Designing What Matters: How Creativity Shapes a Life

Exclusive to Vivid Sydney, American designer Debbie Millman unpacks the life-shifting insights into creativity, success and connection she’s unearthed across her career and with Design Matters – one of the most acclaimed, longest-running podcasts in the world.

With an inspiring keynote at the State Library of NSW, Millman will explore how design shapes our world, from everyday innovations to the profound ways we see, understand and connect to one another and ourselves.

Considered “one of the most creative people in business” (Fast Company), Millman is an acclaimed designer, best-selling author, educator, curator, and a pioneer of podcasting, with the multi-award-winning Design Matters debuting in 2005.

Over the last two decades, Millman has interviewed more than 700 of the world’s most creative and influential people, sharing in-depth, remarkably honest conversations about the pivotal choices, challenges and moments in the lives of guests such as Marina Abramovic, Gloria Steinem and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

At its core, Design Matters explores how inspirational figures have designed their lives, centred what matters most, and navigated the natural conflicts that come while in pursuit of art, knowledge, family, connection, justice, innovation and beauty.

Offering inspiration and insight, Millman’s keynote will thread together revelations from decades of illuminating conversations, as well as lessons learned during her remarkable career – including recently finding inspiration outside of work, as explored in most recent book Love Letter to a Garden.

This event is presented in partnership with State Library of New South Wales.