Paul Dichter: Stranger Things writer on why the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio

More from Design Better

1. 

   S12 · E176 · 14 May 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

   Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief and how to change your mind to change your life

   Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/nir-eyal-returns If you want to understand how much your beliefs shape your reality, try this quick exercise. Google the “checkerboard illusion” below and you can witness first-hand that even when you know two squares are the same shade of gray, your brain still refuses to show you the truth. If it can’t get a simple shade right, imagine what it’s doing with everything else. In his book Hooked, Nir Eyal helped people build habit-forming products for good. Then he wrote Indistractable to help people break free…

2. 

   S12 · E175 · 6 May 2026 · 27 min

   Mason Currey: Mason Currey: Author of Daily Rituals on Making Art and Making a Living

   This is a preview of a premium episode. To the listen to the full thing, head over to our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mason-currey At several points in his life, Eli imagined what it would take to become a full-time artist — a photographer or illustrator free from client work. What he didn’t realize was that he already had an example of a different path right in front of him: his father, a practicing physician whose published poetry earned recognition from luminaries like John Ashbery. Mason Currey’s most recent book explores these alternate paths. He’s the author of Daily…

3. 

   S12 · E174 · 29 Apr 2026 · 48 min

   Etinosa Agbonlahor: Behavioral economist on why pricing belongs in the design process

   Find the full episode and bonus content on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/etinosa-agbonlahor For product teams at startups and established tech giants alike, finding the right pricing and value proposition often feels more like alchemy than science. It’s a high-stakes game of guesswork involving the complex psychology, shifting values, and ingrained behaviors of your customers. While it can take years of trial and error to dial in, our guest today is here to help us decode the pricing formula and understand the behavioral drivers that make a product indispensable. Etinosa…

4. 

   S12 · E170 · 16 Apr 2026 · 46 min

   Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot

   We’re all familiar with the tropes around innovation and how it starts. You just need a garage in Silicon Valley, a few geniuses and visionaries, maybe some good snacks. Our guests today help us debunk that myth. Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw wrote a book called Innovation-ish, and that little “-ish” is doing a lot of work. Rich Braden is a design strategist who’s taught innovation at Stanford and advised companies around the world. Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist whose lab studies the psychology of creativity — why we lose it, and how we get it back. In this conversation, we talk…

5. 

   S12 · E171 · 8 Apr 2026 · 32 min

   Luis Mendo: Designer turned illustrator on making things that could only come from you

   Luis Mendo is a Spanish-born illustrator based in Nagano, Japan, and his work is unmistakably, irreducibly human. His drawings are populated by bespectacled bird-like figures — part alter ego, part philosophical sparring partner — rendered with the kind of warmth and specificity that no prompt can summon. There’s a hand behind every line, and you feel it. That’s not an accident. It’s a philosophy. Because as we talk about in the show, as non-human intelligence becomes cheaper, the human touch, and real, earned, interpersonal trust will become the rarest currency (to paraphrase Anu Atluru’s…

6. 

   1 Apr 2026 · 36 min

   David Shim and Rachana Rele: Read AI CEO and VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe on amplifying creative work — not replacing it

   Today we have two guests from two different companies who have one shared conviction: AI works best when it amplifies people, not replaces them. Today we’re joined by Rachana Rele, VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe, and David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Read AI. Together, they’re building very different products — but they share a vision of AI that removes the drudgery from creative work and makes room for the thinking that actually matters. In this conversation, we dig into some ideas that could genuinely change how you think about your work. David talks about this…

7. 

   S12 · E194 · 7 Oct 2026 · 40 min

   Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

   In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student. Get bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/randy-hunt Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn’t the sting but the standard: keep the floor high, and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glaser’s studio, where he apprenticed,…

8. 

   S12 · E193 · 5 Oct 2026 · 56 min

   Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit

   When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/matt-owens-athletics-co-founder-on Matt launched Volumeone.com in 1997, and it now sits in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. Before that, he was a skater and punk kid from Texas who…

9. 

   S12 · E192 · 23 Sep 2026 · 28 min

   Blaine Billingsley: OpenAI designer on the collaboration problem AI hasn't solved yet

   Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup. This is a preview of a premium episode. To listen to the whole thing, join our premium membership on Susbtack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/blaine-billingsley The engineers taught him to script his way through the work in a couple of hours, and he…

10. 

    17 Sep 2026 · 44 min

    Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

    In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles — all three in decline — and its universities were turning out talent that promptly left for somewhere with better jobs. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mack-paul-co-author-of-miracle-road Today the stretch of pine woods between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill is the largest research park in the United States. The barcode came out of it. So did AZT, ultrasound, and AstroTurf. Our guest Mack Paul spent years working…

Every episode of Design Better →