Design Darlings

How Interior Design Trends Spread: From the Renaissance Maker to the YouTube influencer

Design Darlings — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:59:28 GMT

We've always wanted to peek into other people's homes. In this episode, we trace how mass media turned having the trending paint color or most in-demand decor from something relegated to the elite to an attainable reality of the people. This delirious journey starts with how the Gutenberg press and renaissance pattern books allowed for trends to proliferate. We then journey through the 19th and early 20th century as World’s Fairs, parlor oddities and early magazines became centers of culture (hello Cold War "kitchen diplomacy"). We then enter the TV era of interior design from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to the chaos of Trading Spaces to today’s DIY revolt against “sad beige” interiors.

Stuff we Referenced:

Keywords: Interior Design, Lifestyles of the rich and famous, gutenberg press, World’s Fairs, Florence Knoll, Kitchen Diplomacy, Designing Women, HGTV, Martha Stewart, MTV Cribs, Decorating Cents, Flip of Flop, Architectural Digest, Life Magazine

Allie Miller is a designer, researcher, and strategist who believes in the power of design to foster understanding and facilitate meaningful change. She holds a Master’s of Industrial Design from Georgia Tech, bringing human-centered thinking and a system lens to every conversation—and your podcast feed.

Robyn Richardson is an experience design strategist, tech consultant, TEDx speaker, and Graduate Professor at Georgetown University. She holds an MFA in Design Management from SCAD and has spent her career making design thinking accessible, opinionated, and a little bit fun.

Disclaimer: This podcast was prepared in their personal capacity. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, opinion, or position of their employers.

Design Codes: From Louis Vuitton Trunks to Cheesecake Factory Interiors to Coca-Cola Red

Design Darlings — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:51:42 GMT

From the iconic red square of Coca-Cola to the curvilinear geometry of midcentury furniture, codes define the objects, environments and systems around us. Design codes are what make us instantly recognize a blue box as Tiffany's, or associate a gargantuan menu and a cacophony of interior design choices with The Cheesecake Factory. In this episode, we dive deep to define exactly what a "code" is. How does it differ from a brand? An aesthetic? A vibe? Does design literacy help us apply design codes to our own work with greater nuance (I'm looking at you, Tomato Girl Summer!)? We end with some introspection, discussing how design codes make up our personal visual languages.

Things We Referenced:

Key words: brand codes, design literacy, fashion history, semiotics, luxury branding, visual signals, identity, aesthetic, belonging, Chanel, Hermès, Coca-Cola, mid-century modern

Lights, Camera, Design: Production and Costume Design

Design Darlings — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This week we’re getting stitched into the world of theatre with CS Fergusson-Vaux, a theatre and installation artist whose work moves fluidly between costume, set, and performance art. We start with Shakespeare and trace the histories hiding in every hemline and well-placed pearl. Fergie talks to us about world building and character creation, down to the details that make stories feel real. Can a costume really set the stage (pun intended) to impose tension, restriction, and atmosphere before an actor says a word? Objects, intention, makeup, and codes: we get into all of it. Grab your historically accurate finery and settle in. Maybe you’ll even reconsider how you costume for the theater of everyday life.

Stuff We Referenced:

Keywords:

theatrical design, costume design, research, Shakespeare, ethical practice, stage production, historical accuracy, world building, creative process costume design, authenticity, visual storytelling, theater, film, internet literacy, fashion, culture, costume construction, audience perception

About Your Hosts:

Design Culture Catchup: The Odyssey, Couture Dressing, Political Design and World Cup Iconography

Design Darlings — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:25:56 GMT

This summer has been scorching, and the design discourse has been no cooler. In this episode, we're serving up a menu of design tapas: an artistic amuse-bouche, a cinematic charcuterie board, and a little bit of everything in between as we catch up on the biggest design stories of the past few months. This episode has it all — from the runways of Paris Haute Couture Week, to the mysterious islands of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, to the campus of the Obama Presidential Center, and — yes — even the world's sudden, unshakeable love affair with Hidden Valley Ranch and Haaland's Hair. Bon appétit.

