We’re all familiar with the tropes around innovation and how it starts. You just need a garage in Silicon Valley, a few geniuses and visionaries, maybe some good snacks. Our guests today help us debunk that myth.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw wrote a book called Innovation-ish, and that little “-ish” is doing a lot of work. Rich Braden is a design strategist who’s taught innovation at Stanford and advised companies around the world. Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist whose lab studies the psychology of creativity — why we lose it, and how we get it back.

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.

Bios

Tessa Forshaw

As a co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, Tessa specializes in using cognitive science to develop creative and innovative potential in the workforce. She draws upon her academic research as a cognitive scientist and extensive background as a former designer at IDEO CoLAb and Accenture to turn the cognitive processes involved in design, creativity and innovation into practical insights that can be applied in the flow of work. These insights are also the foundations of what she teaches as a design educator at Stanford University and now Harvard University. Recognized for her impactful design projects, Tessa is the recipient of multiple design awards: a Fast Company Design Award for General Excellence, two Core77 Industrial Design Magazine Design Awards, and the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Innovation Awards.

Rich Braden

Rich Braden is the founder of People Rocket LLC, a strategic innovation firm based in San Francisco. With over 15 years of academic experience, Rich is a recognized thought leader in design thinking, leadership, and innovation. He is a design educator at renowned institutions including Harvard University, Stanford University, and London Business School, helping shape future leaders. As CEO of People Rocket, he works with clients such as Airbnb, Google, the United Nations, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Red Cross to drive strategic innovation and responsible AI solutions. Rich holds degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more

A few months ago, I was on a flight to San Diego, to visit my parents. It was my dad’s birthday in a few days, and mine shortly after. He was in hospice, so I knew it was probably the last birthday I’d be celebrating with him.

I had a small book with me: Mundo Mendo, Book One. It’s the creation of Luis Mendo, who publishes a book each year which is a collection of the “best stories published on Mundo Mendo…carefully revised and adapted for the printed page.”

After paging through the little illustrated vignettes that Luis wrote and illustrated, I began to fall in love with his warm, human illustrations, and uplifting stories. It felt like wisdom coming from a friend who had taken a different creative path than I did. I took notes in the book on post-its with a fountain pen from my dad, which left ink imprints that made the book feel even more personal.

I’ve long been a fan of Japanese culture, ever since falling in love with the book Musashi when I was a pre-teen. So I was naturally curious about Luis’s journey, as a Spanish-born designer and creative director who burned out in Amsterdam, took a sabbatical in Tokyo, and never came back. After watching his own father’s health degraded by a stressful job, he decided to give up his career as a designer and art director, and focus on illustration full time.

Fourteen years later, his illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide. He draws on an iPad Pro in a country whose language he still speaks only “in a very elementary way,” and is building a membership platform* that he runs on his own server because he doesn’t want to be “the ham between two breads” on Instagram.

His book, which he printed standing at the foot of a press personally adjusting the cyan and the magenta, is a small, sturdy object designed to be carried in a jacket pocket. You can lick it, he notes (though, you may not want to!).

Here are five ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.

*Design Better subscribers can get 20% off a membership to Mundo Mendo, which includes a book every year: dbtr.co/mundomendo

Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX

Embedded design — UX/UI for appliances, cars, and other physical products — is a real challenge with the tool stack web and mobile designers use.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design to learn how the tools and processes are falling short.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, download their research for free.

Download free embedded design report

LLMs Are Just a Calculator

There’s a lot of anxiety in creative communities about AI. Luis has a different frame.

“I realized that this thing is just a glorified calculator. It’s nothing else. And I think we should stop saying AI. We should say LLMs. The AI, artificial intelligence still doesn’t exist. What you have is LLMs — they are language learning models and they are just trying to guess things and connecting things with each other.”

He uses LLMs for things he describes as “taking my time from drawing, taking my time from writing poetry, taking my time from smelling the flowers” — like automating the spreadsheet that logs book orders. For grammar checks in English, a language he writes in fluently but didn’t grow up speaking. For translation between Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese.

