Recliner Designer

For episode 22 of the podcast, I was joined by my Adobe colleague Laura Herman, a user researcher for some of our mobile and emerging products in the creative space. As Laura and I are big fans of her work, we were excited to speak to Payal Arora, researcher, author, professor, and speaker. Her well-known book 'The Next Billion Users - Digital Life Beyond the West' has been described as, "A ‘must-read' for anyone interested in digital uses around the world.”  We were interested in asking her thoughts on how western companies like our own can more effectively research and design products that truly benefit 'Global South' (i.e. developing countries like India, Brazil, and African to name a few.) Payal's thoughts on how we can co-design with local influencers, how western designers need to be passionate about creating inclusive products, and how truly radical products aren't always the most novel, were truly inspiring.Forbes named Payal the “next billion champion” and “the right kind of person to reform tech.” She has given more than 200 talks in 109 cities in 59 countries and a TEDx talk on the future of the internet. She is the co-founder of FemLab.Co, a global future of work initiative Payal is a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. More about Payal Arora:https://payalarora.comTedX talk: "Who is in charge of the future of the internet?"

I had a great time speaking with the author, university professor, and UX strategist Jaime Levy.  Her best-selling book UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want gets top results for UX on Amazon and has just come out in its second edition. I was excited to hear about her career and how she approached the second edition of her book. We had a fun walk down memory lane hearing about her upbringing in LA where she was exposed to the entertainment industry. While she initially wanted to become a filmmaker, like many creatives in the 90s she turned to digital media and eventually the all-new internet and launched a career in interface design, animation, information architecture, and eventually UX strategy. Working as a UX strategist while teaching courses at USC, she used her 30 years of consulting and academic experiences to write UX Strategy. She currently lives in Berlin, conducts workshops worldwide, consults, and is discovering the joy of hanging out in the middle of the day instead of constantly working.Learn more:https://jaimelevy.com/

In this 20th episode, I talk with Phillip Golub, VP, Digital Product Experience and Innovation at Symphony Talent, based in Washington, DC. He shares about his 25-year journey as an information architect, designer, and design leader at a number of companies including his own agency he started in college, Isobar, Amex, Sapient, and now Symphony Talent where he heads up UX. Phil also shares about his creative podcast What Bubbles Up, which he started up during the pandemic with his friend Barry Fiske. I also have to ask my son to stop singing during the podcast.Phil Golub is an experienced creative leader, design thinker, and transformation strategy expert, with over 25 years in Experience Design, Digital Product Innovation, Service Design, and Cognitive Experiences. Phil is currently the VP, Digital Product Experience and Innovation at Symphony Talent. Previously, he was the Head of Experience for the South Region at Publicis Sapient, leading both teams and clients in the creation of transformational digital experiences for the world's foremost brands. Most importantly, he is a devoted husband and father to his wife, two kids, and a Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier.Musical credit: Poddington Bear

In this 19th episode, I talk with Tom Foley, Creative Type Director for Monotype, based in London. Tom reflects on his deep experience designing type in the past 10 years and how things have changed with the introduction of variable fonts, current type design tools,  the technical side of modern type, the use of AI to create Chinese fonts, and how type designers share their fonts. Not having worked in the type industry myself, I was intrigued to hear about working at Monotype, the world's largest type foundry and creators of a vast 10,000 font library including Helvetica, Univers, and Frutiger as well as creating custom fonts for major brands. Tom also shares the role of custom fonts compared to open-source fonts and how having your own company font helps differentiate your brand.Tom Foley is responsible for leading a team of type designers creating fonts for the Monotype Library and corporate brands. Words and letters are in Tom’s blood - his great-grandfather was from a family of stonemasons that specialized in letter carving, and his uncle was a sign painter. Tom spent seven years at type foundry Dalton Maag where he progressed from font developer to creative director, and worked to solve the typographical problems of some of the world’s well-known brands. He joined Monotype in July of 2018, and he continues to work on custom fonts and leading his team of type designers from the Monotype office in London.About Tom Foley:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-foley-75062158/https://www.monotype.com/studio/tom-foley

