of this little foal, if they could tell how drunk I was. I mean, it hit me like a sledgehammer, I was smashed. It came over me very quickly. It was very hot out and we were sitting out in the sun drinking and they kept pouring more and more and more wine. When I stood up, I almost fell over and I thought, “Oh geez, this is embarrassing, but let’s just assume they didn’t notice.” I went to sleep blissfully ignorant.
Susan Orlean:
When I opened Twitter, which I do early on, I really almost fainted. Then I had a bunch of requests from different publications, from a newspaper in Australia, from this, from that. I thought, “What is going on?” Then somebody said to me, “Were you performing?” and I said, “Oh my God, I wish I could perform that well. I mean, no, I’m not performing.” I mean, I could never have done a drunk tweet as well as I did it drunk.
Debbie Millman:
I think that’s why people enjoyed it, people knew you were drunk.
Susan Orlean:
Yeah. It was funny because I thought, also, “How cynical, I would never do something like that.” This is somewhat embarrassing, though they were very good natured about it, my neighbors, the ones who had had us over for drinks, emailed and said, “Sounds like you had a fun night.” These are people I would never have thought would have been on Twitter, because my first thought was, well, at least they won’t know that I was so drunk and they’ll never see the Twitter feed because they’re not the kind of people who are on Twitter. Immediately in the morning, it was like, “Sounds like you sure had fun. You want to come over again tonight for more drinks?” I thought, “Oh my God.”Then our next door neighbors, who we had never met because they just bought the house, I guess they messaged me on Twitter saying, “Hi, we live next door. We’d love to meet.” I thought, “Oh my God.”
Susan Orlean:
I mean, it was actually really funny. I will say that I never felt embarrassed. I think I felt like, look, we’re all at the end of our ropes, everybody’s drinking too much, I didn’t say anything I’m embarrassed of having said. I mean, it was mostly me ranting about my cat. This is one of the weird things about the modern world. I mean, broadcasting being drunk I guess is the first piece of this, but the way something like that spreads is so astonishing and so odd.
Susan Orlean:
I had one little flicker of thinking, “Oh my God, I’m a serious writer and are people going to now think I’m a flake?” but this has happened in my career multiple times, like agreeing to let The Orchid Thief be made into adaptation. I had a moment of thinking, “No, it’s going to ruin my career. I can’t let them do this to my book,” and then I had another moment of thinking, “Well, what the hell?” I guess that feeling, it’s all part of the package. It revealed me in a way that I don’t reveal myself so much really, but it was also very authentic. I can’t say I regret it. I find it still so much of the moment that I just laugh when I think about the doldrums of summer and the pandemic and everything that we’ve all gone through and drinking at 4:00 in the afternoon. The whole thing was just so much the moment in time,
Debbie Millman:
Susan Orlean. May other such tweetstorm come our way, we are sure going to need them.
Debbie Millman:
This past August, I spoke with photographer and artist, Catherine Opie, who has made some of the most indelible images of our time. Her intimate portraits of queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco put her on the map in the 1990s and her black-and-white urban landscapes of freeways and strip malls are beautiful and haunting. I asked her specifically about a famous self-portrait she did in 1993, called Self-Portrait/Cutting.
Catherine Opie:
Well at the time, it was something that actually is a photograph out of mourning. My first domestic relationship and the only one I had ever had before of being with my current partner and wife, Julie Burleigh, was with a woman, Pam Greg. I was utterly in love and we built a house and we got two puppies and we were living the domestic dream. I imagined in my mind that it would go on for a long period of time, that the two puppies would potentially turn into children and all of that, which was still hard in 1993 to imagine, you know?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, yes.
Catherine Opie:
It was very difficult in 1993 to imagine. Then blood as a substance is a substance that was feared. One of the things that I did say in the quote that SM was never sexual wasn’t actually completely true, because Pam and I met in a leather context and ended up being lovers. I’ve had other lovers within the leather community in that context. There is a bit of pleasure in terms of sexuality mixed into it, in terms of my history of relationships.
Catherine Opie:
But Pam broke up with me and I was devastated. For a year I spent doodling on a pad and I would doodle these stick figure girls with a house with the sun coming out of the clouds as a sense of optimism that I will find love again. Then I decided to go ahead and make it a cutting and make it a portrait. I was in the process of making the other portraits at that time, and that it was just a profound sense of loss and longing, not just for me personally in losing my first domestic relationship, but the notion of loss overall, in terms of the AIDS epidemic and watching it decimate all of these couples and communities. Even though there’s two stick figure girls with skirts, but it was … Yeah, I wanted to make a very complicated universal piece that went beyond my own personal sadness of the loss of my domestic relationship, and that is what I came up with.