He was struck by something he’d heard recently: give the same prompt to five LLMs and you get more or less the same answer. Give the same sentence to five filmmakers and you get five different movies. That gap is where human creativity lives, he argues, and it’s not closing anytime soon.

Shokunin: Do It Well, or Don’t Do It

The Japanese concept of shokunin doesn’t have a clean English equivalent. It’s often translated as “artisan” or “craftsman,” but the word carries something more — a refusal to cut corners that isn’t about perfectionism, so much as about the intrinsic meaning of doing something well.

Read more

Hi everyone!

Bobby Hughes and recently created a new workshop offering, aimed at Design Researchers who are looking to expand their skillset. The first workshop sold out and went really well, so we’re running another two-day workshop on April 24th and May 1st.

We’re limiting the event to 20 tickets, and are giving early discounts to Design Better premium members (see links at bottom).

These discounted tickets will likely sell fast, so if you miss them, you can also register here (workshop hosted via Maven):

Register for workshop

Here’s a testimonial from one of our participants:

“My biggest takeaway was how to better influence stakeholders, shifting from delivering large, dense reports to sharing smaller, digestible “snacks” of insight. It’s a simple idea, but it completely reframed how I think about communicating research.

The course also introduced new AI tools and, more importantly, new ways to use them. The hands-on exercises made it easy to explore and apply what we were learning in real time.

I’d recommend this course especially for researchers newer to AI, but even experienced practitioners will likely pick up a few valuable techniques.” —Marlon V., Senior UX Designer

Workshop Description

AI x Influence for Design Researchers

A hands-on workshop for design researchers who want their insights to go further.

You’ve done the interviews. You’ve found the patterns and written the report. And then... a stakeholder skims it, a designer misinterprets it, and six months later someone suggests research you already did.

The problem isn’t your research. It’s that insight alone doesn’t move people — stories do. Visuals do. Things people can hold onto, share, and remember do.

This workshop teaches you how to make your research stick.

Learn AI tools to transform your findings into artifacts that travel — crisp one-pagers, sharp visuals, narratives that make stakeholders feel what your customers feel. No design background required. No waiting on someone else to realize your vision.

Gain practical skills across three areas:

Discover communication techniques that keep your work visible — Turn findings into clear, compelling updates and narratives that stakeholders actually read, remember, and reference in decisions.

Gain confidence creating visual assets — Build simple, effective visuals that bring emotion to your work and make insights easier to understand and harder to ignore — without needing a designer to do it for you.

Expand visual storytelling skills — Develop storyboards and scenarios with consistent characters and contexts so stakeholders and designers can envision what customers need — as you see it, and on your timeline.

This isn’t about dumbing down your research. It’s about giving it the reach it deserves.

Tools we’ll use: ChatGPT, NotebookLM, Gemini, ImageFX

Discounted Tickets for Design Better Premium Members

We have a limited number of discounted tickets for our premium members, which are first come, first served:

Read more

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Luis Mendo is a Spanish-born illustrator based in Nagano, Japan, and his work is unmistakably, irreducibly human. His drawings are populated by bespectacled bird-like figures — part alter ego, part philosophical sparring partner — rendered with the kind of warmth and specificity that no prompt can summon.

There’s a hand behind every line, and you feel it. That’s not an accident. It’s a philosophy. Because as we talk about in the show, as non-human intelligence becomes cheaper, the human touch—and real, earned, interpersonal trust—will become the rarest currency (to paraphrase Anu Atluru’s quote below).

Luis’ path is anything but direct. After two decades as a successful art director and editorial designer in Amsterdam — building magazines, running teams, living inside meetings and inboxes — he took a sabbatical in Tokyo and never really came back. Not because the work dried up, but because he found something better: a life built around drawing, shaped by Japanese craftsmanship culture, and grounded in the shokunin ethic that says if you’re going to do a thing, you do it properly, all the way, no shortcuts.

Today Luis publishes his work through a membership site he built himself, on his own terms, on a platform he controls. He’s obsessed with making things worth keeping — including a beautifully crafted physical book he sweated every detail of, right down to standing at the press to get the colors right.

