In short
Design Better’s live AMA at The New York Times with interim head of design Matt Raw, where hosts Eli Woolery and Aaron Walter discuss the podcast’s origin, how they find creative guests, audience growth, publishing formats (Substack/YouTube/video/live), and how generative AI affects production while “taste” remains human-led. They also cover community-building plans and future offerings.
Guests (backgrounds)
Eli Woolery—Stanford product design lecturer; background in photography/filmmaking/product/industrial design; formerly director of design education at Envision; founded Out of the Deep Blue (web/mobile design consultancy for Genentech, Kaiser Permanente). Aaron Walter—UX design leader; started UX at Mailchimp and helped scale it; later at Envision studying design teams; joined public health officials for COVID emergency response; author of Designing for Emotion (2nd ed).
Key claims
Design Better began inside Envision, became independent in 2023; they’re expanding beyond product design; AI helps with transcription/theme extraction, proposals, forecasting, audio cleanup, and tools, but they still curate and write; ADHD/neurodivergence among creatives is more common than assumed; community is hard due to moderation risks, so live events/AMAs/directories are preferred.
Notable examples
David Sedaris prototypes and edits; John Cleese’s open/closed creativity modes; Sarah Seeger (autistic astrophysicist) as cross-disciplinary guest; Eileen Fisher, OK Go, Kevin Bethune; David Sedaris met in person before a reading; NYT games as intergenerational connection.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOOrigins of Design Better
2:21 to 4:48
Hosts discuss the origin and evolution of the Design Better podcast.
“So think John Cleese to George Pechnig and everything in between.”
Impact and Growth of the Podcast
4:48 to 6:44
Discussion on the growth, audience impact, and recognition of the podcast.
“product design, especially digital product design, given what Envision's focus was, I think we both came to realize, like, we're starting to have some of the same conversations.”
Exploring Creative Inspirations
6:44 to 9:23
Hosts explain how they find guests and stories from various creative fields.
“She said she started listening to us in high school and actually convinced her to study design in college.”
Diverse Audience Insights
9:23 to 11:51
Hosts discuss their audience range and the different expectations from listeners.
“So in many ways, the way that somebody like him, a humorist, a writer, there are echoes of the same types of things that we do.”
Future Directions: Video and Live Engagement
11:51 to 14:00
Exploring future avenues in video content and live interactions with the audience.
“or like I mentioned earlier, the young woman going to design school.”
Exploring Multimedia Engagement
14:00 to 17:40
Learn how different content formats can engage diverse audiences.
“And if you're on YouTube, I mean, I personally would have trouble, even if it was filmed very well, like sitting down and watching a three-hour podcast.”
Harnessing AI in Creative Processes
17:40 to 24:14
Discover the impact of AI on creative work and content production.
“Let's talk about your creative process a little bit.”
Understanding Creativity and Neurodivergence
24:14 to 26:20
Examine the relationship between creativity, neurodivergence, and societal perceptions.
“People made fun of me or they thought I was sort of weird.”
Understanding Creativity and Neurodivergence
26:21 to 27:29
Examine the relationship between creativity, neurodivergence, and societal perceptions.
“So many designers we talk to tell us that they're stressed out about how rapidly the creative process is changing.”
The Benefits of Dupe.com
28:27 to 28:46
Learn how to find similar products online for less using Dupe.com.
“Upload a photo and it'll instantly show you similar items for way less.”
Show all 19 chapters
Building a Community Around Design Better
28:53 to 31:23
Explore the challenges and opportunities in creating a design community.
“And Aaron, you used a word early on, community, which is really interesting to me.”
Future Developments for Design Better
31:25 to 34:15
Discover exciting upcoming projects and offerings from Design Better.
“A couple of things that stand out to me.”
Staying Inspired in Design
34:17 to 36:59
Hear insights on maintaining inspiration and creativity in design work.
“For the Times, there are lots of different types of information needs we try to meet, different products that we provide, things like that.”
Recharge and Balance in Creative Work
37:01 to 38:31
Learn how to find balance and recharge while pursuing creative endeavors.
“Well, we're passionate about creativity.”
Networking with Guests
38:33 to 40:00
Explore humorous anecdotes and strategies for connecting with podcast guests.
“The way that I've arranged my schedule, this is back from the Envision days when everybody was on an East Coast schedule.”
Podcasts Recommendations and Favorites
40:01 to 42:04
Discover podcast recommendations from the hosts, including insightful shows.
“I don't know that we have a lot of crazy things we have to do to get guests, but you do have to be persistent in a non-annoying way, which Eli's much better at this than I am.”
Exploring Favorite Podcasts
42:04 to 43:28
Learn about the host's favorite podcasts and their unique styles.
“His connection with Dune, the story, Frank Hebert, the different instruments he used.”
The Power of Games and Connection
43:28 to 45:24
Discover how games foster intergenerational connections and family bonding.
“This might be inspired by your comment on cooking.”
Sharing Recipes Across Generations
45:24 to 46:38
Hear how cooking and recipes strengthen family ties and memories.
“It's like we have to save things or we get yelled at.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01Aaron and I were recently invited to the New York Times where we spoke with Matt Raw, the interim head of design at the Times. We're accustomed to interviewing, but this was a different experience for us as this time we were the ones telling our story. Matt and the Times design team were curious about the origin story of Design Better, what we've learned about creativity and design after more than 200 interviews, and how we approach building our business. If you've ever wanted to peek behind the curtains of the Design Better studio, well, here's your chance. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.
