Design Everywhere

Developing a unique style as a designer is a journey. Being able to translate that style to both fine art and commercial applications while maintaining your signature stamp takes raw ambition and persistence, craft, and creativity. That is Oliver Barrett in a nutshell. His unique style has been applied to some of the world’s most iconic brands, like Amazon, Nike, ESPN, Apple, and Marvel Studios. In today's episode, we'll talk with him about his career and development as an artist and designer, and even a little bit on the time we shared playing in the hardcore band, Above This Fire.

In part two of our discussion with Karl Fast, we take a deep dive into how our bodies and physical surroundings are used as tools and actors in the process of cognition and understanding - that understanding is not something that solely happens in the mind but is inextricably linked to artifacts of our surroundings. Karl Fast is a former professor of User Experience Design and Information Architecture, an Information Futurist, and the co-author of the book, Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding.

Throughout the history of civilization, we have seen an ever-increasing need and ability to create, store, and share information. But as our ability to access information grows exponentially, are we as designers, focusing too narrowly on the short-term; designing, developing, and shipping product based on the information and technology available to us today and ignoring what the future might have in store for us? In this episode, Karl Fast, a former professor, the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, and an Information Futurist, explores how we might approach the challenges associated with the exponential growth of information in our uncertain future.

Complexity is all around us. From our social systems to the products and services we create, complexity lurks beneath what might seem to be the most simple solutions. If we ignore it, the consequences might haunt us long into the future in ways we didn't foresee. But if we approach complexity more systematically, we can better understand the potential impact of design decisions further up- and downstream. In the second in our two-part conversation with Erik Dahl, we'll discuss how modeling can help us make sense of complexity so that we can better understand the constraints and opportunities in anything we have a hand in designing.

As a designers, how do we define and approach practice? Athletes practice before a competition and musicians practice before a performance. Do we, as designers, live by those same standards? In this episode, Erik Dahl, a seasoned UX consultant, educator at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, co-founder of the Midwest UX conference, and ultramarathoner, dives deeply into the philosophy and execution of practice.

Collaboration is a critical element of design. It facilitates the cross-pollination of ideas, concepts, and diverse perspectives. What happens when collaboration in a physical, face-to-face sense becomes at best much more difficult and at worst, explicitly outlawed? If this was some time in the not-so-distant past, we would brush this off as science fiction. But the pandemic of 2020 made it a reality. In this episode, Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at Mural and expert workshop facilitator, will discuss what collaboration means today and into an uncertain future.

Follow Jim on Twitter: @jimkalbach

Join host Jonathan Morgan with some of the leading voices in the industry as we explore what it means to be a designer in this highly disruptive time. Each week, we get an insider’s look into the strategies, tactics, philosophies, and techniques of designer’s as they creatively face some of their biggest challenges. We explore the common thread in everything from designing ethical artificial intelligence to concert posters to collaborative communities.