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

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into our live video with !

Get more from The Curiosity Department in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Mar 12, 2026 | TIME: 11:00 am EDT

AI is changing how design teams work — faster than most organizations know how to handle. Teams are moving quickly, expectations are rising, and yet something curious is happening as work moves from early ideation toward review and launch: confidence is dropping.

That tension is worth exploring.

Drawing on research with 183 designers across the US and EU from our friends at UserTesting, this 60-minute session looks at how design leaders are building accountability into their workflows — not by slowing down, but by making their decisions easier to defend.

We’ll dig into what that actually looks like in practice, why evidence and user insight matter more than ever for maintaining trust with executives and other stakeholders, and what it takes to lead through the ambiguity that comes with working with these new tools and platforms.

If your team is experimenting with AI but struggling to stay confident as the stakes get higher, this one’s for you.

Join us for a panel discussion moderated by Jahvita Rastafari, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at UserTesting, with Jason Giles, UserTesting’s VP of Product Design, and us — Aarron and Eli.

Register for the panel discussion

Most musicians start learning at an early age—or so we think. But that wasn’t the path our guest today took. He was an arty kid—drawing and painting in his bedroom—then a film teacher, before he became the musical success he is today.

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

Five time Grammy-nominated Sam Beam—who you know as Iron & Wine—told us his music career still feels like a bit of a fluke, even though it’s been over half his life now. Things started to come together for him when he got his hands on a 4-track recorder. Suddenly, music wasn’t about performing—it was about making something that he could develop and refine, just like a drawing.

We talk about how he balances prolific output with raising five daughters, why he used to keep “office hours” for creativity, and how a successful day can be as simple as finding one good lyric.

We also dig into collaboration—how working with other musicians and even his daughter Arden on the new record pushes him outside his comfort zone. And why he believes your art should be like a mirror reflecting something.

Listen to a track from the new Iron & Wine album above. 🎵

Sam’s new record Hen’s Teeth drops today—February 27th—and he’s heading out on tour hitting Australia, the Midwest, East Coast, and West Coast. But first, we wanted to understand how someone who came from visual art built one of the most distinctive voices in American folk music.

Bio

Sam Beam is a singer-songwriter who has been creating music as Iron & Wine for over two decades. Through the course of eight albums, numerous EPs and singles, and the initial volumes of an Archive Series - Iron & Wine has captured the emotion and imagination of listeners with distinctly cinematic songs.

Links

• Beef, Iron, and Wine

• Paul Simon Graceland story

• Roberto Bolaño

• ironandwine.com

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

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

Art, Story, Design, & Film.

By James Buckhouse, Design Better Expert in Residence

I parked my left hand on my keyboard and let my fingers strum the keys, marching from the outside towards the center to tap out the four-letter nonsense phrase asdf.

It’s an easy hand movement, a bit like playing the first few notes of the C-Major scale where your hand just does it without really thinking. It trills up the scale by raindropping one key after the next, naturally, easily, with a familiarity that is comforting.

The phrase asdf doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a little bit of digital jetsam that sputters off of your keyboard as you try to advance through some ungenerous UX that insists you give over some data before it will offer anything back.

It’s a useful placeholder where you can pretend to submit your required information without actually having to divulge your secrets. It’s fast and fun to type. asdf. Ritualistic nonsense.

And yet for some reason, just this one time, instead of seeing those letters as meaningless, I saw them as something else: a little message about my whole creative career so far: ASDF: Art, Story, Design, and Film.

Moments of Noticing: Art

Let’s examine moments of noticing in art, story, design and film, starting with art.

Most of representative painting isn’t learning brush control or applied chemistry (although there’s some of that), the main skill is noticing. Painters notice the form, the line, the color, the negative space, the shadows, and the light, and we do this in spite of our brain’s fantastic ability to pre-render, or pre-hallucinate, what it assumes we’re seeing instead of doing any actual looking. This comes from the fact that we can only see a narrow bit of our field of vision at a time, so our brains fill in the rest while our eyes are busy redirecting themselves around the scene. Once our language systems kick in, and we assign object-identifier names to what we register (cat sitting on couch or child on a bike), then we mostly stop actually seeing it, all while we think we are still looking.

An example… Here are four oil paintings of the same subject from slightly different angles. I did this minor act of insanity to practice my noticing; to render the familiar strange. To learn to foreground my assumptions and then reveal my lack of actual looking to myself so I could start to see and then paint.

It takes special effort to turn off our “pre-rendering” object-detection assumptions and actually examine the elements in front of us (and to do so with care). The brain knows so much that we think we already know what are we seeing without really looking and so we imagine what we already believe to be there. With effort, we can learn to see instead of assume.

How Low are Your Elbows?

