Paths, Puddles, Products

On building respect for designers in an organization, with our guest Scott Zimmer.

In part 2 of this guest episode, Juli and Scott continued their hike on the Buda Hills, discussing hiring designers, giving them a seat at the table, and building a culture that respects design.

The path we took:

• Treating designers as a partner, not a resource;
• The risks of hiring external design help;
• Explaining and selling the idea of iteration;
• Why the first impression is important, and how a bad experience with a designer can feed bad stereotypes;
• The dangers of the agency model, and a better alternative for dedicated persistent internal design teams;
• Pleasing versus challenging the client;
• Hiring for aptitude and interest, and filling the rest with mentorship;
• And finding upsides for AI, supercharging human connections.

Further reading:

• https://www.tmpt.me/
• https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/this-is-why-i-dont-call-myself-a-service-designer-any-more-5dcf639bebe0
• https://www.amazon.com/Elements-User-Experience-User-Centered-Design-dp-0321683684/dp/0321683684/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Grab your headphones, and come walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us, comment on our Instagram, or find us on Threads - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On building respect for designers in an organization, with our guest Scott Zimmer.

In this guest episode, Juli and Scott hiked the Buda Hills and talked about hiring designers, giving them a seat at the table, and building a culture that respects design.

The path we took:

• Making connections over a Medium article;
• Building design teams and the dangers of naive hiring;
• Entrepreneurship as a creative output;
• How a culture that respects design can look like;
• Designers getting a seat at the table, and going from receivers to influencers of decisions;
• The importance of apprenticeship and mentorship in designer careers;
• And treating designers as a partner, not a resource.

Further reading:

• https://www.tmpt.me/
• https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/this-is-why-i-dont-call-myself-a-service-designer-any-more-5dcf639bebe0
• https://www.amazon.com/Elements-User-Experience-User-Centered-Design-dp-0321683684/dp/0321683684/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaptive-path/about/

Grab your headphones, and come walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us, comment on our Instagram, or find us on Threads - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On Service design as mediation, on the borders of organizational development, with guest Morten Pedersten.

In this guest episode, Juli, Morten, and guest dog Max hiked around the Hålandsvatnet lake near Stavanger and talked about Scandinavian design and business culture.

The path we took:

• A brief intro to Morten, and the step to leave a management role to build something new;
• How a background in psychology and organizational development can merge with service design;
• A dream Scandinavian company: transparency, open salaries, sharing burdens and ownership at Canoe;
• The Scandinavian design world, with a history of collaboration, flat hierarchies, and government support for design;
• Designers who help and serve vs designers who want to impress;
• Changing definitions and expectations around design work;
• And a brief glimpse into AI, as a mediator between people, not a shortcut to cheaper work.

Further reading:

• https://servicedesignnext.com
• https://www.canoe.no/
• https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/bld/nedsatt-funksjonsevne/norway-universally-designed-by-2025-web.pdf
• Mauricio Manhaes' article in Touchpoint Magazine about Design as Female Characteristics can be downloaded here. Ongoing conversation on the subject on Linkedin can be followed here.

Grab your headphones, and head to the nearest lake to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram, or find us on Threads - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On the need for service design in the age of AI, with award-winning Service Designer and Human-Computer Interaction researcher Pontus Wärnestål. The second part of a two-part episode.

In this guest episode, Juli, Pontus, and the pack hiked up to the Hármashatárhegy airport to dive deep into all the things we call AI.

The path we took:

• Thought leaders who can expand our understanding of tech possibilities
• Humans changing the job landscape with AI, or AI taking our jobs
• How AI is about predicting the future, and how that can go very wrong
• The agency of designers on a strategic level, design maturity in an organization
• The way forward is education - different education paths leading to responsible service design
• Worries about the dilution of the service design profession
• How interaction design can finally be about designing interactions, not just screens
• And advice for mindful design in the age of AI

Further reading:

• https://warnestal.com/
• https://drpontus.medium.com/ai-will-not-take-any-jobs-cdea12d86d2c
• https://www.predictionmachines.ai/
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40102.Blink
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-paradigm/
• https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/designing-agentive-technology/
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63631742-frankenstein

Grab your headphones, and head to the snowy hills to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On the need for service design in the age of AI, with award-winning Service Designer and Human-Computer Interaction researcher Pontus Wärnestål.

In this guest episode, Juli, Pontus, and the pack hiked up to the Hármashatárhegy airport to dive deep into all the things we call AI.

The path we took:

• The importance of having a critical eye toward AI, and why it is no longer optional to be interested in AI
• Defining AI and ML among fluffy terms, stochastic parrots, and semantic dragons
• The five pillars of service design, and the necessity of focusing on backstage operations
• Legal implications, and the current state of tech based on data theft
• Breaking things fast vs the ethics of business decisions
• And a brief history lesson with Ada Lovelace, envisioning a machine capable of composing music

Grab your headphones, and head to the snowy hills to walk with us!

Further reading:

• https://warnestal.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/pontuswarnestal
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62588814-designing-ai-powered-services
• https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Ps. At some point in our lives, we all were tech bros. Sorry for all the tech bro-bashing that’s about to happen in this episode.

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On AI, with its threats and hopes, history and religion.

We are back! In the last season, we mostly focused on our past: where we came from, and how our history affected the value we seek to create in our career. This season, we are looking towards the future. 

This time we recorded among the mushrooms of the autumn forest. While the dogs ran around sniffing the wind, we discussed what we hope from AI, and what we fear the most.

