Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Genius Of Design

For National Geographic, The White House, The Baltimore Sun, The Milwaukee Journal and some of the most decorated newsrooms in America, Mike Davis has been the quiet force shaping how the world actually sees the story.

A legendary visual editor, educator and mentor, he’s spent decades helping photographers turn raw images into narratives that endure—most recently as the endowed Alexia Chair at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.

We talk about what really makes an image stick in a viewer’s mind, the invisible craft of editing that most photographers overlook, and how a career at the top of photojournalism reshaped his understanding of story, ego and service.

Mike shares what competitions and grants have taught him about the difference between good and great work, how to think about a sustainable career in photography, and why in an era of infinite images, clarity of intention is the rarest asset.

If you’ve ever felt torn between shooting more and saying more, this conversation will change how you see your own work—and the stories you’re really telling every time you press the shutter.

For brands like Microsoft, GitHub, NBA, Johns Hopkins, Sony, VW, Audi, BMW, Hennessy, New Balance and global stages such as World Expo Dubai, the World Economic Forum in Davos and Electric Zoo, Vadim Mirgorodskii is the person you call when you want space itself to come alive.

In a world where most people treat technology as a tool, he treats it as a living material. Founder and art director of Interactive Items Studio, he designs interactive installations and “living interfaces” for brands, concerts, museums and large-scale events, where spaces don’t just display content – they listen, react and remember.

This episode confronts the uncomfortable truth about the AI revolution: for most people, unlimited creative and technical power will be completely wasted. As the cost of code, content, and creative production collapses to near-zero, the bottleneck shifts from execution capability to strategic direction.

AI Art: Shortcut or New Medium?

This episode explores the contentious debate surrounding AI art — not by asking whether it’s “good” or “bad,” but by questioning how we define art in the first place.

It challenges the reflexive rejection of AI, arguing that the value of art has never been about the tool, but about the taste, vision, and judgment behind it. Like the camera before it, AI is a medium — and in the right hands, a powerful one.

The conversation examines the economic anxieties fueling resistance, the evolving definition of authorship, and what separates derivative output from meaningful creation. This is not a defense of automation — it’s a defense of discernment.

Creatives should stop waiting for original ideas and instead focus on copying and iterating on existing works to develop deep skills.

Mastery comes from deliberate practice, which includes focused attention, clear standards, immediate feedback, and pushing comfort zones.

By copying the work of masters, they can discover their unique voice and create original work through the process of iteration.

You said you'd start, and yet there you are, staring at a blank page with nothing to show for it. That pain is real, and it has a way of compounding. One day becomes a week, a week becomes a month, and before you know it, the book, the app, the project you swore you'd build never happens. But here's what nobody tells you: that feeling isn't a sign that you're failing. It's actually the process working exactly as it should.

The secret is understanding the difference between push and pull. In the beginning, you have to fight for it — one page, one step, one small act of showing up even when it hurts. But if you keep pushing long enough, something shifts. The work stops feeling like a battle and starts whispering to you, pulling you back into its orbit. You stop forcing it and start falling into it. The only thing standing between you and that feeling is the willingness to stay in the pain a little longer.

What if the problem isn’t inspiration—but infrastructure? In this episode, we break down why most creatives don’t suffer from a lack of ideas—they suffer from losing them. You’ll learn how a simple capture system flips you from blank-page paralysis to creative overflow, why your brain needs a trusted external home for ideas, and how reviewing what you capture turns chaos into compounding momentum.

We also unpack the one small, “boring” captured idea that completely changed a life trajectory—unlocking faster learning, bigger creative output, and massive professional growth. By the end, you’ll have a clear 15-minute action step to build your own system and shift from scarcity to abundance.

The ideas aren’t missing. Your container is.

Haris Fazlani is the co-founder of WØRKS, the New York creative studio behind campaigns for Nike, Netflix, Fear of God, Converse, Calvin Klein, and more. In this episode, Haris takes us from growing up as a child of immigrants drawing alone in his room, to interning for Ryan Leslie and living on a tour bus, to building a studio that the biggest brands in the world trust to shape their visual identity.

