Weeknotes – series 06 episode 04

Meeting the team

This week, I met some more of the team I’ll be working with. We had a few one to one chats, and our delivery manager also ran a good “ways of working” session with the team.

One exercise asked everyone to think about what the worst team in the world might look like. It was a good way to recognise bad practice, and to hopefully do the opposite.

Some of us have started to share our Manuals of Me, so I took it as an opportunity to update mine.

Design community

We had our fortnightly design community of practice. This includes our content designers, interaction designers, service designers and some of the user centred academy members.

I hosted a retrospective, looking back at the last 3 months of the community, and we came up with some actions to help strengthen the community:

• Create a slide deck containing intros to everyone in the community
• Gather some notes around the different meetings and Slack channels
• Agreed to share more work, problems and tips via Slack

Design leadership for introverts

Someone in the wider design community shared a link to this great podcast design leadership for introverts with Tim Yeo.

I really enjoyed listening to Tim’s thoughts about being introverted. He shared lots tips about being a design leader and an introvert, in a world where extroversion is often seen as the ideal or default:

• Learn to schedule in breaks and time to focus
• Prepare for meetings and workshops in advance – plan what you’re going to say and practice saying things out loud to give yourself confidence
• Preparation enables you to be present and to listen well
• Don’t wait until you think you are 100% right before speaking up, say the thing, and use feedback to improve ideas together
• Be yourself, everyone has a unique perspective to bring

Design portfolios and tools

I had a chat with some of the user centred academy members who were interested in interaction design. We talked about how to build a network, and how to create a portfolio:

• Use social media like Twitter and LinkedIn
• Play around with code on Github and CodePen
• Start a personal blog to practice writing and html/css
• Create case studies in slide deck format

It also spurred me on to update my blog post about interaction design tools.

Paddle boarding around Mumbles

I went paddle boarding at high tide with some friends this week. We went around the headland at Mumbles, over to the lighthouse island. It really was beautiful – Mumbles at high tide is one of my favourite places, but I’ve never really been in the water there to look at it from the opposite side. Definitely one of Swansea’s best features.