Here’s an example from a beginning student’s journey into figure drawing: You “know” the form of the human body—and yet—without looking in a mirror or doing any calculations, or even thinking too hard, just blurt out an answer, if a person is standing up with their arms hanging down at their sides, about how far down are the elbows?

Most people immediately think: I know my elbows are in the middle of my arms which are on my upper body, so I guess it’s about half-way down my upper body so idk about halfway down my torso.

But the reality is bonkers.

Your upper arm is one of the longest bones in your body (after the bones in your legs). The upper arm hangs all the way down to to top of your pelvis. YES! What your tailor would call your natural waist!!!!

What ?!!?

Can you believe it?

But think about it. When you sit down your arms can rest comfortably in your lap. Your upper arm goes all the way down to your lap and your forearms extend from there. Your elbow is at your natural waist, or just above the top of your hips. Your hands dangle down much closer to your knees than your waist. Wow!

Doctors and trained artists aside, most all other people underestimate the length of the upper arm. The first mistake most people make when drawing the figure is to make the arms too short, or the legs too short, or the head too small, or the head too large. It takes real effort to actually notice something as familiar as our own body.

What color are shadows?

Another example: The next time you see a shadow, ask your self what color is it? Is it black? The non-noticing self say yes! Shadows are black! But look again.

If not black, then, are shadows grey? or some other color all together?

Look at the shadow, does it have blue or violet undertones? Or is it slightly orange or red? Does the color change at the borders? What is causing that color? What color is the light source? Is there any reflected light bouncing off of objects near it? What color do my eyes perceive it to be based on the colors around it?

The first time a painter a notices a shadow’s true color is a revelation. The mind melts. We are born anew. And then our mental model of color evaporates. Newton used a prism to dissect white light into individual colors. Goethe examined how color is only experienced via our perceptions, not in some ideal state.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the same ideal “colors” appear to us differently depending on the relative simultaneous contrast of the surrounding colors. In other words, our brains understand color in relation to other colors, not as absolutes. Wild.

Serious noticers like 11th century physicist Ibn al-Haytham, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810, Johannes Peter Müller in 1838, all the way to Albers in the 1950s, dug into this curious aspect of the perception of color. We experience color differently, depending on the colors around it.

The next time you look at a painting, or something that might be an interesting subject for a painting, examine your own noticing.

Moments of Noticing: Story

Non-fiction writer and literary critic (and Harvard prof) James Wood posits that noticing is also at work for writing. His two most famous collections, How Fiction Works and Serious Noticing both make the case for examples from literature where the author’s ability to notice some aspect of humanity is the nidus of great work. Noticing, for him, is the nest, the seed, the source. The art is enacted both in the selection of details the writer includes and what truth those details expose. In a way, this post is a tribute to his two books. Here’s an excerpt from How Fiction Works.

James Wood shows us how to notice details in great writing where an author can gently nudge a seemingly removed, impartial “third-person” description of a moment either towards or away from a specific character’s point of view. An author can slip us towards a character’s understanding of the world, or retreat to a seemingly neutral state, or move towards a new character’s view all by deploying small changes to the style of the third-person description and the choices of details described. Style is an interesting term to use here—because we think of an author having a style or voice, but whose voice is it really? The character’s? The non-character-third-person narrator’s? or the author’s? Or the language of the world created by the fiction? Wood makes the case that it is often all of the above, and our we find our way through by noticing the details, observing the choices, and delighting in the subtle shape-shifting as we embody different fictional minds all while also perceiving the world through the author’s orchestration (and vision) as she or he tells us where to look and teaches us how to see.

Look at the Fish

Novelist Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sourdough, Moonbound) has a “tap essay” called fish. https://www.robinsloan.com/fish/

You read the essay by downloading an app Robin wrote and tapping through one page at a time. The story progresses along a bit like a 80s-era text adventure game, revealing only the smallest amount with each new tap, in the same way a cautious house guest might walk down unfamiliar stairs at night with no light.

If you haven’t experienced the essay first hand, I won’t ruin it here. But at its heart is the idea of looking closely, deeply observing, and learning to notice. It takes only a few minutes to read, so please enjoy. There is a something lovely waiting there for you.

Text Boxes on the Internet

Robin and I worked together early days at Twitter, where we were thinking about networks, distribution, and story. Oral tradition, papyrus scrolls, manuscripts, printed books, newspapers, magazines, blog posts, Tweets…

Images: Robin Sloan (now) and me (back then).


While co-founder Jack Dorsey has become the face that materializes in most people’s minds when they think of who founded Twitter, the spirit of co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone were always there as well. Ev founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium. In many ways, Ev has been the main through-line in the democratization of text on the internet. In the best light, Ev’s products all came from a place of hope to give a voice to the under-heard.

Blogger was long form, Twitter was short. And Medium was, well, medium. This isn’t the whole story, of course, there’s more to each product and platform, and yet all three products managed to do a lot of work with a simple text box.

