I just discovered a fabulous podcast about Design Leadership which is a topic that is slowly getting the attention it deserves. Two industry veterans – particularly at the service design/experience design edge talk through challenging topics that shed lights on what the real world issues are that we’ll need to deal with if we try to design a better world.
https://overcast.fm/+aWTyCZt6o
This was brought to my attention by my friend Stephen Taylor, a service designer with the Atlanta, GA based firm Harmonic.
Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett take on an age old dichotomy in design cultures that lead to very different outcomes. On the one hand is a view of design as wholistic practice that begins with understanding real people with real needs, desires, passions and urgency as a way to artifacts that make life better, versus an engineering view of the design process that starts with technology and people are just one component of a machine/human system that the designer optimizes through infinite experimental tweaks.
(I’m a bit thick around WordPress so I know that just sticking in a link as I have doesn’t give a very good listening experience, but I hope that it does the trick at some minimal level. If someone reading this can show me how to just insert a play button and podcast identifier directly, I’ll be very grateful for the help).