Stories Referenced:

The Odyssey Filming

Scapirelli Couture

Hermes Hand Drawn Site

Robert Wun Couture

Milan Design Week

Ikea PS 2026 Collection

Obama Presidential Center

Roosevelt Presidential Library

Mamdani’s Campaign Type

Herlings Hair Ties

When did Summer get Branded?

Design Darlings — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:06:35 GMT

The postwar ‘50s saw TVs proliferate into every American home—and the ad dollars followed. As media flooded American living rooms, ad dollars poured right in after them — advertising spend nearly quintupled from the 1950s into the ’60s.

Branded summers and ideal living were packaged and purchased writ large. These pop-color-soaked styles have stayed with us as the quintessential American summer. Throw in America’s birthday party and you’ve got a recipe for sweet celebration. Join us as we take a road trip across the decades and explore some of the iconic summer themes and designs that are endlessly reinvented for the modern world. Hot girl summer, feral girl summer, or Neil the Seal summer—whatever your vibe, get inside and let’s ride!

About Your Hosts:

Disclaimer: This podcast was prepared in our personal capacity. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are our own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, opinion, or position of our employers.

Mirrors on the Dance Floor: How the Disco Ball Illuminated a Revolution

Design Darlings — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 02:44:32 GMT

In this episode, we trace the disco ball from 1920s jazz clubs where it scattered light equally across every dancing body, through fifty years of obscurity, to its resurrection in the 1970s alongside a revolution in music technology—the synthesizer, the drum machine, the extended 12-inch remix—tools that were never designed for disco but got seized and celebrated by producers and DJs who understood something crucial: dance could be a powerful form of community and purpose.

Disco didn’t die in 1979. It was murdered. And we’re here to tell you exactly how a singular cultural object was at the center of major movements and social change. The light didn’t totally die out on disco… it just shifted across time and space, always spinning same the narrative of joy and resilience. I Will Survive was more than an anthem, it was a timeless mantra beating at the heart of all great designs.

About Your Hosts:

Analog Nostalgia and a Liminal Longing for 90s Design

Design Darlings — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:41:11 GMT

We’re living in a moment where recent history feels lost but still recoverable. The 90s are close enough to feel familiar, and distant enough to feel like a mirage in the desert of all things digital. Turning away from the endless algorithmic feeds, we long for that era of the last genuine analog culture. That final decade of the 20th century has become like the secret garden… a walled off sanctuary where things were built by hand, patina’d by imperfection, and steeped over time. While waiting for the photos to develop and the movie to hit VHS, we were using technology without being possessed by it. Can we recover the liminal spaces and a design sense that existed before doom scrolling?

Topics Referenced:

Liminal Spaces

The Lisa Frank Mystery

Malls coming back

Memphis Design Group

Apple Clamshell Computers

Jonny Ives

Wine About Design

Design Darlings — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:43:45 GMT

Wine has always been two things at once: what's in the bottle and everything around it. In this episode of Design Darlings, we uncork the full design story of wine. Our guest Matthew Stebenne is a product-developer-slash-sommelier who brings rare fluency in both design craft and what's actually in your glass. He helps us decant each topic, even touching on the graphic design of labels—a surprisingly contested space where tradition, typography, and pure panache collide in a 4 inch square. We dig into ways that regional identity shapes great grapes and discuss why a Burgundy bowl looks nothing like a Champagne flute. Robyn makes a case for postmodernism as a quiet but undeniable force reshaping winemaking. Pour your favorite vino, then press play.

About the Hosts

Robyn Richardson is an experience design strategist, AI product developer, TEDx speaker, and Graduate Professor at Georgetown University. She holds an MFA in Design Management from SCAD and has spent her career making design thinking accessible, opinionated, and a little bit fun.

Allie Miller is a designer, researcher, and strategist who believes in the transformative power of design to solve complex problems. She holds a Master's in Design from Georgia Tech and brings human-centered thinking, a sharp eye for systems, and a commitment to meaningful change to every conversation—and your podcast feed.