When I first saw Robin create his Tap essay, I could sense him exploring what it means to seek new forms for text on the internet. This was not a condemnation of the text box, but instead a moment of recognition of priors and an act of curiosity and bravery. It makes me want to be just as brave. To design for transformation at every level.

Moments of Noticing: Design

Ask a UI/UX/Product/Software designer about their job and they will usually talk at two levels: one is a high-level story about the transformation of the user that involves the flow of the product from some initial state to a desired result. The second is at the level of all the tiny details. These tiny differences are noticed by designers and are mostly just “felt” by everyone else, even if they can’t quite tell you why a design feels nice or clean. The choice of typeface, the space between letters, the space between lines of text, the alignment to a grid, the breaking of a grid, the harmony of color, the elegance of a smooth button state transition, the dynamic resizing of content and layout… all these details add up to the craft of design. Designers care deeply about these details, it’s a shared, private language of excellence.

So what happens when we are no longer the ones to actually make these choices? What happens when Claude or OpenAI or some other model looks at all the existing react components of the public web and makes all the choices for us and, well, they are actually pretty good? What happens in a few weeks or months or years when those choices are actually truly excellent? Let’s pretend for a moment that this will happen—that AI will be able to design brilliantly, now what?

Options:

1. We become “Art Directors” and tell the app how to adjust it’s own design, but we mostly stay in our lane as designers. Adjusting padding with a prompt. Reminding the LLM to go look at the react repo. Offering suggestions like “add more white space”

2. We become “Product Directors” and take over the responsibility to guide the product, design, and front-end engineering for the project to see it all the way from idea to being fully built and shipped. We dream, then build.

3. We become “Creative Directors” and dream up new styles, directions, vibes, juxtapositions, complications, affordances, influences, and possibilities to drive culture forward. This is the important part —> We drive culture forward.

I like a combo of 2 and 3. Creative Directors who build their ideas. Cultural scouts, ahead of the curve, dreaming up the future and then making it. We ship our dreams. Where we both dream up the future of culture AND build it.

Back to Noticing…

Which brings me a moment of serious noticing in traditional design. Sequoia’s brand uses three typefaces: Unica77, Rosart, and Pitch. These three are our brand-specific choices in the classic type-triangle of ▲ Sans, ▲ Serif, and ▲Mono. The type-triangle is pretty standard: your sans might be Geist or Inter or Helvetica or Gotham. Your serif might be Georgia, Baskerville, or Garamond. Your mono might be Space Mono, Courier, or any other mono really. We chose Unica77, Rosart, and Pitch, but your team might choose something else.

Now here comes the moment of noticing: our mono was picked to be used for UI labels or those tight little all-caps “eyebrows” that serve a section headers to break up a wall of text. This was already a detour from the norm, as Pitch was originally designed as to evoke a “typewriter” feel, like Courier. The name references a screenwriter’s use of Courier, the standard typeface for pitching to studios. The idea was to create a well-built typewriter font for the digital era. See it at Klim Foundry. https://klim.co.nz/fonts/pitch/

At first we used it instead as an accent font, instead of body copy. But then Sequoia Designer Andreas Weiland noticed the details in the face—those little welds in the corners—and he started blowing it up and using it as a display face. WHAT?! and at these giant sizes, the welds become architectural. They become trusses on the Golden Gate Bridge. They become the brackets and wooden beams exposed on the Gluckman lofts of NYC galleries in the 90s. They become the support that holds the grid together. They become the invisible hand of help behind the scenes. They become metaphor. They become poetry.

Here is one example of Andreas using Pitch as both a Display face and as a more typical UI label text (although in this case, it’s animated for a video intro). This image is also a good example of the Creative Director vibe who creates culture… think of this unexplained combination: that rock. that flower. that broken grid of text. We feel the vibe, we believe. We understand the weight and the delicacy, even if we can’t tell you for certain what the flower and rock “mean” in any coded symbolic or allegorical sense. We can pretend to know, but we don’t really know just by looking. But also… we do know. We feel it. We vibe it out. We understand. Delicate and non-deterministic. Weights and biases. A changed world.

See more of Andreas’s designs here: https://sequoiacap.com/series/training-data/

Moments of Noticing: Film

I got my start making movies, working on the Shrek, Madagascar and The Matrix series. Filmmaking was a practical education in hands-on creativity.

For today, I want to talk about a moment of noticing that will change how you see film. It will take you from a person who merely watches film to one who sees the invisible string that holds the whole endeavor together.

It’s a bit like when you realized almost all classic physics comes down to F=MA. It’s called the 180 degree rule. And it’s the biggest thing missing from today’s AI video models. Let’s break it down.

AI is good at generating images. It’s also good at generating videos. What it is not yet good at is creating a series of shots. Cinematography applies to both at the shot and at the sequence level. Cinematography is the composition of a single shot AND the orchestration of lots of shots collected together to move the audience through the scene.

