I recently spoke to Thomas Girard for his UniqueWays podcast, which has an impressive roster of previous participants, including John Maeda, Bruno Porto, and Debbie Millman.
In this episode, we talked about the future of design, how collaboration has a lot more to do with mindset than with physical location, work-life balance, how AI will automate a lot of tasks that designers take for granted, and some advice I wish I had got when I first started my career.
Physical location plays a much smaller role in my work than most people with in a 9to5 job: even before the pandemic (actually for the last 15 years), I’ve been working in teams that are completely distributed and very much remote. For example, I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of times I actually have to go to the office since all my counterparts are in the United States, or in India or China or Australia.
Itamar Medeiros in conversation with Thomas Girard
Thomas and I met when we both taught at Raffles Design Institute way back in Shanghai, and we both share a passion for teaching and coaching the next generation of designers.
A piece of advice I told Thomas I share with people in an individual contributor capacity is that questions have more power than they think: while it might be perceived as irritation at first, teams are more likely to be thankful for people asking questions that ensure they are on the right track. As Andy Stanley says, “Well-placed, appropriately timed, thought-provoking questions help us think through our decisions.”