In a moment when so many of us are asking what creativity even means when machines can approximate it on demand, Luis has an answer: make things that carry your presence. Make things that could only come from you.

You can explore his work and join his community at mundomendo.com. Also, Luis has a special offer for Design Better listeners: get 20% off a membership to his site by visiting the link dbtr.co/mundomendo.

Join Mundo Mendo, get a book!

Bio

Luis Mendo is an artist and author based in Japan.

Luis studied graphic design in Spain and The Netherlands. After working as an editorial designer and creative director for 20 years in Amsterdam, Luis moved to Tokyo and changed his career to drawing. His illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide.

His artworks have been shown in art galleries in Spain, France, Japan, South Korea and the USA.

Preferred subjects include sensory-driven stories, city/urban life, interiors, objects, animals and people in context. Also travel, narratives, feelings and human interactions. Luis’s illustration signature is to make mundane things look special and make visible the invisible. He can’t avoid impregnating positivism to everything he draws.

He was the Creative Director and co-founder of creative residency Almost Perfect together with his wife Yuka, from 2018 to 2025.

In 2024 Luis launched Mundo Mendo, a membership program where he shares art, stories and thoughts that subsequently and annually become printed books

In the newsletter called The Illustrated, Luis shares and promotes his favorite illustration talent.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. 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.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. 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

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more

How AI Is F*ing Up the Creative Process — and What We Can Do About It

Claude Code and Claude Cowork have become the darlings of the tech world, and the mood across design and research teams right now is something close to giddiness. AI is turning many of us into unicorn designers — suddenly fluent across disciplines we’d spent years staying in our lanes about. Researchers are prototyping. Designers are shipping. PMs are vibe-coding their way to working demos before the designer has finished the brief.

But trouble is brewing underneath it.

We posted an observation recently on LinkedIn about the cracks we were beginning to see in the creative process, and the responses flooded in — from design leaders at Microsoft, CVS, Meta, Salesforce, JPMorgan Chase, and teams across the industry. What came back wasn’t just validation. It was recognition. People are watching the same things break and haven’t quite had the language for it yet.

Here are five breakpoints we’re all about to hit — and some early thinking on what to do about them.

Join the conversation

We want to hear how your creative process is changing your team’s workflow. Jump into our chat thread on Substack.

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX

Embedded design — UX/UI for appliances, cars, and other physical products — is a real challenge with the tool stack web and mobile designers use.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design to learn how the tools and processes are falling short.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, download their research for free.

Download free embedded design report

We’re excited to be part of Crafted, UserTesting’s conference for people who build products, design experiences, and do research.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

1. Our tools aren’t built for collaboration — and teams are starting to feel it

The AI tools we have are exquisitely good at making individuals faster. They are not built to help teams think together. The result is that everyone is accelerating in their own direction, and collaboration is quietly eroding.

Jess Holbrook, who leads UX research across Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, gave this a name that stuck: massive parallel play.

It’s not just that the work is happening separately. The tool stacks have fragmented too. Every person on the team is running different models, different prompts, different workflows — with no shared interface between any of it. The outputs can’t easily be handed off, reviewed, or built upon by someone else.

Read more

Today we have two guests from two different companies who have one shared conviction: AI works best when it amplifies people, not replaces them. Today we’re joined by Rachana Rele, VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe, and David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Read AI. Together, they’re building very different products — but they share a vision of AI that removes the drudgery from creative work and makes room for the thinking that actually matters.

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 break out of their own blind spots.

We also push them on the harder questions — the job anxiety that’s real right now in tech, the surveillance concerns that come with recording your work life, and where they each personally draw the line.

Bios

David Shim is Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, an AI productivity platform focused on helping knowledge workers leverage the power of AI to improve how they collaborate, communicate, and get work done. The platform provides meeting insights, search, chat, and proactive recommendations for millions of professionals, integrating seamlessly with the tools teams already use. Read AI is pioneering the concept of the Digital Twin—AI that serves as a true extension of you, built on deep contextual understanding of how you work.