You might have an establishing shot to show the audience where you are. Next might be a mid-body close up to establish which character is in this scene. You might next get a series of close-ups, two-shots, over-the-shoulder shots, tracking shots, etc. as we progress along with the action. Holding all of this together is the 180 degree rule. It tells the audience where the characters are in space and in relation to each other.

Here is a page from the classic filmmaking text book, Shot by Shot.

The 180 degree rule, or line of action rule, is what keeps the audience floating along with the bliss of the suspension of disbelief in the cinematic apparatus. When it unintentionally breaks, and the edit bumps, we feel the jolt of artifice, we feel that we are watching something constructed. We no longer get to inhabit the waking dream of cinema.

And yet… AI video generators mostly just make individual shots. It’s up to the prompter to make sure that for each next shot, you are placing the characters in the correct configuration for the line of action. You can’t just say “wide shot” you need to describe where the characters are in space and on the screen. Here are a few techniques:

Options:

1. Describe the locations of the characters both in space, describe the location of the camera, then describe the shot elements in terms of Screen Left and Screen Right.

2. Use a placeholder drawing or image to show the position of the characters as input to generating the characters.

3. Explicitly talk about not breaking the 180 degree rule in your prompt. Describe the set-up and tell it to follow the rule.

4. Use a top-down diagram in your prompt to describe where everyone is in the shot.

Study the 180 degree rule and you’ll start to watch TV and movies differently. You’ll start to deduce the location of the camera. You’ll start to notice the invisible line of action connecting the characters. You’ll start to notice that the characters are almost always looking a little (or a lot) off to one side or another. You’ll start to notice the hidden architecture of cinematography at work in shot construction. With a little practice, you’ll be able to start to pick out wide and flat lenses. You’ll start to notice f-stops and depth of field. You’ll start to see the choices made that everyone else just feels. You’ll be able to notice the choices that make all the difference. This is a new kind of pleasure when watching film—the joy of seeing the brilliant, ingenious, poetic choices made every step of the way.

Thanks for reading! You can find me at Outsider Insight, my regular Substack below. Please reply with your own moments of noticing in story, art, design, film or any other field. I’d love to hear from you.

Outsider Insight

A weekly newsletter on creativity, human ingenuity, and how to build what you want to exist in the world.

By James Buckhouse

Things to read, watch, and explore

Ellie Grace, who is our wonderful producer and engineer Brian Pake’s daughter, just came out with her first album, check it out below!

• Read: Pablo Stanley on AI, slot machines, and forgetting how to craft pixels

• Read: Austin Kleon on how he gets into something new

• Watch: The Olivetti Valentine typewriter in action (ugh, so beautiful!)

• Read: Steve jobs email to himself (via the podcast ScriptNotes)

Join us for on Friday, February 27th at 9:00a PT for a conversation and AMA with , cartoonist extraordinaire. We’ll chat about his creative process, living a creative life, and what he calls “the slow burn of mastery,” as well as taking questions from the audience.

Sign up to join the livestream

We’ve all heard the mythology around great ideas: the lone genius struck by inspiration, the eureka moment in the bath or shower. But George Newman believes we’ve been thinking about creativity in the wrong way.

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

George is a cognitive scientist who’s spent years studying where great ideas actually come from, and his research reveals something surprising: creativity might be less like magic and more like archaeology. In his book How Great Ideas Happen, he argues that ideas aren’t just born in our brains—they’re discovered through a systematic process of excavation.

In our conversation, George walks us through the four stages of creative archaeology: surveying the landscape, gridding out the problem space, digging without judgment, and sifting through what you’ve found. He shares fascinating research on “hot streaks”—that pattern where creators explore widely, strike a rich vein of ideas, mine it completely, then move on.

And he challenges one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs, namely that ideas without execution are worthless, using evidence from a study done on Quirky.com showing that good ideas really are worth waiting for.

If you’ve ever felt stuck waiting for inspiration to strike, or wondered whether creativity can actually be systematized without losing its magic, this conversation offers both the science and the practical steps to help you uncover your next breakthrough.

Get the book

Bio

George Newman is an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a leading expert on creativity. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, BBC, Scientific American, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has been named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2026.

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

One of my big goals this year is to get my household a bit more organized, and for me, that starts with my two teenage boys. I love them, but let’s be honest: they stink.

My wife and I have been teaching them to do their own laundry every weekend, but we found there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to measuring detergent. We got them Laundry Sauce to lower that learning curve, and it has been a game-changer.

Why We’re Obsessed

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.

• Effortless Performance: Drop one pre-measured pod in with your dirtiest clothes. Each pod is enriched with a bio-enzyme blend that tackles tough stains and revives fabrics for a brilliant clean.