0:38I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.
1:09We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
1:15Design Better is supported by Framer. These days, anyone can generate a website in about a minute. The first 80 % is easy, but that last 20 % is a headache. The spacing's off, there are dozens of design mistakes, the CMS isn't wired up, and before you know it, what seemed easy has eaten tons of time. Framer closes that gap. It's a pro website builder with AI agents working right on the canvas with you in the same place the real site is designed and published. The agent drafts a page, you inspect it, edit, publish it. Agents bring speed and scale. You bring taste, judgment, and your control. By the way, Miro and Perplexity build their websites in Framer.
1:58Learn how you can get more out of your website from a Framer specialist or get started building for free at framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off. framer.com slash design better rules and restrictions may apply
2:21and now back to the show
2:27i'm really excited that you're both here to talk with us today let me say a little bit about design better and introduce the two of you and then we'll jump into the conversation design better if you don't know explores the intersection of design technology and the creative process through conversations with inspiring guests across a lot of different creative fields. So think John Cleese to George Pechnig and everything in between. These guys have talked to them. Eli trained in the product design program at Stanford, where you now teach as a lecturer, right? And you have a background in photography, filmmaking, as well as product and industrial design.
2:58You're formerly the director of design education at Envision, which is a platform, I think if you're a designer, you're probably very familiar with. You also founded Out of the Deep Blue, a design consultancy where you worked on web and mobile applications for clients like Genentech and Kaiser Permanente. And I've come to learn you're really into the ocean. And I studied marine biology, also loved to surf, dive, and kayak. Aaron is a design and technology leader. He started the user experience design practice at MailChimp and helped grow that company from a few thousand customers to tens of millions.
3:29And later also was at Envision, where he studied design teams at some of the most admired tech companies to identify the traits that influence success. And more recently, when COVID emerged, Aaron joined forces with public health officials to use design and technology in the emergency response. Aaron, you're also the author of a number of books, the latest of which is the second edition of Designing for Emotion. Designing for Emotion was one of the more formative books for me as a designer. It's super cool to be able to talk to you. And your guidance has helped the White House, Department of State, dozens of major corporations, startups, and venture capital firms.
4:02So really excited to have you both here today talking with us. Maybe we could start by talking a little bit about Design Better. For those who aren't as familiar with Design Better, what is it and what's the origin story? So Design Better, it's a podcast, but more than that, it's a community of designers, people who are passionate about design. It's something that started inside of a company. It started inside of Envision, a design company that is sadly sunset. But Eli and I took it independent in 2023, was it? Yeah. And we are expanding it in new directions. Yeah. And I think it's come out of a natural curiosity that Aaron and I both have, both about, you know, how do we become better designers, but how do we also just be better creatively in general?
4:44And I think after the first few years of doing the show, which did very much focus on product design, especially digital product design, given what Envision's focus was, I think we both came to realize, like, we're starting to have some of the same conversations. And if we're getting a little bored, our audience is probably getting a little bored. So we want to get new people in. We want to explore other areas of creativity and draw lessons that folks in our audience who are still primarily designers can use, whether that's from a David Sedaris or John Cleese or Eileen Fisher. When did you know you had something bigger on your hands?
5:15So the thing about a podcast or even writing a book is it feels a little bit like you're shouting into the void. You don't really get any feedback of if it's useful or interesting to people. But I remember we got covered by Vanity Fair. It was on Vanity Fair's website, and there was a really lovely quote. And I thought, oh, oh, so people actually listen to this and pay attention. And then Architectural Digest. And then we started to kind of pay attention to numbers. But for us, it was a labor of love when we were inside of Envision. And nobody in Envision said, hey, please create a design podcast.
5:50It was like a thing that we wanted to do as a way to learn and also support people and bring a lot more voices into the conversation. No one was really asking for the numbers. But once we started to look at the download numbers, which didn't really mean much to us, and then we started to look at other podcasts, we realized this is actually substantial. And it's been interesting to see that grow. You know, podcasting is a very long tail game where there's maybe 3 million podcasts in existence. And most of those aren't living anymore. They're sort of dead content. But at the scale we were, we sort of found ourselves in the top half percent of all podcasts globally, which seems like a lot.
6:28But we're still like way smaller than the giants like the Joe Rogans of the world. Definitely smaller than the daily. Smaller than the daily, for sure. And so the numbers were interesting. But I think for me, what really gave me a sense that we were onto something is some of the just qualitative stuff that we were hearing. So, for instance, I heard from a young woman who just entered college. She said she started listening to us in high school and actually convinced her to study design in college. I was like, wow, we are having an impact. That's an impact. Yeah. That's cool. One thing that's sort of been constant with Design Better is creative inspiration and getting under the hood a little bit and what makes creators in all sorts of disciplines tick.
7:05Tell us a little bit about how you find these stories. How is it that you are able to find such a wide group of folks to hear from and who are willing to sort of let you into their heads a little bit? You know, I mentioned that sort of looking at disparate fields, and sometimes it ends up being kind of obscure things. So, for instance, we reach out to publicists, Penguin Random House, and try to get interesting folks who have new books coming out. And sometimes they'll pitch us on someone, like, for instance, Sarah Seeger, who's an astrophysicist. And at first glance, you might think, what is an astrophysicist have to teach us about design, right?
7:35But we read her book and it was very interesting. And it turns out that her work is very cross-disciplinary, working across different fields. And I think we can actually learn from that, like learning from, you know, how do we speak the language of other disciplines? And she herself was autistic. She found this out later in life. So how do you communicate with people who think differently? We occasionally get pitched or we find someone who's in a very different field than maybe a traditional product design or graphic design, and we learn a lot from them. We still love to talk to people in product design space.
8:08It's still kind of the nexus of a lot of what we're curious about, but we feel like the space is pretty navel-gazy. We've had a lot of conversations, whether it's conferences or things that have been published online, books and so forth, about design systems and other core things, leadership, etc. Useful and interesting, but it turns out that these disciplines or these ideas did not originate with product design. And there are a lot of other folks who are solving problems creatively in novel and new ways. They're prototyping, they're experimenting in ways that can inform the way that we work. So for example, David Sedaris is someone who is a master of prototyping.
8:49He is constantly observing, does amazing user research. He's always looking at the absurdity of humans and the weird things we do. Capturing that in his notebooks, Every day, turning those into some sort of little essays, reading those in front of an audience where he sees where the laugh lines are, where they don't happen. Then he edits his books 50 times, like 40, 50 times before it goes to an editor. Editor comes back and says, you need to cut this line. He's like, no, that's my best line of the whole chapter. And he knows that because he's doing all the research. So in many ways, the way that somebody like him, a humorist, a writer, there are echoes of the same types of things that we do.
9:30And we feel like if we expand the purview of what we're looking at beyond just people who are literally creating the exact type of digital product as us, there's a lot more that we can learn from the world. Another example is John Cleese, who wrote this little short book on creativity. We were talking about your process here at the New York Times earlier, where there's an ideation visioning phase, and then you execute and iterate prototype. Turns out he does very similar things where he talks about having an open mode when you're coming up with ideas, writing comedy or drama, and then more of a closed mode where you make the decision, you finish the script, you film it, etc.
10:07So even in these different disciplines, there's a lot of similarity in how you approach that process. Right. And just hearing some of the language of how people approach this and other creative fields can unlock things. For me personally, as a listener, I just learned David Sedaris prototypes. I would not have made that connection without Design Better. Right. That's very cool. One of the things we think a lot about at the Times is audience, who we're reaching. And if you want to stick with a podcast like The Daily, like how that audience grows over time. What have you guys seen in terms of your own audience as you've grown?
10:35How has it changed? Do they have new or different expectations of you, especially as you bring in folks from different creative fields? There's a lot of range in the audience. And we know because we do a survey every year with our audience. And we do the math and make sure that's representative of the entire audience. But it's everybody from their students all the way up to chief design officer, some executive, and everything in between. But then what surprises us is there are people who are not designers. We call them design curious. Crossover to the way the Times looks at the audience as well.
11:08We think about curious, yep. In fact, our parent company is called the Curiosity Department because that is what we do professionally. We pursue curiosity. So the audience, we have people who are musicians. We have writers. We have filmmakers, people who are unexpected. We did not go out searching for this audience to bring them in. But we do think there's a broader conversation for all of us. It's interesting to get a chance to talk sometimes one-on-one to the folks that are listening because sometimes they're in a moment of transition where they're thinking about maybe their product manager thinking about becoming a designer or vice versa.
11:42I've heard it both ways. And it's valuable for us to know that the content that we're sharing with people, the stories that we're sharing with people are helping in those transition moments or like I mentioned earlier, the young woman going to design school. So hopefully they're relevant to them, but then also folks way up the ladder that are leading larger teams. We can talk to say someone here at the New York Times, how did your team approach the design process or a team at Google and share those stories and insights to help on the leadership side too. So we're trying to kind of address all ends of it.
12:12I think the way that stories are told also broaden the aperture of the audience as well. And I know that y 'all are experimenting a lot with video and other ways to engage an audience. That's something that we've been exploring too. We moved, I think it was like a year and a half or two years ago over to Substack. And Substack is actually an amazing platform. I'm fascinated by how a platform like that could become popular and it's a business model that people pay content creators. And that's how Substack makes their money is they take some percentage of that. It's a great platform though for discovery because there's a lot of people who they subscribe to a different Substack, they find us and we see tons of growth through that, a lot of adjacent growth.
12:58So that being built into the system is pretty significant. Video, we see YouTube, like clearly that's like the number one discovery platform for podcasts right now, which sort of surprising a video platform having audio be such a central piece. And I know that's another thing that the Times has been experimenting with is just more video content. Yeah, you're sort of getting into my next question, which is, you know, whether it's being on Substack or thinking about publishing on YouTube, how does that change how you think about what you're offering in terms of format or even the content itself?
13:29Yeah, I think we, you know, Aaron and I have had a lot of conversations about video because we're a small team and producing videos, a pretty high lift and can be expensive. But we've come to realize that that's where a lot of the growth is. Certainly a lot of the discovery. YouTube's the second biggest search engine in the world, at least until AI disrupts everything. For now. For now. It can be challenging, quite honestly, to make like a talking heads video over Zoom interesting. You know, I think folks that are consuming over audio are often doing other things. they're cooking or they're taking a run.
14:00And if you're on YouTube, I mean, I personally would have trouble, even if it was filmed very well, like sitting down and watching a three-hour podcast. I just don't know if there's time for that. But some people do or they dive in and out of it. So thinking about how can we make that interesting? How can we make it engaging? So we started to re-release some of our older episodes where we had video but never did it like with John Cleese. But we did have a censor part of it where his wife walked in the towel because we didn't want to embarrass her. One of the perils of being more interesting. There's that.
14:29But it's definitely something we want to explore. And then kind of tied to that, how do we think about doing more live stuff like we're doing here and we're doing another show here live? And that's another way for us to both connect with our audience directly, but also give them opportunity to get to know each other too and kind of build community. A term that keeps coming to mind for me as we think about some of the things we're doing at The Times is this old term, actually, at least for me from like 90s, multimedia. Things are becoming more multimedia. CD-ROM. Yeah, we might. Let's get back to that.
14:58This idea that like podcast might be the core offering, but you might use video actually as a way to pull people in, get them interested or find new audience. And it sounds like you're experimenting with lots of different ways you might use what you create in different ways. People learn different ways too. There's these different modalities. Some people are auditory learners. Some people read. We write long form content. We produce 45 minutes to an hour long podcasts. We remix that into different ways, different types of content as well. There's video, live events. We had a term that we used to use when we were working inside of Envision, use the whole animal.
15:38There's a heavy lift to go deep on a particular subject. And that can be segmented and cut into different ways, remixed into different ways. And now more than ever, that's easier, I will say, because it's still, I mean, it's a lot of work for us. But you record an episode, we can make TikTok videos where we cut specific pieces. But what's amazing is like that gets transcribed in something like Riverside. You can edit specific words out. So you get very specific editing. You're editing copy to edit video. You produce that. You can put that out onto many platforms. It goes onto YouTube. It goes onto socials.
16:17It goes into Substack as a different piece. We're exploring different ways that that can be used. The idea is, especially for a smaller shop like us, we want to try to meet people where they are. We see that they listen and they learn in different places. We learned that a lot of people learn at lunch, at work. You know, they sit down, they eat lunch, they listen to a podcast, they read a thing. And so what could we make that fits into that portion of their life? That's a really key thing for us is just like trying to right size the content and offer a lot of different things on the buffet of learning.
16:52How do you get insights like that? We talk to people that survey I mentioned. I know surveys are much maligned, but they can be a really great learning mechanism. And then we will get people on Zoom and talk to them about things. And that's really interesting just to see. we discovered through some of those interviews that when we think of our audience, we think like we have these different channels and it's all the same audience. There's an audience that just listens to the podcast. It doesn't know anything about our website. There are people who just read Substack and they don't listen to the podcast at all, which means we should be better at remixing those pieces, flipping the audio and putting that into the blog posts or the emails.
17:32We've got to cross-connect all of these different pieces to create pathways of discovery. Sounds very familiar. Yes. That might resonate. Let's talk about your creative process a little bit. Turn the tables on you. You know, obviously, the technological landscape is changing very quickly. I was going to say, you've gone 20 minutes without really talking about AI, which I think is probably a record for 2025. In what ways is or is not generative AI impacting how you create design better? With the caveat that there's still a lot of like ethical considerations to think about and ways that things go terribly, horribly wrong.
18:09I think Aaron and I are both very optimistic overall, and we do use it quite a bit, especially given that we're such a small team and we need to kind of leverage ways to expand our capabilities. As a small example, we just started this new series, which we're calling The Roundup. So what we're doing is looking at past shows and trying to tease out insights that are common across the shows. And the first one was about AI. And we had, you know, hundreds of pages of transcripts that, you know, five years ago, we would have had to go through by hand, but we could feed it into AI, have it pull out some of the common themes.
18:42Now, it still hallucinates, so you have to double check things, but it makes that part of the work a lot easier. And then we can use our human lens and editorial judgment to figure out, okay, what's really going to be interesting? What are the real insights here? So, yeah, in that way, and many others, we've been using it quite a bit. I mean, there's not really part of design better that AI does not come in handy. We are not mathematicians. We have creative backgrounds. But running a business, you have to do some things. You have to write a bunch of proposals. And we would rewrite those proposals all the time, which does not require math, but built a tool that helps us create that proposal with common language that pulls our latest statistics about our audience.
19:27audience size, what brands are represented in our audience, et cetera. Built a tool that helps us forecast like, okay, here's our data, our analytics about how many people are subscribed, paying, et cetera, et cetera, and forecast out what do we look like in a year, two years, three years, if it's linear, if it's exponential, et cetera. So we can start to forecast that stuff. I could not begin to figure that out. I mean, I guess I could begin, but I certainly could not finish. We've used it to do some vibe coding stuff, building a platform that allows designers to post their profile, to find a job, and then people can post a job.
20:07Companies post great jobs so we can kind of play match banker with some folks in our audience. We use it to clean up audio. There's an AI tool for kind of every piece of our business. Wow. Let me maybe ask the inverse of this question. What hasn't it changed for you? At least personally, I don't know, Aaron may think differently but i don't use it to like oh what guests should we have on or what areas of interest we pursue i still lean on like what am i really curious about who would be interesting to have on the show and what am i excited to just have a conversation with in some way our roles as creatives may become more and more the producer the curator the editor where we're guiding these tools we're getting a lot of output that we need to decide what's good what's not and our taste is very important in that regard and those are fun parts too like i enjoy you don't want i don't want Or what question do we ask some interesting person?
20:59It is useful to have AI as a sounding board. Like what are some things that you might think to ask? But most of the time, I'd say like 95 % of the time, it's something that we already intuitively, we want to explore. And then that last 5 % AI sort of prompts us in a direction that we might not have thought of. And that's useful. We're still writing. We still write everything. it'd be easy to just say like, here's podcast transcripts from these five episodes of a common theme, write a blog post. It's just not interesting. It's just not interesting. You've got to have an interesting human take. Something that keeps coming up a lot as a theme with our guests is the idea of taste.
21:40And taste is a word that has very much put me off for a long time because it feels very snooty. But taste is a really important thing that comes from years of experience. It comes from a deep understanding of a topic, a space, a discipline. So you can discern what quality looks like. And that, I think, is emerging as this relationship that we have with AI in a creative way, where we can be the judges, we can evaluate, we can have an idea, which AI can sort of carry our water creatively to a certain degree. but ultimately we have to be the ones based on the breadth of our human experience to create something for other humans to enjoy.
22:26That resonates. That's something that's been coming up a lot in conversations among designers I talk to here is in some ways the rise of especially tools that help us create designs just further illustrates the critical role that the human designer plays in selecting and judging in understanding what works and why it will work or won't. So it makes a lot of sense to me that you're hearing and feeling that too. You mentioned that this has sort of been a theme that you've heard more recently among some of your guests. What sorts of things stand out to the two of you? Like, do you have a favorite interview or the themes that have been surprising to you over the years as you've been able to sort of have such a broad set of conversations with creative folks?
Read the full transcript
23:04The thing that's been most interesting to me lately is just how many creative people have ADHD or some sort of neurodivergence, dyslexia, looking at the world in a different way, so much so that it has caused me to wonder, is this a misnomer? It's, you know, attention deficit disorder, a disorder. And so the National Health Institute did a study and discovered that globally, about seven and a half percent of the global population has ADHD. I have a strong hunch, not a scientific hunch, that that is very underreported because there are a lot of people we've talked to who exhibit ADHD. I'm not a psychologist, so I can't really evaluate, but there are these echoes that continue to present.
23:52I think it's a much higher number. And if that's the case, then is that a disorder if a large portion of the global population, their brains operate this way? Not a bug, it's a feature. If it's a feature, what is that feature offering us? And I think that as we talk to creative people in different disciplines, we hear common stories. I wasn't great at school. I couldn't sit still. I looked at things differently. People made fun of me or they thought I was sort of weird. Those are the people who make big impact. Those are the people who innovate, who create something that engages us, excites us.
24:27And I think that that is something that we need to reevaluate and maybe think about our educational system in a different way. Think about our hiring processes. What are the signals of this person is worth hiring or not? Maybe adjust the workplace too, to not be that we have to conform and sit into this controlled space where someone's going to observe and measure our activity. That's a way to kill creativity. That is not a way to encourage that. And I would love for more people to explore this more. My favorite conversation is kind of in two flavors. And one of them is interviewing somebody who's maybe quite well known, but bringing their stories and their kind of insights into a realm where our audience would get used to that out of them.
25:13So for instance, Eileen Fisher, founder of the fashion brand, as a product designer, you might not think you could learn much, but she has a set of principles that she uses that are very much like the design principles we might use as a designer. Then also her just entrepreneurial journey is very interesting, or the band OK Go does these amazing music videos. And what is that process like? And it is very iterative and explorative. And there's things that we can take away from that. And then the other flavor is somebody who's not very well known, but they have an amazing story. So one of those is Kevin Bethune, who started as a nuclear engineer, essentially a mechanical nuclear engineer, and transitioned through working nights at Nike into becoming a shoe designer at Nike, just through sheer will of force.
25:58And I'm sort of biased maybe because I've had kind of a multidisciplinary career, but seeing those inspirational stories of somebody who started in one place and ended up in a very different place, I hope is inspiring to the folks in our audience who might feel like they're stuck or wanting to change. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
26:20Design Better is supported by Masterclass. So many designers we talk to tell us that they're stressed out about how rapidly the creative process is changing. I know it's cliche to say AI is changing the world, but hey, it's true. I've been building with AI for a while now, and I still don't have my head fully wrapped around how everything works. That's why I took Fei-Fei Li's masterclass. Her point is that AI has no direction of its own. The forces shaping it are human choices, and people who understand those forces don't just keep up with the technology. They steer it. And that changed my perspective.
26:56Instead of wondering which tool I should learn next, I now stay focused on my goals and how my tools empower my best work. That's just one idea from one class on Masterclass. There are 200-plus more available taught by people who define their fields from just$10 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Right now, as a listener of Design Better, you get at least 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash designbetter. That's 15 % off masterclass.com slash designbetter. Head to masterclass.com slash designbetter to see the latest offer. Design Better is supported by dupe.com. I find that I do my best work when I'm in a room that feels good to be in.
27:42I like warm wood, low light, and a chair that doesn't fight me. And I love mid-century modern design because I live in a mid-century modern house. But building that room on a real budget is the hard part. Dupe.com is how I've been doing it though. Paste in any product URL into dupe.com and it finds you the same look for much less. Much of what's sold online comes out of the same factories anyway, just listed under different names at different prices. I furnished most of my office this way, my desk, my lamp, even the piece of furniture behind me. It's the room that I wanted and I didn't have to wait five years for it.
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28:45And now, back to the show.
28:52I'd love to come back a little bit to sort of how you think about Design Better as a product. And Aaron, you used a word early on, community, which is really interesting to me. Maybe we'll start there. To what extent do you see Design Better as a community? Is that a frame of mind that you both have? It is a frame of mind that we both have, and we're struggling to figure this out. What's the best way to enable that? Because the word community suggests some sort of interaction. It's not just a broadcast. It's a dialogue. Right now, I'd say that Design Better skews heavily towards broadcast with some interaction.
29:27And we are trying to push that further because we think that there's just more that we could get out of it personally. our audience could get out of it if they engage with each other. But we see things like Slack groups, you know, where you go sign up for yet another Slack group, Discord. And there's some bad apples who come in and are just awful, you know, awful to each other, just come in to raise hell. And then we have to go deal with that. You know, that's a lot. And it can sour people. We're protective of the brand that we've spent seven, eight years building. And we don't want to create a community situation where people feel ostracized, isolated, or we create a scenario where we've made our own job and then we could make our job terrible that we don't like to do it.
30:12So we're protective in that way. Live events, I think being in person and having conversations with people, there's probably more of that in our future. That's been really fun. That's a fun way to engage and like social norms help guide people that maybe are absent online. You all see this in the comment section in the New York Times, I'm sure. I mean, your audience is massively larger than ours, but there's always going to be somebody in there. And when we get these kinds of things, sometimes we'll get email that feels very hurtful and you realize that something else is going on with this person.
30:40They're hurting in their own life and they're taking it out on you. It still doesn't feel good, but we don't want to have to patrol that every day or be exposed to that every day. So we do think like the in-person things where we can bring people together and they're much less likely to call us names in person, hopefully, or call each other names in person. They're going to be friendly, cordial. I think those are the opportunities we want to make more. Yeah. And even things like the directory, designbetter.directory, where you can post your profile and companies can post jobs. That feels like a way to engage the community.
31:09Like we see you. We see that this is a difficult time to make a job transition. And we have connections on both sides of this transaction. What could we do to be a broker? There are different ways to approach community. We're still figuring it out. I was thinking maybe of what you're thinking of. A couple of things that stand out to me. I don't know if you'd think of them as community, but there are ways for people to engage and participate. AMAs are a thing you're doing more of. You have an experts in residence program, right? Yeah. As well? Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about those? Yeah.
31:41So that is a pretty recent thing where Aaron and I have our own sort of areas of expertise. And I'd say over the years, we're a little bit more distanced from some of the hands-on product design type stuff. So we wanted to bring in folks that have that direct exposure in a given field. So people like Brad Frost, who's very well known around design systems, or Kristen Berman, who works on behavioral design and behavioral economics. People that have deep expertise that's kind of adjacent or overlapping the things that Aaron and I are knowledgeable about, but can really talk to them in a meaningful way.
32:12Yeah, the AMAs are a great way to engage. We see familiar faces, people who come in. So we do these every month for our premium subscribers. and have amazing people like, you know, former CMO of Nike will come in and answer all your questions and talk to you. Lots of other types of folks in different types of disciplines. And we try to make sure that we cover various areas, but it's great. People are excited. There's a good energy that comes in because it's real time. There's something about like, I just dropped this thing off of your doorstep and it's a nasty comment, you know. That's very different that distances people.
32:46Whereas like if you're doing an online event or you're doing an in-person event, social norms are more prevalent. Right. And you don't have the challenge of necessarily having to scale yourself as content moderators. You're at the live event. Should anything happen, you can deal with it. Let's talk about the future a little bit. To the extent you're willing to share, do you have some things that you're excited about either coming up later this year or beyond for Design Better? There's a few things. One of them is, so we have a library of books that we developed while we were at Envision. And for a number of reasons, it's taken some time to transfer ownership of those over to us, but we do have them now.
33:19And so we're updating those and restyling them and we'll be releasing those. We'll have seven, eight books. Something like that, yeah. On different topics, design systems, design ops, the business of design. And so we're going to have this library, which we hope to grow over time. And Aaron's got his book, which he's going to release there that will just add on to like the ways that you can learn from Design Better. Yeah, and then we're also partnering with companies who are offering Design Better subscribers some pretty awesome software tools and so forth that you can get for free as part of your membership.
33:53So we're always just trying to think, how could we provide more value and be useful? So this is sort of a core tenant of what we want to try to do. How do you build community? How do you keep an audience around? Be useful. Recognize what are people's interests? What are people's problems? What are their needs? And then what can you create that meets them where they are? Yeah, it strikes me that one of the things we probably have in common, the Times and Design Better, is a pretty long view on our relationship with our audience. For the Times, there are lots of different types of information needs we try to meet, different products that we provide, things like that.
34:28As people cycle in and out of sort of interest through their life, hopefully the Times remains a constant there. And it strikes me that you're kind of building a similar journey for folks. The podcast might be the way that they come in, but if you really want to deepen your expertise as a designer or design leader, there are all these other offerings as well. I don't know if I have a question necessarily, but I see something very similar there in terms of thinking about a longer lifetime relationship with the folks who come to design better. Well, being compared to the times is quite flattering, so we'll take it.