Today, Read AI is trusted by teams at 90% of the Fortune 500 and in the past year, was recognized as a Top 10 AI Vendor for Enterprises by Brex, a Top 50 AI App by a16z and Mercury, and named one of Inc.’s Top 16 Companies to Watch

Before founding Read AI, David served as CEO of Foursquare and previously founded Placed, which was acquired by Snap in 2017. In 2025, he was named CEO of the Year by Geekwire.

Rachana Rele

Rachana has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology and human experience — figuring out not just what to build, but why it matters. At Adobe, she shapes the direction of new products, nurtures ideas from zero to something real, and helps early-stage businesses find their footing and grow.

She’s also a perpetual student — currently finishing an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, with an M.Eng. in HCI from Clemson and a B.E. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

About Read AI

Read AI started as a meeting notetaker, but it’s grown into something closer to a team intelligence layer. It captures what happens in your meetings and connects that context to the tools your team already lives in — Notion, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Teams, and more — so institutional knowledge stops disappearing into calendar invites.

The newest piece is Ada, an AI executive assistant that lives in your email. CC ada@read.ai on a thread and Ada handles scheduling, surfaces relevant context from past meetings, and follows up on action items — checking with you before sending anything substantive. No new app, no onboarding for external collaborators. It’s particularly useful for design and product teams juggling multiple projects and time zones, where coordination overhead tends to quietly eat the day.

A few recent milestones worth noting: Ada is now live for all 5M+ users (the largest digital twin deployment to date), and Read AI just launched an MCP server and open API — meaning your meeting data can now flow directly into Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools your team uses to do the actual work.

Get Started for Free with Read AI

As designers, we know better than anyone that great work requires great collaborators. And finding collaborators you can actually trust? That’s the hard part.

We used Upwork to find a designer for a book layout project — and what started as a single hire turned into a real working relationship. When he delivered something exceptional, we were even able to send a bonus directly through the platform. That matters to us. We believe in paying people well for great work.

If you’ve been skeptical of freelance platforms — and honestly, some have a reputation for undervaluing designers — Upwork is different. You can browse full profiles and portfolios, review past client feedback, and hire with confidence before any money changes hands. It’s a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across 125+ categories, from book layout to brand identity to motion design.

Contracts and payments are handled in one place, which cuts out a lot of the administrative friction. And if you want access to the top 1% of talent, Business Plus uses AI-powered shortlisting to match you with the right person in under 6 hours.

For the designers in our audience: Upwork works both ways. It’s a smart way to fill income gaps between jobs, pick up extra work when you need it, or build a reliable pipeline of freelance projects — all on your own terms and at your own rates.

It’s free to sign up and posting a job takes just a few minutes.

👉 Post your job for free at Upwork.com

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX Designers

The gap between what designers intend and what actually ships can be wide, especially in embedded design — the interfaces in your car, your medical devices, your appliances. The screens most people never think about, but interact with constantly.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design space across six industries worldwide, and the finding that stuck with me: 6 in 10 said they want a different design tool. Why? Because the tools they’re using were built for the web and mobile, not for hardware with specific screens and real constraints. So they compensate with code, workarounds, custom fixes. And somewhere in all of that, the original design intent gets lost. It gets stripped down until what reaches the device barely resembles what was designed.

That’s a product experience problem, and it’s more widespread than most people realize.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, Qt commissioned this research to understand exactly what designers in this space need.

Download the Qt embedded design report

We’re excited to be part of Crafted, UserTesting’s conference for people who build products, design experiences, and do research.

May 28th: Seattle

September 17th: London

It’s a hands-on event — workshops, panels, and keynotes from practitioners — held in spaces designed to actually get people talking and collaborating. If you’re a product leader, designer, or researcher looking for fresh thinking and practical tools you’ll use after you get home, this one’s worth a look.

My colleague Bobby Hughes and I will be running a workshop in Seattle on AI + Design Thinking and UX Research.

More info coming soon, and register here if you can attend in either Seattle or London.

Get Tickets

It’s difficult to escape the fact that we live in a very turbulent time. Apart from the warp-speed pace of technological change, wars and world events are keeping many of us on edge. It’s tempting to think that we are living in a unique period of history, but humans have gone through these upheavals before, and it’s helpful to hear stories from those who lived through them.

