Journal 11 // Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman the President of the design division at Sterling Brands, an international design consultancy. She has been there for fourteen years and in that time she has worked on the redesign of global brands for Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Campbell’s, Colgate, Hershey and Hasbro. Debbie is President of the AIGA, the professional association for design. She is a contributing editor at Print Magazine and the chair of the new Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts. In 2005, she began hosting “Design Matters with Debbie Millman,” the first weekly radio talk show about design on the Internet.

Design Matters is a opinionated and provocative internet talk radio show. The show combines a point of view about graphic design, branding and cultural anthropology. In a business world dependent on change, design is one of the few differentiators left. VoiceAmerica is now the industry leader in Internet talk radio, and Design Matters has over 150,000 listeners.

I listened to the radio show with Jonah Lehrer. The theme of this talk was really about our memories. Millman started by talking about being asked to try and remember her first memory. Once Lehrer got onto the show he made an interesting point about how our memories are things that had to biggest impact on us and what affected us the most. We "tweak" our memories to fundamentally change it. Lehrur studied Neuroscience and he talked about what drew him to the subject and how he was always interested in studying the brain and mind. He wrote in his book as the moral, "We are made of art and science." This is a very interesting view point; the book is about designers who embrace neuroscience.

I think this goes to show how broad design is and how it really has an impact in any field; whether neuroscience or graphic design. This is also shown with Lehrer himself. He studied neuroscience at Colombia and is now the editor at large for Seed Magazine (this incorporates the science and design, "art and science"). It also shows that maybe people aren't just a left brain/right brain person.

Neuromarketing was also brought up, in addition to neuroeconomist. They focus on brain research and testing. They discuss how different parts of the brain affect people. There was an interesting topic brought up about people drinking expensive wine compared to cheap wine. Scientists monitored brain activity and found that people that thought they were drinking more expensive wine enjoyed it more than people who thought they were drinking cheap wine. They have done similar testing with coke and pepsi.


What I got from this talk can be summed up with this quote from Lehrer:
"Collaboration at unexpected places."