NeoConversations Podcast

NeoConversations takes you inside the heart of NeoCon, the premier platform for the commercial interior design industry.

Each month, we extend the conversations beyond the show floor, bringing you the ideas, perspectives, and voices shaping our industry year-round.

From emerging insights to established leaders, this is where the NeoCon community continues to learn, connect, and evolve.

NeoConversations is proudly sponsored by IDCEC, supporting continuing education for the design community.

Episodes

Innovation as a Practice: Jessica O. Matthews on Building Ideas into Impact

What if innovation isn’t a moment of breakthrough but a practice shaped by community, lived experience, and responsibility?

In this episode of NeoConversations, Jessica O. Matthews offers a powerful reframing of innovation not as an individual act, but as a collective one.

Drawing from her experience building ideas into real-world impact, Jessica introduces her approach to innovation through a pattern-based framework, one that challenges how we identify opportunity, assess risk, and move from concept to execution.

Rather than offering a formula, she invites listeners into a way of thinking, one grounded in discipline, context, and the belief that the most meaningful ideas are shaped in relationship to the communities they serve.

She closes with a clear call to action, urging designers and leaders to rethink not just what they build but how and for whom they build it.

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What happens when curation becomes the point of view?

On this episode of NeoConversations, host Nubia Henderson sits down with Chris Force of Sixtysix Magazine to discuss Paved States, the exhibition presented with Haworth and co-curated alongside Patricia Urquiola.

Together, they explore the evolving relationship between design, culture, publishing, and experimentation through the lens of emerging designers working beyond traditional industry constraints. The conversation also examines how blurred boundaries between living and working are influencing new approaches to materials, storytelling and creative practice.

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On this episode of NeoConversations, host Nubia Henderson sits down with futures designer, author and Royal Designer of Industry Nick Foster RDI to explore how designers can navigate a world increasingly shaped by AI, automation and rapid technological change.

Drawing from his book Could, Should, Might, Don’t: How We Think About the Future, Foster reflects on the cultural, ethical, and deeply human dimensions of design. From his work leading speculative projects at Google X to his belief in what he calls “the future mundane,” the conversation examines how design moves beyond artifacts and outputs to focus on process, responsibility, and the ways people experience technology in everyday life.

Together, they discuss the evolving role of craft in the age of AI, the tension between what technology can do versus what it should do, and why the future must remain grounded in humanity, reflection, and care. The episode also explores mentorship, representation, and Foster’s perspective on using design to open pathways for the next generation of creative thinkers.

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In this episode of NeoConversations, host Nubia Henderson sits down with polymath David Shing, known as Shingy, for a conversation on what it means to design for creativity in a culture shaped by constant consumption.

Recorded during NeoCon, the conversation explores how workplaces, learning environments, and digital spaces can better support active creation, human connection, and more expansive ways of thinking. From tactile tools like doodling and LEGO’s to post-COVID workplace expectations, Shingy challenges us to rethink the environments we build and ask whether they truly help people create, collaborate, and bring their full selves to work.

Episode drops July 15th.

NeoConversations Podcast

Episodes

Innovation as a Practice: Jessica O. Matthews on Building Ideas into Impact

Design as Dialogue: Chris Force on Process, Experimentation and Paved States

The Future Mundane: Nick Foster RDI on Process, AI and Designing What’s Next

Are We Designing Workplaces for Creativity or Just Attendance?