Start here: the essential design talks

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address is built on three personal stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It is a general talk on following what you love, not a talk about design.

Kirby Ferguson's video series argues that creative work is built by copying, transforming and combining existing ideas, with examples from music, film and technology. It also criticizes how copyright and patent law treat that process.

Powers of Ten is the 1977 short film by Charles and Ray Eames, made with physicist Philip Morrison. It starts on a picnic blanket, zooms out by a factor of ten every few seconds to the edge of the known universe, then zooms back in to the scale of a proton. It runs about nine minutes.

Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy, explains how the aluminum beverage can is designed and manufactured. He walks through the forming process, the necked-in top, and the pull tab that opens a pressurized can.

Tom Scott walks through the design of the British plug and socket, such as the built-in fuse, the shuttered socket and the insulated pins. He argues that these choices make it safer than other national plug designs.

Bret Victor's talk argues that creators need an immediate connection to what they are creating. He demonstrates tools where code, animation and drawings respond live as you change them, then turns to the idea of living by a guiding principle.

Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho take a plain game prototype and add small effects one at a time, such as tweening, particles, screen shake and sound. The talk shows how much feel and fun come from this kind of feedback and polish.

Hans Rosling, the Swedish physician and statistician, uses animated charts from Gapminder to show how health and wealth have changed around the world. He uses the data to take apart the idea of a divide between developed and developing countries.

Composer and designer Tantacrul, who later led design for MuseScore, takes apart the user interface of Avid's Sibelius music notation software. He walks through specific screens and workflows to show where it breaks basic UI and UX principles.

Not Just Bikes explains the stroad, the road and street hybrid common in North America: wide, fast arterials lined with driveways and businesses. The video argues that stroads are dangerous, costly to maintain and bad for the businesses on them compared with real streets and real roads.

The first of six episodes of Stewart Brand's BBC series How Buildings Learn, based on his book, titled Flow. Brand looks at how buildings change over time as people use and adapt them, and at how architects and the way buildings are built often ignore that.

Christopher Alexander's 1996 talk on patterns in architecture, given to a software audience at an ACM event. He discusses his pattern work and his move toward more fundamental, intrinsic ideas about what makes a place feel alive.

Posy goes through the history of mouse cursors, from early designs to the Mac and Windows pointers, and the problems with some of the standard ones. He then explains why he drew his own cursor set and shows how it fixes them.

Douglas Engelbart's 1968 live demonstration of the oNLine System (NLS) at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. It shows the mouse, windows, hypertext links, shared-screen collaboration, outlining and video conferencing, all framed as tools to augment human intellect.

Steve Jobs's full Macworld 2007 keynote introducing the first iPhone, running about 80 minutes. It shows the multitouch interface live, with scrolling, pinch to zoom and visual voicemail, and frames the phone as three devices in one.

Mike Monteiro's CreativeMornings talk is a blunt, funny lecture for designers on contracts and getting paid. He explains why every job needs a written contract, with a lawyer's help, and how to deal with clients who stall on payment.