When we spoke to Jordan Mechner, video game pioneer (Karateka, Prince of Persia) and author and illustrator of the graphic novel Replay, he mentioned toward the end of the interview how much he was enjoying the The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.

“Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

Stefan Zweig wrote those words in the early 1940s, in exile in Brazil, watching the civilization he loved — Vienna, the great flowering of early 20th-century European culture — consumed by the war that ended it all.

Zweig's Vienna was arguably the most fertile creative scene in modern history. In a few square miles, at roughly the same moment, Freud was mapping the unconscious, Klimt and Schiele were painting naked bodies on gold leaf, Mahler and Schoenberg were pulling the tonal center out of music, Wittgenstein was rebuilding philosophy from the ground up, and a young architect named Adolf Loos was declaring ornament a crime. They were all, somehow, talking to each other—either literally, in the case of Schoenberg and Mahler, and Klimt and Schiele, or metaphorically—and out of that conversation came much of what we call modernism.

Then history happened, and most of them fled or died.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Jordan Mechner: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack, Youtube

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We ❤️ Wix and we know you will too!

The World of Yesterday, Feeling Like Today

Jordan picked up The World of Yesterday again while working on Replay, partly because his grandfather grew up in that same Viennese world.

What surprised him was how contemporary it felt.

“It almost felt like he was writing it today because he’s talking about the impact of technological change and how the world got so much faster. And he’s talking about like 1905, but everything he says, it’s like, that’s how I feel. That’s how I felt about the iPhone. That’s how I felt about the internet. That’s how I feel about AI. He’s writing an instruction manual for today.”

Read more

Leonardo Giusti has spent his career in the spaces between disciplines — between art and science, between research and product, between the physical world and the digital one. It’s not a conventional design path, but it’s one that led him to work most designers never get near.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Leonardo is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Archetype AI, a company building foundation models trained not on text or images, but on the continuous stream of sensor data flowing from the real world, like factories, power grids, and city intersections.

Before that, he spent nearly seven years at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where he led design on Project Soli — a miniature radar chip that taught devices to understand human gesture and presence — and Project Jacquard, which wove interactivity into everyday objects like Levi’s jackets and YSL bags. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the University of Florence and spent years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Design Lab. He’s also filed more than 30 patents (!).

What makes Leonardo’s thinking distinctive is his insistence that the metaphors we use to describe AI shape everything — how we build it, how we regulate it, and who it ends up serving. He’s skeptical of the dominant vision of AI as an autonomous agent that does things for us, and is pushing toward something different: AI as a tool we think with.

In this conversation, we get into his unusual path to design through cognitive science and robotics, 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.

Bio

Leonardo Giusti, Ph.D., is an award-winning design and research director. With over 15 years of experience, he excels in transforming R&D projects into innovative hardware, software, and AI products.

Prior to Archetype AI, Leonardo was the Head of Design at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, UX Design and Product Lead at Samsung Design and R&D and interaction design lead at MIT Design Lab. Leonardo was a Post-doctoral Associate at MIT Design Labs and completed his Ph.D, in human-computer interaction at the University of Florence.

He has filed more than 30 patents, and published more than 40 scientific papers. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Fast Company and other recognized magazines.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. 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.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. 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

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more

Our world doesn’t quite know what to do with multidisciplinary thinkers. It can’t find the right category for us. Eli and I are exactly those kinds of people — we have wide-ranging interests, we like the big picture, and we’ve always found more energy in the connections between disciplines than inside any single one. In entrepreneurial settings, that’s a real asset. In corporate environments built around specialists, it can feel like a liability.

We think that’s about to flip. As AI takes over more of the execution work that used to require narrow, deep expertise, the ability to connect — to see across fields, borrow from unexpected places, and synthesize — is going to become the differentiator. The synoptic thinker, the person who doesn’t fit neatly into one box, is going to have a very good decade.

Which is why we keep coming back to creative people in fields adjacent to our own. Musicians, writers, filmmakers, architects — people who’ve had to build a creative practice from scratch and live inside it for years. They’ve solved problems we’re still naming.

