Design Better · The Curiosity Department, sponsored by Wix Studio

The Brief: Stop specializing—live a multidisciplinary creative life

·14 min·1 clip

Eli Woolery reveals why the most innovative creators refuse to stay in their lane, from nuclear engineering to footwear design.

Eli Woolery opens with a personal story: the day after his son was born in September 2015 on the Monterey Peninsula, his startup's co-founders had a fight and dissolved the company, leaving him jobless on the first day of paternity leave. His wife reassured him they would be okay. That crisis became a prompt to reflect on his scattered career as a strength rather than a liability. He traces a path from Stanford product design in the late 1990s -- where product design blended industrial and mechanical engineering with human-centered design -- through an inability to land jobs because companies wanted specialists, to a scuba diving internship in Bermuda, a stint at underwater camera equipment maker Light and Motion, a marine science master's degree where he discovered he was a terrible scientist, starting an underwater photography magazine that was beautiful and unprofitable, freelance app development, a startup in Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors accelerator where every venture failed, and eventually landing at Envision where Aaron Walter recognized the value of his sprawling background. Woolery quotes Jordan Mechner on the luck of being 20 years old with game royalties from Karateka's bestseller success, which gave him time to ask what he actually wanted to do -- film school versus making another game. Scott Belsky's collapsed talent stack concept is invoked: the best teams have people with tighter conduits between two critical functions, able to speak the language of engineering and design simultaneously. The essay argues that AI is accelerating the multidisciplinary advantage by filling the gap between vision and execution and enabling people with cross-domain experience to build things they could not implement alone before. The Design Better interview archive is presented as evidence: the most impressive guests are consistently the ones who refused to stay in their lane.

As heard by us

A practical case for building career range through small bets, real feedback, and curiosity across creative fields.

Design Better makes a clear career case for refusing the narrow lane, treating multidisciplinary work as a hedge against a labor market that keeps shifting underfoot.

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Why you'd press play

You want to stop treating curiosity like a hobby and let it point you toward a more multidisciplinary creative life.

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