Our guest is Hannah Cormier, a visual and digital experience designer at One Design in Chicago.

In this episode, Hannah speaks with host Christian Solorzano about a design origin story rooted in curiosity, sensory processing disorder, and early web culture. Adopted from China and raised by musician parents in rural Illinois, Hannah shares how the way her brain processes physical and digital environments became the foundation of her approach to systems-focused design.

Hannah traces her path from a middle school design tech class to building and selling virtual goods on IMVU, freelancing in high school, and eventually finding her home at a Chicago design agency. She talks about what drew her to web and product design, what it means to design experiences that compassionately address the end user, and the value of getting comfortable with endless iteration and troubleshooting.

The conversation also explores the future of interfaces — where invisible design works, where it breaks down, and why the threshold between invisibility and control is one of the most interesting problems in design today.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.

Our guest is ⁠Eric Hotchkiss⁠, an interdisciplinary designer, engineer, and educator based in Chicago, and the founder of ⁠Made in Englewood⁠ — a design-build practice grounded in the belief that communities should shape their own spaces and tell their own stories.

In this episode, Eric speaks with host ⁠Christian Solorzano⁠ about growing up in Englewood, where he and his friends made go-karts from garbage can axles, built clubhouses from construction site scraps, and figured out how to make nearly everything they needed. He reflects on how that upbringing — and a father who taught him to make things with his hands — quietly became the foundation for his entire practice.

Eric talks about the origins of Made in Englewood, why he almost didn’t name it that, and what it really means to design with a community rather than for one. He shares how artifacts — murals, installations, basketball backboards nailed into alley walls — carry the stories of neighborhoods that history might otherwise overlook, and why that idea drives everything he makes.

The conversation covers his work designing a youth-led miniature golf course in North Lawndale, his ongoing community work on Chicago’s South Side, and what’s coming next — an Afro-diasporic outdoor kitchen and gathering space he’s building in Englewood. Eric also opens up about what makes him angry, what inspires him, and why he thinks this moment — as uncertain as it is — might be exactly the right time to be making things.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.

Our guest is Nika Simovich Fisher, a writer, designer, and educator based in New York City. A tenure-track Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design, Nika directs the AAS program and researches how design shapes what people believe — politically, spiritually, culturally, and about themselves. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, Fast Company, and AIGA Eye on Design, and she is the founder of Labud, a design studio working across fashion, publishing, and technology.

In this episode, Nika speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her journey from publishing fiction on Neopets as a child to studying journalism at Columbia and building a practice that lives at the intersection of writing, design, and education. She shares how her research brings overlooked histories of the internet into contemporary conversations about technology, and why she believes the way things look is never just aesthetic — it's always political, always cultural, always telling you something about power.

The conversation explores the early web as a space of genuine self-expression, what gets lost when platforms replace personal homepages, and how vernacular design — from MySpace customization to Trump's political merchandise — reveals more about culture than polished professional work ever could. Nika also speaks candidly about her daily writing practice, her Serbian immigrant identity, and the studio name that connects everything.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.