Having a Perspective

Here are my thoughts on maintaining creative prowess in the face of big team management. A short snippet...

“As managers and leaders, we can never lose perspective on the work. This is especially important as your team grows larger and you are required to spend more time and energy on the wonderful arts of people management and team leadership. It’s natural that as you increase focus on your team, it becomes harder to maintain the perspective required to nurture great design into the world.

I started my career as a design intern at Adobe, apprenticing myself toremarkable creative talents. I learned the hard way, through tough and occasionally heated critique. When I was ready, I stepped into management. From there, my teams grew in size. From seven, to twenty, to eighty, and now to over 180. Through it all, one thing remained constant — we are all peers before the object (thanks Michael). In other words, after all the leading, managing, mentoring, supporting, and road-block clearing, the ultimate goal is to make the world a better place, to make people happier and more able, through the objects we design.

Throughout my career I’ve struggled with balancing the demands of management with maintaining the necessary focus on design. Perhaps you are struggling with it now. Here are a few tips I’d like to share that I hope will help you along the way.”

Read the entire article on Medium. 

Design at Uber - From Pixels to People

Interested in how we design at Uber? Read this article I recently published. A snippet...

Take a moment and think about your last transportation experience. Were you in a car, on the bus, riding the train or taking a subway? Did you walk, bike, skateboard? How many people did you come into contact with? How did you experience your surroundings? What was the weather like? Was that trip stressful? How much did it cost?

Now think of the last time you visited a different city or country. How were your transportation experiences different from back home?

Travel can be easy or hard, comfortable or confusing. And that’s because regardless of the way you travel or where you do it, the way you feel when you travel — your experience of it — is always inherently physical, cultural, and emotional. It’s contextual and complex.

Our goal at Uber is to interact with this complexity to facilitate worldwide transportation experiences reliably and well. We want to save people time and money, offer them a sense of calm, and, ideally, evoke a sense of joy. To accomplish this, we must think — and design — far beyond the screen.

Read the entire article on Medium. 

IXDC 2016

In June I spoke at IXDC 2016 in Beijing. IXDC is the largest conference focused on digital and interaction design in China. As with all my experiences in China over the last year, it was wonderful, full of new experiences. Fortunately for me, Beijing was lovely the entire week I was there. Blue skies for days, a rarity for the heavily polluted city. Now that Uber is no longer in China, I hope that Didi helps to reduce congestion across China's megacities. See video of the talk here. 

My First 120 Days at Uber

I wrote a Medium piece on my first 120 Days at Uber. Hope you find it informative and useful. 

“I’ve been at Uber for four months. It’s been an exciting ride, and full of surprises. For example, I didn’t expect one of my best moments at work would be overlooking Chengdu, China riding up an elevator on the way to lunch with our local city team. Nor did I expect to be editing this post from an airport in Manila, Philippines. But then, the platform we are building is global, and the speed we’re scaling is accelerated, and so here I am at Terminal 3 in Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport having been to 4 countries in as many months. And — because it doesn’t look like Uber will be slowing down anytime soon, I’m committing myself to documenting my experiences on a semi-regular basis. In the coming months I’ll write about what we’re working on, and explore the systems, teams and processes we’re building to solve insanely interesting problems and scale quickly at warpspeed.”

PSFK Future of Retail

Thanks Piers for having me speak at PSFK's Future of Retail conference. Wonderful hosts, wonderful venue. 

Snakes & Spikes

Created with Sculpey, from the mind of Axel. When he learned how to roll spikes, his imagination took off. 

My Dad

Decent detail in the face. Hope my body isn't truly funnel-shaped, and I just don't see it. 

My Name

Ani wrote my name tonight. For the first time.

Rad School

In which Ani describes the relationship between Rad School and Job School. I wouldn't mind attending. 

Car Tunnel

Layers and layers.

Drawing

Grandma Holly's friend who made my perfume.

Magnacastle 1

5:20pm

Functional Complexity

Vilem Flusser on the evolution of human/computer interactions. 

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PayPal + Samsung

PayPal integrated into Samsung's new G5 phone, activated via fingerprint scan. 

Article here. 

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Stepping Up

Great article by @kevinmccull about the design thinking trend, its promise and failures, and requirements for design leadership success in business environments. 

For all its failings, Design Thinking uncovered real opportunities for design managers aiming to play a more strategic role in business. The problem stemmed from a naive combination of overreach and a lack of ambition to learn.

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