The path we took:

• Science fiction's AI promises, teaching us to fear the robots early on.
• The promise of growth and prosperity, and the last time we heard those promises: in the mobile revolution.
• Machines doing stupid human stuff much more efficiently than humans.
• The brief history of AI, or all the different things we called AI at some point.
• Regulation, legislation, and setting rules for something we don't fully understand.
• Surpassing human intelligence being a thread in itself or a way to salvation.
• Robot gods, robots with emotions.
• And for a more grounded ending: AI tools we use now, in our daily work, and why we're not worried about robots taking our jobs just yet.

Further reading:

• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6398163-the-orchid-cage
• https://www.fastcompany.com/90942310/ai-napster-who-going-to-own-it-next
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/12/30/a-very-short-history-of-artificial-intelligence-ai/
• https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/17/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-changed-the-world-but-it-didnt-change-facebook
• https://ourworldindata.org/artificial-intelligence
• https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/04/28/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-ai-has-hacked-the-operating-system-of-human-civilisation
• https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40947778-the-outside

Spoiler warning: This episode contains major plot spoilers for the following sci-fi movies or books: The Matrix franchise, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, The Orchid Cage by Herbert W. Franke, and The Outside series by Ada Hoffman. 

Grab your headphones, and walk with us! We have some sparkly winter sunshine, just ideal for a one-episode-long walk.

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On the topic we have been avoiding this whole time: the rise and fall of our co-owned company.

In the last episode of this season, we took the dogs to the Buda Hills to have a surprisingly chill conversation about the emotionally loaded subject of our experience with co-ownership, distributed decision-making, and trust.

The path we took:

• A journey back in time to 2015: the pitch to join a co-owned company, and what made us say yes.
• The era of building end-to-end product agency / venture builder hybrids.
• The beanbags and foosball tables of every 2010s office, aka hiring developers before the bootcamp boom.
• The motivational powers, technicalities, and challenges of co-ownership.
• Experiments with flat organizations and distributed decision-making, and the ups and downs of our implementation of holacracy.
• And the downfall: why we left, and what we are taking with us - about PLCs, amazingly productive meetings, and contract-backed trust.

Further reading:

• https://www.lab.coop/
• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NVNYM4C
• https://www.holacracy.org/
• https://blog.crisp.se/2015/06/07/henrikkniberg/no-i-didnt-invent-the-spotify-model
• https://blog.lab.coop/holacracy-from-scratch-40e1f01e9030
• https://blog.lab.coop/share-more-to-have-more-why-lab-coop-is-an-employee-owned-holacracy-governed-company-c85915ae3168

Ps. We are going on a little summer break now and will be back with our next season in September. We're experimenting with some shorter outtakes and thought-nuggets on Instagram until then. Also, we are all ears - if you want to chime in, have some feedback, or have a topic in mind that you would love to hear about next, hit us up at @paths.puddles.products!

On learning models, DnD, and dressage.

This time we grabbed a light topic with roleplaying games, horse riding, and arts, and gathered around an unlit campfire with the dogs for what turned out to be a deep dive into our learning and teaching experiences. 

The path we took:

• Our most recent learning choices, favoring tabletop roleplaying and literary writing over tools of the trade.
• How learning things unrelated to our profession helps build context for our work.
• Teaching university classes, bootcamps, nights and weekends, designers, coders, and horse riders.
• The unseen work of mentoring or explicit teaching responsibilities.
• Learning models and pedagogical approaches, black boxes and cognitive apprenticeship.
• Gatekeeping by degrees versus the democratization of education.
• And a question for you, while we run from the boars: what is your favorite unexpected skill or piece of knowledge that you could use in your work?

Further reading:

• https://learningjournals.co.uk/what-are-the-different-pedagogical-approaches-to-learning/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_apprenticeship
• https://www.simplypsychology.org/zone-of-proximal-development.html
• https://www.storytellingcollective.com/pages/rpg-writer-workshop
• http://kunstfuck.tilda.ws/
• Ken Robinson on How schools kill creativity on TED

Grab your headphones, and head to the nearest forest to walk with us! - Just beware of the boars  🐗

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On working towards social and environmental impact as an entrepreneur.

For this guest episode, angel investor turned social impact entrepreneur Antal Károlyi joined Juli and the dogs for a walk on Margaret Island.

The path we took:

• Steps from being an investment banker to being a good person, through startup investments and impact projects.
• The limits of the angel investor role and the missing "why" of startup pitches.
• Impact investing and social enterprises, and why making money and having a purpose should not be contradictory.
• If you should start your career by working for your passion or for money.
• How finding an issue close to you can maximize your impact and can fuel your passion.
• The triple bottom line of B-Corps and a new definition of success.
• And if you can still have a life with the responsibility of a social impact project on your shoulders.

Further reading:

• 80000hours.org
• Study on nonprofit funding models
• B-Corps
• SignCoders development agency
• Hungarian Business Angel Network
• The Golden Circle

Grab your headphones, and head to your favorite nearby island to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On different attitudes towards work across two generations with our guest Balázs Fejes.

This is our second guest episode, recorded between concerts at Primavera Sound Festival, where Anikó and her brother Balázs, who lives on the other side of the globe, reconnect each year. We walked around the parks of Barcelona, discussing the diverse values that drive our two very different careers.

The path we took:

• Getting to know Balázs, who manages product teams across the APAC region from their office in Hong Kong.
• Why our episodes can sound like two aliens talking to someone in the same field, but in a different generation.
• The place for pro bono work, social impact projects, and charity.
• How two people with similar personalities and environments can end up with wildly different value sets and career paths.
• Productivity metric-driven teams, and high performers taking our jobs.
• And where to start anew when AI takes over the world.

Grab your headphones and a bottle of water, and head to your favorite park to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!