Humility is expensive.

November 16, 2018 Newsletter

Presenting Work With Confidence

Humility is expensive. When you put work in front of people you need to be able to tell them how well it meets their goals and you need to be able to do it confidently. That’s what they hired you to do. Our Presenting With Confidence workshop will teach you how to present well, it will help you get over presentation nerves, and it will help you keep projects on time and on budget. Sign up now for our December 7th workshop. This is our last one of the year.

When To Put Down the Tools

On November, 1, 2018, 22,000 Google employees across the world walked out of their jobs to protest the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment. It mattered. The company took notice. The world took notice. Hopefully, employees at other tech companies took notice as well.

On November 14, The New York Times published a story about Facebook hiring an opposition research firm to discredit its critics. The world is waiting to see if Facebook employees have the courage of their compatriots at Google.

— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro)

Smoke And Fire

I was born in California, I live in California, and now California is on fire, again. Both in the south where I grew up, and north of San Francisco. The city is shrouded in smoke. Friends of friends have lost everything. My old high school is an evacuation shelter. I can’t wrap my head around the devastation, which won’t be totaled for days. Wildfires have always been a part of living here, and they are just going to get worse with the changing weather patterns.

Coexisting with Wildfire lays out the situation in all its complexity, including the science, policy, and social perspectives on the barriers to taking the best actions to preserve human lives and homes. It’s a long piece, but I hope you can find the time.

“Many vulnerabilities to wildfire, once in place, can only be addressed relatively slowly through changing people’s behaviors or retrofitting individual structures. A variety of impediments — in law, in political will, in traditions of risk tolerance — therefore exist in identifying and attenuating human vulnerabilities, despite their importance in reducing losses of lives and homes.”

There are many paths to destruction. I just happened across this thoughtful piece by a reporter who obliterated a Portland burger joint by “discovering” it and then went back to confront what he’d done.

“They weren’t invested in the restaurant’s success, but instead in having a public facing opinion of a well known place. In other words, they had nothing to lose except money and the restaurant had nothing to gain except money, and that made the entire situation feel both precarious and a little gross.”

— Erika Hall (@mulegirl)

Silly Little Cars

As of last Thursday, I am the proud new owner of a Go-4 Interceptor. You may be familiar with it as the little vessel that you shake your fists at because it carries the people who give you dumb parking tickets.

I won’t be handing out parking tickets though (not real ones anyway 😉). I’ll just be using it as my means of transportation around the ever-crowding streets of San Francisco. It’s not an original idea to use one of these tiny little diddies to get around. I’ve seen my neighbor Roman driving around a customized Cushman meter maid car for years. There even used to be a lively forum called Silly Little Cars dedicated to, well, silly little cars.

It wasn’t until a couple of months ago when I talked to local artist Amos Goldbaum, who uses his Go-4 to cart around his work, that I started obsessing about getting one of my own. Another chat with our neighbor Jeremy Fish, who totally personalized a Piaggio Ape, only further fed my obsession. And a few days later, with some luck and the help and encouragement of my friends, I had the pink slip for my own lil’ box on three wheels. Now to navigate the DMV and insure the thing. 🙃 Any tips are welcome.

— Amanda Durbin (@fannyburping)

Empathy For The Devil

On our latest episode, Stephanie Lucas, Senior UX Designer, Member Trust, Privacy, and Help at Linkedin, joined us in studio to share how she applied principles from our Design Ethics Workshop to her own team’s practice.

— Voice of Design (@VOD_Rocks)