"Design Downtime" celebrates the joys of living a balanced creative life outside the pixels and wireframes.
Join your host, Guy Segal, a design director, on this journey to redefine what it means to be a successful design professional, as each episode features a conversation with a talented design expert, delving into the world beyond their design screens and uncovering the passions that fuel their imagination.
We invite you to break free from the shackles of hustle culture and embrace the full spectrum of human experience – because life is too precious to be spent only in pursuit of productivity.
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 (http://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 (https://www.das.house)
Dave’s VW on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calliethevwcamper (https://www.instagram.com/calliethevwcamper)
Credits
Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.
1 Oct 2026
Araxie Miller Loves JRPGs
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/ (https://www.araxiemiller.com/)
Araxie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/araxiemiller (https://www.linkedin.com/in/araxiemiller)
Credits
Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.
24 Sept 2026
Stephanie Tuerk Loves Learning Languages
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/ (https://stephanietuerk.net/)
Stephanie on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/stephanietuerk.net (https://bsky.app/profile/stephanietuerk.net)
Credits
Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.
Who has been a guest on Design Downtime
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Erika Hall
Dominika Noworolska
Ryan Rumsey
Homer Gaines
Stéphanie Walter
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
5 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
17 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 29 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
30
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
71
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Guest appearances
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