In this 18th episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, Founder & Creative Director at iid, a brand strategy & design agency headquartered in San Francisco. He is also a professor at Academy of Art University. Matt and I have known each other for more than two decades - first working together as art directors at an agency during the Dot-com bubble and many years later as business partners at iid for seven years. Matt shared his pandemic experience as an independent agency owner, as a design school professor, and as a parent. He sees the Covid-19 and the economic downturn as an opportunity for young designers to come up with solutions to help people facing challenges. Matt also talked about an interesting product idea of highly local digital marketplaces that enable people to trade products and services to help local communities thrive. He feels that during the pandemic with local businesses shutting their doors large corporations like Amazon or Walmart just grow bigger at the expense of local businesses.Matt leads design and creative teams at iid to develop digital brands, products, and businesses. He has over 20 years experience designing brands, apps and websites. He is originally from Melbourne, Australia and has lived in the U.S. for close to two decades. He has three sons and two dogs.Matt's Linkedin Profileiid Website

In this 17th episode, I talk with Darren Crawforth, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy Shanghai. Darren shared his experience going back to the office in China. He talks about the different mindset in China compared to other parts of the world and the infrastructure in China set up to manage the Coronavirus. As creative leader at the largest international agency in China, he shares how his team worked during the pandemic and how he found their work sped up and became more focused. He also mentioned the downside of the always-on life at home leading to overwork at one stage. Now back to the office, he feels that large group meetings aren't as efficient as they were working during the lockdown. Darren shares about the interesting changes in the ways brands are now doing ad campaigns in China to be more appropriate and relevant during Coronavirus. He also talks about the shift to doing advertising on e-commerce and live streaming in China. Specifically, he explains the very unique Chinese way the TMall site has become a powerful ecosystem for content, advertising, and shopping, where consumers spend much time than on Amazon in the U.S.Darren Crawforth was born and raised in the East Midlands, UK. His work has taken him around the world including New York, Boston, LA, Beijing and Shanghai, where he currently calls home. He's helped to define and design some of the world’s largest global brands such as Korean Air, Volkswagen, Johnny Walker, Hennessy, Burberry, Intercontinental Hotel Group and TOMS Shoes. He's as crazy about boundary-pushing electronic music as he is about understanding the mysteries of pickle fermentation. He currently lives in Shanghai with his wife and 3 rescue dogs.Darren's Linkedin ProfileDarrencrawforth.com

I had a very inspiring chat with graphic designer, educator, publisher, and event organizer Esen Karol, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey. Esen shared her personal journey of becoming a type and graphic designer - starting as a young girl in Istanbul, getting her masters on a Fullbright at Pratt and teaching at Istanbul Bilgi University. She said she wanted to become a designer to be a "mediator" to help people communicate.I was intrigued to hear about the thriving local Istanbul design culture Esen has contributed to. In particular, I Ioved hearing about her starting "Jeff Talks", the name a parody of Ted Talks and inspired by a cheap IKEA chair she first used at the event. What started as a small design salon grew into an event in the hundreds. For Jeff Talks she began baking cakes (the favorite of each featured designer) and as the event grew she ended up making lots and lots of cakes (as documented in https://jeff-bakes.tumblr.com/) Esen also founded Manifold, a platform for designers to write about design and culture in Turkish. Manifold is a cultural criticism journal featuring hundreds of contributors aged 17 to 70.Esen is a graphic designer based in Istanbul, who works on both digital and analog projects in her one-person studio. Her current work focuses on designing books for art exhibitions and cultural institutions. Her clients and collaborators have included Arter, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Mavi, Meşher, and SALT. From 2003–2012, she taught typography and publication design at Istanbul Bilgi University. She is a graduate of Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul and received her master’s degree in communications design from Pratt Institute, New York, where she was a Fulbright Fellow.Esen's Linkedin ProfileManifold (TR)Jeff Talks (TR)Jeff Bake Cakes (EN)