• No More Mess: Say goodbye to giant, clunky bottles and dripping measuring caps.

• A Fragrance Revolution: These aren’t your typical “fresh linen” scents. We’re talking world-class fragrances that make you actually look forward to taking laundry out of the dryer.

Sophisticated Scents for Every Style

I love the variety Laundry Sauce offers. It’s a genuine treat to get dressed in the morning smelling this good—and it’s much better hugging the kids when they smell like bergamot and sandalwood instead of the alternative!

• Australian Sandalwood: Rugged, warm, and earthy with notes of cedarwood, eucalyptus, suede, and amber.

• Italian Bergamot: Modern, bright, and citrusy with notes of sweet mandarin, vetiver, and sandalwood.

• Himalayan Cashmere: A cozy, limited-release hypoallergenic fragrance featuring notes of Himalayan musk, white florals, and sweet pear.

The Design Better Exclusive Offer

Laundry Sauce is more than just a detergent—it’s a full upgrade for your entire laundry routine. If 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.

Shop Laundry Sauce Now

Every order comes with a full money-back guarantee. If you don’t get better-smelling, cleaner laundry, you get a full refund—no questions asked.

Bill Burnett, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, has helped countless people design and prototype a better life. At the heart of his work lies a familiar tool: design thinking.

Bill recently joined us for a second time on the show to talk about his latest book, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Through years of coaching and teaching at Stanford, Bill and co-author Dave Evans discovered that even those who have “figured out” their careers often find themselves stuck on a deeper question: “What is the meaning of life?”

Is meaning something we derive from our work? Perhaps—but sometimes, work is just work. Should it come from our personal lives instead?

In How to Live a Meaningful Life, Bill suggests there is no singular “meaning of life” waiting for us on a mountaintop. Instead, by using the power of design, we can find ways to extract more meaning out of life. Bill argues that designers are uniquely wired to find fulfillment because the craft requires a specific set of mindsets.

To build a life that is “fully alive,” Bill identifies four essential elements: Wonder, Coherence, Community, and Flow.

Let’s break down each of these elements.

Listen to our conversation with Bill Burnett

🎧 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

Work asks a lot of us. Our time, our energy, our full and undivided attention. We pour ourselves into our jobs and for many of us, the pouring never quite stops.

It’s no surprise, then, that burnout has become one of the defining experiences of modern professional life. Christina Maslach, the UC Berkeley psychologist who pioneered the scientific study of burnout, describes it as a response to chronic job stressors that plays out across three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (the gradual erosion of empathy and compassion toward others), and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment. It’s a term that resonates, Maslach says, because it “describes what happens when you used to have passion, used to be on fire, and then it’s gone.”

“Don’t confuse stress with burnout.

Feeling overwhelmed sometimes is normal—it signals responsible engagement in meaningful work.

Burnout is persistent, impairing emotional exhaustion. It stems from too many demands—and too little control and support.”

—Adam Grant

Rest might be the wrong prescription

The instinct when that fire goes out is to stop. To rest. But Maslach has long cautioned that simply taking time off won’t fix what ails you. Burnout is an organizational issue, not a personal one, and time off and self-care don’t resolve its root causes. What can help, though, is stepping fully outside the conditions that drained you and finding something that refills what work has taken.

Geetika Agrawal understood this deeply after two decades of traveling the world. She discovered that the only true cure for her own professional burnout was to step out of her routine, travel somewhere new, and spend time reconnecting with her creativity by working with an artist. These immersive encounters offered more than just a break from her digital work; they provided a profound emotional and creative recharge she couldn’t find anywhere else.

By the time she joined the remote work community Remote Year, the vision for her business was already clear. She took a year-long sabbatical from her career not just to travel, but to actively build that vision into a reality. That year spent living in 12 different countries allowed her to move from being a student of craft to the founder of Vacation With An Artist (VAWAA)—a platform that connects curious travelers with master craftspeople for hands-on apprenticeships that offer something far rarer than a typical holiday: genuine creative renewal.

We sat down with Geetika to hear her story, and to find out what it’s really like to vacation with an artist.

The story behind Vacation With An Artist

Aarron Walter: You’re a designer by training, but you’ve built something that steps far outside the digital world. What creative frustration or unmet need led you to start Vacation with an Artist (VAWAA)?

Geetika Agrawal: As a designer, you’re trained to have this muscle to imagine a world and then create it. But sometimes, when you’re working for others or have clients, it’s hard to see that vision through. The real frustration was wanting to realize a vision exactly as I had it in my head.

The backstory starts in India. I studied interior architecture in a country where most people study engineering or medicine. I had no architects in my family, so in 10th grade, I just started calling people from the Yellow Pages and asking, “What does it mean to be an architect?” That curiosity led me to the U.S. for grad school, then to Disney Imagineering, and eventually to R/GA in New York.

