2018. It has definitely been a year to test how comfortable I really am with change. As it turns out, I massively overestimated my level of comfortability with it.

Selling properties, travelling internationally with a toddler, moving ourselves and everything 17,000km back to Ireland and living out of a suitcase for months on end has been a huge undertaking. Throw into the mix, new jobs and a search (and purchase!) for property in Ireland, we have just about scraped to the end of the year. Oh, and I nearly forgot, we are expecting our second child in 2019. It’s been a busy 8 months since we have arrived home. Funnily enough, I feel like I have achieved a lot more, with a lot less time. That in itself is a key-learning for me in 2018.

This is HCD in 2018

This is HCD has achieved so much and has far exceeded where I thought the podcast could grow to. We’ve grown x4 in 12 months, and our audience is growing month on month, and are currently averaging around 6000–7000 downloads a month. It’s been a huge undertaking and want to thank the guys who work (voluntarily out of love for Design) on the project. Thanks to Cherry-Lee for her enthusiasm and passion for designing great conversations with everyone in the US, and also to Adrienne Tan and Mark Catanzariti for their help in Australia throughout. Also to Pete and the guys in Melbourne who handle the audio production of the episode.

Special thanks to O’Reilly Media in NYC

I want to thank O’Reilly Media in NYC for giving our community books throughout the year, and also to Rosenfeld Media for providing the community with discount codes as well. Other thanks goes to Smashing Magazine for giving several books for our Christmas Book giveaway, and Gerry McGovern and John Thackara for signing and giving books during the year.

Launching Bringing Design Closer

We launched Bringing Design Closer in Dublin, a new type of event and training series that is aimed at delivering richer learning experiences for people.

All photo on the night by the fantastic Adam Masterson

We held our first official ticketed event alongside Rosenfeld Media and the amazing Teelings Whiskey in November with the wonderful Patrick Quattlebaum and the delightful Chris Risdon — co-authors of ‘Orchestrating Experiences’ one of the (IMO) best design books of 2018. We are hoping to hold another BDC in the coming months and move it partially online for people outside of Ireland to attend.

I also wanted to pay a huge thanks to Aiden McGale of Affinity Recruitment for his incredible help in shaping Bringing Design Closer in Ireland. A lot of what he has done has been behind the scenes, but trust me when I say, it would not have happened without his help and passion and belief in Design. We are exploring new ways to scale this idea to help generate revenue to scale This is HCD even further and into other disciplines to help understand how we can work and scale strategic design within organisations.

Launching our brand new Resources section

We are working on a kick ass Resources section for the website, with a stellar list of curators (people who I believe are world class at what they do). This again is another milestone and a huge resource for the emerging and established Global Design community.

The goal of Resources is to try and appeal to people who may not fall into a ‘Designer’ category but people from all professional are interested in learning more about human-centered design. In sort, we want and need more people from other industries to gain greater insight into what it means to be human-centered.

We need to move beyond talking about Design Thinking, and we need to become better at developing shared understanding and languages to help drive better human-led services. So if you have a resource you’d like us to consider, please go ahead and suggest it :-)

In some of the key areas, I have failed with This is HCD

It’s not all roses for 2018 to be honest. On reflection I have failed in so many areas. What I have learned is even with our mini-successful year comes responsibility, and a recent conversation with a soon-to-be-announced podcast host helped me see the error of my ways.

We have not been inclusive or diverse enough this year. We massively failed in addressing this quicker. This is due to the fact that we are working within our own immediate networks when interviewing people, and because of this we have at times really just interviewed ourselves, and this is not what I believe reflects the heartbeat of human-centered design.

In fact, I am embarrassed at the men to women ratio on our podcast to date. It has been noted, and our key goal for 2019 is to make a massive concerted effort to address this. I need to get better at walking the walk -

We have several new hosts joining the podcast in early-2019

We have two or three new guest hosts joining. What with 2019 being more of a family affair for me and my family, it will be a welcome relief to hand the hosting reigns over to fresh faces to help continue to produce what I believe to be the best podcast host lineup anywhere. We will announce the new hosts in January but suffice to say, I am extremely excited.

Again, thank you to everyone who has listened and supported This is HCD in 2018.

Here’s to 2019 -