About the Guest

Matthew Stebenne is a product manager and design strategist with a Master's in Design Management & Communications from Georgetown University and WSET wine certifications—both earned with Distinction. He sits at a rare intersection of design craft and sensory expertise, which means he can critique your wine label and what's inside the bottle.

Fashion is Art, Design, and Media Machine

Design Darlings — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:51:54 GMT

Fashion is a cultural phenomenon. A mix of design, photography, style, and setting, a garment isn't just an isolated confabulation of fabric — it's an experience, an aspiration, a mini movie in a single snap. This episode uses the Met Gala and the long-awaited Devil Wears Prada 2 to interrogate what happens when fashion stops being worn and starts being performed... for the camera, for the meme, for the morning-after discourse. Who is at the helm of the design dialogue? Are the editors and critics steeped in true design knowledge of craft and material science being replaced by an algorithm competing for clicks? In this episode we ask the question: is fashion art, is it content, or have we made it impossible to tell the difference?

The Cult of Big Water Bottle and the Design of Hydration

Design Darlings — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:43:39 GMT

Over the millennia, our humble water bottle had a serious glow-up. The modern metal tumbler is an innovation in thermodynamics that you tote from the farmers market to your freeway commute. But somewhere between the Stanley craze and the Hydro Flask wars, this utilitarian object became a full-on totem: color-dropped like a sneaker, curated like a handbag, plastered with stickers that scream I have opinions about oat milk. This episode, designer Vidya Mantrala joins us to unpack how a heat-transfer workaround became the bumper sticker of the body — a walking mood board that also hydrates you.

Show Note Links:

The Surprisingly Long History of Bottled Water

Why Did Stanley Water Bottles Suddenly Become a Cultural Phenomenon?

The Buy Guide - The Story of The Cup

GSD&M Marketing Case Study

Maker and Machine: The History Behind Design's Most Dramatic Relationship

Design Darlings — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:14:33 GMT

From the steam-powered chaos of the 18th century to the silicon-fueled frenzy of the digital age, humans have always met technological upheaval with the same cocktail of terror, wonder, and remarkable adaptation. Each industrial revolution didn’t just rewire economies — it rewired identities, aesthetics, social structures, and what it means to be human. Luddites smashed looms and Cubists fragmented reality in response to mechanized warfare. Now, as AI reshapes the landscape yet again, history whispers its familiar truth: the most interesting story was always about us.

Links and References:

Design Grind: The Aesthetics of Coffee House Culture

Design Darlings — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:37:50 GMT

This week our hosts discuss a caffeinated story arc covering early 2000s coffee houses to the design-ification of coffee hustle vibes. Did the social media girl boss grind aesthetic hijack the formerly cozy couch setting of your favorite spot? Are we coming full circle with a return to the book store hangout that defined the late 90s? Grab your favorite brew and sit for this open mic coffee house revival.

At the news desk, we cover the fashion and production design of the 98th Academy Awards, and how a partnership announcement between NVIDIA and Adobe could change our design workflows.

Links:

NVIDIA and Adobe Partnership Announcement

Oscars 2026 First Look: This Year, the Stage Is a “Sanctuary of Celebration”

Light My Fire: How Objects of Function become Markers of Identity

Design Darlings — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:48:41 GMT

Can something as functional as fire have design? This episode asks how the invention of matches and lighters sparked from a basic necessity–like lighting candles, lamps, and tobacco– into statements of self expression. Join the discussion as we examine how lighters and candles expanded beyond functional objects from the 1800s into modern designs of personal vibes and aesthetics.

A Brief History of Flame

Brief History of Matches and Lighters

BIC Timeline

AD Set Tour- Wuthering Heights

It’s Design, Darling

Design Darlings — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:19:11 GMT

This first episode introduces our podcast premise, our hosts, and posits the big question- what IS design? We consider the 4 orders of design and their place in brand development, while also considering how human cultures developed the original modes of design. Listen for fun and insights from this friendly duo and look to their show notes for inspiration and links to extra content.

LINKS:

Wicked Problems in Design Thinking (4 orders of design)

Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design

Victor Papanek- Design for the Real World