I was very fortunate to speak with Pernilla Johansson, Chief Design Officer at Electrolux, and based in Stockholm, Sweden. I enjoyed our very full discussion about her journey to becoming a design leader. She started her first job with Philips and it took her to 3 continents and 5 countries. Arriving in Singapore, and staying for 16 years, the leadership part of her journey began. She then joined Electrolux in Singapore to build a design innovation center there. In 2014, she moved back to Stockholm, Sweden to head the global team for small appliances, after being away for 23 years. She advises designers to take the opportunity to live and work abroad to learn differences in people and realize real empathy. In 2018, Pernilla took on the role of CDO, enabling designers to do a better job and work better together. As an interesting type of research to start this role, she asked 200 Electrolux designers from around the world to write her a “thank you letter” and date it a year and a half later. Pernilla asked them to give her a thank you for what they as a community had achieved together. She received 55,000 words and got to know everyone and all the teams. By doing this she turned the letters into five top topics globally and five from each region and set up the priorities for the organization, which she continues to measure their progress to becoming a better global design team.On the topic of Coronavirus and what changes were made at Electrolux, she said within a week everyone took home their equipment and with help from IT, it didn’t take long before they were productive. It happened in waves, starting in Shanghai in end of January, then Singapore where they did half teams on-site, then Italy where they have a big R&D facility. By then they realized they needed to mobilize globally. They used Bluejeans and Miro to collaborate digitally. One of her multi-discipline project teams said that since Covid, they actually feel closer together during quarantine because they were all equal. They felt a tendency to lean in and help each other more since they felt less physical distance than they had before being separated by floors. She thinks it’s working surprisingly well.Pernilla's Linkedin ProfileVimeo Video: "Pernilla Johansson – Electrolux new Head of Design"

Leandro Agro', Design Director at Design Group Italia, shares his thoughts on ways to create more engaging collaborative video calls. He attempts to bridge the physical and digital by bringing in objects and green screen elements to create "stages" to make each online workshop truly unique. When I asked him for advice to designers, he said we need alternative ways to be close to each other across distances, as traveling will be problematic for the foreseeable future. He thinks designers should help come up with ways to bring humanity together.Leandro Agro is a design director and technology designer at Design Group Italia. He loves to create, nurture, grow, and scale design teams; and has done it a number of times, usually in a tech environment. He led the development of the very first smartphone UI (3G) and has contributed to patents for eye-tracking, mobile, and video. His dream is to design intelligent, transparent and human-centric tech because he thinks Star Trek is inevitable and we are here to build it.

It was a truly fascinating opportunity to speak with Uta Knablein about her UX design team's work doing research and design at iHeartRadio during the pandemic. Uta offers much-needed tips on how to manage a design team remotely. Onboard new team members remotely presents a challenge in these times and Uta talks about how she handles it. She talks about how she subscribes to servant leadership style, which is reflected in how she looks after her team as they made the adjustment to remote working during difficult times. I was also intrigued to hear about changing radio listening habits during the pandemic and how her team brings user research, data, and design together to address listener needs during Covid-19.Uta is the EVP of UX /Product Design for iHeartRadio. Under her leadership, the UXD team connects iHeartMedia’s digital music, radio, and podcast service to its users’ ever-changing lifestyles, technologies across 280 platforms. Uta leads user-centered product research efforts and helps optimize iHeartRadio’s digital products for the best customer experience. Knablein is known to be a servant leader, a habitual question asker, approach defined, and a skill-fluid lifelong learner.

