Hey y'all! I hope this issue finds you well and you’ve been having a fun and fruitful week so far.
Without further ado, 5 of my favorite stories and findings from the last month:
The value and how-to of regaining the lost art of reflection 🙏⏳
Online toolbox with 54 free methods for Service Design doing that you can play with today 👩🎨💼
Sam Harris podcast on consciousness and the self 💭🎧
Why digital literacy is for everyone and it’s not just about hard tech skills 👩💻
Pani Puri’s, Rickshaws, and more: A personal blog on the ups and downs of my first 2 weeks in Mumbai 🇮🇳
Design for Social Anxiety: how social anxiety awareness could help us design more meaningful and inclusive experiences 💬🖼️
By Julia Borzucka (byjuliab.tumblr.com)
How to regain the lost art of reflection 🙏⏳
This well-written article on HBR hones in the importance of quiet time for leaders (and everyone else, really). It paints this image in stark contrast to the reality of how most executives and managers spent their day - running around, attending unnecessary meetings and replying emails. Finally, it gives some very hands-on ideas on how to move from the latter into a rhythm that invites space to think - and to regain the lost art of reflection.
A famous but possibly apocryphal tale about Albert Einstein is that he dreamed up the theory of relativity when riding his bicycle. Warren Buffett is on record as saying that he reads for six hours per day and has very few scheduled meetings. We believe that corporate leaders in today’s complex world urgently need to recultivate the art of reflection.
Along with human-centered design, experience design, UI and so on, there’s service design on the horizon. It about aligning experience design with a business’ resources (people, props, and processes) to deliver that value to the end user. I think it’s a valuable approach because it brings together front-stage and back-stage of a service, and I have been learning about and applying it over the last year or so. A bunch of SD practitioners crafted this insightful and practical book, and released 54 free methods online for you to play with today. See how you can use these in your work to help your users + teams and let me know if you do!
Learn how to embed service design thinking in your organization, and change the way your teams work. Benefit from the collected knowledge in the book or make use of 54 free method descriptions, directly available for download.
I’m sure a lot of you already know the Sam Harris, but for those of you who don’t and have an interest in philosophy; check it out. This episode in particular, although lengthy (3 hours! wow) absolutely fascinated me, as Sam and Anil Seth discourse with depth and both scientific and philosophical lenses the mindfuck of human consciousness. Recommended! (even if just 30 mins because attention span and stuff)
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Anil Seth about the nature of consciousness, how to think about it scientifically, where consciousness emerges in nature, anesthesia, sleep, dreams, perception as a “controlled hallucination,” emotion, the experience of “pure consciousness,” and more.
Memo: this is the 21st century and digital literacy should be the foundation of every employee’s skillset. It’s important to clarify that we’re not talking about hard technical skills. Employees who possess digital literacy don’t need to have an engineering background. Instead; they demonstrate it through an understanding of platforms, applications and collaborative tools and, most importantly, they know how to use these technologies to deliver on business objectives.
Employees who possess digital literacy don’t need to have an engineering background; they demonstrate it through a deep understanding of platforms, applications and collaborative tools used in their organization.
Mumbai is a city surrounded by questionable stereotypes and mixed messages. 2 weeks into Bombay life, I figured I’d share my experiences and first impressions with you.
Thoughts on how social anxiety awareness could help us design more meaningful and inclusive experiences for all. Most of our events, spaces and services are targeted towards confident extroverts. In reality, this profile pertains only few of us. Imagine the interactions and experiences we could facilitate if we would create consciously keeping this in mind? What would happen if we would design for social anxiety?
Thoughts on how social anxiety awareness could help us design more meaningful and inclusive experiences for all. What would happen if we would design for social anxiety?
Let me know which of these pieces resonated with something you’ve been thinking or talking about recently, or alternatively put you onto something completely new, by simply hitting that reply button. I’d love to hear from you. Take care and see you at the next one!
A regular curation with favorite links + things from the web plus updates on what I've been keeping busy with and thinking about. Mostly design, tech, AI, data, culture, and creativity. Driven by curiosity, selected with love, published monthly.
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