This is HCD: Human-Centred Design, UX & Service Design

In this episode, I had a really enjoyable conversation with the wonderful Vimla Appadoo, Co-Founder and Chief Cultural Officer for Honey Badger.

In 2019 Vimla was included in Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech, and was a Rising Star by WearetheCity. 

Vimla's perspective on design and in particular culture design is something that really resonates with me. We chat about many aspects of leadership and internal workplace culture - we speak about what the role of a cultural designer looks like (on a day to day basis), and learn more about what sort of methods a cultural designer uses in a day to day basis, including how they measure their success.

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In this podcast, we will speak about all the behind the scenes things related to actually DOING Design, such as Design Research, Service Design, UX, Content Design, Product Management - you’ll get to hear from all the wonderful trainers and hear about new things that they are working on, and collaborations that in the pipes.

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The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
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Today on the show, is Bas Raijmakers, co-founder and creative director of Standby, a specialist design research organisation for service innovation, based in London and Amsterdam. Bas is also a co-founder of the Reach Network (I’ll throw a link to this in the show notes). For those of you who don’t know what Reach Network is, it’s a global network of agencies specialising in human-centred design research - a wonderful organisation and definitely worth checking out.

Bas is also a partner of This is Doing, and works alongside myself and a host of other amazing people. Some of the courses that Bas has live centre around life centred design, and we discuss in this episode the local differences of HCD and how people are currently researching, and what are the common problems in this. How can we as practitioners become more culturally inclusive? Bas is a wonderfully deep thinker and has fantastic insights into what we need to do, to not only improve Design (with a capital D) but also how we can make more of a global impact with our work.

• https://twitter.com/hellobas?lang=en
• https://www.stby.eu/
• Train with Bas at This is Doing

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
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All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
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Chris Coyier talks to Gerry McGovern about how many of the tools and resources out there make it easy for developers and designers to create bloated, heavy, energy-sapping digital designs. Chris says we need new thinking and new tools that clearly indicate when we are making design decisions that are bad for the user and bad for the planet.

• https://twitter.com/chriscoyier
• https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
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In this episode of Moments of Change with Melanie Rayment, Melanie speaks with the new Director of Design and Innovation at theRSA.org (Royal Society of Arts) about her experience in leading Design to enable positive outcomes for people.

• https://www.thersa.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannachoukeir/?originalSubdomain=uk
• https://twitter.com/JoannaChoukeir
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanierayment/?originalSubdomain=uk

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Bringing Design Closer. My name is Gerry Scullion, and I’m a service designer, and founder of This is HCD and CEO of This is Doing - a live class design and innovation company, providing training in the skills of service designers, design researchers, product managers, user experience designers and much more.

You in for a treat with this episode. Let me tell you a story, in a previous life, I had dreams of becoming a musician. I was a singer-songwriter, and had a band and reflecting back now it was some of the best experience and times of my life. I’ve played music from the age of four and started writing my own music at the age of 12. So for me, Design and Music were part of the same mindset. It wasn’t until earlier this year, that I was out for dinner with a friend and mentioned how I see the huge similarities between Design and Music, that I realised, not everyone sees this. 

Let me tell you, the musical mindset is something that Designers can and should embrace more of. There are so many layers to this mindset, from creating music being a team sport, needing rhythm and cadence, and excitement, you need talent, but you also need the dedication and confidence to explore and embrace the unknown in the live format. Music is created in a studio, very much like a designers studio, but it’s how songs are delivered into the live arena, that they start to become living and breathing things. 

Designing services and creating music are so similar - there’s the obvious metaphor, to lift Patrick Quattlebaum and Chris Risdon’s book of ‘Orchestrating’ but there is much more to it than that. Just creating a song, from the moment of ‘jamming’ in a studio or working alone, is like creating an outline of a thing. Over time it’s iterated and iterated upon, and often tested live to get feedback from the audience. The ‘song’ is often refined and refined until you go into the studio. Well, that was the process that worked for me up until 2006 and we discuss what happened around then, and how technology helped reshape that process.

In this episode, I connect with a former producer of mine, that I was lucky enough to work with way back in 2006-2008, Rafa Sardina. 60-time Grammy-nominated, 15-time winner. With a client list that looks like the most celebrated artists of the last 100 years, that include Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Dr Dre, Beyonce, Stevie Wonder, Celine Dion, and everyone’s favourite singer, Susan Boyle. 

