DesignThinkers Podcast

69 Episodes

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Nikki Gonnissen on Designing for Human Connection

2026-10-1451:40

Nikki Gonnissen is co-founder and Creative Director of Thonik, the Amsterdam design studio she started with her partner Thomas Widdershoven in 1993. That’s the same year they met in Vondelpark, when Thomas spotted her eating ice cream with friends and followed her until she stopped to talk. What began as two solo practices under the clunky name "Gonnissen and Widdershoven" eventually became Thonik. A name built from their two first names: Thomas and Nikki. Thirty-three years later, they're st...

Erika Barbieri on Tasty Packaging Design

2026-09-3050:43

Erika Barbieri is the co-founder and creative director of OlssønBarbieri, a design studio in Oslo. The studio's ethos is built almost entirely around one idea: that packaging can be a portal into much bigger conversations about food. She and her partner Henrik met in design school in Florence, moved to Oslo in 2005, and spent years finding their footing before officially committing to the studio in 2012. In this episode, Erika talks about how for her, good packaging design lives at the inters...

Goldie Chan on Personal Branding for Introverts

2026-09-1652:22

Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts, the founder of the social strategy agency Warm Robots, and the Huffington Post once called her the "Oprah of LinkedIn." She built that reputation kind of by accident. She started posting a daily video on LinkedIn as a way to push her introverted self to speak on camera. She then went on to post 800 consecutive daily videos between 2017 and 2019, long before AI made that kind of output easy. In this conversation, Goldie takes us ba...

Gabby Lord & Lauren Wong on Being Delusional Enough to Start a Company

2026-09-0251:38

Five years ago, Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong started a design studio because a friend joked that they should—and because Gabby was, by her own admission, extremely burnt out and looking for a way out of her work situation. Those aren't good reasons to start a company, and yet SUPER KEEN is succeeding by most metrics. They complete 20 to 35 projects a year, have found a work-life balance that works for them, and have built a reputation for delivering solid design and strategy work. In thi...

Valentina D'Efilippo on Giving Data a Voice

2026-08-1954:28

Valentina D'Efilippo is equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. That tension has shaped nearly two decades of work translating dense, unwieldy datasets into visual stories: flowers standing in for a century of wars, a dandelion holding the shape of the #MeToo movement on Twitter. A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a profession—pairing her with data journalist James Ball on The Infographic History of...

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