Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

20th Anniversary celebration with technology pioneers Bill Moggridge, Jason Kottke, Anil Dash, and Kevin Kelly

December 1, 2025·45 min·4 clips

Bill Moggridge explains why the mouse remains surprisingly effective and what might replace it.

The mouse still surprises. One archived voice starts there, with a small tool that still feels oddly good after all this time. For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman goes back to tech pioneers she has interviewed over the years. The episode is reflective without getting dusty. It puts older conversations next to current worries about artificial intelligence, ethics, and creative responsibility. Jason Kottke becomes one of the anchors. In the 2013 conversation, Millman asks about his daily posting rhythm and the discipline of choosing less. Six feels like magic. Kottke says he used to post more, but learned to spend more time picking work that might still feel alive later. Timeliness is not enough. The ideal post is not only news; it is something a reader could find years later and still want to follow. That difference lands. A Facebook acquisition can turn into stale trivia. A physicist trying to build a tiny sun still has a charge to it. The archive makes its point quietly: good technology conversations are about invention, but also about judgment, memory, and consequence. Anil Dash changes the temperature. Introduced as a software engineer, entrepreneur, activist, and writer, he brings ethics back to the training of technologists. The concern is blunt. Computer science programs often leave ethics out, even while they prepare people to build powerful tools. AI makes that gap harder to ignore. The cold open imagines more specialized artificial intelligences, each built for different tasks with different stakes. Millman keeps the tone steady. She is not chasing panic or novelty. She keeps asking how tools, choices, and habits enter a life, then a culture. The ending returns to the show's first promise: talking about making a difference, making one, or trying both.

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