DesignThinkers Podcast

Nikki Gonnissen is co-founder and Creative Director of Thonik, the Amsterdam design studio she started with her partner Thomas Widdershoven in 1993. That’s the same year they met in Vondelpark, when Thomas spotted her eating ice cream with friends and followed her until she stopped to talk. What began as two solo practices under the clunky name "Gonnissen and Widdershoven" eventually became Thonik. A name built from their two first names: Thomas and Nikki. Thirty-three years later, they're still creative and life partners, running a studio that's stayed intentionally close to the same size, around 15 people, because, as Nikki puts it, grow too far past that and the work starts to slip through your fingers.
In this conversation, Nikki walks through two recent identity projects that show just how differently "moving people" can look in practice: a bright, kinetic identity for the Phion Symphony Orchestra, where the typeface bends and slants like a conductor's baton, and a complete overhaul of Schiphol Airport's identity, where the job was actually a practical one of stripping away visual noise and inconsistency until travelers could simply find their way. From there, the conversation turns to the argument at the center of Nikki's DesignThinkers talk: that as AI makes the world faster and more efficient, staying close (to yourself, to the people you design for, to what actually resonates) becomes increasingly more important.
This episode is for designers thinking about what to protect as their tools get speedier, for anyone building a studio and thinking about their philosophy, and for listeners who believe the most human parts of design are also the most valuable.
Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Erika Barbieri is the co-founder and creative director of OlssønBarbieri, a design studio in Oslo. The studio's ethos is built almost entirely around one idea: that packaging can be a portal into much bigger conversations about food. She and her partner Henrik met in design school in Florence, moved to Oslo in 2005, and spent years finding their footing before officially committing to the studio in 2012.
In this episode, Erika talks about how for her, good packaging design lives at the intersection of economic interest, cultural and social expression, ecological complexity, and aesthetics. That balance shows up in how the studio works, too. They’re as equally committed to research and storytelling as they are to creating beauty in the world. We talk about their work on Varus 775, a spirits package that was named Best in Show at the 2026 Dieline Awards, their work on Steroescope Coffee, an early wine project and her upcoming DesignThinkers talk. 
This episode is for designers who want packaging that does more than sit on a shelf, for anyone curious about the research that hides behind a beautiful work, and for the food lovers who've always suspected that there's some overlap between what tastes good and what looks good.
Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts, the founder of the social strategy agency Warm Robots, and the Huffington Post once called her the "Oprah of LinkedIn." She built that reputation kind of by accident. She started posting a daily video on LinkedIn as a way to push her introverted self to speak on camera. She then went on to post 800 consecutive daily videos between 2017 and 2019, long before AI made that kind of output easy.
In this conversation, Goldie takes us back to her biology degree from Stanford, a failed fashion brand, and an intervention from her friends that nudged her out of a depression and into a marketing job that shifted her focus. From there we get into the real substance of her work: the five C's of personal branding, why she thinks the stereotype that introverts are quiet is a myth, how she protects her energy, and the surprisingly playful daydreaming exercise she uses to help people figure out what they actually want. We also get into her side hustles, which includes producing films and writing Archie Comics, and a candid conversation about why she chose to share her cancer journey publicly.
This episode is for anyone building their personal brand or working in branding. It’s also for the introverts in the room who feel like the current playbook wasn't written for them.
Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Five years ago, Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong started a design studio because a friend joked that they should—and because Gabby was, by her own admission, extremely burnt out and looking for a way out of her work situation. Those aren't good reasons to start a company, and yet SUPER KEEN is succeeding by most metrics. They complete 20 to 35 projects a year, have found a work-life balance that works for them, and have built a reputation for delivering solid design and strategy work.  
In this conversation, Gabby and Lauren walk me through the studio's early years. It was reactive, maybe a little chaotic, and included a website that instead of showing work, redirected prospective clients to a video of Tom Holland lip-syncing. They talk candidly about why they've kept Super Keen small despite pressure to grow, why they've published their studio's financials publicly every year, and how they're thinking about success.
This episode is for anyone questioning whether bigger is actually better. It’s for anyone feeling the pressure to scale—or to do things the way they’ve always been done. 
Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Valentina D'Efilippo is equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. That tension has shaped nearly two decades of work translating dense, unwieldy datasets into visual stories: flowers standing in for a century of wars, a dandelion holding the shape of the #MeToo movement on Twitter.
A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a profession—pairing her with data journalist James Ball on The Infographic History of the World, a book that's since sold in eleven languages and launched the career she now runs through her studio, Apostrophe One.
In this conversation, Valentina traces her path back to a graduate thesis on gender stereotypes in children's books. It was her first real data project, before she had a name for what she was doing. We talk about the responsibility of deciding what a dataset reveals and what it hides, and why she reaches for beauty and visual metaphor even when the numbers are devastating. She also opens up about revisiting her 2014 project Poppy Field last year: an analog visualization where each hand-painted mark represents a single Palestinian death, made largely in silence over sixteen hours and shared on Instagram. 
This episode is for designers, journalists, and anyone who's ever had to decide how to represent a data set—and felt the weight of that choice.
Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.