We chat about how the craft of songwriting has evolved from the early 90’s on what working with Michael Jackson looked like, to how the industry validates songs. We chat about how technology disrupted and ultimately killed the large recording budgets that typically ran for months or years in some instances, and to where Rafa is currently now, mid-pandemic, producing globally via live recording sessions in the top studios in the world.

• https://www.rafasardina.com/?thisishcd
• https://www.twitter.com/rafasardina
• https://www.facebook.com/rafasardina
• https://www.instagram.com/rafasardina

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
________________________

Hello and welcome to another episode of BDC. My name is Gerry Scullion, and I’m a service designer, and founder of This is HCD and CEO of This is Doing - we provide live online design and innovation classes, providing training for service designers, design researchers, product managers, user experience designers and much more.

Today on the show, is Geke Van Dijk, co-founder and strategy director of https://www.stby.eu/ in Amerstasm and London and is Chair of the Dutch Chapter of the Service Design Network and also Co-Founder of The Reach Network a network of human-centred design agencies centred on service innovation. 

Geke is one of the most experienced design researchers that I know and has worked in this space since in the early '90s.

In this episode, we chat about design research for meaningful change. We discuss organisational purpose and intent and how to do you, as a practitioner determine is a project or business is say “good” - what is “good” who defines “good”. 

• https://twitter.com/hellogeke?lang=en
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gekevandijk/?originalSubdomain=uk
• stby.eu

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
________________________

In this episode, I speak with Buelani Mfaco, a South African asylum seeker and activist based in Ireland - he’s a spokesperson for MASI, the movement of asylum seekers in Ireland and is an active voice in shedding light from within one of Irelands Direct Provision centres, Knocklisheen in Co. Limerick.

To give some background to this system, in 1991, only 9-people sought asylum in Ireland, compared to 3883 in 1997. This caused alarm to the Irish and the Irish Government at the time, But rather tackle and provide a safe refuge for these people who are vulnerable, they created this scheme to detract or reframe that the Irish “social welfare system was in some way attracting asylum seekers to this state”.

Some people listening may ask how this topic is related to Design - it is absolutely interrelated. The awful experiences that Bulelani and the thousands of people in the Direct Provision scheme are facing, as a direct result of a system that was created by the Irish Government in 1997. 

This episode is an example of a system that was NOT created from a human-centred perspective - not in the slightest. As an Irish person, I am extremely embarrassed that this scheme is still in existence. An updated new Irish Government has committed to dissolving Direct Provision, but we discuss in this episode what that might look like.

• Bulelani Mfaco on Twitter

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting. 

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The Big Remote is a podcast of people's remote stories, collaboration tips, remote life hacks, tips on entertaining yourself and your kids, personal stories and more, hosted by Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion.

In this episode Jeroen Spoelstra talks to Andy about his and his partner's decision to relocate to a small pueblo in the Spanish Pyrénées and set up Unbeaten Studio and to be a mountain bike guide, and what lockdown meant for their life and work that was already set up as a remote service.

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SPONSORED ADS
The Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26) takes place 28-30 October in Frankfurt RheinMain region - onsite and online. Get 10% off by using 'HCDSDGC10' at checkout

*New* Listen to Marc Stickdorn's new podcast https://www.smaply.com/podcast
________________________

• Tutti Taygerly's website
• Tutti's writings on Medium
• Tutti on Twitter
• Tutti on LinkedIn

Creators & Guests

________________________
BRING THIS IS HCD INTO YOUR ORGANISATION

→ Train my organisation https://www.thisishcd.com/training
→ Video Courses https://www.thisishcd.com/courses
→ Coaching Community (Coaching, Courses, WhatsApp) https://www.thisishcd.com/members
→ Gerry's consultancy (Service Design and Design Research) https://humana.design/

________________________
BECOME A DIRECTORY MEMBER (IT'S FREE!) and get all of this

→ FREE Introduction to Journey Management course with Marc Stickdorn & Gerry Scullion (Sign up for free with an email)
https://www.thisishcd.com/dashboard/learning/introduction-to-journey-management
→ Discover & Connect with others https://www.thisishcd.com/directory
→ Claim partner discounts https://www.thisishcd.com/partners
Gerry wears clothes from Sutsu, and has a coupon code for them, as well as Smaply, Scenario Cards, Unit 1 and more...
________________________

All episodes have been produced by This is Podcasting.