Design Better

The Curiosity Department
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Design
  • Updated weekly

Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with guests across many creative fields, helping you hone your craft, unlock your creativity, and learn the art of collaboration. Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”

  1. 5 hr ago

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

    A few years ago, Ian Bogost wrote what he thought was a throwaway Atlantic piece about how electric vehicles would finally kill the manual transmission. It went off like a bomb — and the reaction told him people weren’t mourning a car part. They were mourning the feeling of dropping a gear into place, a small moment of sensory connection quietly disappearing without anyone choosing to give it up. Find the full episode and bonus content on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ian-bogost That feeling is the subject of his new book, The Small Stuff. Ian calls it gratification — distinct from happiness or satisfaction, it’s the immediate sensory delight of communing with ordinary things: the ridged coffee cup, the click of an elevator button, the tink of ice in a water bottle. And he diagnoses what he calls dematerialization: the slow way efficiency, automation, and software have severed us from the physical texture of daily life. A game designer, longtime Atlantic contributor, and philosopher of the everyday at Washington University in St. Louis, Ian has spent his career — across books like Persuasive Games and Play Anything — arguing that the systems we build carry values whether we intend them to or not. Here he turns that lens on the ordinary objects most of us stopped noticing long ago. For designers, this is becoming more and more relevant. Ian argues that somewhere between the mid-90s and now, user-centered design quietly mutated into outcome-oriented design — we kept the language of user experience while the goals drifted toward the organization instead of the person. But this isn’t nostalgia or a plea for friction. Gratification, he insists, is easy. It’s already happening to you all the time. The designer’s job isn’t to add friction, but to notice where the sensory life has quietly drained out of the things we build, and to re-introduce it. And the challenge he leaves us with is deceptively simple: get curious. The Small Stuff is out now. You can find Ian at bogost.com. Dr. Ian Bogost is a writer, designer, and scholar of media and technology. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor and Assistant Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis. At WashU, he is appointed in three colleges and the co-executive director of the Office of Public Scholarship. Bogost is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the founding partner of Persuasive Games LLC, a game and design studio. He is the author of 11 books, most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Bogost’s award-winning games and artworks, which include Cow Clicker and A Slow Year have been played by millions of people and held in permanent collections around the world, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  2. 1 Jul

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

    Years ago, two friends in Philadelphia — both designers, both obsessed with jazz — kept noticing the same notation on the back of their favorite records: “recorded by Van Gelder in Hackensack.” So one Saturday they drove out to find it. They tracked down the address in a 1955 phone book, pulled up — and found a parking lot. No sign, no plaque, nothing to mark that Rudy Van Gelder had once turned his parents’ living room into a recording studio there, capturing some of the most important American music of the century. This is a preview of a premium episode. To hear the whole thing, head over to our Substack:⁠https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/chris-entwisle-and-mark-havens⁠ That quiet drive home planted the seed for a twenty-year project. Mark Havens and Chris Entwisle are the authors of WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records — the first real look at the design history of a label that, unlike Blue Note, never got its design mythology, despite cover art that’s just as striking and durable. They tracked down original pressings, interviewed the designers before that history disappeared for good, and uncovered how a label run, in one historian’s words, “like a mom and pop store” — no budget, no briefs, no marketing department — produced a visual identity coherent enough to still echo through design today. Buy the book What we love about this conversation is how much of it comes down to constraints driving creativity. Reid Miles couldn’t afford imagery, so he made typography the art. Tom Hannon had no budget for stock photography, so he shot the musicians himself. Designers got an album title and nothing else — no brief, no comp, no client approval — and turned that absence of direction into creative freedom, because Bob Weinstock simply “viewed it all as art,” the music and the covers alike. This is a conversation about jazz, but it’s also about what happens to creative work when nobody’s watching too closely, and why limitations so often produce things that last. Bios Chris Entwisle is an artist and illustrator. For over thirty years, he has used his passion for both jazz and postwar graphic design in his illustration work. Entwisle has a BA in graphic design from Rutgers University. He and his wife live in the Philadelphia area. Mark Havens is an artist and educator with a dual background in graphic and industrial design. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in both public and private collections. Out of Season, his first major monograph, was described by the New York Times as “a decade-long elegy.” Havens is a professor of industrial design at Thomas Jefferson University. *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  3. 25 Jun

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

    Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment — deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as a personal learning loop. That instinct took her from a bachelor’s in design inside one of India’s most prestigious engineering colleges, where almost nobody understood what design was, to a research role at Carnegie Mellon where she studied health info needs for low-literacy users in rural India, to Autodesk’s bio-nano innovation lab building molecular visualization tools for scientists — and eventually to Google, where she joined the Next Billion Users team. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/niyati-gupta That team’s mission was to ask an open question: where would the next wave of users come from, what did they need, and what products didn’t exist yet to serve them? Niyati ran immersion sprints in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Mexico — shadowing users, building prototypes in the field, testing them in the wild, and bringing those insights back to a team that was building products like Camera Go and Google Files from the ground up. And she’ll tell you that the swim lanes between designer, engineer, and PM felt just as artificial out there in the field as they do today with AI accelerating everything. These days she’s a senior product designer at Netflix, working on commerce and partnerships — which means thinking hard about discovery, about fandom, about how you help someone decide what to watch on a Friday night without making them feel like the choosing is harder than the watching. It also means designing across a ten-foot TV screen, a phone, and every device in between, and trying to make all of it feel like one seamless experience. In this conversation, we get into what the Next Billion Users work taught her about designing for people who aren’t like you, how she thinks about influence as a designer — and why she’s convinced the title was never where the influence actually lived — and what Netflix’s design culture looks like from the inside, including how they run crits and how they think about A/B testing. *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  4. 17 Jun

