The Design Of: Ten Years of Listening

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser

Listening is an act of respect. It says this matters. It says slow down. It says there’s something here worth understanding.

Ten years ago, Design Of began as a way to practice that kind of listening. Not to build a platform, but to create space. To sit with people long enough for something real to surface. We weren’t as interested in what people made as we were in what shaped them. The work mattered, but so did the moments, choices, and tensions that formed the person doing it. That curiosity has carried the show for a decade.

Why Story Has Always Been at the Center

Story isn’t decoration. It’s how humans make sense of complexity. Long before brands or business language, story helped us remember, belong, and move forward when certainty wasn’t available. Over ten years of conversations, that truth keeps repeating itself. The stories that matter most aren’t polished. They’re honest. They include doubt, missteps, and clarity that arrives later than expected. Those are the stories that actually help people move.

What Listening Reveals Over Time

Listening closely teaches you things you don’t learn any other way. Patterns start to appear. Growth often comes from discomfort, not confidence. Clarity usually comes from subtraction, not addition. Leadership reveals itself less through certainty and more through responsibility. Story isn’t something people tell once they’ve figured everything out. It’s how they navigate while they’re still in the middle. That insight has shaped every season of Design Of.

A Show That Grew by Staying Human

Over time, the conversations reached more people than we ever expected. Not because they were engineered or optimized, but because they respected the listener. Today, Design Of sits in the top 5% of podcasts globally. Not as a badge to chase, but as a signal. There is still room for thoughtful, long-form conversation. There is still an appetite for depth.

Why Season 10 Stood Out

Season 10 arrived during a period of real change. Work is evolving. Roles are shifting. Old playbooks are giving way to new questions. Instead of resisting that tension, the season leaned into it with curiosity and hope. Getting unstuck wasn’t framed as pushing harder, but as learning to see differently. Clarity came through restraint rather than noise. Joy showed up as a deliberate and powerful choice. Leadership was reimagined as presence and care. Even conversations about AI focused less on hype and more on agency, on how creativity expands when guided by human values.

Season 10 didn’t try to simplify the world. It reminded us that we are capable of navigating it.

Looking Ahead to Season 11

Ten years of listening has made a few things clear. Listening itself is a form of leadership. Story creates alignment before it creates attention. And beauty, empathy, and joy are not soft ideas. They are essential ones. When people are given space to speak honestly, they usually rise to it.

If you’re someone who believes good work starts with better questions, you’ll feel at home here.

Season 11 grows from that foundation. The questions aren’t getting easier, but they are getting truer. Ten years in, Design Of still exists for the same reason it always has. To slow the conversation down. To honor story as something that shapes who we become.

The same approach that shapes The Design Of also shapes our work at Rule29. We start by listening.

Season 11 is coming. And the conversation continues.