A Culture of Learning
Design is that it never stops moving. Tools, techniques and technologies are constantly evolving and there’s always something new to learn. I love that.
I enjoy being part of a team where self-improvement is part of the culture. And if that’s not there when I join a business, I’ll do my best to make it happen.
Inspiration Sandwich
While I was at SYZGY, I teamed up with a couple of colleagues to start a monthly lunchtime talk series. We persuaded the CEO to pay for pizzas to save time and give a bit of an incentive to turn up.
Initially we focused on external speakers, working through our contact books to bring in speakers from Google, the BBC and others, and we also brought in SYZYGY partners to demo things like VR headsets.
My two collaborators moved on and I reframed the talks as internal knowledge-sharing sessions. This had particular value as it allowed junior members of the company to practise presentation skills in a safe environment. I would help them construct their presentations and stories and encouraged line managers to include presenting for us as a personal development goal.
UX Club
The Sandwich talks uncovered a real interest in design, so we started another lunchtime session where we picked problems and created products to solve them.
The attendees were all people who weren’t normally designers, so it helped broaden the understanding of the processes and techniques of user-centred design within the studio.
And it was also fun!
Our designs included a phone app for arranging lunch with colleagues and a multimodal voice skill for booking meeting rooms.
UX Book Club
At ELSE I co-founded and then single-handedly ran a UX book club.
We took the traditional book club format and gave it a twist. Rather than all read the same thing, we picked a theme and each person chose a book which they felt presented the subject in a way which worked for them.
We met for lunch every six weeks or so to discuss what we’d found and share what we’d learned.
I started recording the sessions and then turned them into Medium posts, partly to capture what we’d talked about but also to give our PR agent something to add to our social channels.
