Living vs. Managing Life →

I found myself trying to get 61 seconds out of every minute. I was managing life, as opposed to living it. Because I was driven by passion to create positive change and a desire to learn, as opposed to an unhealthy work environment, I didn’t see that I became a hostage to external demands. Like a device that’s run out of battery and needs to be charged, I needed to figure out how to replenish my batteries. Since stress has a direct connection to health and well-being, interventions needed to be explored for ease of mind.

I spent time learning about the history of the words “worker” and “leisure” and had my spiritual Sherpa walk me through how to be present. I also spent time exploring every “self-care” routine, regime, app I could find while reading ancient Greek philosophy about fulfillment to act as journal prompts.

Read about the four things I learned in Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global.

Empathy in organizational transformation →

Empathy has long been touted as a critical component for business success and positive employee and customer outcomes. As designers, we frequently discuss the value of empathy in our industry. But the word has become almost meaningless through its regurgitative over use, frequent misuse, and under implementation.

Often this is a result of a mismatch between positive intentions, like “Let’s have more empathy!” and implementation like “How?” and Where?” In addition to understanding and practicing empathy, organizations also need the capacity to scale empathy, translating intention into reality and sustaining it.

As a strategist, I partner with universities, Microsoft teams, and companies around the world hoping to bring the value of empathy into their culture and processes.

We tend to start with similar questions:

• How can we go beyond interviewing customers, finding problems, and fixing things to truly building innovative experiences that amplify, augment, and unleash human potential?

• How can we teach the importance and nuance of empathy at scale? For example, how do we take the one-on-one experience and ensure that thousands of employees can feel, think, and act empathetically?

We explored these questions through different lenses. For one project, we took cues from ethics, marriage therapy, zoology, and community management to understand components of empathetic experiences and identify ways to scale them. This article features what we learned in-depth. Here’s a short film about it as well:

Making Sense of Scents: A Language for Aroma

Aroma can elicit joy, transport us immediately to a different place, or even inspire us to purchase products. The word “scent” comes from Latin, meaning to feel or perceive. “Our sense of smell is directly connected to our emotions. Smells trigger very powerful and deep-seated emotional responses,” said Kate Fox, a social anthropologist.

Ultimately, aroma has a power to enhance the human experience. We breathe over 23,000 times a day — that’s 23,000 moments of taking in information. We might easily register potently negative aromas (walking by a sewer) or positive aromas (walking by a bakery), but the subtleties in between can get lost in our goal-oriented days. In our current cultural quest for presence and mindfulness, why aren’t we more conscious of the scents around us and the roles they play in our lives? How many of us can describe the scent we’re taking in? The human ability to recognize scent and communicate aroma is often limited.

Similar to wine, a tea vocabulary feels inaccessible or even elitist to most. When calling wine “vinegar” at a nice restaurant for example, I — a wine novice — was met with disdain. So, what might going beyond descriptive language do for us? For example, describing a scent like “this smells like a joyful sunny afternoon.” Yet, one person’s joy is another persons sorrow. Much like an emotional vocabulary encourages self-awareness, enables framing, and leads to healthy relationships with ourselves and those around us, an aromatic vocabulary could do the same.

To answer these questions, we can learn a lot from traditional experts like aroma scientists, sommeliers, and chefs. But it’s important to bring in diverse opinions for an inclusive approach.

Take a look at the full article and documentary.

Kill your personas

1.

Personas are often not created for their original intent. They are built in siloes without a defined goal or purpose, kept static across time and use cases, not flexible and adaptable, and, grounded in artifacts product teams/designers can’t use.

The more “human” we try to make them by adding specific personality traits and details about his habits, the more we unconsciously stereotype people. This is dangerous.

As we move toward building intelligent, responsive systems, we need new tools that further embrace diversity and respect multiple contexts and capabilities.

2.

We need tools that reintroduce diversity into our design process. Every decision we make either raises or lowers barriers to participation in society.Inclusive design emphasizes our responsibility to solve for mismatches between humans and their products, environments, and social structures. We need ways to check, balance, and measure the inclusivity of our designs.

At Microsoft, my team and I created a tool called the persona spectrum. This repeatable tool uses power of personas to ground and humanize user insight while keeping different human attributes distinct. By designing along a spectrum of need and motivation, we avoid the biases and assumptions built into a persona. We design for a diverse range of real users instead of one average, theoretical human. Read more here.

How to Design Focus

“The scarce resource of the 21st century will not be technology; it will be attention.” — Mark Weiser

Imagine you’re having a positive, fully immersive conversation with someone in a restaurant. Your concentration is focused on the person across from you.

In this context, how would a server complement this experience? Detract from it?

Some servers ignore you and need to be tracked down, which negatively affects the overall experience. Others organically know when and how to interrupt you.

More often than not, servers adjust their approach based on your verbal and non-verbal cues. This example is a reminder that humans are the true experts in adapting. We can apply this analogy to technology; a person may desire real-time pop-ups or in-text communications when we share tips, updates, or alerts. Or, those may be distracting and disrupt their flow..

Achieving focus

When technology communicates and behaves well, it enables you to do what you want to, on your terms. It communicates in ways that allow you to focus, and achieve the level of concentration you need to accomplish a task.

Learning from people

I wanted to learn how to design interruptions more respectfully from people working in multiple industries, cognitive science experts in and outside of Microsoft, and those with heightened sensory sensitivity. This manifested in interviews with chefs, emergency room doctors, pilots, cognitive psychologists, people who spoke English as a second language, and people who have disabilities — seen and unseen.

Take a look at this guide detailing what I learned and, the short-film below.