Jessica Helfand, Author of "Design: The Invention of Desire"

Jessica Helfand resists taking center stage. If anything, she wants to give her place in spotlight to the audience. An author and Yale professor and co-founder of *Design Observer*, Helfand thinks that the time has come to stop gawking at the stars pontificating the podium and instead start conversations—meaningful ones—with each other. To this end, she recently prototyped something she calls The Next Stage, in our Boston studio. And the moment that experiment ended, our Lee Moreau jogged her over to a conference room to record a podcast reflecting on the experience. Listen closely, and you’ll hear her say some bright, provocative, and deeply humane things, such as: • “Performance is fine if it’s theatre. Performance is fine if it’s sports. But why does performance have to happen in social engagement, in personal interaction?” • “Even failure has become a buzzword. Failure ™.” • “I love podcasting because just as I loved like this conversation this morning because, the minute you put other people in the mix, the vocabulary changes, and you get much more of a rich soup. There’s more flavors.” • “The whole point is to spawn better, easier, more mindful, more consistent, more connected ideas in the world. That’s civilization in progress.” • “Viral is not a word that’s good if you’re an epidemiologist or an immunologist.” • “Designers are really good at making stuff look cool. At making stuff look shiny. And I don’t think that the world is a shiny place. And so, we would be doing ourselves and each other a disservice if we didn’t ask some ruthlessly objective questions about what that means.” • “Why are we autodidacts in terms of technology and not of philosophy or ideas?” • “I write to figure out what I can’t make in the studio. And I make things to figure out what I can’t write. And I teach to keep myself inspired by the ideas of others—and it’s just not enough to do it in the classroom.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon