Design Better

Brooke Hopper stays close to her craft. Before she hopped on a call with us to chat about her role at Adobe, she was deep in Cursor prototyping navigation design ideas. Though Brooke holds an individual contributor role after more than a decade at Adobe, she’s managed to have influence and demonstrate leadership without being relegated to management. This is what many designers dream of—craft and career. Bonus content and more on our Substack: ⁠https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/brooke-hopper⁠ As Senior Principal Designer for Machine Intelligence and New Technology, she helped design the very first Firefly experiments and is now working on unreleased tools that raise fundamental questions about whether things like non-destructive editing, or even layers, still mean what they once did. If you listen carefully, you might get some clues about the products Adobe is cooking up next. But Brooke is more than a product thinker. She’s also a design educator, leading a partnership between Adobe and Parsons called “Not Generated” — a name she chose deliberately to start a conversation, not end one. In this episode, we get into what it actually means to use AI as a creative collaborator rather than a shortcut, why design education needs to stop teaching tools and start teaching taste, and why Brooke believes this moment might be the most exciting time in her career. Bio Brooke Hopper is a design leader, speaker, and champion for artists — passionate about building community through creativity and designing better experiences for some of the most talented people in the world. Her work spans platforms and products, always centered on making space for artists and creators to thrive, collaborate, and stay at the heart of the creative process. With years of experience building 0-to-1 products and leading innovation in ambiguous spaces, she turns uncertainty into opportunity — translating bold ideas into tools that empower creative expression. *** 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 benefit: 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 ***

Daisy Fancourt's research makes the case that engaging with the arts changes your gene expression, slows your biological aging, reduces your risk of dementia, depression, and chronic pain, and actually helps you live longer.

In our conversation with Fiona Crombie, we explore how production design shapes performance, how historical accuracy balances with storytelling, how a visual “mission statement” guides an entire crew, and what it means to create environments that carry grief, love, and memory.

We talk with musician Sam Beam about how he balances prolific output with raising five daughters, why he used to keep “office hours” for creativity, and how a successful day can be as simple as finding one good lyric.

George Newman walks us through the four stages of creative archaeology: surveying the landscape, gridding out the problem space, digging without judgment, and sifting through what you’ve found. He shares fascinating research on “hot streaks”—that pattern where creators explore widely, strike a rich vein of ideas, mine it completely, then move on.