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

    Typography is often treated as a detail — the thing you finalize after the real design decisions are made. But for our next guest, it’s closer to the foundation everything else rests on. He’s spent two decades in editorial design at some of the most iconic American magazines — Men’s Health, Esquire, Popular Science, Entertainment Weekly — and he’s now the Creative Director of Fast Company, where he recently led a redesign that does something pretty unusual: the magazine gets a completely new typeface every single issue. His name is Mike Schnaidt. This is a preview of a premium episode. Visit our Substack to listen to the entire interview: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mike-schnaidt Mike’s also a professor, a runner, and the author of Creative Endurance — a book that maps the principles of physical and mental endurance onto the creative life. It’s built around 56 rules for sustaining a career in design, drawn from interviews with ultra-marathoners, astronauts, and designers who’ve pushed way past the limits most people set for themselves. And as you’ll hear, he’s already working on book two. We chat about the nuts and bolts of typography (utilitarian vs. expressive, food metaphors, Fast Company's per-issue typeface system) to the philosophy underneath it all (design as service, authorship, hospitality). We dig into his book Creative Endurance — 56 rules for sustaining a creative career drawn from athletes, astronauts, and designers — and his counterintuitive take on burnout: the cure isn't rest, it's picking up something creatively different. Bio Mike Schnaidt is the creative director of Fast Company. He’s also the host of the Webby-awarded video series It’s All in the Typeface, a professor of illustration at the School of Visual Arts, and the former president of the Society of Publication Designers. One of the coolest moments in his life was when Paula Scher said his first book, Creative Endurance, was “beautifully designed.” His second book arrives in 2028. *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  5. 11 Jun ·  Bonus

    Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note

    There’s something magical about the Vestaboard: it’s a physical, split-flap display connected to the internet that displays missives and useful information with a charm that we love. The Vestaboard in our kitchen greets our family with the family schedule for the day, riddles, updates from our favorite sports teams, and the best/worst dad jokes. Everyone who visits our house is amazed by it. Vestaboard is the vision of Dorrian Porter, and has its origin story in a Parisian train station. A few years ago, we had Dorrian Porter on the show to tell us about Vestaboard, and since then, we’ve become even bigger fans of the product. We keep spotting them in the wild, from coffee shops in Savannah to airport storefronts in Minneapolis. Dorrian is back to tell us about the Vestaboard Note, a smaller, more affordable, and more versatile version of the original that went from basic prototype to Red Dot Award winner in about a year — a story that starts, believe it or not, with tariffs. We talk about what it’s like to build a hardware company through supply chain disruptions and trade wars, why Dorrian keeps betting on the consumer market when the easier path might be B2B, and how Vestaboard is finding its way into classrooms, baseball stadiums, and a bar in Northern California born out of a community recovering from wildfire. We also dig into the tension between nostalgia and innovation — Dorrian’s honest about the fact that split-flap displays attract people who love vintage and transportation, but his ambition goes further than retro. He wants to build products that pull meaningful content out of our phones and into the physical spaces where we actually live together. This is a special sponsored episode of Design Better, and we’re happy to share it because Vestaboard is a brand we truly love. Their mission to inspire and connect people resonates with us, and we think it will with you, too. *** There’s currently a waitlist for the Vestaboard Note. But as a Design Better listener, you can head over to vestaboard.com/designbetter to skip the waitlist and receive a special offer. Claim your special offer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note

