Design Better
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.”
Episodes
November 18, 2025 • 22 mins
We’ve talked to many design leaders who have burned out after a decade or more of corporate work. But after 17 years at Philips designing health innovations, Cecilia Brenner wasn’t burnt out…she loved it. And she wanted to find a way to scale her sense of purpose, so she joined Design for Good as Managing Director, and found a way to work with hundreds of designers who want meaningful impact without leaving their day jobs.
This is...
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This is a preview of a premium episode. You can find a video version of the full episode on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dvoGPZEY1g
We’ve been on the road this week, recording some in-person episodes in Portland Oregon, with Ryan Coulter—co-founder of The James Brand, and the wonderfully hilarious graphic designer Aaron Draplin.
We’re excited to bring you this episodes soon, and in the meantime we’re re...
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November 5, 2025 • 50 mins
As educators, we’ve grown wary of the term “safe spaces,” especially when what many students really need is a space to engage with “dangerous” ideas. But true dialogue doesn’t begin with risk—it starts with trust. Our guest today, Ben Swire, wrote the book Safe Danger, which offers a thoughtful, practical approach to building the psychological safety that allows curiosity, connection, and even productive disagreement to flourish.
...
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October 28, 2025 • 21 mins
Design is a problem solving discipline. We research user needs, explore solutions, make things, and ship them. But one important stakeholder is often missing from the conversation: the world we live in. What toll do the products we design impose upon the environment? Sustainability is an essential part of the discipline of design, but not understood by designers. If only we had a manual to get us up to speed.
This is a preview of ...
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October 21, 2025 • 46 mins
We’ve worked alongside people for years, only to realize that we know nothing about their personal life. And it probably affected our working relationship. Knowing your colleagues as humans reframes inevitable challenges at work. Had we known our colleagues better, would we have worked through disagreements better or found new ways to collaborate? Yeah, we sure would have.
Alison Rand, who helped establish the discipline of design...
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October 20, 2025 • 14 mins
In this issue of The Brief, we’re reflecting on what we learned about the past and future of design from our conversation with Paola Antonelli (The Museum of Modern Art), Mark Wilson (Fast Company), Kate Aronowitz (GV), Mike Davidson (Microsoft), and Meaghan Choi (Anthropic).
Looking back at 30 years of design
by Eli Woolery
Roughly thirty years ago, I was an undergrad, sitting in our dorm’s computer cluster —this was before the...
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This is a preview of a premium Design Better episode. Visit our Substack to hear the whole interview, for bonus content, and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/fitz-and-the-tantrums
With the 150th official episode of Design Better, we’ve got something special for you.
For many of us, if we haven’t had creative success by our 40’s, we feel like we may have missed the boat. But Michael “Fitz” Fitzpatrick of Fitz and the Tantr...
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Visit our Substack for bonus content and more:https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/bonus-episode-30-years-of-design
Today we celebrate 30 years of Wert&Co.—the quiet champions of design who have shaped our field by placing the brightest designers in roles of influence at brands that impact culture, commerce, and community.
Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencie...
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October 1, 2025 • 59 mins
Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/rewind-paola-antonelli
Design Better has been on the road recently, recording a live episode in Manhattan for design search firm Wert & Co’s 30th anniversary. Guests for the episode included Paola Antonelli (senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA) Mike Davidson (VP of Design and User Research at Microsoft AI), Kate Aronowi...
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September 24, 2025 • 28 mins
This is a preview of a premium episode on Design Better. To listen to the whole episode, head to our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/keith-sawyer
The key to creativity isn’t about having brilliant ideas in isolation, but about cultivating our ability to observe the world around us, and make the intuitive leaps that connect disparate ideas. Keith Sawyer, a creativity researcher who spent over a decade interviewing hund...
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September 23, 2025 • 47 mins
Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jae-park
As designers and creatives, many of us spent years of our career looking at blank canvases and attempting to find the best place to start solving the problems in front of us. Now that AI can churn out designs and imagery, not to mention writing, video, and even music in seconds, what are we losing from the friction that is being removed from ...
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September 10, 2025 • 27 mins
This is a preview of a premium episode. To hear the full episode, head to our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/astro-teller-and-ivo-stivoric-why
When a company talks about taking a “moonshot,” it often ends up being something trivial: a new emoji keyboard, or delivering a pizza in less than 30 minutes.
But at X, the Moonshot Factory, which is part of Google, they’re tackling some of the world’s thorniest problems: ...
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September 3, 2025 • 47 mins
Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/henry-modisett
AI isn’t just another layer in our digital toolkit—it’s reshaping the tools themselves, and in the process, transforming how we work, think, and solve problems.
Henry Modisett, VP of Design at Perplexity, is in a unique position to challenge many of the norms that have shaped tech for some time now. Perplexity just released a beautiful n...
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August 26, 2025 • 20 mins
This is a preview of a premium episode on Design Better. Head to our Substack to get access to the full episode: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/elizabeth-lin
Have you played around with Cursor? If not, it’s time. Designers with no coding skills are passing Cursor Figma files and getting working apps out the other side. And if you have no design, you can just prompt this AI powered development environment to get a solid prototyp...
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August 20, 2025 • 59 mins
Most designers are comfortable in the world of known problems—we talk to users, gather insights, iterate based on feedback. But what happens when you're designing for a future that doesn't exist yet? When you're creating products for people who haven't been born, or technologies that might not emerge for years?
Today's guest has spent decades designing for the future, a space where design specs are ambiguous at best. Nick Foster l...
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August 14, 2025 • 22 mins
This is a preview of a premium episode. Head to Design Better to hear the whole thing: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tim-brown
Sometimes your career takes an unexpected turn—and that pivot can lead to something bigger than you imagined.
Tim Brown, co-founder of Allbirds, has been there. After a stint as a professional soccer player, Tim found himself on a different path—one that led to creating a simple wool sneaker that wou...
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August 6, 2025 • 46 mins
Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/matt-raw
Matt Raw, Interim VP of Design at The New York Times, and his team have a tough job. Their work is seen by millions every day who come to the Times website and apps for information they can trust, presented clearly, across platforms, striking a stylistic balance between tradition and innovation. Somehow they approach the pressure of their wor...
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July 30, 2025 • 9 mins
Microscopes and telescopes
By Aarron Walter
A friend and former colleague called me recently to catch up and get my perspective on an important question. He leads a product team at a major tech company and the design team had just been moved under him.
He’s an exceptional product thinker with a sharp grasp of engineering systems and shipping processes. But managing designers? That was new territory.
“Where should design really...
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July 23, 2025 • 20 mins
This is a preview of one of our premium Design Better episodes. To listen to the whole episode, head over to our Substack and subscribe: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/rhiannon-bell
We all rely on search—sometimes dozens of times a day—to make sense of the world around us. But behind that simple white box is a vast, dynamic system that has to understand not just language, but intent, context, and trust.
In this episode, we ta...
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July 17, 2025 • 30 mins
For many creative people, music is a central part of life. Count us in that camp. We’ve long admired Sonos products for their quality and easy integration into our homes, and everything they design is beautiful.
The integration of design and technology is often a challenge for companies. From the outside, it would seem that Sonos has something figured out in this department. To learn more about their approach, we spoke with Matt B...
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