Brooke Hopper: Adobe's machine intelligence design lead on what AI can't touch
From Design Better by The Curiosity Department, sponsored by Wix Studio
March 18, 2026 · 47 min
About this episode
Brooke Hopper discusses her role at Adobe and the intersection of AI and design.
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…
People in this episode
Guest: Brooke Hopper
Topics covered
- AI in design
- design education
- creative collaboration
- machine intelligence
Keywords
- Adobe
- Firefly
- Cursor
- Not Generated
- design leadership
Sponsors
Wix Studio
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Cursor, Firefly, the Design Better Toolkit
Books & works: Design Disruptors, The Roundup, The Brief
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