  6. 10 Jun

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

    When Tina Roth Eisenberg moved to New York in 1999 as a new designer, she kept asking herself the same question: where are my people? Eighteen years ago, she answered it by starting Creative Mornings—a free breakfast lecture series that has since grown into what she describes as the world’s largest face-to-face creative community: 252 cities, 70 countries, and more than a thousand volunteers gathering with around 25,000 people every month. Or, as she puts it, “church for creativity.” Visit our Susbtack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tina-roth-eisenberg-creative-mornings But Creative Mornings is just one thread in Tina’s story. She’s the voice behind Swiss Miss, the beloved design blog she’s kept up for 21 years; the founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking community in Brooklyn; and the creator of Tattly, the designer temporary tattoo company that started as a joke and turned into a business. In our conversation, Tina shares what she’s learned about building communities that scale on trust rather than control, why she measures success in “return on friendship,” and how playful side projects increase “the surface area for luck to find you.” We also talk about commitment as a creative practice, raising creative kids, and why she believes the future isn’t lonely—it’s hyperlocal. Bio Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based designer and serial founder—though many know her simply as "swissmiss," after the design blog she started in 2005 as a personal visual archive, which grew into a popular design journal drawing an average of a million unique visitors a month. Raised in Speicher, Switzerland, and shaped by Swiss design (and, as she puts it, a lot of fresh mountain air), she completed her design studies in Geneva and Munich before moving to New York in 1999. She is the founder of CreativeMornings, the world's largest face-to-face creative community, with monthly talks in 252 cities across 70 countries; the founder of Tattly, the designy temporary tattoo company; co-creator of the to-do app TeuxDeux; and founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking space in Brooklyn. She lives in beautiful Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with her two children, Ella and Tilo, who teach her about current memes and TikTok. Books & Links mentioned: CreativeMornings.com Creative Quests, Sam Furness Dark Forest,Yancey Strickler Nanowrimo Swissmiss Yancey Strickler: Creative Mornings talk from May 2025 Vacation With An Artist Creative Mornings Field Trips Creative Morning Clubs The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  7. 3 Jun

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

    Paul Ford likes to call himself a “fun Cassandra” — someone who, like the priestess in Greek mythology, sees trouble coming, but unlike her tries to make the warning as entertaining as possible. He’s the writer, developer, and co-founder of the tech agency Aboard who saw Claude Code drop last November and immediately understood it was going to change everything — while finding, to his surprise, that most people around him simply weren’t seeing it that way. This is a preview of a premium episode. Find the full interview on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/paul-ford That same instinct is what drew him into AI early. Where others hedged, Paul dove in — vibe coding nonstop, running full enterprise subscriptions for his entire team, and building in earnest. But he’s not a fanboy. He’s a critical optimist who believes something important is happening, while holding equal concern about the companies pushing it, the students expected to learn from it, and the decades of hard-won knowledge that might be quietly evaporating in the rush. Paul is also an English major who sold an agency, a developer who thinks in prose, and a father of 14-year-old twins — one of the most multi-disciplinary thinkers we’ve had on the show. He won the National Magazine Award for writing an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek dedicated to explaining programming to a mass audience — a 38,000-word essay called “What Is Code?” A regular contributor to Wired and published in The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review, he’s one of the rare writers who can make the inner workings of software feel urgent and human. He’s exactly the kind of thinker this moment needs: someone who can write code and read the room, and who cares about quality as much as velocity. He can also make you laugh while explaining why you should probably be a little worried. Bio One of the world’s leading technology thinkers, Paul Ford has written about the way that software works for dozens of publications like Wired, Businessweek, and the New York Times, including his National Magazine Award–winning Bloomberg cover story “What Is Code?” After years of writing about technology, Paul decided to do something about it, co-founding Postlight and Aboard to help deliver quality products to the people who need them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

  8. 27 May

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

    As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the Constitution remains the most consequential document in American life — and more people are reading it than ever. But pick up almost any commercial edition and you’ll find the same thing: small type, no imagery, nothing that invites you in. Jessie McGuire noticed this too. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jessie-mcguire Every copy her studio ordered looked identical — dense, utilitarian, forgettable. So they redesigned it. They printed thousands of copies, donated them to New York City schools, and invited designers like Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast to create posters for each amendment in the Bill of Rights. That project became a turning point — not just for the studio, but for how they think about what design is actually for. Jessie is Managing Partner of Thought Matter, the independent design and creative studio that just won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — the field’s highest national honor. It’s an award that recognizes not a single project but a decade of practice, and Thought Matter’s practice has been built around a bold idea: that imagination is a radical act. A Salvadoran-American designer, New Yorker, and mother of two, Jessie brings a perspective shaped by navigating spaces that weren’t always designed for her. She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt, mentors emerging designers, and leads a studio that works with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands — all grounded in the belief that design is civic infrastructure, a tool for helping people see themselves as participants in shaping the world around them. In this episode, Jessie talks about the origin of the Constitution project, what it means to fund the work you actually want to talk about, why she thinks scale and speed aren’t serving us, and why sitting down to make something with your hands — like the beaded bracelets she makes with her kids — still matters. Bio Jessie McGuire is Managing Partner of Thought Matter, the independent design studio that won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — the field’s highest national honor. She leads the studio’s strategy and long-term vision, working with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands on work grounded in the belief that design shapes what people believe. A Salvadoran-American designer and mother, Jessie is committed to expanding who gets to lead in the design industry. She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt Institute, lectures on design as civic infrastructure, and mentors emerging designers. Before Thought Matter, she worked in-house at Kimberly-Clark and led projects for multinational brands. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MPS in Branding from the School of Visual Arts. *** 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 subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool
See All (253)

Trailers

Hosts & Guests

About

Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with guests across many creative fields, helping you hone your craft, unlock your creativity, and learn the art of collaboration. Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”

Information

  • Creator
    The Curiosity Department
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    253
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Curiosity Department, LLC 2026
  • Show Website
    Design Better

You Might Also Like