Design Better

The Curiosity Department

Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with guests across many creative fields, helping you hone your craft, unlock your creativity, and learn the art of collaboration.

Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”

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254 episodes
Updated July 22

Episodes254

Newest first

Eric Ries: Lean Startup author on why good companies go bad, and why good design is critical to success
We chat with Eric Ries about the “harder is easier” principle through stories from Patagonia and the long-term stock exchange he built as a design challenge, and why the value a company makes comes from the design of its products. And because we couldn’t resist, we get into AI slop, LLM psychosis, and Eric’s clear, simple antidote: never ask these tools to make you an artifact — ask them to teach you how to make one yourself.
July 22 · 34 min
Ian Bogost: Game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the ordinary, on the small stuff that makes life delightful
A few years ago, Ian Bogost wrote what he thought was a throwaway Atlantic piece about how electric vehicles would finally kill the manual transmission. It went off like a bomb — and the reaction told him people weren’t mourning a car part. They were mourning the feeling of dropping a gear into place, a small moment of sensory connection quietly disappearing without anyone choosing to give it up.
July 15 · 47 min
Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens: authors of WAIL on the constraints that led to timeless designs for Prestige Records
What we love about this conversation is how much of it comes down to constraints driving creativity. Reid Miles couldn’t afford imagery, so he made typography the art. Tom Hannon had no budget for stock photography, so he shot the musicians himself. Designers got an album title and nothing else — no brief, no comp, no client approval — and turned that absence of direction into creative freedom, because Bob Weinstock simply “viewed it all as art,” the music and the covers alike.
July 1 · 24 min
Niyati Gupta: Netflix Product Design Lead on what happens when a designer becomes a product manager, and why your influence might not be in your title
We talk to Niyati Gupta what the Next Billion Users work taught her about designing for people who aren’t like you, how she thinks about influence as a designer — and why she’s convinced the title was never where the influence actually lived — and what Netflix’s design culture looks like from the inside, including how they run crits and how they think about A/B testing.
June 25 · 44 min
Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haul
We chat with Mike Schnaidt about We chat about the nuts and bolts of typography (utilitarian vs. expressive, food metaphors, Fast Company's per-issue typeface system) to the philosophy underneath it all (design as service, authorship, hospitality). We dig into his book Creative Endurance — 56 rules for sustaining a creative career drawn from athletes, astronauts, and designers — and his counterintuitive take on burnout: the cure isn't rest, it's picking up something creatively different.
June 17 · 23 min
Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note
We talk with Vestaboard CEO Dorrian Porter about what it’s like to build a hardware company through supply chain disruptions and trade wars, why Dorrian keeps betting on the consumer market when the easier path might be B2B, and how Vestaboard is finding its way into classrooms, baseball stadiums, and a bar in Northern California born out of a community recovering from wildfire.
June 11 · 39 min
Tina Roth Eisenberg: Creative Mornings founder on building communities that run on trust
Tina Roth Eisenberg shares what she’s learned about building communities that scale on trust rather than control, why she measures success in “return on friendship,” and how playful side projects increase “the surface area for luck to find you.” We also talk about commitment as a creative practice, raising creative kids, and why she believes the future isn’t lonely—it’s hyperlocal.
June 10 · 37 min
Paul Ford: Writer, developer & "fun Cassandra" on why everything is changing (but not how you think)
We chat with Paul Ford about the strange paradox of AI that makes ideation blindingly fast but leaves the hard work of product thinking as slow as it ever was, why the best thing you can bring to this moment might be taste rather than technical skill, and what it actually means to build a company around tools that didn't exist two years ago.
June 3 · 26 min
Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool
In this episode, Jessie talks about the origin of the Constitution project, what it means to fund the work you actually want to talk about, why she thinks scale and speed aren’t serving us, and why sitting down to make something with your hands — like the beaded bracelets she makes with her kids — still matters.
May 27 · 41 min
Colin Fisher: The lone genius is a myth
In this conversation with author Colin Fisher, we get into why teams are 6.3 times more likely than individuals to produce breakthrough work, why the sorting hat in Harry Potter is actually the series’ true villain, and why 84% of managers try to coach their way out of team problems when the real fix is structural. We also talk about the dangers of using competition to motivate creative teams, why the ideal team size hovers around 4.5 people, and what it would take to pull our increasingly indiv
May 20 · 33 min
Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief and how to change your mind to change your life
We talk to author Nir Eyal about why your brain actively resists changing its mind, how the placebo effect is reshaping what we know about pain and performance, and what all of this means for designers and creative thinkers navigating the uncertainty of AI. Nir also gets personal about living with ADHD and dyslexia, stage fright, and how a single reframe — not a new fact, just a new belief — changed the way he experiences all of it.
May 14 · 1 hr 7 min
Mason Currey: Mason Currey: Author of Daily Rituals on Making Art and Making a Living
Mason Currey walks us through the four funding models his book explores — family money, day jobs, patronage, and schemes — and what the lives of creatives from Kafka to Murakami can teach us about building a practice that actually lasts.
May 6 · 27 min
Etinosa Agbonlahor: Behavioral economist on why pricing belongs in the design process
Etinosa walks us through the cognitive shortcuts that shape how customers perceive value — from anchoring and the decoy effect to the surprising power of round numbers. She explains why pricing should be a conversation that starts early in product development, not an afterthought tacked on at launch. And she offers practical guidance for freelancers and studio owners who struggle with that uncomfortable moment of telling a client what they charge.
April 29 · 48 min
Paul Dichter: Stranger Things writer on why the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio
We chat with Paul Dichter about the dynamics of the Stranger Things writers’ room, exploring the diverse roles—from enthusiasts to skeptics—that drive creative teams. He explores the discipline of restraint in using 80s nostalgia and the balance between following systemic logic and knowing when to break the rules for a great idea.
April 22 · 32 min
Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot
In this conversation, we talk about why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot — and why chasing moonshots might actually be holding your team back. We dig into the neuroscience of what Tessa calls “innovation hesitation,” the tiny amygdala response that makes us reach for certainty instead of possibility.
April 16 · 46 min
Luis Mendo: Designer turned illustrator on making things that could only come from you
In a moment when so many of us are asking what creativity even means when machines can approximate it on demand, Luis Mendo has an answer: make things that carry your presence. Make things that could only come from you.
April 8 · 32 min
David Shim and Rachana Rele: Read AI CEO and VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe on amplifying creative work — not replacing it
In this conversation, we dig into some ideas that could genuinely change how you think about your work. David talks about this concept of “storage of intelligence” — the idea that your knowledge, your meeting history, your working style could all be captured and made available as a kind of digital twin that keeps working even when you’re not in the room. And Rachana shares how Adobe is thinking about AI not as a one-shot creative output machine, but as a collaborative partner that helps teams br
April 1 · 35 min
Leonardo Giusti: Archetype AI's co-founder on physical AI and the limits of the chatbot
We speak with Leonardo about what it actually means to treat emerging technology as a design material, why the chatbot is a primitive interface for the physical world, and why he believes augmenting human intelligence might be the most important design challenge of our time.
March 25 · 28 min
Brooke Hopper: Adobe's machine intelligence design lead on what AI can't touch
Brooke Hopper stays close to her craft. Before she hopped on a call with us to chat about her role at Adobe, she was deep in Cursor prototyping navigation design ideas. Though Brooke holds an individual contributor role after more than a decade at Adobe, she’s managed to have influence and demonstrate leadership without being relegated to management. This is what many designers dream of—craft and career. Bonus content and more on our Substack: ⁠https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/brooke-hopper⁠ As Senior Principal Designer for Machine Intelligence and New Technology, she helped design the very first Firefly experiments and is now working on unreleased tools that raise fundamental questions about whether things like non-destructive editing, or even layers, still mean what they once did. If you listen carefully, you might get some clues about the products Adobe is cooking up next. But Brooke is more than a product thinker. She’s also a design educator, leading a partnership between Adobe and Parsons called “Not Generated” — a name she chose deliberately to start a conversation, not end one. In this episode, we get into what it actually means to use AI as a creative collaborator rather than a shortcut, why design education needs to stop teaching tools and start teaching taste, and why Brooke believes this moment might be the most exciting time in her career. Bio Brooke Hopper is a design leader, speaker, and champion for artists — passionate about building community through creativity and designing better experiences for some of the most talented people in the world. Her work spans platforms and products, always centered on making space for artists and creators to thrive, collaborate, and stay at the heart of the creative process. With years of experience building 0-to-1 products and leading innovation in ambiguous spaces, she turns uncertainty into opportunity — translating bold ideas into tools that empower creative expression. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium benefit: get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid *** Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
March 18 · 47 min
Daisy Fancourt: Epidemiologist on how creativity rewrites your biology and extends your lifespan
Daisy Fancourt's research makes the case that engaging with the arts changes your gene expression, slows your biological aging, reduces your risk of dementia, depression, and chronic pain, and actually helps you live longer.
March 12 · 46 min