Sam Beam is one of those people. You likely know him as Iron & Wine, the project behind five Grammy nominations and one of the most distinctive voices in American folk music. What you might not know is that he almost didn’t become a musician at all. There’s a version of his life where he’s still a film professor in Miami, drawing in his sketchbook between classes, recording songs on a four-track as a side hobby. That version nearly won. Instead, a friend passed along his recordings, and everything changed.

When Eli and I sat down with Sam, we weren’t just talking to a musician. We were talking to a painter, a filmmaker, a collaborator, and a father of five who has spent decades thinking carefully about how to build a creative practice that can genuinely surprise you. A lot of what he shared resonated far beyond music — whether you’re running a design agency, leading a product team, or just trying to stay creatively alive inside a large organization.

Three things he said stayed with me.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Sam Beam of Iron & Wine: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We ❤️ Wix and we know you will too!

Read more

Feedback is the lifeblood of a healthy design team. It informs the design process, leads to better products, and helps designers grow. Yet in most tech companies, it’s practiced poorly or not at all. Designs live trapped inside individual MacBooks, starved for the critical discourse that could help them become something far greater.

The design critique — when done well — is one of the most powerful rituals a team can build. It accelerates quality, creates psychological safety, and teaches designers to think clearly and communicate their ideas with confidence. Done poorly, it wastes time, demoralizes the room, and turns into watered-down committee design.

This guide covers everything you need to know: how often to run critiques, who to invite, how to frame a problem, the language of constructive feedback, how to adapt for large teams, and what follow-through actually looks like.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We’d love to hear how your design team approaches critique

Read more

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.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

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

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more

Aarron and I had a special reason to pay close attention to the Academy Awards this year: two of our guests, Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Fiona Crombie, were nominated for an Oscar.

And we weren’t disappointed—while unfortunately Fiona didn’t win for Production Design on Hamnet, Autumn did take home the statue for her cinematography work on Sinners. It was a historical win too, as the first woman, and first woman of color, to win that category.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We chatted with Autumn about her creative process, including any “rules” she has (and when she breaks them), the overlap between photography and design, and how technology including AI and pre-visualization is changing the process of making films and television.

Other former guests on Design Better who’ve been nominated or won Academy Awards:

Fiona Crombie (nominated in production design this year for Hamnet).

In our conversation with Fiona, we explored how production design shapes performance, how historical accuracy balances with storytelling, how a visual “mission statement” guides an entire crew, and what it means to create environments that carry grief, love, and memory.

Shirley Kurata (nominated in costume design for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022).

We spoke with Shirley Kurata about how working with a limited budget inspires creativity, how costume designers think about color in their work, and how they collaborate with directors and other colleagues to execute on the vision for the film.

Watch a short trailer from Shirley’s episode, paired with a trailer from our interview with production designer Yashar Kassai, in the clip above.

John Cleese (nominated for best original screenplay in 1988 for A Fish Called Wanda).

We spoke with John about his book Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, and also about creative collaboration in the midst of friction, how to be comfortable with ambiguity, and creating boundaries of space and time to get in a creative mode.

Ed Catmull (multiple Academy Awards for Technical Achievement, Scientific and Engineering Award, and more).

We chatted with Ed about his transition from creating things himself, to leading creative teams; the elements of a sustainable creative culture, and how to give people feedback so they’ll actually listen to you. Ed also collaborated with Steve Jobs longer than probably anyone else who knew him—for over 30 years—and we heard some stories that haven’t been told anywhere else.

Bonus: What designers can learn from filmmakers

For many of the inspiring people we’ve spoken to over the years, from John Cleese, to David Sedaris, to the band OK Go, creativity isn’t something that it is drawn from thin air. Rather, it’s a process of discovery, often involving the subconscious.

One is that anything really new comes from the unconscious, and the second is that you can only get in touch with the unconscious if you’re in a playful mood, not if you’re in a driven, purposive mood, and that we’ve learned, by and large, not to play, partly because it’s not encouraged in schools and partly as we get older, we have too many responsibilities. —John Cleese

Rick Rubin, the renowned producer of musicians ranging from the Beastie Boys to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, writes about this phenomenon extensively in his book The Creative Act. Successful artists are able to “tune in” to ideas that are ready to be born.