But in parallel to that career, I had this other life. In architecture school, we spent summers working with craftspeople. At 17, I spent my summer with a master in a village learning to make brass lamps. Seeing the discipline, the history, and the community around that craft was mind-blowing. Throughout my professional career, I traveled to 65-plus countries seeking that same feeling—learning silversmithing in Indonesia or natural dyeing in Mexico. I realized that these artists weren’t online. They were busy with their hands. I wanted to build a bridge so others could find them.

Aarron Walter: You eventually took a “Remote Year” to bring this to life. How did that transition happen?

Geetika Agrawal: In 2015, I spent a year living in 12 different countries. It was a chance to get away from my day-to-day in New York and dedicate myself to this vision. I would go on the ground in each city, find these artists, take photos, and write their stories. I launched the site on Squarespace in the sixth month of my travels. I didn’t even have payment hooked up yet! I woke up the next morning to a booking from someone in Austria for a soap-making session in Slovenia. Within a week, we were number one on Product Hunt. I realized then: this is real!

Eli Woolery: When you’re working with these artisans, there’s an economic side to consider. Many of these traditional crafts aren’t valued correctly by the market. How does VAWAA support their livelihood?

Geetika Agrawal: Creativity has never been valued correctly monetarily. Our goal is to create a “knowledge economy” for artists. Right now, the arts world offers an infrastructure for selling their products. We're building a global infrastructure for them to share their knowledge.

We guide them on pricing looking at the global market and to how to factor in their time, materials, and studio costs. Crucially, we add our fees on top of theirs—we never take a commission out of their fee. They get 100% of their fee. If the artist, the customer, and the platform are all happy, it becomes a sustainable system.

Aarron Walter: Many of our listeners come from digital design backgrounds. How does working with physical materials—clay, wood, textiles—change the way a digital designer approaches problem-solving?

Geetika Agrawal: Our best imagination and vision come from lived experiences. Digital life isn’t very experiential; it’s primarily the mind and the eyes. We lose that mind-body-hand connection.

This is even more important now with AI. If AI can do many of the things we used to do, how do we tap into our human superpowers? We have to go back to the source. We have all these “super senses” that a computer hasn’t been given. When you activate those through physical craft, you upskill your humanity.

Eli Woolery: What do people actually take back to their “day jobs” after these experiences?

Geetika Agrawal: New connections in the mind, first of all. But also, they bring back wisdom. I did a session in Montreal with a master felt-maker, Marjolein. She lives in the forest, and every morning at 9:00 AM, she is in her studio. She works until 6:00 PM. She’s world-renowned—she designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil—but she’s not getting awards every day. She just shows up in her studio consistently. You take away that wisdom of how to live—how to stay grounded and not get distracted by the noise.

Aarron Walter: Do you have a story of a specific guest whose perspective shifted during one of these trips?

Geetika Agrawal: We had a designer from Google who was completely burnt out. He went to Mexico to do stone sculpture. He was so attached to a “perfect” outcome; he wanted to plan everything. At one point, he chipped the stone too much and was devastated. He thought the whole project was ruined.

The artist, Julio, just looked at it and said, “Okay, let’s just reshape it and move on.” For the designer, it clicked: it wasn’t a failure, it was just redirection. We forget how to get unstuck sometimes. He came back so excited, signing up for charcoal painting and other classes. You could see the spark in his eyes.

Eli Woolery: For people who are burnt out or perhaps looking to leap into independent entrepreneurship, what lessons have you learned?

Geetika Agrawal: To take a leap, you have to overcome fear. As adults, we have very few opportunities to be “not knowing.” VAWAA is like a week-long gift where you’re allowed to make mistakes and explore. That builds the confidence needed to take a leap in your career. When I took my leap, I needed that structure of one year to transition, test, and play.

Aarron Walter: How do you find and vet these artists? What makes someone a “VAWAA artist”?

Geetika Agrawal: I work backwards. For the experience to be transformative, the artist needs mastery. It can’t just be a two-hour “entertainment” activity. They need depth so they can guide anyone from a beginner to an advanced student.

We also look for work that is grounded in history but looking forward. Usually, the artist is native to the place because they incorporate the local materials and community story into the craft. And finally, they have to actually like people. That’s essential.

Eli Woolery: As we wrap up, what’s your call to action for the creative community?

Geetika Agrawal: Many senior creatives feel disconnected because they’ve moved into management. They’ve stopped making. Give yourself permission to have a creative recharge.

Designers have a huge responsibility right now. We are playing a massive role in shaping the world, so it’s vital that we stay centered. Go out into the world. Make things with your hands. Disconnecting from your day-to-day and coming back recharged will bring something entirely new to your work and your life.

Beat burnout. Book a rejuvenating Vacation with an Artist.