We get into what good design actually does to the human body, why WØRKS leads every project with emotion before ever choosing a medium, the real reason people have a visceral rejection of AI imagery, and why Haris believes originality doesn't exist — and why that's freeing.

Ken Buslay is a German photographer whose work blends quiet intimacy with documentary depth, shooting primarily on analog film to explore human connection and memory. In this episode, Ken takes us from his first 3-megapixel camera to years of shooting only black and white on a single 50mm lens, to medium format Hasselblad, and what each stage taught him about himself and the people he photographs.

We get into why limiting your tools teaches you more than upgrading them, how slowing down literally changes the energy between photographer and subject, what rainbow gatherings and alternative sailing communities taught him about life, and why AI imagery will never carry the weight of a photograph made by someone who was actually there.

Ken also opens up about the fear of losing his creative drive, the moments of doubt that even the greatest artists share, and why the act of making the work matters more than anyone ever seeing it.

AI Can Generate. Can You Judge? Boris Eldagsen & the New Rules of Knowledge Work

In 2023, Boris Eldagsen won the Creative Open category of the Sony World Photography Awards with an AI-generated image—and then refused the prize.

The experiment exposed a larger problem: technology was moving faster than the institutions responsible for evaluating, regulating, and governing it.

Boris Eldagsen is a Berlin-based artist, philosopher, educator, consultant, and early practitioner of generative AI. He works directly with emerging models, tests new systems, teaches AI workflows, and advises organizations navigating the shift from traditional production to human–AI collaboration.

In this episode, we move beyond the question of whether AI-generated images qualify as photography.

Instead, we examine what happens when producing an answer, image, strategy, or piece of work becomes nearly effortless.

What becomes more valuable when output becomes abundant?

Boris argues that AI is a knowledge amplifier. It rewards people who understand their domain, can provide useful context, recognize weak output, and make deliberate decisions about what happens next.

For most of software’s history, designers could assume that an input would produce a predictable output. AI is changing that.

In this episode, Ousman speaks with Tammy Coombs, a product designer and design engineer with more than 15 years of experience building complex tools for security, reliability, and operations teams. Her work has included leading UX initiatives at Palo Alto Networks and designing AI systems for security researchers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other expert users working in high-stakes environments.

Tammy explains how product design must evolve as software moves from deterministic workflows toward probabilistic systems that interpret human intent—and sometimes get it wrong.

They discuss the growing overlap between design and engineering, the role of Figma in an AI-assisted workflow, designing guardrails around natural-language interfaces, and why AI should support human judgment rather than quietly replace it.

The conversation also explores what remains unchanged: understanding users, learning the language of a complex domain, experiencing failure firsthand, and knowing when technology should simply get out of the way.

Why Building Anything Beats Waiting for Permission — The Optionality Argument Nobody Makes (Part 2)

Last episode we did the hard half — the broken promise, the 41.5% underemployment, the grief a generation isn't allowed to name. This is the other half. Because while institutions take their time catching up, you still have to wake up tomorrow and decide what to do with the day in front of you.

So we change the question: forget what society owes you for a moment — what does the practice of building actually offer you, sitting where you sit, with the life you actually have? The answer is not what most people tell you, and once you see it framed correctly, you can't unsee it.

We start with Jevons Paradox — a 160-year-old principle that explains why making coal more efficient made Britain burn more of it, and why the printing press, the automobile, and the internet each created entire worlds nobody could have predicted. Then we get honest about the uncertainty, because the historical pattern is encouraging, not guaranteed.

And then the spine of the episode: the real case for building. Most people frame it as a bet on success — build the thing, hope it grows. That framing is wrong, and it's why building feels demoralizing. The actual case is this: building is not a bet on outcomes. It's the construction of optionality. You're not building because the thing will save you. You're building because every node you put into the world becomes a door — and in a world where the doors you were promised are closing, the person with the most doors wins. We take the survivorship-bias objection head on, and show why it actually strengthens the argument.

We close with two honest tracks — one for the listener with stability, one for the listener in survival mode — because they are not having the same conversation, and pretending they are is why this kind of advice usually rings hollow.

