A76 | a design pod

Change. It’s so ubiquitous that it seems ridiculous to even talk about. Yet our relationship to change is challenging. We have poor reactions to it, we ignore it hoping it will go away. We’re even surprised when it happens; which we should never be. The only thing in life that is constant and will never stop, is change.
Obviously this is a big topic with many facets to it, but why do we have to approach it this way? Why does change have to be so painful? Are there other ways to get ahead of it? To manage it better? And could a designer’s mindset completely change how we approach, change?
My name is Noel Childs and in season 1 of A76 we discussed AI’s impact on the design industry and a potential shift in our methodology. And throughout our conversations I was reminded of the incredible flexibility of thinking from the designers I talked to. And I’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the most creative people in the world over the course of my career. Their ability to not only deal with change but to drive it for their projects, their clients and people around them is heroic and inspiring.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I often say that I should have a PhD in Change Management simply by working in the design industry. If I’m touching a project, or my team is, there’s a reason for it; something needs to change, or be solved, or be enhanced. We need to move people’s perspectives from one area to another. And the reality is, I spend a comparatively short amount of time coming up with the solution and most of the time convincing my clients and the people around me it’s the right approach.
So in season 2 of A76 I’ll go deep on the designer’s mindset. Get into how we approach change, talk about the tactics we use to shift the thinking around our projects and hear stories from people who grapple with this everyday. My goal is to not only share it with all of you so we can get a little better, but also bring it to as wide an audience as possible. This is a strength designers have that everyone can benefit from, and our world needs it.
We have too many issues to solve that can only be done through transformation. We need to continue to build those mental muscles to get better at managing change. Find the right balance between a fixed mindset and a growth one. And recognize change for what it truly is, an opportunity.

A76’s Season of Change. Coming soon.

A76 was created by Noel Childs
Season 3 on Scale is produced by Noel Childs
Season 2 on Change was produced by Noel Childs
Season 1 on AI was produced by Casey Hudetz and Noel Childs
Our theme music was composed and performed by Stella Solveig
and mixed and mastered by Abbey Nettleton
Our outro was read by Kari Childs

If you like what you hear, please give us a rating.
Or become a member of the A76 Patreon at patreon.com/A76designpod
Have a question or comment, email [email protected]
and connect with us on Bluesky

For today’s pod - I’m thrilled to bring you part 1 of my interview with Frank Grubich. He’s had a 35 year career that’s still going. He’s a creative juggernaut who owned a successful design agency for years called Laughing Dog—years before I designed with him. And he's worked on everything you can think of in the creative and design industry.
Yet, the qualities I appreciate most about Frank are his insane curiosity and his passion to differentiate, all balanced with a surprising humor and down to earth ease. Plus he’s got this intense focus on striving for the why of everything, while exploring the future always asking "What if..." which we discuss in detail.

I’ve never met another person like Frank. He’s one of a kind. I cherish the years designing on his team—they were like taking multiple design master classes. I learned so much from him both as a designer and a person and I’m grateful that he is a mentor of mine.
~ Noel

From Frank
I Believe

• Everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change.
• Without trust, nothing is possible.
• All jokes lead to the truth.
• Parameters make creative better.
• If we aren’t making our clients nervous, we aren’t doing our job.
• Clients succeed when we connect people to people — not to stuff.
• Design is a process, not a thing.
• The problem with customer experience is never with the customer.
• An agency should be more passionate about the client’s business than the client.
• You can’t truly think outside the box until you respect the box.
• Successful brands are not born in boardrooms (or in Zoom meetings).
• If you’re billing creativity by the hour, you’re doing it wrong. (a.k.a. the path to efficiency leads to obsolescence.)
• Ideas are a dime a dozen. Real value is in the artful execution and implementation of ideas.
• True innovation is a messy, ugly, exhausting process. If someone is telling you it's easy— they're lying.
• It’s more important to have a sense of purpose than it is to have a sense of place.
• Creativity is an agency's leading point of difference. Treat is like your business depends on it (because it does).
• My team should be better than me.
• There are no boring clients, only lazy agencies.
• Nobody—and I mean NOBODY—wakes up and thinks, “oh goodie, more data!”
• I believe there is nothing more wasteful than doing nothing.
• If a client thinks their nephew can do that, don't waste another minute on that client.
• I believe I have the second coolest job in the world.
• House was right — everybody lies.

A76 was created by Noel Childs
Season 3 on Scale is produced by Noel Childs
Season 2 on Change was produced by Noel Childs
Season 1 on AI was produced by Casey Hudetz and Noel Childs
Our theme music was composed and performed by Stella Solveig
and mixed and mastered by Abbey Nettleton
Our outro was read by Kari Childs

If you like what you hear, please give us a rating.
Or become a member of the A76 Patreon at patreon.com/A76designpod
Have a question or comment, email [email protected]
and connect with us on Bluesky

The British Design Council codified the Double Diamond model in 2005. If you’re not familiar with the Double Diamond Model, it’s a visual model that interprets the design process represented by 2 diamonds. First one is all about Discovery and Research. Second one is all about design and testing.
There are many articles written about it and many takes. We’ll break down the details and unpack it here. Chances are even if you’ve never heard of it and you’re a designer, this is your approach already. Google it and you can see the many visualizations.
Back to that British Design Council; their intention was to research how designers, well design. And they took a look at all kinds of designers with different backgrounds and mediums and this is what they came up with. But the fact of the matter is, designers have been approaching problem solving and creativity this way for arguably hundreds of years; and in some ways humanity as a whole, going all the way back to those iterations of hand tools thousands of years ago, that have been discovered. We create. We progress. Test. Iterate. The fact is, we all live this model.
But recently, I’ve been feeling an industry shift. You could say it started with the recent pandemic forcing changes in the way we live and work, but I think it was shifting way before that. I’ve created A76 to discuss this shift and speculate on the future of design. And talk about complicated topics that need to be unpacked.
Why did I feel compelled to create A76? To be fair, I prefer doing over talking. I love designing, managing design teams and solving problems with my clients. But this has all brought me forward and my criteria for this podcast; take a thorny subject that has threads to this shift, find a co-host that’s brave enough to get into it with me and have discussions with experts that will help unravel, clarify and find a road forward.
And this first season is all about a technology that feels like its playing by different rules and very much in the design zeitgeist right now, and that’s AI. And for this season, we’ll bounce the double diamond model up against AI and explore its continued relevance in this changing era.
And with me to co-host the first season of AI, is Casey Hudetz. Casey has been interested in how AI can enhance and impact the field of design for the better half of a decade. He has given talks around the world on the topic, created a docuseries and is currently a product design manager at DocuSign where he oversees a team of designers focused on the company's AI efforts.

A76 was created by Noel Childs
Season 3 on Scale is produced by Noel Childs
Season 2 on Change was produced by Noel Childs
Season 1 on AI was produced by Casey Hudetz and Noel Childs
Our theme music was composed and performed by Stella Solveig
and mixed and mastered by Abbey Nettleton
Our outro was read by Kari Childs

If you like what you hear, please give us a rating.
Or become a member of the A76 Patreon at patreon.com/A76designpod
Have a question or comment, email [email protected]
and connect with us on Bluesky

In today’s pod we talk to Mick Champayne, a senior visual designer at Google by day who moonlights as an illustrator. She loves navel-gazing about the future, especially how designers can support people’s values and intentions. With AI coming at us at warp speed, the implications for both design and illustration are far-reaching, but she's actively working on shifting her mindset from, in her own words, “it’s all over” to “hey, things could be pretty cool."

Our discussion covers Mick’s views on generative AI, content creation and whether or not it will make the illustration industry obsolete. We cover what happened when Casey feed Mick’s illustration style into an AI model. Mick proposes how a positive optimization mindset has huge ramifications. We discuss the homogenous sci-fi plasticity of existing text to image creations. We get into the critical discussion of ethics, IP and critical copyright legal issues. And discuss the end of the “move fast and break things” era. Finally we discuss how Mick embraced her own unique pov to unlock more opportunity.

We end the discussion with how AI is bringing forward a critical discussion around humanity and necessary changes in our society. And the critical responsibility designers have to spearhead and embrace that change. Mick discusses her design practice at Google, getting better at prompting, and the power of collective ideation empowered by AI.
Reference:
Mick Champayne site and illustrations
AI generated illustrations in style of Mick

A76 was created by Noel Childs
Season 3 on Scale is produced by Noel Childs
Season 2 on Change was produced by Noel Childs
Season 1 on AI was produced by Casey Hudetz and Noel Childs
Our theme music was composed and performed by Stella Solveig
and mixed and mastered by Abbey Nettleton
Our outro was read by Kari Childs

If you like what you hear, please give us a rating.
Or become a member of the A76 Patreon at patreon.com/A76designpod
Have a question or comment, email [email protected]
and connect with us on Bluesky

Welcome to a new episode of A76. Today, we're taking a detour from our usual in-depth interviews with designers and makers to explore something a little different—micro-interactions and moments of personalization that could be vastly improved.

If you're curious about what's happening over on our Patreon or if you simply want to support the A76 Design Pod, head over to patreon.com/A76designpod. By joining, you'll gain access to exclusive episodes and my original series on hyper-personalized AI assistants, dubbed NoelAI. In that series, I dive into topics of working for tech, personal risk concerns, the uncanny ID, conversational UI, behavioral habit mapping and debating the pros and cons of an AI assistant.

Looking ahead this season, Matt Saip and I will discuss our journey in making the A76 Design Pod a carbon-neutral production including our insights, research, and plans for achieving this goal.

Also, exciting news—I'll be announcing an in-person A76 event in Chicago, featuring an open debate panel, salon-style, towards the end of the season. Stay tuned for topics and details.

A big thank you to all our Patreon members—your support makes this all possible.

Now, let's dive into the world of personalization—specifically, the micro-interactions and moments that absolutely drive me bonkers. I can't turn off my designer brain when engaging with these frequently failing experiences, even in my daily life. And while it may sound harsh, my aim is to help us learn as designers by examining these small, fixable interactions. And all the examples we'll discuss are drawn from well-resourced brands, that should do better. While I'm not personally connected to these brands or their teams, these are interactions I've personally experienced. And while I have hundreds I could pull from, I've pulled five for example.

I'm fully aware of the challenges involved in launching amazing digital experiences, from platform and database limitations to the inevitable concessions designers must make. If you've worked on any of the examples I discuss today, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out via email or on BlueSky. Enjoy!

Example references

1. EA Sports FC
2. NordiTrack Treadmills
3. Chipotle App
4. Apple Ultra Watch & Suunto Race Watch
5. My Northwestern App

A76 was created by Noel Childs
Season 3 on Scale is produced by Noel Childs
Season 2 on Change was produced by Noel Childs
Season 1 on AI was produced by Casey Hudetz and Noel Childs
Our theme music was composed and performed by Stella Solveig
and mixed and mastered by Abbey Nettleton
Our outro was read by Kari Childs

If you like what you hear, please give us a rating.
Or become a member of the A76 Patreon at patreon.com/A76designpod
Have a question or comment, email [email protected]
and connect with us on Bluesky