Shows / Design Darlings
Design Darlings
We are two dorks with degrees in design and we wax poetic about everyday objects, fashion, interactions, and all things designed in the world. Our conversations run the gamut from examining that pen in your pocket to questioning whether pressing or percolating coffee produces a better brew. Part persnickety and part pop culture, our hosts keep things keen. So join us as we incite deep dives and invite expert perspectives about all things design, darling.
Episodes
- Design Darlings
Design Brief: Candy Corn's Sweet but Complicated Past
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…
- Design Darlings
Design Brief: Skelly the Skeleton and Finding Whimsy in the Macabre
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…
- Design Darlings
Design Brief: Defining the Brief
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…
- Design Darlings
How Interior Design Trends Spread: From the Renaissance Maker to the YouTube influencer
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…
- Design Darlings
Design Codes: From Louis Vuitton Trunks to Cheesecake Factory Interiors to Coca-Cola Red
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 Darlings
Lights, Camera, Design: Production and Costume Design
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…
- Design Darlings
Design Culture Catchup: The Odyssey, Couture Dressing, Political Design and World Cup Iconography
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…
- Design Darlings
When did Summer get Branded?
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…
- Design Darlings
Mirrors on the Dance Floor: How the Disco Ball Illuminated a Revolution
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…
- Design Darlings
Analog Nostalgia and a Liminal Longing for 90s Design
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…
- Design Darlings
Wine About Design
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…
- Design Darlings
Fashion is Art, Design, and Media Machine
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…
- Design Darlings
The Cult of Big Water Bottle and the Design of Hydration
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…
- Design Darlings
Maker and Machine: The History Behind Design's Most Dramatic Relationship
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…
Design DarlingsDesign Grind: The Aesthetics of Coffee House Culture
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…
- Design Darlings
Light My Fire: How Objects of Function become Markers of Identity
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…
- Design Darlings
It’s Design, Darling
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…