Design Downtime

In this conversation, Anna E. Cook and I talk about what happens when the work that defines you stops being the work you're hired to do. Anna traces the systemic forces pushing accessibility specialists out of their roles, connecting it to broader DEI rollbacks, and reflects on the identity crisis that follows when your expertise becomes a liability. We also talk about burnout, and why "just work less" misses the point entirely. For Anna, recovery required detaching her identity from her job, accepting imperfection, and exploring hobbies with zero expectation of productivity. This episode is for anyone who's ever wondered whether caring too much about the right things might cost them, and decided to keep caring anyway.

Guest Bio

Anna E. Cook (she/they) is a designer working across design systems, platform infrastructure, and the code that connects them, with a specialty in accessibility. She is currently a Senior Designer at Microsoft and created the LinkedIn Learning course "Auditing Design Systems for Accessibility."

Links

Anna's website: https://annaecook.com/

Credits

Cover design by Kristine Planche (inspired by Raquel Rubio Breternitz).

It's the season 5 finale and we're going whimsical, when Natalya Shelburne joins us to talk about the psychology of creativity. She makes a case for why creativity is not a personality trait, but a muscle most of us were slowly trained out of, explains how creativity killers show up in workplaces and daily life, and why "I'm not creative" almost always traces back to a single formative moment of being shut down. Natalya also introduces whimsy as a practical gut-check for creative readiness, shares her own daily rituals, and argues that reclaiming your creative practice is ultimately about deciding your time is yours to assign value to.

Guest Bio

Natalya Shelburne (she/her) is a designer, developer, artist, author, educator, and doer of good deeds. She leads the designers working on the DRUIDS design system at Datadog. Previously, she worked at GitHub working on design infrastructure and leading the Primer design system team. Before that, the New York Times and teaching at Harvard Extension. She loves to write, publishing the Design Engineering Handbook and articles for various online publications. Natalya holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychology, and a master's in Creativity and Talent Development. Crossing disciplines and building bridges between design and engineering is at the foundation of much of her work, and building teams, growing community, and investing in human creativity at scale is the next big adventure.

Links

Natalya’s website: https://natalyashelburne.com

Natalya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalyashelburne/

Books by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/27446.Mih_ly_Cs_kszentmih_lyi

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

You're guaranteed to catch the Love Bug, when Dave House joins us to talk about his love of old Volkswagens. He shares how owning and restoring old air-cooled VWs filled a gap left when music stopped being his primary community, and describes the VW scene as a counter-culture rather than a car hobby, one that mirrors the openness and camaraderie of punk. Dave reflects on the deep satisfaction of learning to weld and restore vehicles by hand, the meditative focus required to drive a 50-year-old machine, and his love of tracing the human histories embedded in these cars.

Guest Bio

Dave House (he/him) is a Design Systems Specialist that has spent the last decade working on Design Systems for organisations like GOV.UK, BT, Lloyds Banking Group and most recently Dentally, a management system for Dental Practices. He lives in Egham, a small town just outside of London and has played in punk adjacent bands since the late 90s - releasing multiple records and travelling the affectionately named “toilet circuit”.

Links

Dave’s website: https://www.das.house

Dave’s VW on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calliethevwcamper

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

Get ready to be swept away to a world of magic and giant swords, when Araxie Miller joins us to talk about her love of Japanese role-playing games. She explains what sets them apart from Western RPGs: rather than asking who you want to be, they invite you into a world of existing characters, deep story arcs, and themes of friendship, sacrifice, and hope. From discovering Chrono Trigger in 1995 to playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with her husband, Araxie traces how JRPGs have been a constant companion - through childhood, career in game design, and now parenthood - with the music, art books, and stories still inspiring her creativity today.

Guest Bio

Araxie Miller (She/Her) has spent her whole career making complicated things feel human. She started out building video game worlds at Blizzard and Carbine. Back then, one small detail could change the day for millions of players. That stuck with her. She learned something early. The best work never comes from one person alone. It comes from a team that trusts each other. Today she's a designer at ServiceNow, working on AI. She's led big design teams. But she still loves cracking open the code and building something herself. She's the one who stays up too late with a prototype, just to get it right. Off the clock, she's in Boston. She's got a husband, a daughter, a dog, and a cat who run the house. And in her spare time? She forages for wild mushrooms. Then she cooks with whatever she finds.

Links

Araxie’s website: https://www.araxiemiller.com/

Araxie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/araxiemiller

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

No need to break your Duolingo streak, when Stephanie Tuerk joins us to make a case for learning languages. She traces her journey from high school French to PhD-era German to humbling Russian, arguing that language learning is less about fluency and more about a gateway into culture, history, and a completely different relationship with your own mind. Stephanie also reflects on the rare pleasure of being a deliberate beginner, and why a language class might be one of the last great third spaces left.

Guest Bio

Stephanie Tuerk (she/her) is a designer-developer who currently works at a startup making verifiable AI for science. She previously did this work in quantitative policy research context, and loves serving as the translation layer between technical domain expertise and users. She entered the world of interface and product design through data visualization, and prior to that spent time in the fields of architectural design and architectural history.

Links

Stephanie’s website: https://stephanietuerk.net/

Stephanie on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/stephanietuerk.net

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this episode where Andy Bell joins us to talk about his lifelong obsession with the Legend of Zelda. He explores what makes the franchise compelling: its creativity, humour, weird NPCs, and remarkable ability to stay consistent in spirit while reinventing itself across 20 games spanning 40 years. Andy also shares his self-imposed challenge of playing the entire series in timeline order, and the magical experience of introducing his daughter to the franchise and watching her fall in love with the same games that shaped him.

Guest Bio

Andy Bell (he/him) is a designer, front-end developer, design agency founder, and the founder of Piccalilli, based in the UK. He has worked in the design and web industries for over 15 years with some of the largest organisations in the world like Google, The NHS, Harley-Davidson and Oracle. Over the years he has worked on both extremely large projects for huge organisations and tiny projects for small startups. Andy mostly specialises in CSS — whether that is consultancy, writing an expansive course, co-writing a course for Google, co-authoring a book on CSS layout, or creating a methodology to help people write better CSS.

Links

Andy’s website: https://bell.bz/

Andy’s agency: https://set.studio/

The blog post that explains what he’s doing: https://bell.bz/im-playing-the-zelda-games-in-timeline-order/

Zelda timeline tracker: https://tangled.org/bell.bz/zelda-in-timeline-order/blob/main/readme.md

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

In this episode, Lisa Carey joins us to share her decades-long appreciation for Brian Eno. She introduces us to Eno the musician, producer, visual artist, and one of the originators of systems thinking in creative work, and traces a through-line from Roxy Music to Bowie's Berlin Trilogy, and from Oblique Strategies to a generative documentary that shows differently every screening - all united by a philosophy of embracing randomness and the unexpected over rigid planning.

Guest Bio

Lisa Carey (she/her) is a Design System Lead and Product Designer with a unique, 30+ year creative career spanning film, marketing, television, and software design, and her own creative pursuits. Working in the financial sector since 2012, Lisa brings over 20 years of UX/UI experience to her work. Currently, she is focusing on systemic design, front-end development, and AI collaboration within modern design system frameworks. Previously, Lisa spent 15 years in film as a director including the film Rough Road and managing international distribution and licensing for Ken Burns and other filmmakers. Today, she brings that same passion for visual storytelling to digital product design. A practicing painter who also teaches community courses exploring music and art, Lisa anchors her multi-disciplinary work in her true passions: systemic design, creative strategy, and making unexpected connections.

Links

Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacareydesign/

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

A picture is worth a thousand words when Erin Casali joins us to share about her illustration practice. She reflects on not being able to visualize images in her mind, which makes her process generative and exploratory; drawing to discover, not to transcribe. Erin describes switching from pencil to ink as a forcing function to break perfectionist habits and train herself to think in whole compositions rather than obsessing over details. Finally, she explores the blurry line between design and art, where what makes something art is the human soul projected into it.

Guest Bio

Erin Casali (she/her) is a VP/Director of both product and design, with over 10 years of experience in each. She has a hybrid approach with design, product, and engineering in her background. Her rare blend of skills, including psychology and change management, enables her to foster collaboration and break down silos. Driven by a passion for improving lives through her work, she empowers teams to reach their full potential. She advocates for purpose, transparency, and diversity, fostering a culture of trust and agency. Her diverse experiences across startups, large corporations, advisory, and board roles have equipped her with a versatile toolkit to adapt to various organizational contexts and drive meaningful change.

Links

Erin’s website: https://intenseminimalism.com/

Inklings of Late on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inklings.of.late/

Inklings of Late on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/inklingoflate.bsky.social

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

Saddle up and start your stopwatch, when Jenny Dee Brecheisen joins us to talk about her passion for barrel racing. She shares how it completely transformed her life, from city dweller to 10-acre landowner with four horses. Jenny explores the deep bonds formed with her horses through daily care and patience, the 14-17 seconds of pure adrenaline that make all the preparation worthwhile, and the steep learning curve and real physical dangers that come with the sport.

Guest Bio

Jenny Dee Brecheisen (she/her) is a UI Engineer on Cloudflare’s UI Platform team, where she works across frontend UI, systems, and engineering infrastructure. Beginning with a degree in graphic design and early work in print and marketing, she later moved into product design and design systems before transitioning into engineering, bringing a cross-disciplinary perspective to building products in the age of AI. Her work today spans everything from frontend development and accessibility to migrations, debugging, and improving how software gets built and maintained at scale. When she’s not working, she spends her time barrel racing and investing in futurity horse prospects.

Links

Jenny’s website: tinycrowbar.com

Jenny’s race-tracking app: highloper.com

Jenny on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yennie/

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.

It's not all mosh pits and crowdsurfing when Luke Murphy joins us to talk about nearly 20 years of band life. They talk about the sharp contrast between recording an album and the rush of performing it, and how the Brutalligators' chemistry works through defined roles, mutual respect, and just enough creative tension to push each other forward. Luke also punctures the myth of touring glamour, but explains that the friendships, the crowd energy, and the moment a new song lands on stage make it entirely worth it.

Guest Bio

Luke Murphy (they/them) is a Principal Design Advocate at zeroheight. Before zeroheight, Luke has worked as an IC and leader in product design and advocacy teams at Memrise, Mr & Mrs Smith and Microsoft. They host the Design Systems WTF podcast, and co-organize the WDC and Converge conferences. When they’re not nerding out about design systems and DesignOps, they are busy raising their 13-year-old son, shouting in a queer punk band, or running a DIY vinyl subscription company. They also don’t sleep.

Links

Luke’s Website: www.lurkmoophy.com

Brutalligators on bandcamp: brutalligators.bandcamp.com

Brutalligators on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6PQwcg9SjBaPxGhqWeSIs5?si=w0sEdUZiTI27Yfr1stBZyA

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Rubio Breternitz.