Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

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

On this program, Debbie Millman talks with the superstar blogger Maria Popova

about growing up in Bulgaria, about what she calls

combinatorial creativity, and about what it means to be a curator of information.

Organizing is a form of design, that I think, quote-unquote, curation is really about creating a framework for what matters

and why.

Here's Debbie Millman. Maria Popova sorts through the amazingness of the Internet and gathers it all on a happy yellow

site called brain pickings. The site and the Twitter feed and the newsletter entices with titles such as 2,000 panels of cartographic imagination,

the cult of Lego, and 25 Saul Bass title sequences in 100 seconds.

Dig in a bit and you'll find a neuron firing, hyper-linking, wildly creative web for the curious mind.

Popova admits that she spends far too much time curating interestingness, and we're going to talk about that on today's show.

Maria Popova, welcome to Design Matters.

Thanks Debbie, thanks for having me.

So I understand you have a massive culture crush on Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern

Art in New York.

That is true.

I don't remember when I wrote that, but in the time since,

Powell and I have actually become friends and spend time together and she is a brilliant, brilliant mind.

But what I like the most about how she thinks about design and culture is that she gives this metaphor of the curious octopus, this sort of single brain that has its tentacles in an

infinite number of disciplines and fields of interest. And that's how I've always sort of

...