Design Better Podcast Por The Curiosity Department sponsored by Wix Studio arte de portada

Design Better

Design Better

De: The Curiosity Department sponsored by Wix Studio
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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.”© The Curiosity Department, LLC 2025 Arte Economía
Episodios
  • Phil Gilbert: Making a 114-year-old, 400,000 person company care about design

    Phil Gilbert: Making a 114-year-old, 400,000 person company care about design
    Nov 25 2025
    Changing the culture of a 400,000-person company isn’t just hard—it’s the kind of transformation most leaders wouldn’t even attempt. But when Phil Gilbert joined IBM as General Manager of Design in 2010, that’s exactly what he set out to do. And remarkably, he had a lot of success. Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/phil-gilbert Phil led one of the most ambitious design transformations in corporate history, hiring over 1,000 designers, creating IBM’s design thinking framework, and embedding a new way of working across nearly 180 countries. Now, with his new book Irresistible Change, Phil is sharing the blueprint for how he did it—and more importantly, how you can apply these lessons to your own organization. In this episode, we talk with Phil about treating change like a high-stakes product, why IBM’s transformation was opt-in rather than top-down, and what it takes to win over engineers who’ve spent decades deeply entrenched in a technical worldview. We also explore the design thinking bootcamp that became legendary within IBM, the intentional design of physical studio spaces, and what happened after Phil left the company. Phil’s insights aren’t just for those leading massive organizations—they’re for anyone trying to spark meaningful change, build enthusiasm without mandates, and create work that actually matters to the people doing it. Bio Phil Gilbert is best known for leading IBM’s 21st century transformation as their General Manager of Design. After selling his third startup to IBM in 2010, Phil was asked by IBM in 2012 to use design thinking, coupled with agile, to update how IBM’s teams worked. The transformation became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, the documentary film The Loop, and feature articles in the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Forbes, Bloomberg, INC and many others. Phil’s 45-year career spans startups, large corporations, and board memberships, where he has led organizations ranging from solo ventures to those with 400,000 employees. In 2018 Phil was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Hall of Fame. In 2019, the State of Oklahoma (Phil’s native state) named him an Oklahoma Creativity Ambassador for his achievements in the world of creative thinking and innovation. Phil left full-time operational responsibilities at IBM in 2022 in order to focus on helping the next generation of entrepreneurs, business, and military leaders understand how to impact culture at scale, to improve innovation and team performance. Phil lives in Austin, Texas. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid *** If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com
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    44 m
  • Alison Rand: Leading with radical humanity instead of radical candor

    Alison Rand: Leading with radical humanity instead of radical candor
    Oct 21 2025
    We’ve worked alongside people for years, only to realize that we know nothing about their personal life. And it probably affected our working relationship. Knowing your colleagues as humans reframes inevitable challenges at work. Had we known our colleagues better, would we have worked through disagreements better or found new ways to collaborate? Yeah, we sure would have. Alison Rand, who helped establish the discipline of design operations through roles at Hot Studio, Frog, Automattic, and SAP, explores building relationships at work in her new book Sentido—a term that encompasses both making sense of things and feeling them deeply. In our conversation, Alison challenges the Silicon Valley orthodoxy of radical candor with her concept of radical humanity. She also explains why designops is fundamentally heart-driven work, and draws unexpected parallels between organizational dynamics and the regenerative systems of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest. Bio Alison Rand brings a unique perspective forged in the crucible of real experience. A native NewYorker who lost her mother at sixteen, she learned early that life rarely follows neat narratives. Her career trajectory—from navigating the male-dominated agency world to building design operations practices at scale—taught her that the skills needed to thrive professionally often mirror those learned navigating the New York subway in the 1980s. After being laid off the same week MIT Press accepted her book proposal, she retreated to the woods to write what became part memoir, part radical reimagining of design leadership. She makes the case that organic intelligence matters as much as academic credentials, and that the future of design leadership lies not in prescriptive frameworks but in building cultures of genuine mutualism. Whether you’re wrestling with organizational transformation or questioning the artificial boundaries between personal and professional identity, Alison offers hard-won wisdom about leading with both courage and compassion in spaces that often reward neither. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid
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    47 m
  • The Brief: How our recent past should prepare us for the age of AI

    The Brief: How our recent past should prepare us for the age of AI
    Oct 20 2025
    In this issue of The Brief, we’re reflecting on what we learned about the past and future of design from our conversation with Paola Antonelli (The Museum of Modern Art), Mark Wilson (Fast Company), Kate Aronowitz (GV), Mike Davidson (Microsoft), and Meaghan Choi (Anthropic). Looking back at 30 years of design by Eli Woolery Roughly thirty years ago, I was an undergrad, sitting in our dorm’s computer cluster —this was before the days when most students had laptops. I ran into something I hadn’t seen before. It was called Netscape Navigator, and it was one of the first commercial internet browsers (which our very first guest on Design Better, Irene Au, helped design). I clicked on one of the buttons (probably, “What’s Cool”), and along with a nifty loading animation, the browser took me down some early internet rabbit hole. I don’t remember where exactly I ended up, but I do remember being blown away by the experience. As a computer nerd kid in the 80’s, I had spent plenty of time with bulletin board systems (BBS’s) and things like America Online, which we could access through a dial-up modem from home. But this was very different. It was fast—compared to what I was used to—and it felt like I could almost instantaneously access content from all around the world (even though the content online at the time was a miniscule fraction of what it is today). I had entered school to study product design, but this was for products in the physical world…digital product design didn’t exist as we know it today. The first use of the phrase “User Experience” in a job title was Don Norman’s role a a User Experience Architect at Apple in the mid-90s. Browsers like Netscape Navigator, and then the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, opened up a new world of opportunities and challenges for the field of design. In our conversation with Paola and Mark, we talked about four: the democratization paradox, design’s loss of innocence, the fragmentation of the design profession, and the shift from tangible to intangible design. The Democratization Paradox “We democratized all the tools and we democratized none of the platforms. And that gap is just in a nutshell, kind of what’s broken about the individual’s ability to communicate.”—Mark Wilson, Fast Company While design tools and capabilities have been democratized (everyone can now access design software, create content, etc.), the platforms and systems remain highly centralized within a few large companies—Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. The early, messy days of the internet (Geocities, MySpace) have been largely tamed, which can make for better user experiences, but we also miss the wild creativity that came from having an infinite number of ways to express yourself online. Back then, your personal web page could be a nightmare of animated GIFs, visitor counts, and autoplay music—terrible for usability, but at least it was yours. Today, we’re all posting in the same formats, and are subjected to the same algorithmic rules for engagement. The tools to create have never been more powerful or accessible, yet we’re increasingly creating within narrower and narrower boundaries defined by a handful of tech giants. Visit our Substack to read the whole article: ⁠https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/the-brief-how-our-recent-past-should⁠
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    15 m

Featured Article: The Best Design Podcasts for a Fresh Creative Perspective


There’s no shortage of wonderful design podcasts spanning every aspect and kind of design—from how-to graphic design podcasts to podcasts that blend history and culture with design theory. Whether you’re looking to learn a new skill or you want to stay up to date on the latest design trends, we’ve got you covered. Aspiring designers, interested amateurs, and professional creatives alike are sure to find their next listen, full of new ideas and practical advice.

Featured Article The Best Design Podcasts for a Fresh Creative Perspective
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