Where What If Becomes What's Next

The Shape of Everyday Life: How Carnegie Mellon Revolutionized Industrial Design

What if the objects around you weren't just built, but carefully designed to shape how you live?  In this episode, we trace the origins of industrial design from Pittsburgh's factory floors to the iconic products defining modern life — and explore how Carnegie Mellon University – and its faculty and alumni – have been at the center of it all. In 1934, Carnegie Tech launched the first degree-granting program in industrial design in the United States — sparked by a student petition. That revolutionary curriculum, grounded in real manufacturing visits and human-centered thinking, would shape generations of designers and transform everyday objects from clunky contraptions into intuitive, beautiful tools. We're joined by Rachel Delphia, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art and CMU alum, who walks us through the program's beginnings, the remarkable legacy of silversmith-turned-designer and CMU professor Peter Muller-Munk, the story of Maude Bowers — the program's very first graduate — and the design thinking behind icons such as the revolutionary cordless Black & Decker Dustbuster, also created by a CMU alum. Then, CMU alum and founder of Bould Design, Fred Bould, joins to discuss how CMU's design philosophy shaped his work on the Nest Thermostat and dozens of other products ranging from the GoPro Camera to a wearable breast pump to a humane chicken coop. He also shares his vision for where AI and sustainability are taking the field over the next decade. Good design, it turns out, doesn't just make things look better — it makes life work better for the consumer – and for humanity.  Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  For more, info visit: cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast [http://cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast]. Explore more * Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk [https://carnegieart.org/exhibition/silver-to-steel-the-modern-designs-of-peter-muller-munk/] * Bould Design [https://www.bould.com/] * The Normandie Water Pitcher [https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/485316] * The Nest Thermostat Origin Story - WWIBWN Episode #4 [https://www.cmu.edu/whats-next-podcast/all-episodes/s3-episode-3-designing-planet-clever-thermostat-and-odorless-food]

Making Machines Make Music

What happens when a computer scientist is also a trumpet player?  Meet Roger Dannenberg — CMU professor, pioneer of computer music, and co-creator of Audacity — one of the most widely used free audio editing tools in the world.  In this episode, drawing from CMU’s Oral History Archives, Roger reflects on a career spent bridging two worlds. From building a custom computer in 1984 to accompany live musicians in real time, to developing Nyquist, a programming language built just for music, to developing one of the most popular programs for teaching music to students, Roger’s work has redefined how computers play with and play music. He also shares the unexpected origin story of Audacity, born not from a product vision, but from a research project on "query by humming."  And he reveals how early gesture research in his CMU lab — including pinch-to-zoom — foreshadowed the touchscreen interactions we use every day.  Roger also looks ahead, imagining a future where AI becomes a true musical collaborator, as he acknowledges how far computers still have to go in understanding the importance of rhythm, anticipation and surprise in music. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  For more, info visit: cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast [http://cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast].

Designing for the Planet: The Clever Thermostat and the Odorless Food Recycler

What if the secret to saving the planet was hiding in your hallway and under your kitchen sink?  Matt Rogers, Carnegie Mellon University electrical and computer engineering alumnus, joins us to trace a remarkable career path — from engineering iPods and iPhones at Apple to co-founding Nest, the learning thermostat now in millions of homes, to his current venture Mill, a food waste technology company. Matt shares how his CMU robotics training shaped his instinct for systems thinking, and how working alongside Tony Fadell at Apple taught him the power of focus and user-centric design. He explains how Nest's learning thermostat has saved more than 100 billion kilowatt hours of energy worldwide — and how the same design philosophy (make the right choice, the easy choice) now drives Mill's odorless, AI-powered trash can that dehydrates food waste overnight and turns it into “rocket fuel” for the garden and the food chain (including backyard chickens).  Matt makes the case that profitability and planetary impact aren't just compatible — they need to be inseparable.  Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  For more, info visit: cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast [http://cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast].

Watching the Universe Change: A New Era in Astronomy Begins

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is now operational, and humanity's view of the universe will never be the same.   In this episode, we return to Carnegie Mellon University’s Rachel Mandelbaum, professor and head of the physics department – and a key architect of the observatory's data infrastructure — to hear what's happened since the revolutionary telescope first opened its eye to the sky. Mandelbaum walks us through the observatory's first scientific data release, the launch of its public alert system, and the successful measurement of gravitational lensing using early commissioning data. She explains how CMU and the LINCC Frameworks team are building the software tools that will allow scientists worldwide to make sense of up to 10 million nightly cosmic alerts. And we discuss the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the observatory’s decade-long mission to track 40 billion celestial objects that will essentially create a 10-year movie of our universe. In this episode, you’ll learn: How the Rubin Observatory acts as a time machine for light from billions of years ago; the role of "alert brokers" in processing the 10 million nightly cosmic events the Observatory will track; and why understanding dark energy could be as transformative as the discovery of quantum mechanics. Resources Learn more about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory [https://rubinobservatory.org/]

The Birth of the Hashtag: How a Simple Symbol Changed the World

In 2007, an unused key on the phone keypad became the internet's most powerful organizing tool. In this episode, we sit down with Chris Messina, the Carnegie Mellon University alumnus who invented the hashtag – now used more than three billion times a day – and famously gave it away for free. Messina shares the fascinating journey of the hashtag, from its roots in early "nerd centers" like his BarCamp meetup to its rejection by Twitter’s founders as "too nerdy." You’ll hear how a 2007 wildfire in San Diego turned the symbol into a life-saving tool for citizen journalism, ultimately forcing tech giants to embrace it. The conversation explores the hashtag's evolution from a simple metadata tag to a catalyst for global social movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Messina reflects on his principled decision to forego intellectual property rights, ensuring the hashtag remained free for the world to use. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  For more, info visit: cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast.