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…
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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…
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It’s been a pretty busy first-month launching Recliner Designer, a podcast focused on the varied perspectives of designers and design executives around the world stuck at home during the Covid-19 quarantine. So far 14 interviews have been done remotely in seven countries: the U.S., China, Australia, Estonia, Switzerland, Mexico, and Poland. Interestingly, designers live everywhere…
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Lockdown has given Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo, the chance to slow down, enjoy the small 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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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