Clever with Amy Devers

Clever with Amy Devers is an interview-driven design show with a wide definition of what design can hold. It moves beyond finished rooms and polished objects. Recent conversations treat craft, architecture, costume, public art, climate knowledge, spatial justice, and investigative storytelling as different ways of shaping how people live together. The show is patient. It gives ideas time to gather force. A conversation with Alyssa Velasquez frames craft as community action, with collectives and archives using making to build skills, visibility, and opportunity. Julia Watson brings design into contact with Indigenous knowledge systems and climate-adaptive technologies, asking listeners to reconsider what counts as innovation. Liz Ogbu connects spatial practice to grief, dignity, informality, and communities affected by harm. Dennis Maher turns architecture into layered contact with time, preservation, imagination, and embodied experience. Debra L. Scott’s work on film costumes shows craft meeting digital production at immense scale. Michael Townsend’s story of the Secret Mall Apartment brings public art, trust, gentrification, and strategic creative agency into the frame. Stephanie Tinsley’s episode stretches the show’s borders again, following a personal collision with a murder trial into podcasting, courage, and investigative care. Across these subjects, Clever keeps returning to the same larger question: what does creative work make possible for people? The tone is warm but not soft. It values candor, process, and the moral texture of decisions. The interviews often begin with biography, then widen into culture, community, and consequence. That structure gives the show a cumulative feeling, as if each guest is adding another layer to an ongoing argument about design’s role in public life. Clever is especially strong when a guest’s practice sits between disciplines. It listens for the hidden labor inside visible work. It notices the systems around an object, the community around a building, and the story behind a method. For PlayNext listeners, it offers design as a living field of care, risk, preservation, and invention.