Paths, Puddles, Products

On Service design as mediation, on the borders of organizational development, with guest Morten Pedersten.

In this guest episode, Juli, Morten, and guest dog Max hiked around the Hålandsvatnet lake near Stavanger and talked about Scandinavian design and business culture.

The path we took:

• A brief intro to Morten, and the step to leave a management role to build something new;
• How a background in psychology and organizational development can merge with service design;
• A dream Scandinavian company: transparency, open salaries, sharing burdens and ownership at Canoe;
• The Scandinavian design world, with a history of collaboration, flat hierarchies, and government support for design;
• Designers who help and serve vs designers who want to impress;
• Changing definitions and expectations around design work;
• And a brief glimpse into AI, as a mediator between people, not a shortcut to cheaper work.

Further reading:

• https://servicedesignnext.com
• https://www.canoe.no/
• https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/bld/nedsatt-funksjonsevne/norway-universally-designed-by-2025-web.pdf
• Mauricio Manhaes' article in Touchpoint Magazine about Design as Female Characteristics can be downloaded here. Ongoing conversation on the subject on Linkedin can be followed here.

Grab your headphones, and head to the nearest lake to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram, or find us on Threads - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On learning models, DnD, and dressage.

This time we grabbed a light topic with roleplaying games, horse riding, and arts, and gathered around an unlit campfire with the dogs for what turned out to be a deep dive into our learning and teaching experiences.

The path we took:

• Our most recent learning choices, favoring tabletop roleplaying and literary writing over tools of the trade.
• How learning things unrelated to our profession helps build context for our work.
• Teaching university classes, bootcamps, nights and weekends, designers, coders, and horse riders.
• The unseen work of mentoring or explicit teaching responsibilities.
• Learning models and pedagogical approaches, black boxes and cognitive apprenticeship.
• Gatekeeping by degrees versus the democratization of education.
• And a question for you, while we run from the boars: what is your favorite unexpected skill or piece of knowledge that you could use in your work?

Further reading:

• https://learningjournals.co.uk/what-are-the-different-pedagogical-approaches-to-learning/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_apprenticeship
• https://www.simplypsychology.org/zone-of-proximal-development.html
• https://www.storytellingcollective.com/pages/rpg-writer-workshop
• http://kunstfuck.tilda.ws/
• Ken Robinson on How schools kill creativity on TED

Grab your headphones, and head to the nearest forest to walk with us! - Just beware of the boars 🐗

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On why we struggle with defining what we do.

This time we took the scenic route to Three Border Mountain in the Buda Hills and let the dogs frolic in the wildflower fields, while we fought with job titles and talked about how we work.

The path we took:

• Defining service design, and the difference between a service and a product.
• Working "in business" and business in a job title.
• What makes someone an expert in something - with a short rant on the inflation of knowledge.
• Developers coding in a dark room and other layers of creating value with code.
• Agile coaches, scrum, and Shape Up; frameworks for working together and decisionmaking.
• How working on strategy looks like vs how the visionary designer is pictured.
• How to bring an outside perspective and install lasting changes in an organization.
• And how our job is sometimes like therapy - people getting all vulnerable and being open to change.

Grab your headphones, and head to the nearest lookout to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On different attitudes towards work across two generations with our guest Balázs Fejes.

This is our second guest episode, recorded between concerts at Primavera Sound Festival, where Anikó and her brother Balázs, who lives on the other side of the globe, reconnect each year. We walked around the parks of Barcelona, discussing the diverse values that drive our two very different careers.

The path we took:

• Getting to know Balázs, who manages product teams across the APAC region from their office in Hong Kong.
• Why our episodes can sound like two aliens talking to someone in the same field, but in a different generation.
• The place for pro bono work, social impact projects, and charity.
• How two people with similar personalities and environments can end up with wildly different value sets and career paths.
• Productivity metric-driven teams, and high performers taking our jobs.
• And where to start anew when AI takes over the world.

Grab your headphones and a bottle of water, and head to your favorite park to walk with us!

Ps. If you want to chime in, DM us or leave a comment on our Instagram - we're @paths.puddles.products and would love your feedback!

On what drove us to freelancing, how our paths converged as co-owners of a company, and how we both found ourselves in the burnout puddle.

The weather was not kind to us this time, so we're recording from our homes - no birds, only crickets.