Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

20th Anniversary celebration with the most memorable guests: Jason Reynolds, Marina Abramović, Chris Ware, Richard Saul Wurman, Rick Rubin, and Roxane Gay

January 19, 2026·46 min·4 clips

Jason Reynolds explains how his mother's mantra 'I can do anything' fossilized into his identity.

Twenty years become an archive. Debbie Millman uses the anniversary to revisit memorable voices and the show's steady question: how creative people become themselves. The episode takes its time. Pieces of conversation sit beside one another: language felt in the body, work trying to feel real, and the categories that shrink women. Then the room gets colder. A guest remembers a six-hour performance where she stood without will and gave the public complete freedom. What followed is hard to shake. Clothing is torn. Her body is hurt. A gun gets close enough that someone else has to step in. Debbie does not dress it up. She asks whether the guest was surprised by what people could do, and the answer lands plainly. The performance taught her that the public could kill her, while she loved life too much to kill herself. Years later, another lesson comes into focus. Give people tools that lower the spirit, and some will use them. Give them different tools, and some will help lift it. The guest connects that brutal early piece to a later work with a chair, where the spirit travels somewhere else. The anniversary frame keeps the episode from becoming a clip reel. One memory holds the bigger Design Matters preoccupation with risk, calling, and what people do in front of another person. Debbie closes by pointing to more than 700 interviews and a 21st season already underway. The refrain is simple: talking about making a difference and making one can belong to the same gesture.

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