The pioneering podcaster, graphic designer, educator and author is coming to Vivid Sydney in June for an exclusive keynote, imparting wisdom gleaned from decades in practice and more than 700 conversations with creatives.

Debbie Millman has breathed deeply with Marina Abramović, discussed humanity with Gloria Steinem, and once had a heated argument with Richard Saul Wurman (in a recording her producer wanted to cut short). She interviewed Bill Moggridge, who helped design the first laptop, shortly before he died, and sat down with The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman to talk about architecture.

Typographers, theatre designers, musicians, actors, athletes, activists, scientists, philosophers, poets and more have graced Millman’s podcast studio in New York, sharing the ways they’ve designed the trajectories of their lives. In her 20 years hosting Design Matters, she has had enviable access to genius, asking deeply researched questions informed by her own understanding as a creative multi-hyphenate.

The many talents of Debbie Millman

Before launching Design Matters, Millman was president of global consultancy Sterling Brands for two decades. Her career feats include redesigning the Burger King logo, developing the brand identity for Planned Parenthood of New York and co-founding the world’s first graduate program in branding. She also currently serves on Canva’s design advisory board.

A prolific writer and illustrator, Millman has penned eight books. She serves as editorial director of printmag.com and co-publishes literary and cultural magazine The Rumpus with her wife, bestselling author Roxane Gay.

Millman has ridden the waves of industry evolution and she’s coming to Sydney to talk about it. Her one-night-only keynote, ‘Designing What Matters: How Creativity Shapes a Life’, will take place on 11 June as part of the Vivid Minds program. Set to cover the state of design and touch on artificial intelligence, Millman’s presentation is primarily about change.

“I’m going to talk a little bit about the historic arc of change in our species and how we’ve always, it seems, had a lot of trepidation and push back to any big technological change, both high-tech and low-tech,” she says.

Millman highlights early opposition to the written word, something Socrates and Plato thought threatened human memory. She’s researching similar responses to print, radio, television and photography.

Does AI pose a threat to creativity?

Despite being one of the world’s first podcasters, Millman doesn’t consider herself the type who readily embraces technological disruption to traditional mediums. “I have old phones [and] old computers,” she says, adding that Design Matters began “purely by accident”. 

“I was in a particularly deep creative rut at the time and was offered an opportunity to host an online radio show, which I had no knowledge of how to do, but thought it would give me a creative spark, which it did,” she says.

Millman’s feelings about AI are complex and can be broken up into two camps: personal and professional.

“Personal feelings, I think if you’re of a certain age and have a certain level of expertise in making things, then AI can be a good way of conducting research and creating some shortcuts,” Millman says. “But if you’re not somebody that has a lot of experience making, writing or crafting things, then AI could be a path of least resistance and, as a result, the least creative way of making.”

Developments in science, health and maths excite her, but Millman is less moved by AI’s potential for creativity. She’s sceptical about current prophecies of job losses in these fields. 

“This is like the fourth or the fifth time since I’ve been alive where I’ve heard a prediction about some technology or some site ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of designers – that has yet to happen,” she says. “I heard it in the ’80s when we were working on drafting cables; I heard it in the ’90s when everything went to the web; I heard it when Fiverr came out, 99designs came out – over and over and over again: ‘Designers are doomed.’ It hasn’t happened yet. 

“What is doomed are the minds of students who are relying on AI because they don’t know any better, because they haven’t made enough original things yet and they don’t know what it takes to make something original.”

On this point, she becomes particularly passionate: “My wife is one of the foremost intellectual critics of our time. She teaches a creative writing class at Rutgers University, which is a good school. And she has students submit ‘creative writing’ that’s created by AI. That’s not creative writing. That’s creative debauchery.”

On one hand, Millman proposes age limits on AI use; on the other, she says designers can’t afford to reject AI if they want to stay relevant and capable. Trained on a drafting table and part of the first generation of designers to grasp digital tools, she has only felt at a disadvantage when she hasn’t learned something. “When any discipline is facing technological disruption, the onus is on the designer to learn those skills,” she says.

The lessons that bring comfort

First-hand experience and a vast archive of Design Matters interviews have enabled Millman to distil reassuring insights about creativity, which bring comfort in an uncertain time that she admits “feels different”.

Among them: “That creativity always comes with longing. That people always want to be making something new. They’re always doubting what they’ve made,” she says. “I’ve learned just how human the creative experience actually is, which is why I feel that much more adamant about the use of AI in making things.”

Millman hopes architects and designers will come away from her keynote understanding that change is inevitable.

“Because we don’t know where AI is going, because we don’t know what the future holds, we’re always going to approach it with a sense of vulnerability,” she says. “That’s inevitable. We have to move forward anyway. It’s not really a matter of feeling confident about the future; it’s about feeling courageous about the future.”

Event details and tickets

‘Designing What Matters: How Creativity Shapes a Life‘, featuring Debbie Millman, will take place at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, on Thursday 11 June 2026. Buy tickets here.

Photography supplied by Destination NSW.