Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Milman from Design Observer.com.

On this program, Debbie Milman talks with Maggie McNabb

about what designers can take from nature and what they can give back.

We've got this opportunity to make real in the world what we see our world being.

And design is like a step towards that because that's really the act of

imagining creating visioning and putting it into the world is a real thing.

Here's Debbie Millman. The exact moment when Maggie McNabb fell in love with nature is not certain.

Maybe it was on horseback somewhere in her home state of New Mexico.

Maybe it was when she was nine years old looking into a

microscope. But whenever it was, the love was for real and for keeps.

In 1981 Maggie opened McNabb design and began creating symbols, visual metaphors and conceptual

design for a wide range of clientele. Her designs use nature's ways of communicating

straight to our animal selves. And now, with her two books, Decoding Design and design by nature, she's helping the rest of us to do the same.

Maggie McNabb, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you Debbie. It's great to be here.

So Maggie, is it true that when you were 18 years old, you pasted up a 300-plus page book by hand

titled The Improable Rise of Redneck Rock.

True.

That is true, except I think I was probably 17.

Okay.

And I was traversing, you know, two technologies, the industrial age going into the information age, which evolved into the digital.

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