Podcast: How Creativity can Help Remote Teams Collaborate with Denise Jacobs
We’re bringing Creativity Evangelist Denise Jacobs to our virtual workshop lineup this year! Here, she chats with Lou about how the current era of “doom-scrolling” means it’s more important than ever to unlock our creative minds and make meaningful connections.
One challenge of working remotely is the loss of a sense of personal connection. Having tools that allow you to collaborate in a virtual environment and overcome isolation is a way to expand the collective creativity of the whole team.
Her workshop is an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, skill set, and be inspired by creativity and collaboration using new and different tools to figure out how to add extra life to the work-from-home environment.
Denise’s three day workshop this February (10 hours over 3 segments: February 2-4, 2021) will focus on leveraging collective brilliance, becoming confident in sharing your ideas, and learning to be an excellent listener. Next comes “the fun part” — how to use improvisation to make collaboration feel like a game, and not like work.
Denise Recommends:
- Restore Yourself by Edy Greenblatt
- Around the Writer’s Block by Rosanne Bane
About Denise
Denise Jacobs is a Speaker + Author + Creativity Evangelist who speaks at conferences and consults with companies worldwide. As the Founder + CEO of The Creative Dose, keynote speaker, and trainer, she helps individuals in companies unleash their creativity through banishing their inner critic and hacking their creative brains. Denise’s keynotes and trainings give A Creative Dose™ – an injection of inspiration and immediately applicable tools to help people do their best work. Through working with Denise, people become engaged contributors, synergistic collaborators, and authentic leaders. Denise is the author of Banish Your Inner Critic, the premier handbook on silencing fears to unleash creativity. A web and tech industry veteran, Denise is also the author of The CSS Detective Guide and co-author of the Smashing Book #3 1/3 and Interact with Web Standards. She is also the founder of Rawk The Web and the Head Instigator of The Creativity (R)Evolution.
Podcast — Jim Ottaviani: Nuclear Engineer to Graphic Novelist
Jim and Lou go way back – to when they still called it “library school!” Thirty years later, Jim is a NY Times bestselling author who specializes in science-themed graphic novels on subjects ranging from Jane Goodall to Alan Turing.
Here, Lou and Jim discuss the evolution of cartoon and graphic novels, how their audiences have changed over time, and the role of storyboarding in their respective crafts.
About Jim
Jim is the author of fourteen (and counting) graphic novels about scientists. His most recent books include Naturalist (with E.O. Wilson), Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier, Hawking, about the famous cosmologist; The Imitation Game, a biography of Alan Turing; Primates, about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas; and Feynman, a book about the Nobel-prize winning physicist, bongo-playing artist, and raconteur Richard Feynman. His books are New York Times bestsellers, have been translated into over a dozen languages, and have received praise from publications ranging from Nature and Physics World to Entertainment Weekly and Variety. Jim lives in Michigan and comes to comics via careers in nuclear engineering and librarianship.
Jim recommends:
- “Ologies” podcast with Alie Ward
- “99% Invisible” podcast with Roman Mars
- 826 National, which provides writing and tutoring support for kids across the U.S. (Jim has tutored and taught for 826michigan for over a decade.)
- The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson
- Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars by Kate Greene
Podcast—Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice
Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe first crossed paths on a Slack channel back in 2018, where they were seeking out colleagues who might know a thing or two about conversation design… Fast forward to 2021, and their new book on conversation design is finished and available for preorder! Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you. In this episode, they chat with Lou about writing the book, the ethics of voice design, and more.
Diana recommends:
- AmberNechole Hart’s Why does Siri sound white?
- We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos
Becca recommends
- Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock
- Design Justice Network
A New Community of Civic Designers
Can Jim Kalbach convince Jared Spool that Jobs To Be Done is its own thing?
Register for this event.
Jared Spool has been practicing UX for decades. When Jobs To Be Done arrived, it seemed to him to be just one of those new labels for stuff we’ve always been doing.
Jim Kalbach doesn’t agree. His decades of UX experience have led him to become a strong proponent and practitioner of Jobs to be Done. In fact, he wrote the best book on the topic, the Jobs to be Done Playbook.
Now, Jared is curious. Since Jim is so passionate about Jobs to be Done, has Jared mis-judged it? Is there more to this than Jared originally thought?