There’s a time for certain ideas to arrive, and they find a way to express themselves through us. — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act.

George Newman is a Yale-trained cognitive scientist and author of How Great Ideas Happen: The Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success. We interviewed him on Design Better to talk about his research on the creative process, and he offered a metaphor that reframes creativity: it’s not invention, it’s archaeology.

Ideas Are Already Out There

There were all of these quotes from everybody ranging from Stephen King, who talked about creativity as archaeology in his stories, to Edison talking about, ‘I’ve invented nothing. There’s no such thing as ideas being brain-borne.’ You have all these creatives talking about the notion of discovery. — George Newman

When George sat down to map what cognitive science actually tells us about creativity, the data supported this archaeological view: “It conjured these ideas like archeology—almost as if ideas are out there in the world. And there’s a series of steps or a process that we can go through to uncover them.”

In our exploration of the creative process, which we started in 2023, guests like OK Go, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Tycho, and others talk about discovering creativity through the subconscious.

He discovered a practical framework that changes how we approach creative work. If ideas exist as latent possibilities waiting to be discovered, then the question isn’t “How do I create something from nothing?” but rather “How do I systematically search the landscape?”

Listen to George Newman and some of our creative process episodes

George Newman: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
OK Go, Damien Kulash and Tim Nordwind : Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
Tycho, Scott Hansen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

The Four Steps of Creative Archaeology

George breaks down the archaeological creative process into four distinct stages:

1. Surveying: Getting the Lay of the Land

“This is something that really comes about through expertise. When we’re really understanding a discipline and especially learning where have other great ideas been found, we kind of orient ourselves to those spaces.”

Archaeologists need to do a broad survey of the area they are exploring to orient themselves, but also pay attention to the smallest details that could influence how they approach the dig site.

"I talk about this notion of close looking, which is exactly that. And so it's like attending to the landscape, attending to the environment around us, with...a lot of focus, with a lot of attention to all of those little details."

2. Gridding: Searching Systematically

“Just like an archeologist strings up pieces of twine to create those little rectangles and then goes through each one systematically—can we do the same thing with an idea space? Using the constraints of the problem and a clear idea about what you’re doing and who it’s for, using that as a way to search systematically through a space.”

Read more

You probably already know that exercise, sleep, a good diet, and spending time in nature are the pillars of a healthy life . But what if there’s a fifth pillar we’ve been undervaluing, and in many cases actively cutting? Our guest today argues that the arts belong in that same category.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Daisy Fancourt is a Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London, where she heads the Social Biobehavioural Research Group and directs the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. She’s one of the most cited scientists in her field, and her work sits at a genuinely unusual intersection: the rigorous, data-heavy world of epidemiology and the seemingly softer world of creative practice.

Her new book, Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives, makes a case that’s hard to dismiss: 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. She’s done the longitudinal studies across 52 countries, and she’s lived it personally, watching her premature daughter’s vitals stabilize in the NICU as she sang to her.

Buy the book

For designers and creative professionals, this conversation raises some genuinely thorny questions about whether creative work counts, what burnout is actually doing to your body, and why the arts budget is always the first thing to cut even when the data says it probably shouldn’t be.

Bio

Daisy Fancourt (born June 1990) is a British Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London (UCL) and Head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group. She is a leading researcher on the health impacts of arts, culture, and social prescribing. Fancourt previously worked in NHS arts programs, has published over 300 papers, and directed a major study on COVID-19's mental health impacts.

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

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more

Hi folks!

Bobby Hughes and I have created a new workshop offering, aimed at Design Researchers (but also useful if you are a more generalist designer who would like to increase your influence on your team and organization).

We’re limiting the event to 20 tickets, and are giving early discounts to Design Better premium members (see links at bottom).

These discounted tickets will likely sell fast, so if you miss them, you can also register here:

Register for workshop

AI x Influence for Design Researchers

A hands-on workshop for design researchers who want their insights to go further.

You’ve done the interviews. You’ve found the patterns and written the report. And then... a stakeholder skims it, a designer misinterprets it, and six months later someone suggests research you already did.

