1. “Five Ways to Listen Better” by Julian Treasure

No, seriously, we can all listen better. I’ll repeat that, in case you missed it: we can all listen better. Of course I include myself in this. (Leave comments here.)

I became aware of Treasure’s thinking and talks on this topic through a UX leadership seminar, and that situating is both important on its own and a credit to the speakers, if not the field itself.

When I first talk to a new company, or not-for-profit, or civic team working on making government work better, I ask, “What problem does this solve? For whom? And how do you know this?” That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the what and why around the importance of listening (which user research is a coherent framework for); it is the canary in the coal mine, though, to test whether a company and/or its founders can or will devote the effort to listen and, through listening, have a fighting chance at succeeding.

Treasure’s talk is brief, but in that time it gives you five tips on how to recharge your capacity for listening, improve your patience for listening, and both learn more and find joy in listening. Not a bad thing for work or for heading to visit family!

(Sorry, TED link. And it’s weird.)

2. “You Have Been Lied To” by Mike Monteiro

Okay, basically any Monteiro. His “How Designers Destroyed the World” keynote at Webstock ’13 is a perennial; I’ve showed parts to my UX classes in part for the exposure to real design work, in part to scare the shit out of them in terms of how what they toss into the world can have real (and horrible) consequences.

This more recent keynote — there’s a reason organizers ask him to keynote — is a great corrective to la-la fantasies about how design work just means scribbling into Moleskines, chunky glasses, sexy nerd types, and good pay. I mean, it can include those things (adjusts his non-chunky glasses, pouts for a selfie), but get over yourself and get to work, and here’s what work will mean.

Nobody cares like Mike, and that caring can be horrible, frightening, and utterly necessary.

3. “When You Get a Napkin Sketch” by Audrey Crane

I can’t count the number of times founders, wannabe founders, and even people who should know better suggest to me that what they need from me is to “just take my slides and make them, like, usable and elegant”. (This is usually followed by some alternating of “I’m no designer, of course” and “but I want it to be just like so”.) I’ve spent a lot of hours listening to this sort of thing, and very few of these hours end up becoming work or productive relationships; the people who try to make products like that are often applying for full-time work in other fields in a matter of months.

But! Not all is lost. Crane displays impressive empathy and patience and gives a good talk on how to think around the roadblocks thrown up by b-school, “We Build” thinking. Someone says “make it sparkle”? Maybe you can handle them and get at what really needs to be done, and craft a win for everyone.

(No embed code, so just click here. Then come back. Please.)

4. “Designing How We Design” by Kim Goodwin

Goodwin has helped make big, scary machines friendly. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

She starts by noting that context drives design — what one project finds useful can be damaging to another. (Raise your hand if you’ve heard a boss seriously say, “Company X has Z, so we need Z!” Okay, hands down. You in the back, too.) But that holds for us and how we do things as designers, too. How does our cultural context drive what we do, perhaps even above the needs of those who’ll be on the other end of our work?

(Another link that can’t be embedded, so here you go. See you back here in 24 minutes.)

5. “Predicting and Avoiding the Commoditization of Design Research” by Jon Kolko

There’s a bit of a trick to watch this one. It’s the tiiiiny video at the bottom of Kolko’s page, but if you click on the still, the video will start playing. Double-click to go full screen.

Almost any Kolko is good Kolko (as holds true for all the selections above, to0), but this talk is critical to help us think about how culture deeply affects and shapes how its participants synthesize — and by synthesize, Kolko means just about any of the critical decisions we make in our research and design around anything we put out into the world. It isn’t a call for protectionism, a warning about “foreign workers”, but design and design research suffer if we follow business school precepts and treat them like commodities. And so then everyone suffers.

And Koklo’s call for noticing and listening, and that they’re both hard, and why we need to make the effort, is a nice coda.