Both truths, held at once: the structural critique is real, and it doesn't get to stop you from building. The roads you were promised are closing. The doors you make are the doors you keep.

The Career Ladder Was Invented in 1911 — And It's Being Dismantled While You're Still Climbing It

41.5% of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed. In China, 97,000 new PhDs are competing for jobs that don't exist — some applying to be rural clerks or hotel kitchen interns. These are the people who did everything right. So what do we actually owe them?

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation almost nobody is having honestly. Most takes on the death of the career ladder collapse two separate questions into one — the systemic question (what did society break, and what does it owe the people who held up their end?) and the individual question (what do you do, sitting where you sit, with the life you have?). Conflating them is how we end up telling debt-drowned graduates to "just start a podcast."

So today we do the systemic conversation properly — no rushing to the inspiring part. We trace the corporate ladder back to Frederick Taylor's 1911 Principles of Scientific Management and show how an entire civilization built itself around one management invention. We look at what's happening to real graduates in real time. We name the grief — and the Northwestern research on narrative identity that proves it's a real psychological injury, not weakness. And we ask the question missing from public discourse: what would an honest societal response actually look like?

This episode won't tell you creative thinkers will inherit the earth. It also won't tell you the system failed and nothing can be done. Both are too easy. The truth is harder — and more useful.

YZA Voku is a Seville-born, Madrid-based visual artist and director whose clients read like a who's-who of music and culture: The Weeknd, Swedish House Mafia, La Liga, XG, The Sphere in Vegas, and more. His award-winning AI film Lapse won Best Craft at Gen:48; Pantomime was a finalist. But this conversation isn't really about AI.

It's about the difference between generating and creating — between outputs that get scrolled past and worlds people want to live inside. I reached out to YZA and asked him to teach me everything: how he makes AI work that doesn't look like AI, why he'll never use a single specific color, and what actually separates art from slop.

We get into the secret rules that govern his universe, why constraints create freedom, how taste is just "compressed memory," why imperfection is what makes an image human, and the obsession test he'd use to rebuild from zero. The tools change — Midjourney today, something else tomorrow — but the principles of authorship don't. Whether you make images, film, music, code, or companies, this one's about learning to build a world, not chase an algorithm.

What if the most iconic outsider in modern art was never really an outsider at all?

Doug Woodham holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, spent years as a partner at McKinsey, and served as President of the Americas at Christie's auction house — where he once watched $147 million change hands for a single Francis Bacon painting. But his latest book isn't about the market. It's about a person.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon is the first major Basquiat biography in over 25 years. Built on more than 100 interviews — including family members on the maternal side who had never spoken publicly — it dismantles the myth of the untrained street artist and reveals something far more interesting: a wickedly intelligent kid who was reading the New York Times in first grade, studying Da Vinci at eight, and reverse-engineering the power structure of the art world by nineteen.

In this conversation, Doug and I go deep on why most biographies get Basquiat wrong by ending the story at his death, when the real economics — how markets form, how reputations get built or destroyed posthumously — only begin there. We talk about MoMA turning down donated Basquiat paintings for nearly two decades while collectors were quietly buying everything they could get their hands on. We unpack the neo-expressionist lineage that actually shaped his visual language — not graffiti, not Cy Twombly, but the Cobra movement and artists like Karel Appel. And we get into the quiet skill that may have mattered more than any painting: Basquiat's ability to walk into a room of twenty strangers and immediately identify the three people he needed to know.

We also talk about art and commerce — why the two have been inseparable since the Medici's, why auction houses reflect taste rather than form it, and why buying art is usually a terrible financial investment but an extraordinary human one. Doug brings the rare combination of an economist's precision and a lifelong art obsessive's intuition to every answer — and he doesn't let the romantic myths go unchallenged.

If you're a creative trying to understand how reputations are actually built, or if you've ever wondered what really happens inside the rooms where $100 million decisions get made, this one's for you.

Karolina collaborates with living organisms. At NYU's Laboratory of Living Interfaces, she works with microbes — reading their DNA to detect heavy-metal contamination in soil and water, building computational pipelines that turn a cocktail of unknown bacteria into a readable signal. But her first training wasn't in science. It was in art.