I was very lucky to speak with Ovetta Sampson, Principal Creative Director at Microsoft. I enjoyed our animated discussion about how she got her start wanting to be the Queen of England when she was a nine-year-old in Chicago while learning to code with her father to being a journalist/activist for 20 years and then making a dramatic transition to technology and finding herself doing design research at IDEO. Along the way, Ovetta became an expert at designing for ethical AI and amplifying the need for diversity in AI.As Principal Creative Director at Microsoft Ovetta works with designers, engineers, researchers, and technologists to help the nation's biggest companies visualize and realize a digital transformation. She gets to play with the entire spectrum of technology from plain old enterprise systems design to exciting opportunities in Mixed Reality, IoT, and AI. Before her job at Microsoft, she was a Design Research Lead at IDEO where she focused on ethical AI and integrating data science with human-centered design

Lockdown has given Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo, the chance to slow down, enjoy the details of life, and write a book that captured his life experiences leading large design teams. I was fortunate to hear about his new book and what he believes makes innovation truly happen — people. To Mauro, a designer's main job is to bring innovation to the company. But the branding of designers doesn't always make this easy for executives to understand. I had the great pleasure to talk with Mauro and hear about how he leads his global design team at PepsiCo and how during Coronavirus he has made sure to create personal engagement at all levels to help his design team across the world feel connected and appreciated.Mauro Porcini joined PepsiCo in 2012 as its first Chief Design Officer. In this newly created position, Mauro is infusing design thinking into PepsiCo’s culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company’s product platforms and brands. Before PepsiCo, he was a design leader at 3M and Philips. In 2018 Mauro has been recognized with the Knighthood (Cavaliere) by the President of the Italian Republic.Mauro's Linkedin

For the 10th episode of the podcast, I had the great pleasure to "travel" to Poland to chat with Radek Taraszka, a product design lead at UXPin, a UX design and prototyping software company based in Gdańsk, Poland. My favorite lesson Radek gained from the pandemic was his needing to learn to unplug from work at home. He did this by removing Slack and email from his phone, thereby creating a barrier from notifications taking over his home and family life. Radek also feels that even with all the tools we have (Slack, Zoom, UXPin, etc.), it is difficult to build a company culture and show true appreciation to people for their work. He said this can be especially hard for a company that creates innovative and disruptive products.Radek has worked at UX Pin for 5 years. He is responsible for delivering the part of the software focused on hand-offs between designer and engineers. Prior to working as a UX designer, Radek was a product manager. UXPin was one of the first web-based UX design and prototyping tools.

Worldwide Creative Officer of EF Education First Joel Hladecek shares his personal experiences of how he has overcome three crises - the Dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and now Covid-19. From the ending of a company to the loss of a job, based on his own ups and downs, Joel explains how these challenging times can be unexpected opportunities to do new, innovative things. For finding inspiration, he recommends designers not to reference other people's work but to be inspired by something else - a book, one's childhood, or even the problems we're facing in a pandemic - to invent and be unique.Joel Hladecek is responsible for overseeing EF’s creative, design, and experience globally. Spanning 500 offices in 50 different countries, he works with the creative teams in each office to ensure that the key consumer touchpoints feel consistent across all of EF. Joel currently lives in Lucerne, Switzerland where EF has its global headquarters.

I had a fun and inspiring chat with UX firm founder Adam Faulkner in Sydney, Australia. Adam shared his thoughts on how he keeps his team morale up through staging virtual community events and "Quarantini" online gatherings. He also talked about how the terminology "social distancing" sent the wrong message to the public but that "physical distancing while staying socially connected" was a more positive way to express it.Adam has been working in technology and telecommunications since 2000, and has worked at Sony and Blackberry. He founded UX research and design agency blueegg 8 years ago, is an instructor at General Assembly, and currently runs the Enterprise UX Meetup in Sydney.

In our 7th episode of Recliner Designer, I had the great pleasure to speak to Helen Kokk, a lead service designer from Tallinn, Estonia. Helen told me why Tallinn has the most tech startups in the EU. She explains that Estonia's X-Road, a centrally managed data exchange layer allows organizations to send information over the Internet using confidentiality and interoperability between parties. She stays focused during Coronavirus by imagining her next day like a movie. Helen also makes a strong suggestion to all designers in the world that during pandemic "everyone is at home looking for solutions and now is the time for making bold decisions."Helen Kokk, User Experience and Service Design Lead at Nortal, has almost 15 years of experience with user experience and user interface design. She’s passionate about entrepreneurship, branding and identity. Kokk has helped clients rethink their approach to the UI and UX for their services on numerous occasions and would be happy to do the same for you.