Debbie Millman:
Can you talk about how the artist, Judie Bamber, carved the illustration into your back? What was that like for her?
Catherine Opie:
I think she was really nervous. I mean, it’s actually on videotape. We have both cuttings documented on videotape. We don’t have Self-Portrait/Nursing, but we have the cutting on my back and Pervert documented. Self-Portrait/Cutting happened in Los Angeles in my new living room, in what we called Casa de Estrogen, which was predominantly a lesbian apartment building in Koreatown on Catalina Street.
Debbie Millman:
Sounds dreamy.
Catherine Opie:
There was an amazing history there. Jenny Shimizu who lived above me and there was just an incredible group of dykes and their motorcycles that all lived together in this apartment building. Then my good friends, Mike and Sky, who I had photographed, were there to support Judie, and my other good friend who was a photographer, Connie Samaras, took the dark slides out of the camera and operated the 4×5 camera, because it’s a self-portrait, but it couldn’t be done on a tripod with a cable release because it was 4×5. Judy practiced on chicken thighs before she practiced on my body.
Debbie Millman:
I hope there are photos documenting that too.
Catherine Opie:
Oh, and what’s amazing is Judy is one of the most precise painters ever. I mean, her work is unbelievable. If you don’t know her work, look up her work. We’re born on the same day in the same year, so we both share April 14, 1961, and she was one of my best friends. I wanted an apprehension in the cutting. I wanted it to not be done by somebody like Mike or Sky who would’ve been able to do it perfectly. I wanted the blood almost like as if the surface of the skin was scratched, but at moments the scalpel would actually make a mark that was more definitive. It was never meant to be a permanent cutting. I guess it became obviously a pretty iconic portrait.
Debbie Millman:
Then in 1994, you created Self-Portrait/Pervert.
Catherine Opie:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
This time, you’re sitting in front of a black and gold brocade, your hands are folded in your lap, you’re facing the camera. Your head is completely covered in a black leather gimp mask, you’re wearing leather chaps, and the word Pervert is carved in bloody, kind of oozing, very ornate letters across your chest. The body modifier, Raelyn Galina, cut the word into your skin, and then two of your friends from a piercing shop lined your arms 46 times, from the shoulder down to the wrist, with two-inch needles.
Catherine Opie:
Yeah, I think they were 12-gauge needles, but I remember we wanted the gauge to be big enough that it would create an appearance of body armor in a certain way, and that I wanted the cutting and the needles to be completely precise because I was thinking about Holbein’s Henry VIII portrait in a certain way. I was thinking about what the word pervert meant in 1994 in my community, especially when there was a beginning of a divide within our own community. This is very specific, it’s not just for what pervert means from Jesse Helms, the holding up Mapplethorpe photographs on the Senate floor, but it also came from internal homophobia of our own community of, again, the sex workers, the people who practice S and M were also perverts and that there are portions of the gay and lesbian community that are “normal”. I didn’t like the notion of normal. I’ve never liked the binaries of normal or abnormal. I’m more interested in the complexity of sexuality and desire.
Catherine Opie:
Yeah, it was that moment where in the same way my friend stake tattooed Dyke on the back of her neck that I was going to have Raelyn do this cutting. That was done in San Francisco in a studio while I was making the portrait series. It was attended by an enormous amount of my friends, including the incredible trans historian, Susan Striker, was there. The needles were done first and then I sat in the chair and Raelyn did the cutting and then I put the hood on. We made some without the hood and some with the hood, but I really didn’t want my face because I wanted the notion of visibility to be placed on language. What does the word pervert mean? How do we deal with language? Is this enough of a pervert for you? It’s also really beautiful and then you actually have to deal with the beauty of it as well, because it’s not dripping blood, it’s done in such a way that it just looks like almost a red tattoo, but it is blood coming to the surface.
Debbie Millman:
Catherine Opie. Much of her work has been collected in a book from Phaidon, called Catherine Opie.
Debbie Millman:
Nick Offerman is famous for his comedy, but he’s also a charming and funny author. I spoke with him in October, shortly after the publication of his New York Times bestselling book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside. One of the things we talked about was he became an actor.
Nick Offerman:
What I determined from my first stage, was the altar of the Catholic Church where they never gave me any lines, and so I realized if I was going to get any response out of the crowd, I was going to have to learn how to use my eyebrows and my intense gaze. It was there that I began to understand deadpan. I did get to ring the bells a couple times during the mass. With my timing, and depending on my eye line, I could really make my friends laugh just with my demeanor.
