Episodes

Ep. 488 October 20261:12:40

The Patience of Materials

Ines Calloway · Furniture maker

Ines builds chairs that take eleven weeks to finish and are meant to outlast their owners. We talk about air-dried oak, why she refuses to use a CNC router for joinery, and what thirty years at a bench teaches you about deadlines.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Cold open: the chair that took a year
2. 06:12Learning from a Basque cooper
3. 24:30Wood moves — design for it
4. 48:05Pricing slow work honestly
5. 1:05:20What she would tell her apprentice self

Ep. 4724 September 202658:17

Interfaces That Disappear

Tomasz Rek · Interaction designer

Tomasz spent a decade designing medical device controls, where a confusing button can be a matter of life and death. A conversation about restraint, error states and why the best interface is the one nobody remembers using.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 04:40Designing for gloved hands
3. 19:55Error states as first-class citizens
4. 37:10Against delight
5. 51:30Testing in the real room

Ep. 4610 September 20261:04:52

Typefaces as Infrastructure

Hana Oduya · Type designer

Hana designs type for road signs, transit maps and government forms — letters that millions read without noticing. We get into legibility research, multi-script families and the decade-long life of a typeface.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 03:25Reading at 100 km/h
3. 21:40Drawing Latin, Ge’ez and Cyrillic together
4. 42:15Who owns a public typeface?
5. 57:00Lightning round

Ep. 4527 August 20261:09:03

Small Software

Marcus Lindqvist · Independent developer

Marcus has run a two-person software company for twelve years without investors, growth targets or a single all-hands. We talk about building tools that stay small on purpose, saying no to features, and the economics of enough.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 05:10The first paying customer
3. 22:45A changelog as a promise
4. 40:30Support emails are product research
5. 1:01:15When to stop adding things

Ep. 4413 August 202652:36

The Sound You Don't Notice

Priya Raman · Sound designer

Priya designs the clicks, chimes and alerts inside cars, kitchen appliances and phones. A conversation about the emotional weight of a 200-millisecond sound, and why silence is the hardest thing to design.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro: a listening exercise
2. 07:30Anatomy of a notification
3. 24:00Sound and trust
4. 39:45Designing silence
5. 48:10Recommended listening

Ep. 4330 July 20261:16:21

Building Slowly in Public

Delphine Arceneaux · Architect

Delphine's practice designs libraries and community buildings with the people who will use them. We talk about workshops in parking lots, designing for maintenance budgets and buildings that age gracefully.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 08:20Consultation that actually changes things
3. 29:10Materials that patina
4. 51:45The maintenance budget is the brief
5. 1:09:30A building she got wrong

Ep. 4216 July 20261:01:48

The Repair Economy

Kofi Mensah · Repair technician & founder

Kofi runs a repair workshop that fixes around four thousand devices a year. We discuss glued-in batteries, the right-to-repair movement, and what manufacturers could learn from people who open their products every day.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 06:00A day at the bench
3. 20:35Design decisions you can feel with a screwdriver
4. 38:50Parts, manuals and policy
5. 55:20Teaching repair to teenagers

Ep. 412 July 202657:09

Maps and Their Quiet Opinions

Elena Varga · Cartographer

Every map makes choices about what to leave out. Elena, who draws hiking and transit maps by hand and in code, explains generalisation, projection and the ethics of a single line on a page.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 04:15What to leave out
3. 18:30Hand-drawn vs generated
4. 35:40Borders and naming
5. 50:05Her favourite map ever made

Ep. 4018 June 20261:06:30

Keyboards, Clicks and Muscle Memory

Jun Takeda · Industrial designer

Jun has designed keyboards, controllers and camera bodies. We talk about haptics, ergonomics studies with real hands, and why changing a familiar layout is one of the riskiest moves in product design.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 05:45Prototyping with clay and foam
3. 23:20The feel of a good switch
4. 44:10Respecting muscle memory
5. 59:40Tools on his desk

Ep. 394 June 202654:44

The Letterpress Revival

Margot Lindgren · Printer & publisher

Margot prints small-run books on a 1950s Heidelberg press. On ink, impression, the economics of editions of 300, and why physical constraints make for better editorial decisions.

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Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 06:30Restoring the press
3. 21:15Setting type by hand
4. 36:50Editions, paper and price
5. 49:00What digital taught her about print