In this episode, we follow the thread between those two worlds — and why Karolina insists they were never separate. We get into why she sees math and code as a form of poetry, why identity is something you do and not something you are, and why the educational system's habit of labeling kids early ("you're an arts person," "you're a math person") quietly held her back for years.

The heart of the conversation is about how to think. Karolina makes the case that there are no shortcuts to mastery — that the brain is biological jelly with its own modus operandi, and no AI tool changes the fact that real understanding takes time, repetition, and being willing to be a beginner again. We talk about the equation Ousman scribbled mid-conversation — curiosity greater than ego — and why that single inequality might be the whole game.

We also get into the Gowanus Canal: how an atmospheric art installation made of contaminated water and sludge accidentally produced a legitimate scientific question, and what that says about where good questions actually come from. Plus DNA you can print, the biosecurity stakes of writing the language of life, de-extincting mammoths, and a rescued park parakeet that may be her next research subject.

If you've ever felt boxed in by your own label, or wondered how to ask a question worth chasing — this one's for you.

Erik Tanner has photographed Lizzo, Robert Downey Jr., Roger Deakins, Josh Brolin, and the NBA. Rolling Stone keeps calling. So does the Wall Street Journal. So does the New York Times. But Erik will be the first to tell you he's an introvert who isn't sure he belongs in the room — and that tension is exactly what makes his work extraordinary.

In this episode, we get into what it actually takes to walk onto a set with one of the most recognized faces on the planet and still make the image yours. Erik breaks down his pre-shoot research process, why he keeps a notebook full of ideas with no home yet, and how a PR person dynamiting a concept ten minutes before a Josh Brolin shoot led to something better than what he'd planned.

We talk about the Georgian Prometheus myth that became a photograph on an abandoned Soviet airfield. We talk about why reference isn't imitation — it's language. We talk about the "mental board of directors" every serious creator is quietly assembling whether they know it or not. And we get into what Erik thinks AI will do to image-making, and why he's still showing up to his Bed-Stuy studio either way.

If you've ever wondered what separates someone who makes technically correct images from someone who makes images that stay with you — this is that conversation.

Paul Boag has been on the internet since 1994. He's advised Oxford University, UNICEF, PUMA, and the European Commission. And after thirty years at the front edge of digital, his take on AI is not what you'd expect: stop worrying.

In this conversation, we get into why good design fails in the real world — and why it has nothing to do with the quality of the design itself. Paul breaks down the difference between art and design, why perfection is a trap, and what taste actually is beneath all the mystery people wrap around it. We talk about how AI can follow every rule of design perfectly and still never be great — and why that gap is where human designers live.

We also get into how Paul's process has completely changed. From wireframes and Figma to orchestrating ideas through Claude and iterating at a speed that wasn't possible three years ago. What it means to be a designer when the tools do the pixel-pushing. Why process can become the enemy of good work. And what thirty years of watching revolutions come and go has actually taught him about how to survive the next one.

What if the thing capping your creativity isn't your talent — it's your price tag?

In this episode, CPA and Profit First for Creatives author Christian Brim makes the counterintuitive case that charging more doesn't compromise your art — it frees it. Drawing on 29 years inside the financial engine rooms of small businesses, Christian unpacks why so many creatives confuse suffering with authenticity, effort with value, and humility with good pricing.

We get into the Mercedes-Benz move that turned a struggling brand into a luxury icon overnight, why the customer (not your hours) decides what your work is worth, and the quiet beliefs that keep talented people broke.

Christian shares the Walt-and-Roy Disney dynamic behind every great creative business, why profit is non-negotiable rather than optional, and how to tell whether a belief is actually serving you — or just running in the background like a bad subroutine.

We also look ahead: as AI drives the cost of prediction toward zero, what becomes priceless is human judgment, context, and taste. The creatives who thrive won't be the ones who work hardest — they'll be the ones who solve the right problems and have the nerve to charge for it.

If you've ever felt guilty about wanting to make money from your craft, this one's for you.