Nick Offerman:
Eventually, they had me start doing the gospel readings, in a position known as the lector. Then it carried over, where I found that if I had the right amount of gravitas and intense focus, the parents would be tricked into thinking that was sincerity and reverence, while all my friends just thought it was the most hilarious, like Leslie Nielsen in Airplane kind of delivery.
Debbie Millman:
At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?
Nick Offerman:
Well, working in the arts in any way was not an available choice. I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand that that’s what I wanted to do. I could have said to you, “Well, I love to play music,” I played the saxophone, “And I love to perform,” but I wasn’t aware that you could get a job in either of those fields. My upbringing was such a cultural vacuum that I didn’t understand that people from my school could become a sax player or an actor.
Nick Offerman:
I was pretty confused. I loved using tools and building things with my hands, but again, I didn’t understand that that was a creative job when I used to do it as a teenager. I worked framing houses and I worked on a blacktop crew and so those labor jobs didn’t seem like something to aspire to. I had no idea that one day I would become a fine furniture builder or a boat builder. I was a pretty successful mountebank. I could put on a show, I could charm people into thinking they should elect me to student council president or things like that when I knew secretly that I was just going to try and steal all the candy bars for me and my friends.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I understand that when you attended the University of Illinois, you would dress up as a carpenter and go to the library to see how many tables you could take apart before somebody stopped you. I’m wondering, generally speaking, how many tables were you able to dismantle before being found out?
Nick Offerman:
Usually, I think our record was probably three. I forgot about that. I mean, that was obviously before the internet. We needed to find something to do and so me and my buddy would go. It’s a fun harmless prank. I mean, we always then put the tables back together, we weren’t monsters. I still feel like there were much more destructive ways we could have been spending our time.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I think that just to make sure that all the joists are tight is good when you were putting them back together, I assume, right?
Nick Offerman:
Sure. I mean, that’s just good manners.
Debbie Millman:
Now, initially you thought you would major in music, but everything changed for you when your then born again Christian girlfriend auditioned for the dance department and you drove her three hours to the audition, and while waiting for her, you hung out in the hallway of the performing arts building. Can you talk a little bit about what happened when you were there?
Nick Offerman:
Yeah. I mean, it was pretty astonishing. If you’ve ever been to the Lincoln Center in New York, it’s amazing.
Debbie Millman:
Many times, yeah.
Nick Offerman:
The theater and dance facility at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was designed by the same architect as the Lincoln Center. Similarly, it’s a city block with four theaters, one facing each street direction, all connected underground by levels of carpentry shops, costume shops, massive hallways, where you can build a house set and then load it with forklifts into the massive backstage opera bay doors and stuff. It was this incredible facility that I’m hanging out in the hallway while my girlfriend is auditioning.
Nick Offerman:
I can’t remember what the inciting moment was, but I ran into these two acting students at the time, named Jennifer McCarthy and David something. Oh, I can picture his face, he played Hymen in As You Like It, David Coronado.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Nick Offerman:
I ran into them, and magically, I don’t know how we struck up a conversation. I think they must have said, “Hey, kid, why are you loitering in this hallway?” and I said, “I’m waiting for my girlfriend,” but somehow we got onto the subject of I said, “What are you doing here?” and they said they were theater students. I said, “What do you mean?” and they said, “We’re studying to become theater actors.” I said, “What? Hang on, what does that mean? You can get a job doing plays? Is that a thing?” I mean, I had heard of London and I had heard of Broadway, but I was in Illinois. They said, “Yeah, when we graduate we hope to move to Chicago where you can make a living performing in plays. I mean, it was like somebody just invented electricity. I was so excited. I went home to my mom and dad and said, “You can get paid to do plays in Chicago. That’s what I want to do.”
Debbie Millman:
What was their response?
Nick Offerman:
God bless them. I have always said I’ve had some crazy ideas in my life, but I always work really hard and do my best, no matter what cockamamie scheme I’m up to. They said, “Look, we’ll support you. If you can, try to have something to fall back on. Try and have a way to make money,” which ended up being using my carpentry skills, but they supported me. I couldn’t believe it. I went and had to do my first audition of my life to get into the conservatory there at the University of Illinois. They were short on strong young men to carry the talented people on and off stage, and so I was able to fill one of those slots in 1988.
Debbie Millman:
Nick Offerman. His latest book is Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.
Debbie Millman:
Thanks for listening to this year-end special. There’s lots to go back and listen to and much more to come in 2022. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. This is Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking to you again in 2022. Be safe out there.
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. In non-pandemic times, the show is recorded at the School of Visual Arts Masters and Branding Program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland.