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Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst 

The Curiosity Department

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

Design Better

When Samsung’s CEO asked Federico Casalegno to redesign the cameras on the company’s phones, Federico told him he was the wrong person for the job. He wasn’t an optical engineer. He didn’t understand cameras. What he understood was storytelling — and he pointed to the Lascaux caves in France, where people were marking walls twenty thousand years ago for the same reason we hold up our phones today: to capture a moment, and tell it to someone we love.

Find the full episode on our Substack:https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/federico-casalegno

That’s the kind of answer you get from a designer who arrived by way of studying human society. Federico is Head of Samsung’s Global Design Studios, with teams spread across San Francisco, Europe, and Seoul. Before that he spent two decades at MIT, where he co-founded the MIT Design Lab with Bill Mitchell, and before that he was a social scientist embedded with engineers and psychologists at Philips Design in the nineties — back when “cross-disciplinary” wasn’t yet a word anyone put on a job posting.

We talk about what that looks like in practice at the scale Samsung operates at. His team builds digital twins of human ears — thousands of 3D and 4D scans across real demographics — then simulates millions of variations to figure out how an earbud should fit. Then they strap the buds onto robots and make them run. Then they test with actual humans, because at some point a person still has to decide what “comfortable” means.

There’s a phrase Federico kept returning to: technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. The designer’s role is problem making first, problem solving later.

We also get into how critique works inside a company that speaks a dozen native languages, what he actually looks for when hiring, and the French philosopher who, at 102, looked at his calendar and said he was booked until next year.

Bio

Federico Casalegno is Executive Vice President at Samsung, where he leads product experience innovation across business units and heads the company’s Global Design Studios. Reporting directly to the CEO, he builds teams of designers, engineers, creative technologists, and strategists working on advanced design and next-generation experience planning. As head of design and AI, he established Samsung’s Computational Design function and leads digital transformation across the organization.

Before Samsung, Federico spent two decades at MIT, where he founded the MIT Design Lab and the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and taught at MIT and the MIT Media Lab, researching the intersection of design, AI, and emerging technology. He previously worked at Motorola and Philips Design, and holds a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne.

***

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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: 

⁠Get design and career support in Design Club⁠

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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.

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Upgrade to paid

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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

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Federico Casalegno: Samsung EVP and MIT Design Lab founder on what 20,000 years of human creativity means for design today

Jonathan Adler was one of our favorite guests, so we’ve been angling to get him back ever since. He started as a potter and now designs furnishings and interiors that are decadent, but layered with meaning and humor. A lot has happened since we last spoke: he had a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design — the same institution whose gift shop took a chance on his pots 32 years ago — and launched a sprawling collaboration with Michaels, which he calls a temple of craft.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jonathan-adler-returns

We talk with Jonathan about what it felt like to stop making long enough to curate three decades of his own work, why he’s grateful he chose commerce over the gallery world, and whether people really are trading doomscrolling for making things with their hands.

Along the way, we talk about his father, the lawyer who painted — and why the maximalist you think you know insists he’s a minimalist. Also, much like our last conversation with Jonathan, there are some instances of adult language and humor, so if you have kids around it might be a good idea to throw on some headphones.

Bio

Potter, designer, and author Jonathan Adler launched his namesake brand after leaving his day job to pursue his first love: pottery. In 1993, Barneys bought his collection of pots, and five years later, he opened his first store in Soho.

Today, Jonathan Adler is a design company with retail locations worldwide, a thriving e-commerce site, a full slate of residential and commercial projects, and a global wholesale business. They strive to create luxe and livable interiors that are seriously designed, but don’t take themselves too seriously. Earlier this year, the Museum of Arts and Design mounted a retrospective of his work, presented in dialogue with pieces he curated from the museum’s own collection. He lives in New York with his husband, the writer Simon Doonan.

***

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

***

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Adler returns: The minimalist inside the maximalist

We all know that there is something fractured about the workplace, that makes it inefficient, and at times inhumane. If only someone was thinking deeply about those problems, and how to address them…

Visit our Substack for the full episode: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/clay-parker-jones

That’s what Clay Parker Jones is working on right now. Clay has spent close to two decades on this problem — first at the consultancy undercurrent, and today as Head of Org Design and Development at Airbnb. He advocates for investment in creativity and humanity at work, something you might think would be obvious for any company, but sadly is eclipsed by short term thinking.

His new book, Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces, is one of the most cohesive philosophies of organizational structure we’ve come across. And his diagnosis of what’s broken is simple: there aren’t enough real teams. Most of us work in what he calls “co-acting groups” — people who convene for a meeting and then scatter back to their actual work.

In this conversation, we get into why psychological safety stays a platitude until you make it structural, what rule of law looks like inside a company, and how to break a manager’s job into atomic pieces and hand away the parts you’re bad at. We also chat about why the org chart is a design problem that designers should be at the table for.

Bio

Clay Parker Jones leads Organizational Design & Development at Airbnb, refining how a creativity-first company learns and ships new ideas. A former Chief Strategy Officer at Black Glass, co-founder of August, and transformation lead at R/GA, his work has been recognized by B Lab and profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. A former bike mechanic with a BA in Diplomacy and World Affairs from Occidental College, Clay now resides in Brooklyn with his wife Emily and cat Ian. You can find him on the Fort Greene tennis courts in his spare time.

***

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

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Clay Parker Jones: author of "Hidden Patterns" on why your team isn't really a team

A few years ago, Dropbox redesigned its website and revenue dropped by thirty percent. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment: people working weekends, everyone hunting for a systemic failure.

Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/angel-steger

The culprit turned out to be a pricing page — specifically, the white space between the feature list items was slightly too generous. Angel Steger noticed that her eye kept landing on the white instead of the words. They tightened the gaps, and the revenue came back.

That’s the kind of thing Angel notices, and it’s not an accident. Currently the VP of Design at Wealthfront, She trained as an architect at RISD, where the first question in her first architecture class wasn’t about buildings. It was “What is a drawing?” — the sort of question that makes you realize every tool you reach for carries a point of view you probably haven’t examined.

Angel’s path into tech was less deliberate. By her own account, she mouthed off to her boss, got fired, and spent the severance on O’Reilly books, taught herself to code, and became the first designer at MySpace — where the head of engineering proudly informed her that they had never had design and never would need it. She went on to become the first product designer at 23andMe, learned usability from Larry Tesler, and led design teams at Pinterest, Dropbox, and Meta before landing at Wealthfront.

In this conversation, we get into what architecture teaches you about solving one problem at a time, why she tells her team to go lower fidelity, how a default chart setting can push someone into a financial decision they’ll regret, and what she looks for in a portfolio — high craft, high intentionality, and no boiled broccoli.

Bio

Angel joined Wealthfront in November 2023 and leads product design, content design, and creative teams, bringing 20+ years of experience building and leading customer-centric, business-focused design and product teams. What makes her perspective rare is the through-line she draws between business model and design quality — she's a practitioner who built her career arguing that growth design, done with rigor and craft, isn't a compromise but the highest form of product work. Beyond Wealthfront, she holds advisory positions at AudiencePlus and Ameelio, and previously held leadership design roles at Meta, Dropbox, and Pinterest, where major growth and user engagement initiatives were implemented. She guided Wealthfront's design organization through its December 2025 IPO, in which Wealthfront's shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "WLTH" — the first robo-advisor to go public.

***

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

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Angel Steger: Wealthfront's VP of Design on what architecture teaches you about software

Like a lot of parents, Eli struggled over the years to get his kids more into reading and away from screens. He wasn’t necessarily on the search for a technological solution, but then an interesting device came our way: the Yoto Player, a screen-free audio player for kids. Eli’s 10-year old son has been loving to read along to the Harry Potter books (and he often finds him after he falls asleep, and the player is still going).

Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ben-drury

The story behind Yoto is from a similar moment of parental struggle. About a decade ago, Ben Drury was shopping for a stroller in a London department store and found one with an iPad mount built in. For a newborn. He remembers the reaction being physical — this is just wrong.

But if you’re expecting an anti-screen crusade, that’s not quite what happened . The line Ben uses is: we don’t say screens are bad, we say audio is good. Listening is good for creativity and imagination — and there’s research going back to the 1980s to back that up.

Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Yoto, makers of a kids’ audio player that works by dropping a physical card into a small speaker. Before Yoto Ben spent about a decade building a B2B digital music platform called 7digital which he took public. What he learned from that experience proved helpful as he and his co-founder started Yoto.

Ben and his co-founder became parents at roughly the same time, and wanted a way for their kids to connect with music and books like they did in childhood. So they started hacking on Raspberry Pis with no hardware experience whatsoever. How hard could it be, right?

The 3rd Gen Yoto Player

Turns out, it’s pretty hard. They took a restrained approach. Yoto is a cube, because it was the simplest shape they could think of. It uses NFC cards that have a Pokemon card feel. The 16 by 16 pixel display presents pixel art that gives Yoto a fun personality.

In this conversation, we get into the design principles that came out of Montessori, their experience working with Pentagram on product design and branding, why Paul McCartney became an early angel investor, and what changes when you go from a Kickstarter that raised fifty thousand dollars to nine-figure revenue.

Bio

Ben Drury is the co-founder and CEO of Yoto, the screen-free audio player that lets children control their own listening by dropping a physical card into a speaker. Before Yoto, he spent roughly a decade building 7digital, a B2B digital music platform he took public. He and his co-founder started Yoto in 2017 with a Kickstarter campaign and no hardware experience between them; today the company employs about 220 people across six countries, sells in 1,900 Target stores in the US, and counts Paul McCartney among its early angel investors. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.

***

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

Ben Drury: Yoto co-founder on audio, imagination, and screen-free design

This is a special bonus episode, an interview with Rivian’s Chief Design Officer, Jeff Hammoud. We’ve got all the audio here, but it’s worth heading over to our Youtube channel at dbtr.co/youtube to watch the video.

We recorded this one live in Miami, in the Rivian Pavilion during Art Basel, with a R1T truck in a new eggplant-purple called Boreal parked just over Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff runs a team of about 140 people across Irvine and Palo Alto — interior and exterior designers, color and materials, digital surfacing, perceived quality, even an in-house painter and a clay milling shop. And he has a strong opinion about what all that machinery is for: constraints are what separate designers from stylists. Anyone can make a beautiful concept car, but making the production version look like the concept is the challenge.

We talked about why Rivian keeps making colors most people won’t buy, and how limited-run “Studio Originals” work like sneaker drops. Jeff makes the case that AI is going to level the playing field in design — shifting the advantage from whoever illustrates best to whoever has the better idea. We got into which controls stay physical and why, the haptic halo wheels coming in R2, and how scent ties a car to memory.

***

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

Jeff Hammoud: Chief Design Officer of Rivian on constraints, color, and what separates designers from stylists

Fifteen years ago, Eric Ries handed a generation of founders a playbook. When Eli was in a Palo Alto-based startup accelerator in 2011, The Lean Startup felt like the only book anyone in that ecosystem was talking about. It was in the middle of a wildly optimistic moment for tech. Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world,” social media was blooming, and there was a widespread belief that technology was about to democratize everything and bring us closer together. Concepts like the MVP (“minimum viable product,”), the pivot, and build-measure-learn became the operating language of Silicon Valley.

This is a preview of a premium episode. Listen to the full interview on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/eric-ries

But a lot of the companies built on those ideas went on to get corrupted by forces Eric hadn’t yet named. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his reckoning with what happens after you build something great — and how to keep it from falling apart.

Buy the book

In this conversation, we get into why speed itself wasn’t the problem, but treating a rising stock price as proof of health is like assuming more exhaust means a faster car. Eric explains why doing the right thing 100% of the time is actually easier than doing it 98% of the time, and how companies behave like superorganisms with their own emergent character — a point he illustrates with a genuinely mind-bending study about ants solving a puzzle that no single ant ever could.

We talk about the “harder is easier” principle through stories from Patagonia and the long-term stock exchange he built as a design challenge, and why the value a company makes comes from the design of its products. And because we couldn’t resist, we get into AI slop, LLM psychosis, and Eric’s clear, simple antidote: never ask these tools to make you an artifact — ask them to teach you how to make one yourself.

Bio

Over the last two decades, Eric Ries’s ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader’s Guide; and The Startup Way.

As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.

***

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

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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.

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

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.

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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

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/natalya-shelburne
Natalya Shelburne, Tech Lead for Design Engineering at The New York Times, sits at a fascinating crossroad of design and development. She leads a team of front-end developers and brings her own experience as a designer and art director to her current role.
We chat with Natalya about her move from design to front-end dev, and some of the fears she faced along the way. We also talk about her approach to bridging design and dev, and what she brings from her prior career as a teacher into product design.
Takeaways:

Ways to approach the unnecessary dichotomy between designers and engineers

Why respect is key to developing good cross-functional partnerships

How to overcome fear of moving into a technical role as a designer

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Natalya Shelburne: How designers and developers work together at The New York Times

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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