Vacation With An Artist

Redesigning one of the world’s most-used apps is no small feat, especially when that app is also the second largest search engine in the world: YouTube. Over the last four years, Nate Koechley, UX Director at YouTube, and Matthew Darby, Director of Product Management, have been leading an ambitious effort to balance Google’s metrics-driven culture with the subjective challenge of making an app feel “modern.”

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

In our conversation, Nate and Matt share how they developed predictive measurement tools to gauge user perception, why they pair visual updates with quality-of-life features like comment threading and improved video controls, and how their research process has evolved from measuring clicks to understanding satisfied watch time.

We also dig into one of YouTube’s most complex challenges: the algorithm. As Nate and Matt explain, what users say they want doesn’t always match what actually makes them happy on the platform. They also discuss their work exploring ways to give viewers more agency and control, including the possibility of using natural language to tune your feed.

Both guests have a genuine passion for how YouTube enables deep expertise and niche interests to find their audiences—from 3D models of the Golden Gate Bridge to forest fire education from Northern California lookouts. Behind the algorithms and design updates is a platform where, as Nate puts it, “when you give people a voice, the things they say are just inspiring.”

Bios

Nate Koechley, UX Director at YouTube

Nate Koechley leads the user experience team for Core and Viewer Experiences at YouTube, where he helps shape the product and design strategy for more than 2 billion users and the future of creativity and media.

His 25-year career working on large-scale consumer products has given him a profound appreciation for the rigors of building for a global audience, the nuances of evolving digital ecosystems, and the intricate interplay of design and technology that defines them. This background, along with a passion for the intersection of design and technology, informs his leadership style, providing a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities of creating a seamless experience on a platform as dynamic as YouTube.

Matthew Darby, Director of Product Management at YouTube

Matthew Darby leads the product team responsible for the YouTube Main App where he helps shape the viewer experience for more than 2 billion users. He’s had the privilege of working on a consumer product he loves from its early days, helping advance its evolution into the vibrant creative ecosystem it is today.

Originally from East London, Matt studied in Manchester, Belfast and London before moving to California 20 years ago. His career has spanned a diverse range of industries—including finance, telecom, software, and media—and he has reveled in mastering the intricacies of each.

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:

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

Before we get to The Roundup, we wanted to share some of the exciting guests we have in queue, including:

• Fiona Crombie, Academy Award-nominated production designer for the film Hamnet.

• Sam Beam, Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter who has been creating music as Iron & Wine for over two decades.

• A guest we can’t reveal yet, but who has been a writer for a long-running television series you probably know and love.

If you want to catch these interviews in their entirety, consider upgrading to become a Design Better premium member.

Upgrade

We recently interviewed , bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, and sent him some of our Design Better coffee and tea as a small thank-you for being on the show. He wrote us a very kind thank-you note, along with a delightful little sketch of an owl:

It wasn’t until I went back and re-listened to the interview that I realized what the sketch was referring to. At one point, Austin spoke about owls, and how they probably never think about being owls, they just are. Similarly, if we can embrace our own “creatureliness,” we might be able to access creativity that otherwise would remain locked away.

Listen to our conversation with Austin Kleon

🎧 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 →

Embrace Your Creatureliness

In our day-to-day work, we can get stuck in the same rut, sitting at a desk, grinding away with a keyboard and mouse. We’re not using all of our human capabilities, and that limits our creativity. Austin finds inspiration in an unlikely place—owls—to counteract this.

One of the things that I really loved about looking at my little screech owls that we get out back here is that I check all these webcams of like other owls, like bigger, more impressive owls. And it’s really funny, because if you look at owls, they all do the same thing, even the little ones, the little owls and the big owls, they all act the same…they do owl things, you know?

If we can get back into our bodies, and embrace the capabilities that make us all human—and creative—we can open doors to creativity that we may have unintentionally closed.

The body guides the brain as much as the brain directs the body. In many creative practices, the idea doesn’t exist before the action: it comes to life through the movement of the pen or brush. Acting like a human being out in the world is a necessity for a fully activated creative mind.

Read more

When we last spoke with Bill Burnett, it was in 2020 and he’d just published his book Designing Your Work Life, co-authored by Dave Evans. The world was in the midst of a pandemic, and work and careers seemed very uncertain. Along with their other bestselling book, Designing Your Life, millions of people found guidance and a process for re-framing how to approach their career and life plans in general, inspired by a methodology that Bill taught during his many years in the Stanford design program.

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

Over the intervening years, Bill and Dave had countless conversations with people who had—at least to some degree—”figured out” work , family, and friends, but still felt stuck. They were stuck on the question of meaning. Bill told us that asking, “What is the meaning of life?” is not the right question. Instead, we should be asking “How can I find meaning IN life?”. In their new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, Bill and Dave aspire to give you tools and ideas to help you make a life rich with meaning and purpose.

