Design Darlings

Every Halloween, one candy enters the villa already a villain. We love her. We hate her. She is candy corn. But how did this audacious and polarizing candy come to be? What started as a simple penny candy morphed into a seasonal staple – with the help of our good friend marketing and some rigorous patent law. In this episode we trace candy corn’s history, our theories on why the flavor have changed, and what form it could take in its next incarnation. She’s an icon, she’s a legend. She is the moment.

Things We Referenced

• History of Candy Corn
• Candy Corn Patent
• Halloween Patents: How IP Law Governs the Spookiest Holiday of the Year
• Things That Go “Trademark” in the Night: The Fascinating World of Halloween IP
• Ouija Board Patents

About Your Hosts

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.

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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.

Ok you ghouls in goblins, on this week of Halloween we are casting a spell in honor of the season’s silliest and perhaps most viral decoration. That’s right. It’s the Home Depot 12-foot skeleton also known as Skelly. In this episode, we explore our deeply human fascination with death, the macabre, and how we see motifs of mortality make their way into our modern design lexicon. So, tear open some candy and sit back for this wicked treat.

Things We Referenced

• Home Depot 12’ Skelly Skeleton
• Memento Mori Motif
• Vanitas Paintings
• Dance of Death, leaf from "The Nuremberg Chronicle"
• An Oral History of Home Depot’s 12-Foot Skeleton

About Your Hosts

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.

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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.

After a short fall break, we’re back with a surprise: Design Brief, our new segment of bite-sized design insights to tide you over between our longer episodes. In our inaugural episode, we break down the design brief, the foundational document of every design project. Yes, the pun is intended. You get it. We cover the anatomy of a great design brief and look at famous examples across consumer goods, global development, and urban infrastructure. Whether you’re a seasoned designer or design-curious, this one’s for you. What’s your favorite design brief? Share it in the comments!

Links

• Swiffer Case Study
• Sydney Opera House Brown Book and Design Brief
• UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Coke-a-Cola design Brief
• Ikea Universal Design Brief Principles
• London Road Safety Signs
• Impact of Dove Real Beauty Campaign

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.

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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.

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:

• Lifestyles of the Rich and famous
• I Quattro Libri del L'Architettura

• 18th Century Pattern Books
• Paris Worlds Fairs
• Florence Knoll
• Whirlpool kitchen of the future
• Decorating Cents
• Trading Spaces
• Kim Kardashian 2020 AD Home Tour
• Wood Brags

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.

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:

• Semantics and Semiotics
• Inside Chanel Series
• Hermes Orange Origins
• LV Origins
• Eileen Gray
• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Dana Thomas
• Cheesecake factory design review thread
• Coke Rebrand

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

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.

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:

• https://csfergusson.wixsite.com/website
• Reconciliation Education
• Canada Council
• Malvolio in Twelfth Night Act 3, Scene 4
• Bugsby Berkley
• Ziegfeld Girl (1941)
• Ghost Light
• Ron Mueck
• Jim Henson's The Storyteller

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:

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.

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

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.

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:

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 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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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 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?

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

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:

• Sewing Machine History
• Hudson River School
• Gujarati Mochi embroidery
• Ray and Charles Eames Leg Splints
• History of Tomorrowland
• Yayoi Kusama’s reflective Narcissus Garden
• 1984 Apple Super Bowl Ad
• World Economic Forum on the 4th Industrial Revolution
• The story of Steve Jobs and Issey Miyake

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”

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

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