Come watch while Jim tries his darnedest to set Jared right. Or maybe we’ll find out if Jared has been right all along, and this is just new packaging for an old practice. Either way, you don’t want to miss this. Register for this event.
Writing About Writing: Steve Krug returns to the Rosenfeld Review Podcast
Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, and Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is back for a third appearance on the Rosenfeld Review Podcast! Here, he shares some details with Lou about his book in the works, Writing Made Slightly Easier, and his perspective on the process of writing in general (and why he might advise against it!).
Check our Steve’s previous two appearances:
How To Get Usability Testing Right
Life with the Apple Watch and other wearables
Steve’s wise words for writers:
Don’t be afraid to always start at the beginning. Always assume that your reader knows less rather than more.
Steve recommends:
Follow Laura Klein on Twitter
Podcast: Promise Theory with Jeff Sussna
Lou and Jeff Sussna, author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy, examine the relationships between Design and Operations, DevOps and DesignOps, and DevOps and Agile before wending their way to promise theory, which looks at the “promise” made between a product and its user. Color Lou convinced on the promise of product promises!
- Watch Jeff’s presentation at the 2017 DesignOps Summit
- Read Jeff’s book, Designing Delivery
- Listen to Jeff on a previous episode of the Rosenfeld Review, DesignOps in a Post-Industrial World: Crash-Coursing Complex Systems
- Jeff recommends: Mark Burgess’ Thinking In Promises
Podcast: Surveys That Work with Caroline Jarrett
Caroline’s book Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys is a decade in the making — and finally coming in July 2021! Here, Caroline shares some glimpses into the methodologies and tricks she’ll share in the book, and how it evolved along the years.
Caroline recommends:
Mentor Black Business blackbusiness.mcsaatchi.com/ founded by Akil Benjamin
More about the book:
Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.
Podcast: The Humanity of Technology—Furthering the Greater Good with Jamika Burge
Though trained as a computer scientist, Jamika Burge admits she does not have the heart of a programmer; rather, she’s interested in surfacing and connecting with the humanity of the technology we create. Jamika has taken that approach in her past work, including a stint at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), where she studied the impact of games on learning. Jamika now leads AI Design Insights at CapitalOne, and is also one of the Advancing Research 2021 Conference curators. Here she shares the story of her career path, and the work she is doing with blackcomputeHER.org (pronounced ‘black computer’), an organization she co-founded that is dedicated to supporting computation and design workforce development for black women and girls.
Jamika Recommends:
Gendershades.org, a project by Joy Buolamwini, Lead Author and Timnit Gebru, PhD, Co-Author
Keep up with Jamika:
JamikaBurge.com
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
Dr. Jamika D. Burge leads AI Design Insights at Capital One. Her team uncovers learning & research insights across multiple platform experiences, including conversational AI, which supports Eno, Capital One’s customer-facing intelligent assistant. She’s an authority on intersectionality of Black women in computing and co-founder of blackcomputeHER.org (pronounced ‘black computer’), an organization dedicated to supporting computation & design workforce development for black women and girls.
Prior to joining Capital One, she served as a research and tech consultant to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in the Information Innovation Office. While there, she provided technical and management consult for innovative DARPA programs which were funded at over $70M. Jamika is also Founder and Principal of Design & Technology Concepts, LLC, a tech consultancy that focuses on computer science education, tech research, and intersectional design. She has consulted for Google, the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT), and the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). Jamika holds a PhD in CS from VA Tech.
Rosenfeld Media’s 2020 Retrospective
‘Tis the season for companies to write year-end retrospectives. It’s a fraught sub-genre these days, given the shitshow that 2020 has been. But retrospectives offer a great opportunity to look back, learn, and plan. Here goes for Rosenfeld Media: A quarterly review
Our 2020 started and ends on high notes, with a deep, dark, dank valley in between:
Q1: Who’s invention’s mom again?
We launched our third conference, Advancing Research, in late March/early April. Five weeks prior, we’d sold it out. Three weeks prior, we scrambled to convert it to a hybrid event — both in-person and virtual. Two weeks prior, we realized that we’d have to go fully remote. Rube Goldberg would have been proud of how we contorted ourselves to virtualize the conference (livestream goes here, Zoom there, Slack there), but what choice did we have?
Really, it was a huge success thanks to our team, our speakers, and our sponsors. And the conference received very positive attendee reviews, giving us the confidence that we were on the right track with our virtualization efforts.
But there was no time to catch our breaths, because…