Buy the book

In our conversation, we dig into the loneliness epidemic, especially among Gen Z, and why so many people look to work to provide meaning when work isn’t actually set up to do that. Bill introduces a powerful framework: Wonder, Coherence, Flow, and Community which are the four components of meaning-making and influence longevity.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re checking all the boxes but still missing something, this conversation offers a practical, design-driven way forward.

Books & Links mentioned

• ​​How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Everyday, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

• Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

• The scandal of the particular

• Harvard longevity and happiness study

• Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute

• The Movi Collective

• The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, David Brooks

• The Modern Elder Academy

• Michel De Montaigne’s essays

• Martin Seligman’s PERMA model

• Dr Laurie Santos Happiness Lab Podcast

• Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

• The Creative Act, Rick Rubin

• Sean Caroll’s physics videos

Bio

After years of drawing cars and airplanes under his Grandmother’s sewing machine, Bill Burnett went off to the University and discovered, much to his surprise, that there were people in the world who did this kind of thing everyday (without the sewing machine) and they were called designers. 45 years, five companies, and a couple of thousand students later Bill is still drawing and building things, teaching others how to do the same, and quietly enjoying the fact that no one has discovered that he is having too much fun.

Bill Burnett is an Adjunct Professor and the Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford. He received his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Product Design at Stanford and has worked in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple designing award-winning laptops and a number of years in the toy industry designing Star Wars action toys. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents and design awards, and, in addition to his duties at Stanford, he advises several of his students’ startup companies.

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. Premium subscribers also 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

I built a career in design for a simple reason: I love to make things. There is a specific, quiet joy in the intersection of a big idea and meticulous craftsmanship. For a long time, I treated this path as a sort of professional loophole—a way to spend my life creating while remaining safely insulated from the “business” side of things. I thought if the work was good enough, I’d never have to worry about sales.

“I think it's the under-taught aspect of what it means to be a creative... if you can’t sell your ideas, you are nowhere.”

—Mikon van Gastel

But in a recent conversation, Mikon van Gastel effectively burst that bubble. As the co-founder of Sibling Rivalry, Mikon has spent decades proving that the “maker” and the “seller” aren’t two different people—they are two sides of the same creative coin.

Listen to our conversation with Mikon van Gastel

🎧 YouTube, 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 Cranbrook Firing Squad: Where Making Meets Defending

Mikon’s path to the Cranbrook Academy of Art was a pivot away from the rigid Swiss Modernism of his undergraduate years in Holland. Accepted into an environment with no formal classes and a pedagogical model inspired by the original Bauhaus, Mikon spent two intense years unlearning his previous training to rebuild his creative foundation from scratch.

Read more

To make good creative work, you’ll inevitably do a lot of bad work along the way. So building a thriving creative practice relies on showing up and doing the work consistently, whether you feel inspired or not. And we can get trapped into thinking that if only we had the perfect space, or the best pen, or right notebook, it would all be easier.

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

But our guest today, Austin Kleon, has built a remarkable creative practice around a deceptively simple toolkit: index cards, newspapers, scissors, and glue. He’s the bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going, and Don’t Call it Art. What makes Austin’s approach so valuable is how he’s translated these ideas into a sustainable daily practice that’s lasted over a decade.

Buy the books!

In our conversation, Austin shares why he starts every day writing in his diary before he picks up the phone, how constraints (time, space and materials) actually unlock creativity rather than limiting it, and why the path to doing your best digital work might start with picking up a pen.

If you’ve ever struggled to maintain a creative practice, felt overwhelmed by tools and options, or wondered how to keep going when the work feels hard, this episode is for you.

Links

• The Extended Mind, Annie M Paul

• Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, John Cleese

• Everybody Knows - song and lyrics by Leonard Cohen

• Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles, Beth Pickens

• The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel

• Making Art in a Noisy World:

Austin Kleon

Making Art in a Noisy World

Hey y’all…

Listen now

4 months ago · 68 likes · 12 comments · Austin Kleon

• The Beatles Anthology on Disney+

• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

• Criterion collection War and Peace

• Geese

Bio

Austin Kleon is the New York Times bestselling author of a trilogy of illustrated books about creativity in the digital age: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. He’s also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by redacting the newspaper with a permanent marker. His books have sold over two million copies and have been translated into over 30 languages. He’s been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. New York Magazine called his work “brilliant,” The Atlantic called him “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet,” and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.” He speaks for organizations such as Pixar, Google, Netflix, SXSW, TEDx, Dropbox, Adobe, and The Economist. In previous lives, he worked as a librarian, a web designer, and an advertising copywriter. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and sons. Visit him online at www.austinkleon.com

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. Premium subscribers also 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

Thank you , , , , , and many others for joining our Design Better AMA.

If you’d like to join future AMAs, and ask questions directly to former guests of the show and industry experts, consider becoming a premium member.

Upgrade to paid