Latinxs Who Design

In this relaxed and fun episode, Michel sits down with Jay Demetillo, a design leader with over 10 years of experience across New York City, San Francisco, and Singapore. As an advocate for design inclusion and social impact, Jay shares his journey of adapting to Southeast Asia's collective culture and technology while working at companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, and Grab.

Kevin Bethune discusses the need for multidisciplinary teams and talks about his book Reimagining Design, written for creatively curious individuals to help the intersection of Business, Tech and Design. 

Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a "think tank" that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 20+ year career, and represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture. His book Reimagining design is out now and we’ll talk about that and more. And now Kevin Bethune

Get the book 

In this episode, Michel interviews Aubrey Blanche. Aubrey is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. During this chat, she shares her experiences with us about evolving our process and being inclusive. She's a Latina, Queer, and Bipolar 1 and wants you to know that: You matter.

Books recommended on the Episode:  

We're expanding the mission to include more people in our podcast. UX is not really UX without including people from all walks of life. Inspired by some of the recent voices on twitter I've decided to create a community for us, all of us. Join Diversity in UX Matters today https://join.slack.com/t/diverseuxmatters/shared_invite/zt-xd0nwhg4-YUyi0qU5MweqjDVg3~aI3A…

This week I interviewed Joanna Peña-Bickley, a design technologist, known as the mother of Cognitive Experience Design and pioneer in Ai aided, generative design. She is propelled by a multidisciplinary acumen in research, design, tech and data modeling. Joanna has delivered world-class experiences that drive engagement and business results. She has built exceptional design organizations as an active leader in the design, cognitive, user experience and Ai aided, generative design fields. Joanna's team's achievements have been written up in books and periodicals such as: MIT Technology Review, Time, Forbes, Fortune, TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal. Her drive to learn and invent has produced innovative work that has been internationally awarded, recognized and used by millions of customers.

He was the Lead Designer on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the Creative Suite in the 90s. Project Lead on Adobe Lightroom in the early 00s.

Former Director of Design at Twitter and Yahoo. Early designer and first employee at Figma.

Designing digital products since 1990.

These days he can be found in Amsterdam and around Europe (or under as @trenti on Twitter), and always happy to discuss any and all things Design.

Diego Pulido is a Senior Interaction Design at Google in New York City. He grew up on a healthy diet of Arepas & Coffee in Bogotá, Colombia prior to moving to the US to study Psychology & Human-Computer Interaction. He is passionate about mobile UX design, running, heavy metal & electronic music. You can find him anywhere on the web under the username @ixDiego

Rachel Smith is a Latinx Designer & Founder of Design to Combat COVID-19, a virtual community of creatives over 2,000 strong—who volunteer their skills and time to support under represented communities affected by the pandemic. By day, Rachel Smith is a Product Designer at Facebook, was this year’s 2021 Lead Mentor with The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and previously has worked with companies such as Nordstrom and The Home Depot. The rest of the time, the LA native works on a range of creative projects, both within her local and global communities.

Made in Miami, powered by cafecito. Yvonne Blanco is a Cuban designer currently based in Somerville, MA, who specializes in designing for scientists. She worked in scientific publishing for 11 years, visually translating and conceptualizing scientific research, as well as creating cover art, infographics, posters, and interactive media. She is currently a Senior UX Designer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, focusing on designing experiences for genomic analysis platforms and software. Her hope is that one day, her designs will help scientists achieve breakthroughs that will ultimately improve our lives.

Miguel Angel Cardona is a designer advocate for education at Figma Design where he is helping to bring Figma to more classrooms. Previously he was a tenure track professor in the New Media Design program at The Rochester Institute of Technology teaching user interface and product design. Before that, he was the lead designer at imgix, a platform for compressing and delivering images at scale. Miguel has 18 years of experience designing and illustrating for startups, agencies and teaching design. He lives with his partner Kate and their cat Eartha Kitt in Rochester, NY.