Design Better

Eric Ries: Lean Startup author on why good companies go bad, and why good design is critical to success

Ian Bogost: Game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the ordinary, on the small stuff that makes life delightful

Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens: authors of WAIL on the constraints that led to timeless designs for Prestige Records

Niyati Gupta: Netflix Product Design Lead on what happens when a designer becomes a product manager, and why your influence might not be in your title

Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haul

Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note

Tina Roth Eisenberg: Creative Mornings founder on building communities that run on trust

Paul Ford: Writer, developer & "fun Cassandra" on why everything is changing (but not how you think)

Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool

Colin Fisher: The lone genius is a myth

Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief and how to change your mind to change your life

Mason Currey: Mason Currey: Author of Daily Rituals on Making Art and Making a Living

Etinosa Agbonlahor: Behavioral economist on why pricing belongs in the design process

Paul Dichter: Stranger Things writer on why the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio

Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot

Luis Mendo: Designer turned illustrator on making things that could only come from you

David Shim and Rachana Rele: Read AI CEO and VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe on amplifying creative work — not replacing it

Leonardo Giusti: Archetype AI's co-founder on physical AI and the limits of the chatbot

Brooke Hopper: Adobe's machine intelligence design lead on what AI can't touch

Daisy Fancourt: Epidemiologist on how creativity rewrites your biology and extends your lifespan