The problem isn’t your research. It’s that insight alone doesn’t move people — stories do. Visuals do. Things people can hold onto, share, and remember do.

This workshop teaches you how to make your research stick.

Learn AI tools to transform your findings into artifacts that travel — crisp one-pagers, sharp visuals, narratives that make stakeholders feel what your customers feel. No design background required. No waiting on someone else to realize your vision.

Gain practical skills across three areas:

Discover communication techniques that keep your work visible — Turn findings into clear, compelling updates and narratives that stakeholders actually read, remember, and reference in decisions.

Gain confidence creating visual assets — Build simple, effective visuals that bring emotion to your work and make insights easier to understand and harder to ignore — without needing a designer to do it for you.

Expand visual storytelling skills — Develop storyboards and scenarios with consistent characters and contexts so stakeholders and designers can envision what customers need — as you see it, and on your timeline.

This isn’t about dumbing down your research. It’s about giving it the reach it deserves.

Tools we’ll use: ChatGPT, NotebookLM, Gemini, ImageFX

Discounted Tickets for Design Better Premium Members

We have a limited number of discounted tickets for our premium members, which are first come, first served: Update: we’ve sold out of our discounted tickets for premium members

• 50% discount (2 tickets) Sold out!

• 25% discount (3 tickets) Sold out!

Read more

We talk about “good design” as if it’s a single discipline with a single playbook. As if the same instincts that help you redesign a fintech onboarding flow apply equally to redesigning one of the most-used apps on the planet.

They don’t.

Over the past year, we’ve interviewed leaders across three of Google’s most significant product areas — YouTube, Google Search, and Gemini — and what struck us most wasn’t what they had in common. It was how fundamentally different their design strategies are. Same company, same ambitious mission, wildly different approaches. And for good reason.

Each of these products has faced the same seismic pressure: emerging AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have rapidly changed user behaviors and expectations. Though Google was a leader in AI research, OpenAI moved to commercialize that technology faster, and the race was on. Google has since retooled strategy across its major product areas — and the design decisions that followed are worth studying closely.

We sat down with Nate Koechley and Matthew Darby of YouTube, Rhiannon Bell in Google Search, and Jenny Blackburn of Gemini, to understand how each team is navigating this moment. We came away with three distinct frameworks that should challenge how you think about your own design practice.

Listen to the Google episodes

YouTube, Nate Koechley and Matthew Darby: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
Google Search, Rhiannon Bell: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
Gemini, Jenny Blackburn: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Read more

If you’ve ever wondered what a movie production designer actually does, our guest today describes it in the simplest terms: it is everything you see in the frame that isn’t a costume. It turns out, production design has a lot in common with product design.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Our guest is the visionary production designer Fiona Crombie. You’ve seen her work in incredible films like The Favourite, and most recently, in the hauntingly beautiful Hamnet. This film is currently taking the industry by storm with eight Academy Award nominations, including a nod for Fiona herself for Best Production Design.

Trailer for Hamnet, nominated for 8 Academy Awards in including Fiona Crombie for production design

From the sprawling architecture of a Tudor estate down to the specific curve of a spoon or the texture of a tablecloth, Fiona’s job is to build a physical reality that reflects the interior lives of the characters on screen.

In our conversation, we explore how production design shapes performance, how historical accuracy balances with storytelling, how a visual “mission statement” guides an entire crew, and what it means to create environments that carry grief, love, and memory.

Bio

Fiona Crombie is an Australian production designer, twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design — for The Favourite and Hamnet. Born in Adelaide and raised in Sydney, she trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) before becoming the resident designer at the Sydney Theatre Company, where she developed the deep relationship with text and storytelling that still shapes her work today.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. 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.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. 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

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

Laundry Sauce: Laundry Sauce is like a bath bomb for your laundry. It’s a premium collection of high-performance detergent pods infused with sophisticated fragrances crafted by the world’s top perfumers. f you’re ready to re-invent your signature scent in 2026, we have an exclusive deal for our community.

Get 20% off your entire order! Use code DESIGNBETTER at checkout.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Read more