In this episode, we travel across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia to speak to Krister, who is an experience designer, educator, and author. He tells us how through quarantine he found an opportunity to create a book and course focused on helping entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs realize their dreams.With his 19 years of human-centered design experience, he helps businesses in education discover their ingenuity, and grow new revenue possibilities with cross-channel services that solve customer and operational needs. Doubling as a constantly-curious and imaginative inventor of better processes and 17 unique emerging learning technologies, Krister has consulted, written design manuals, and built teams in 18 fields of design. He is using this pandemic to proactively realize his one dream to launch a book and course.

Momo Estrella is an interaction designer in Shanghai, China leading UX at IKEA. He talks about his experience transitioning from IDEO to IKEA in the middle of the pandemic and how strange it was coming out of quarantine a month and a half ago to go to work. He shares tips for transitioning back to creative life through radical optimism.Momo has 20 years of experience across Film & Animation, Digital Product Design, and Experience Strategy. In the last decade he has helped to set the vision, culture, and capabilities to sustain human-centered innovation in companies like EF Education First, Imagination, and IDEO. He currently serves as the Design Director / Head of UX at IKEA. This has guided his endeavors as a writer, industry speaker, and board advisor. He is currently authoring a book on Design & Leadership and the space in between. He lives with his very-happy son, and his very-cool wife in Shanghai. Learn more about Momo.

In this latest podcast, I was fortunate to speak with Diego Kolsky, a design leader, ECD, and design educator. Diego leads cross-disciplinary teams working on innovations, deep transformations and high-impact design initiatives. He works with studio teams, large corporations and young startups across sectors, from airlines to technology companies, through retail, hospitality, consumer products, and destinations. He is based in New York City and works for clients across the Americas, Asia and Europe. He also is a design professor at Pratt. Diego is a partner at independent brand consultancy The Velo Group and teaches at Pratt Institute.

Our third episode is with seasoned designer and author Charlie Brewer, who explains how being sheltered at home allows him to work when it suits his peak energy levels. Charlie is a user experience designer and product manager with over 20 years of experience in software and media. He is co-author of Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design (O’Reilly Media, 2020). He helps companies establish and grow the full stack of UX capabilities: Customer research, interaction design, information architecture, user interface, and graphic design, editorial, usability, and prototyping. For special projects, he leads the design team to deliver software that is fit for purpose and mindset, easy to learn, and easy to use. In his free time, he likes photography, cooking, and reading. He lives in San Francisco. More: http://www.charliebrewer.com

Design manager Gabe Wasserman in San Francisco shares some great ways he engages his team during the quarantine by having "Doodle Thursdays" and special birthday Slack channels, to keep the culture alive in his team. Design manager Gabe Wasserman in San Francisco shares some great ways he engages his team during the quarantine to keep the culture alive. Gabe manages the operations design team at Opendoor which is inventing a new platform to simplify real estate transactions. Before that, he worked at Facebook as a senior product designer leading a multi-year design effort to overhaul Facebook’s global advertising platform. Prior to joining Facebook, he worked at Hot Studio, the well-known SF agency that Facebook acquired. He enjoys learning new domains, synthesizing complex information, crafting compelling digital experiences, and driving consensus among stakeholders. Gabe is also my surf buddy and helped me come up with the name for this podcast Recliner Designer.

Debut episode #1 for Recliner Designer podcast is with guest Silvio Sangineto, an Italian UX designer working in San Francisco and about to move to Redmond, WA. Silvio shares his amazing experiences working around the world and how he started his new job at Microsoft while under quarantine. Born in a little town in southern Italy (Paola), Silvio spent his last 10 years working in several countries. Currently Principal UX Designer at Microsoft, he led 60+ projects about products, services, and ecosystems at Macy’s, Toyota, BNP Paribas, and many more. Silvio is actively involved as a speaker, mentor, and judge in several organizations, and in the last few years, he started his journey to share a design framework to empower people to achieve more. Silvio has introduced me to the best pizza places in San Francisco!