Katie Swindler: Life and Death Design
What can designers learn from astronauts and race car drivers?
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou speaks with Katie Swindler to answer this and similar questions in her upcoming Rosenfeld Media book, Life and Death Design. Katie’s new book will help us redefine how we might view a core human function – specifically, the stress response – and how stress can be an informative tool for designers.
As an experienced presenter who has spoken on UX topics internationally at industry events, Katie believes that brands who wish to truly connect with consumers must expand utility through emotion. She illustrates how leveraging stress-informed design enables users to perform optimally during high-stress or traumatic experiences.
Important questions Katie tackles are:
How does understanding the stress response help designers deal with high-stress situations?
How can designers leverage redundancy and biomimicry to enhance a final product?
How stress-informed design can support experts in a way that preserves an organic workflow?
How did conscientious attention to detail in design help save the lives of heroic users?
What is “abusive design,” and how do we avoid it?
Why Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives
As a DesignOps professional, your work holds power—the power to reinforce systemic marginalization, or the power to dismantle it. Spencer Stultz will focus on the intersection of Operations and equity, and explore the power dynamics and cultural norms that can impede true organizational change. In this session, you will:
- Learn about ways that Design Operations can (unintentionally) enforce harmful dominant cultural standards
- Explore alternative approaches to Operations that center equity—by examining community-oriented social justice principles that can address institutional failures and foster change
- Gather tools to enable and empower you to dismantle harmful systems and processes within your own practice
Design is About Understanding People: A Chat with Irene Au
How can startups employ good design practices from the beginning? Lou talks with Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, about her work with setting up companies with robust design practices, and why user research is an investment every company should make.
Peter Merholz: Design at Scale is People!
Design at scale is perhaps the most interesting challenge facing the design industry right now. How do you maintain quality and not get bogged down as your team grows? Much of the discussion focuses on systems and processes, but that starting with systems runs exactly contrary to the true value that design brings to companies, which is a humanistic and creative problem-framing and problem-solving approach. In other words, this focus on systems could ironically undercut design’s potential within organizations— in other words, “Design at Scale” is humanism at scale, and share what’s needed to keep people at the center of this work.
Peter Merholz will be both a speaker and a workshop instructor during this year’s Design at Scale conference! Here, Lou and Peter muse over stories from the early days of information architecture before meandering their way to contrasting UX in the public versus private sectors. They also discuss a preview of Peter’s talk at the conference, Design at Scale is People!
Leading Teams That Execute: A Chat with Phillip Hunter
What does an interdisciplinary enterprise team need to focus on to ensure customer satisfaction? Lou talks with Phillip Hunter, Head of UX at Alexa Skills, about the unique challenges of growing and leading enterprise UX teams to success. Phillip Hunter is the Theme Leader for Leading Teams That Execute at 2017’s Enterprise UX Conference.
Imagination Work Meets Remote Work: Reflections on Collaboration with MURAL’s Mariano Suarez-Battan
Mariano Suarez-Battan is the co-founder and CEO of MURAL, a tool for remote collaboration—and longtime partner/sponsor of Rosenfeld Media’s conferences. MURAL was founded in 2011 after Mariano experienced first-hand the struggle of working remotely with a large, distributed team while designing video games. In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Mariano and Lou discuss the challenges of collaboration among remote teams and how platforms like MURAL can level the playing field between coworkers, often flattening hierarchies and changing culture in the process. Mariano also shares his predictions about how workplaces will operate five years in the future.
Mariano’s shoutout – IBM’s Phil Gilbert, one of MURAL’s early adopters, and Tim Brown, former CEO at Ideo who introduced Mariano to Phil.
MURAL is sponsoring all three of Rosenfeld Media conferences this year: Advancing Research, Enterprise Experience, and DesignOps Summit. Be sure to stop by their booth!
Better Together: Partnering with Others to Transform Enterprise
Best Buy’s Jamie Kaspszak and USAA’s Frank Duran join Lou and Bob Baxley to discuss how UX plays a critical role in bridging their organizations’ silos and disciplines. It’s a preview of what they’ll cover at this year’s Enterprise Experience conference, where they’ll be joined by four other speakers, all who are wrestling with the team sport of organizational transformation. Learn more about these sessions, which take place virtually on September 3.
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!).
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.
Breaking through the empathy gap: a conversation with Indi Young
Empathy is a hot conversation topic these days but much as we try, we’re not quite using our empathy muscles to their fullest extent when solving design problems for real people. Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy talks about how our assumptions can lead us astray.
Panel: Collaboration Tools
We have all heard the old saying “communication is key” but as the landscape of technology widens so do the options we have for communication tools using that technology. To talk about the challenges and opportunities that our organizations face when solving the communication conundrum, we have invited three people working in three different areas where communication is key for organizations with designers: research insights, workflow management and design systems management. Facilitated by Abby Covert.