34:57But I know I appreciate that. And I think, again, like helping to inspire folks even before they get started officially in their design education up through when they're leading a team of hundreds of people. It's compelling to me personally, I'm sure to Aaron, too, to be able to help no matter what stage you are in your career. We got a couple of questions from folks watching. The first one is, how do you stay inspired? What a great question. How do you stay inspired? weird so i have two kids 14 and 9 my daughter's 14 my son's 9 and i'll specifically talk about music here but i think many of us when we get to a certain age sort of get like stuck and listening the same thing over and over again oldies but they will add stuff to our spotify playlist i'm like sometimes i'm like what is this this is terrible often though it's actually like wow this is really good i can't believe i've never heard this before and i find the inspiration and maybe even a future guest on the show.
35:45So I lean on my kids a lot to stay cool. Were you ever really cool? No, on their eyes anyway. You know, I try to learn new things as much as I can. I feel like that's like my daily and life goal is learning new things. I try to put myself on paths that are, I'll never climb that mountain. So right now I'm learning to play guitar. I play jazz guitar. I'm awful at it and I love it. It's so fun. It's so interesting. It leads me to listen to a lot of music and understand and respect it in a new and different way. Even learning to read music, I feel like that engages my brain in a different way. I'm working on jujitsu with my 15 year old.
36:27So he gets to beat up his dad a couple of times a week. It is fun and interesting and physical. and again, it's like engages a different part of my brain. So I'm always looking for different activities that cause me to think in different ways. And what I find is that the more diverse set of questions or endeavors that I pursue, the more I see it's all connected. And that I think is ultimately the lesson of life if we are given the time and space to discover it is that all this stuff is connected. Which takes us back to design better that we're passionate about design. design what's underneath that?
37:03Well, we're passionate about creativity. Where is creativity? It's in all the places. It's all the places where you look for it. As long as I'm staying engaged with the world, I'm staying inspired. One other quick shout out to Time's Cooking App. My wife and I both love it. And it's one of those rare instances where the comment section is actually quite helpful. For the most part, people aren't complaining about that. But people have great suggestions, little tweaks on the recipe. And we'll often go there at the beginning of the week to figure out what we're going to make that week. Yeah, yeah, they're super helpful.
37:34Maybe sort of the inverse of this question. This is what I imagine. Tell me if I'm right. You've got the successful podcast. You've got a growing constellation of offerings around it. I would imagine there's a lot of pressure just to continue to create and to publish and to get things out there. How do you find time to recharge or what do you do to recharge? I feel like it's built in. I try to wake up early to have time for myself. I could meditate, write, do a little thing for myself. I also think that if you are doing work that is exciting to you, you're recharging as you're exhausting your battery.
38:08It's kind of like having a solar panel you're charging your cell phone. That's what it feels like to me is work is not work. I have had those types of jobs where I feel like, oh, my God, I just need to go unplug and disconnect from that. But I don't feel that with this type of work. Yeah, I spend a lot of time outside. You mentioned the ocean early on. So I'm a surfer. I spend a lot of time free diving, surfing. The way that I've arranged my schedule, this is back from the Envision days when everybody was on an East Coast schedule. So I live on the West Coast. So I'll usually start at like six or seven in the morning and be done by two or three.
38:44You know, sometimes that means I'll just go pick up the kids. But sometimes if my wife's picking up the kids that day, I'll go surfing or for a hike or mountain biking. And I find that time outdoors for me, that really is necessary to recharge the batteries. There are times where we have calls and Eli's sitting in his Volvo in his wetsuit. I can see the ocean behind him. He's like, all right, let's wrap up. Okay. Another question from the audience. What's the craziest thing you've done to get a guest on the show? This wasn't actually to get the guest, but it's kind of a funny story. So we had David Sedaris on and about, so it was probably a couple of weeks before it happened.
39:20He just happened to be in town where I live in Monterey Carmel to give one of his readings. And I often go with my son down to a little hotel and I'll get him dessert and I'll have a cocktail. And we were stepping out and I saw David Sedaris coming down the street, like bagged behind him. I'm like, Hey, David Sedaris. And he says, yeah. And I said, Oh, we're going to go to your show there today. And he looked down at my son. He's not eight at the time. He's like, he's not going, is he? And now he's not going to the show. And he said, can I walk from here? And knowing that he walks 15, 20 miles a day sometimes.
39:53It's like, yeah, it's like six blocks that he can handle. So I had the chance to actually meet him in person before, which doesn't usually happen with a guest. So that's kind of fun. That's cool. I don't know that we have a lot of crazy things we have to do to get guests, but you do have to be persistent in a non-annoying way, which Eli's much better at this than I am. I grew up in Iowa and the social piece, I'm sort of direct. Like, hey, here's the thing. Here's what you get. Come on over. Let's talk. And I realized that you have to be a lot more open, like kind of shape your language very thoughtfully.
40:28You know, there's some guests who are just busy. And so you constantly like, hey, no problem. You kind of warm up. There's one high profile guest that we have been warming up for a couple of years now. Still not booked, but OK. Hoping maybe this fall. It is a person that we would all know, but we're still working our way. Okay. Yeah. There's another one that I think he's cursed in that he's well known and his email address is public. And for whatever reason, he would respond to me usually pretty quickly. And it was always a polite note. And I would just ask once a year. And third time's the charm, I guess.
41:03Let's stick with the podcast for a second. What are podcasts that you both listen to on a regular basis? Anything you'd recommend for us? The Daily We Heard? Thank you. It's great. Yeah, I'll give the caveat that I don't typically listen to design podcasts too much. I mean, I love Debbie Millman's show. She's been going for a long time. She's a great interviewer. I listen to a lot of comedy shows. So Conan O 'Brien. And I find that his celebrity interviews, they're fine. But what's really funny is you still just have on a random person. There's a lot of improv involved. That's a show I love. I like Song Exploder.
