Today, I'm in conversation with Jorge Arango, an information architect and author of several books. His most recent, duly noted, has just been released. Jorge is a consultant based across the Americas and teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.

We talk about why we make notes, the concept of thinking with notes and how connected notes can be used to further your development and personal knowledge. Now, with big data being at the forefront of the current evolution of computing and artificial intelligence, it kind of stands to reason that we should be thinking about how we make more of our personally generated data. 

Today, I'm talking to Elizabeth Chesters. Born in Wigan, UK, Elizabeth now resides in Munich, Germany. We first met in 2015 when we both presented at a conference encouraging first-time public speakers. Since then, she has worked in-house for several organisations, both in the UK and Germany. I wanted to hear firsthand what it's like to move to another country for work when you don't know the language, the environment you're going to be in, and the personal and professional cultures. What I learned from talking to Elizabeth was that you don't necessarily need to move to an entirely different country to experience culture, clashes and discrimination because of where you are from.

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Andy Parker, the UX Coach. And this is where I share people’s stories of career success and failure from across the tech industry. Today, I’m talking to Marvin Hassan, a UX designer from Germany, who wants to pay back the community with his insights into design leadership, and navigating the different phases of tech startups.

What is the role of a designer when a business is operating on VC money? How do you create great products when the mission is to pay back your debt?

We’ll be talking about all of these things and more in this episode. 

In this episode, I am talking to Pete Winchester. Pete and I have known each other for quite some time now. And he recently posted about his experience of taking on a Design MBA or the D.MBA, I was really curious to know what that was, and how it might differ from an MBA that you might have heard of people, Six Sigma, and all the rest of our business speakers talking about what benefit there might be in designers learning more about business. We got together at the beginning of September, things were chaotic and busy for both of us. It was really great to be able to carve out a bit of time one day to sit down and talk about that. And also to sort of pick into some of the career decisions that Pete has made within the last 10 years as somebody who has gone from being a individual contributor in UX, moving into leadership and management roles with varying sizes of teams, then going back to being an individual contributor, before finding himself where he is now as Head of Design

In this episode, Erica Johansson shares how she went from being a journalist with a love of music to the first content designer, a little known startup called Amazon, and has blazed the trail for content strategy working with big tech, including Microsoft and slack. We talk about the role of content in design, and the differences between content design, strategy, marketing and UX design, what the role of a Content Designer is how design research differs from UX research, and how you can get into content design and research today. Let's kick off with a little potted history.

This time around I am speaking to Tom Bird.

Tom and I met a few years ago, and this actually the second time I’ve interviewed him for the show. 

We first tried this the week before the UK closed its borders and shut the country down for COVID-19.

After some time away I wanted to revisit the topics of design education, and see how Tom’s feelings on Bootcamps for UX had changed, if at all, and to hear Tom share what it was like to join a company the week before the world caught fire, the impact that had on his employee experience,  and his recent move into a product design role for a remote first company.