Designing with Love

Designing with Love is a warm, work-focused show for people building learning experiences in schools, companies, and consulting settings. It speaks directly to instructional designers and educators, but its best material is useful to anyone who has to turn expertise into usable instruction. The show is patient. Episodes often linger on the messy middle of the work: scoping a request, choosing a modality, collaborating with SMEs, revising curriculum, reading the signals inside a job posting, or deciding what belongs in a portfolio. Recent interviews show a strong interest in career transitions, especially the move from classroom teaching into corporate learning and development. Jessica Smith’s episode grounds that shift in secondary Spanish teaching, higher ed curriculum design, and e-learning work at ADP. The conversation is not abstract career branding. It gets into how large organizations plan projects, why performance support can sometimes be easier to update than a full module, and how designers learn from the background information they receive. A solo career episode uses a GPS-style frame to help designers understand industry fit. That episode points people toward pace, people, and process rather than title-chasing. It also emphasizes a bridge portfolio that shows how a designer thinks, not just what they made. Other episodes widen the frame. James Gilchrist talks about leadership, obstacles, and the value of asking teams what is getting in their way. Russell Van Brocklin’s dyslexia conversation gets more granular, focusing on repeated writing practice, cognitive load, student frustration, and practical consistency around rules like comma usage. T. Renee Smith brings AI into the classroom and curriculum conversation, especially around identifying skill gaps and customizing learning paths. Across these topics, the show keeps returning to the same ethic: tools matter, but learners and workers come first. It is not a debate show. The momentum comes from agreement, clarification, and turning someone’s experience into a usable takeaway. The pacing can be roomy, with acknowledgments, recaps, and personal asides. That looseness is part of its character. Designing with Love feels like a colleague making space for the questions people are already asking quietly at work.