41:34That one's so good. I don't know that one. So Song Exploder is actually Netflix. They did, I think, four or five shows of this, too. Rishi K. Shirwe. And I don't know how to spell his name. Like, he's very careful in how he pronounces it, but it just sounds like one word to me. He's so good at breaking down. He still has, like, Trent Reznor or, I don't know, all kinds of different people on the show. Hans Zimmer, that one was really interesting, creating this song for Dune. And I thought, okay, this is like, I've got some time and I need something to listen to. Maybe this will be interesting. Fascinating.
42:11His connection with Dune, the story, Frank Hebert, the different instruments he used. He's like these Middle Eastern tones. And then he interject electric guitar in unique ways. So it's basically a creative process show with musicians. And it is fascinating because he gets all the tracks and he'll isolate each one of the tracks and then have this interview where they're going through that, that one's great. And then I listen to Pivot religiously. That's a very popular one. I'm sure a lot of other people do as well. But I was a Scott Galloway fan long ago when he was just like a video or two you'd find on YouTube because the guy just holds so much information in his head.
42:52So I find that interesting. And then Kara Swisher, the dynamic between them is wonderful. Those are my two staples. Rick Rubin is another one that I just started in the last year listening to. And he created process again. And he has a very particular interview style. And he'll say things like, amazing, wonderful. And on the Vibe coding front, it's like, would be cool to have a Rick Rubin synthesizer? So I use chat GPT to help me and just like CSS, HTML, create a little. And I sample it's like, so you could push a button. I said, maybe it's the lucky pants. This is amazing, wonderful. Love that.
43:27We'll wrap with one more question. This might be inspired by your comment on cooking. Someone is curious, what's your favorite New York Times product? I mean, this is not even a contest. It's games. I mean, you guys know you have a hit on your hands, but I just want you to know how it connects people. I have another podcast called Reconsidering. And on there, we had Wall Street Journal writer. Come on. He wrote a book about seven games. And one of the things that I found fascinating about this research that he did, this was like checkers, chess, go, et cetera. He said, it's the only non-religious thing that unites generations.
44:03And games is something that is transgenerational. And so what I see is when my 11-year-old goes to bed at night and he's sort of like the tail end of I'm a little kid and I'm more of a teen, grown up. I still lay down with him. We still do stuff together. And we play strands. We do wordle. We go through all the stuff. And I have to save the game for him. don't do the game today, dad, so we can do it together. And then I figured out there was a separate games app where there was the archive. And I was like, oh, thank God, because I can't, I can't, I can't hold off. I got to have a little wordle activity in the morning.
44:41But I find that I go to that regularly. And ironically, I had a conversation with George Petchenik a couple of years ago. We were chatting about some stuff. And I said, you know, George, I love the times. I love all the stuff. We were talking about connecting all the pieces together. and I said, I love the times, but I get a lot of anxiety. I get stressed out. I wish there was something more where I could be engaged with the product and not have heart palpitations. And games is like the anecdote to the homepage. Because let's face it, the homepage isn't getting less stressful anytime soon. I love recipes.
45:18I love the videos. I'd love to see more videos in cooking app. Stay tuned. yeah the cooking for me too that's my favorite but it's also intergenerational in that my mom will share recipes with me and my dad but he's not in great health so for me one of the really rewarding things is to find a recipe that i really love and then if i get a chance to visit to go cook it for them because it feels like this full connection we have toward that i love that you're both calling out the intergenerational thing i've experienced that as well my daughter has filled my recipe box with things that she either wants to make or wants us to make.
45:55And similar thing with games. It's like we have to save things or we get yelled at. Can I build on my answer? Sure. Last year for Mother's Day, I gave my mom a New York Times subscription. And I thought, okay, my mom's older. She's sitting around a lot. She needs to keep her brain engaged. And so she's been playing the games, but not really telling me much about it. And I was just there a couple weeks ago visiting in Iowa. And I told my mom, I said, hey, mom, did you know New York Times has a games app and you can go back to the archive. She wouldn't let me complete my sentence. She's like, I already finished all of the mini for every single archive puzzle.
46:29And I'm doing these other crosswords. And I was like, okay, well, I guess that was a good gift. So my kids, parents, it's pretty cool. It's pretty great. Thank you. Well, why don't we wrap here? I want to thank you, Aaron, for traveling from Athens, Georgia. Eli, you came from Carmel Valley, California to be here. Thank you so much. You can find them both at designbetterpodcast.com. And we will make sure for folks who are watching this or can't watch it now, but maybe you're watching it later, we'll send this video out of the talk soon. Aaron, Eli, thank you once again. Thank you for having me.
47:10This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter. with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.
47:44Thank you.
From the publisher
We were recently invited to the The New York Times where we spoke with Matt Raw, the interim head of design at the Times. Eli and I are accustomed to interviewing, but this was a different experience for us as this time we were the ones telling our story.
Matt and the Times design team were curious about the origin story of Design Better, what we’ve learned about creativity and design after more than 200 interviews, and how we approach building a business.
If you’ve ever wanted to peek behind the curtains of the Design Better studio, here’s your chance.
Books and links mentioned:
Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide by John Cleese (and watch the Design Better interview here).
Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter
The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir by Sara Seager (listen to her interview here).
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