Design Downtime

You're guaranteed to catch the Love Bug, when Dave House joins us to talk about his love of old Volkswagens. He shares how owning and restoring old air-cooled VWs filled a gap left when music stopped being his primary community, and describes the VW scene as a counter-culture rather than a car hobby, one that mirrors the openness and camaraderie of punk. Dave reflects on the deep satisfaction of learning to weld and restore vehicles by hand, the meditative focus required to drive a 50-year-old machine, and his love of tracing the human histories embedded in these cars.

Guest Bio
Dave House (he/him) is a Design Systems Specialist that has spent the last decade working on Design Systems for organisations like GOV.UK, BT, Lloyds Banking Group and most recently Dentally, a management system for Dental Practices. He lives in Egham, a small town just outside of London and has played in punk adjacent bands since the late 90s - releasing multiple records and travelling the affectionately named “toilet circuit”.

Links
Dave’s website: https://www.das.house
Dave’s VW on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calliethevwcamper

Credits
Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

Get ready to be swept away to a world of magic and giant swords, when Araxie Miller joins us to talk about her love of Japanese role-playing games. She explains what sets them apart from Western RPGs: rather than asking who you want to be, they invite you into a world of existing characters, deep story arcs, and themes of friendship, sacrifice, and hope. From discovering Chrono Trigger in 1995 to playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with her husband, Araxie traces how JRPGs have been a constant companion - through childhood, career in game design, and now parenthood - with the music, art books, and stories still inspiring her creativity today.

Guest Bio
Araxie Miller (She/Her) has spent her whole career making complicated things feel human. She started out building video game worlds at Blizzard and Carbine. Back then, one small detail could change the day for millions of players. That stuck with her. She learned something early. The best work never comes from one person alone. It comes from a team that trusts each other. Today she's a designer at ServiceNow, working on AI. She's led big design teams. But she still loves cracking open the code and building something herself. She's the one who stays up too late with a prototype, just to get it right. Off the clock, she's in Boston. She's got a husband, a daughter, a dog, and a cat who run the house. And in her spare time? She forages for wild mushrooms. Then she cooks with whatever she finds.

Links
Araxie’s website: https://www.araxiemiller.com/
Araxie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/araxiemiller

Credits
Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

No need to break your Duolingo streak, when Stephanie Tuerk joins us to make a case for learning languages. She traces her journey from high school French to PhD-era German to humbling Russian, arguing that language learning is less about fluency and more about a gateway into culture, history, and a completely different relationship with your own mind. Stephanie also reflects on the rare pleasure of being a deliberate beginner, and why a language class might be one of the last great third spaces left.

Guest Bio
Stephanie Tuerk (she/her) is a designer-developer who currently works at a startup making verifiable AI for science. She previously did this work in quantitative policy research context, and loves serving as the translation layer between technical domain expertise and users. She entered the world of interface and product design through data visualization, and prior to that spent time in the fields of architectural design and architectural history.

Links
Stephanie’s website: https://stephanietuerk.net/
Stephanie on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/stephanietuerk.net

Credits
Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this episode where Andy Bell joins us to talk about his lifelong obsession with the Legend of Zelda. He explores what makes the franchise compelling: its creativity, humour, weird NPCs, and remarkable ability to stay consistent in spirit while reinventing itself across 20 games spanning 40 years. Andy also shares his self-imposed challenge of playing the entire series in timeline order, and the magical experience of introducing his daughter to the franchise and watching her fall in love with the same games that shaped him.

Guest Bio
Andy Bell (he/him) is a designer, front-end developer, design agency founder, and the founder of Piccalilli, based in the UK. He has worked in the design and web industries for over 15 years with some of the largest organisations in the world like Google, The NHS, Harley-Davidson and Oracle. Over the years he has worked on both extremely large projects for huge organisations and tiny projects for small startups. Andy mostly specialises in CSS — whether that is consultancy, writing an expansive course, co-writing a course for Google, co-authoring a book on CSS layout, or creating a methodology to help people write better CSS.

Links
Andy’s website: https://bell.bz/
Andy’s agency: https://set.studio/
The blog post that explains what he’s doing: https://bell.bz/im-playing-the-zelda-games-in-timeline-order/
Zelda timeline tracker: https://tangled.org/bell.bz/zelda-in-timeline-order/blob/main/readme.md

Credits
Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

In this episode, Lisa Carey joins us to share her decades-long appreciation for Brian Eno. She introduces us to Eno the musician, producer, visual artist, and one of the originators of systems thinking in creative work, and traces a through-line from Roxy Music to Bowie's Berlin Trilogy, and from Oblique Strategies to a generative documentary that shows differently every screening - all united by a philosophy of embracing randomness and the unexpected over rigid planning.

Guest Bio
Lisa Carey (she/her) is a Design System Lead and Product Designer with a unique, 30+ year creative career spanning film, marketing, television, and software design, and her own creative pursuits. Working in the financial sector since 2012, Lisa brings over 20 years of UX/UI experience to her work. Currently, she is focusing on systemic design, front-end development, and AI collaboration within modern design system frameworks. Previously, Lisa spent 15 years in film as a director including the film Rough Road and managing international distribution and licensing for Ken Burns and other filmmakers. Today, she brings that same passion for visual storytelling to digital product design. A practicing painter who also teaches community courses exploring music and art, Lisa anchors her multi-disciplinary work in her true passions: systemic design, creative strategy, and making unexpected connections.

Links
Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacareydesign/

Credits
Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.