"Critical making requires critique, theory, activity, reflection, leading back to theory, but it doesn't have to start with theory. It can start anywhere."

"Creating different formats of the vision for different stakeholders improves resonance and adoption."

"The value of what we do is only really valuable if it’s recognized by others."

"The veterinary pathway is well established as a way to safely get clinical validation before human healthcare."

"Systems that can self-organize are the strongest form of resilience."

"Our brains are like Ferrari with several petabytes of memory, but most of our thoughts are negative."

"Your time is so valuable. Ask yourself what’s the best use of your time when pivoting careers."

"Design is often treated as something that is brought in at the end to make things prettier or optional."

"You should never be engaging lived experts without compensating them for their time."

"You’re going to absolutely love using the Rosenbot, our chatbot, and hey, it’s free."

"The Rosenverse is our subscription platform, and it offers a great mix of both free and premium content."

"Research’s role may shift to orchestrators of AI-synthesized insights and gap analyses rather than just primary data collectors."

"AI changes everything in unstructured data analysis; before it was painful manual work, now it's automated theme detection and clustering."

"Total cost of ownership includes integration, customization, support, and ongoing operational effort that can be easily overlooked."

"Testing tools can help us bring the body language of the internet in front of us to see what people are doing."

"You cannot just put this 5% of users did not want this without knowing why or where this insight came from."

"How might we democratize empathy at scale within our organizations?"

"In this context, sometimes slower is actually faster because it allows going deeper and unlocking more meaningful insights."

"Well-set-up AI systems pulling data from multiple company sources will have more context, but it’s still limited compared to human understanding."

"Users were more curious and paid closer attention because some interactions actually produced results."

"If you can’t come up with a rule for something, you can’t code it."

"Empathy is key to wanting to do this job — wanting users to do well."

"Stories require no learning to understand, but you really have to work to make sense of statistics."

"If you’re a team of one, focus on getting one stakeholder at a time to sponsor your work."

"AI is great at summaries and automating mechanical parts of research, but it’s not yet an insight machine."

"Play disrupts hierarchy, which is why it helps teams stuck in defensiveness to move forward."

"Giving people time and space to think individually and pressure test with AI before group discussion prevents dominance by power."

"Follow-up questions missed opportunities to probe deeper or were confusing, and participants had to repeat themselves."

"When you ask a question, try to ask one at a time so the model doesn't get lost."

"Every time you bring a teammate into a research session, you’re scaling change."

"Anchor yourself in what you know to be right and true."

"We need to speak the language of the stakeholders, whether tech-focused or human-centered."

"Michael wasn’t trying to replace in-lab usability studies or in-person ethnography, he was expanding research modalities."

"Google’s sign-up has a progress bar which is really helpful so participants know how far they are along."

"Customer voice lives in minds, not in artifacts. We want people to truly hear how customers think and what they value."

"We are co-creating with the product organization to make sure everything fits seamlessly rather than being separate."

"Showing citations in AI responses helps people develop trust and understand where answers come from."

"You can think of design and development as a rocket escaping Earth's gravity well — process overhead is the fuel you need to jettison."

"It’s dangerous to believe everything AI says or to believe nothing. We must find a balance."

"One of my biggest pet peeves is biased questions; I hate the term validation, I prefer evaluation."

"Turning every study plan into a kind of report with new and existing insights is a mindset shift that can build a durable asset."

"I gathered information and ran little experiments on myself across dozens of jobs to see what might fit."

"Meisner taught actors to respond truthfully in the moment, prioritizing presence over preconceived ideas."

"AI design tools are great for sketching or inspiration, but designers are never asked to create statistically average designs."

"Many of us have followed zigzag paths to get where we are today, and that’s one of the wonderful qualities of the UX field."

"Persuasive technology shifted design focus from ease of use to influencing what users do."

"The sloppier you are, the more real you’re looking in the age of AI content."

"Is gamification just last decade’s fad or have the principles become so ubiquitous we stopped calling it that?"

"A major error in many services is users creating multiple accounts because they can’t find or reuse existing ones."

"Moving into law felt like starting over, but reframing it as a UX challenge made it manageable."

"Everything touched by AI becomes synthetic and needs persistent labeling."

"Service design fundamentals carry over nicely: pragmatism, evidence, building assets, and iterative relationships."

"The democratization spectrum ranges from everyone accessing feedback to a free-for-all, but I don’t advocate for a free-for-all."

"Leadership buy-in is critical to champion inclusive design and drive product innovation and culture change."

"My definition of service design is dancing with needs and value."

"When we showed the Iceland Ministry of Foreign Affairs their portfolio, the Foreign Minister said, we have to pivot our innovation investments to early-stage catalytic innovations."

"Visualization isn’t about beautiful artifacts but about creating accessible spaces for stakeholders to collaborate."

"I spent 40% of my day verifying what the system already knows."

"Designers act as mediators and neutral parties to get stuck projects unstuck through design diplomacy."

"Managing towards outputs means someone has decided what the solution is going to be and told you to make that thing."

"You have to socialize service design within organizations considering their dominant logic — whether engineering, clinical, or commercial."

"Small specific interventions travel further than big programs within organizations."

"Momentum over milestones. Track what's moving, not just what's finished."

"If accessibility is buried three levels deep in a checklist, it’s going to get missed."

"Service designers can help the organization untangle complexity across layers so they collaborate effectively."

"All of our models and metrics are temporary scripts. What matters is the rehearsal and how we keep rewriting the score together."

"Program managers are the unsung heroes who can back up design ops work in many organizations."

"Design systems help us bring healthy consistency across digital and non-digital experiences for equity."

"Generative AI is not creative; it’s just pattern finding and recycling what’s been done before."

"The farther away you are from the CEO or GM, the less happy and healthy your organization tends to be."

"I love the things—technology, design—but I really dislike the industry."

"Academic Purists believe one size fits all, ignoring context and stifling innovation."

"The queen is not a decision-maker, she’s just there to reproduce."

"Using tools like 11 Labs, we instantly generated voices with emotion and appropriate cadence for characters."

"Trust the user and trust the model are the two lessons I’m getting over time."

"Campfires are tribal, engaged knowledge spaces, libraries are corporate buildings, organized and curated."

"The more I work with evals, the more I think UX and product people need to be involved because of the need for diverse perspectives."

"Without a golden dataset, you have to build the golden dataset yourself."

"A product designer said I can now see glaring inconsistencies before I got my head around design system patterns."

"The solution isn’t just planting more trees—it’s understanding the historical urban design and policy layers behind it."

"Different AI systems have different strengths; Claude is great for creative writing, ChatGPT is concise and to the point, Gemini is deeper for research."

"We’re not marketing ourselves as providing UX services, but the toolkit we use is a very strong service design toolkit."

"Organizations are complex systems; you need to understand them deeply before acting."

"Design annotations provide clear developer guidance and reduce guesswork during handoff."

"Next year we need to have an accessibility budget. You do what you want, but that's the choice."

"Our essential skill in this next era will be managing disruptive change."

"Sometimes business context points us to a direction where we no longer have the safety of our identity constructs."

"Most of our team members held term positions, and in 2020 we experienced a mandatory turnover of nearly our entire staff, creating risk of knowledge loss."

"Figma files are no longer just a collection of visual elements; designers actively shape product features now."

"Sustainable teams require visible shared growth paths; designers’ growth should be supported, not accidental."

"We want you to take all AI-generated info with a grain of salt but it gets you part of the way."

"Having standards and human approval is necessary so AI-driven work hits the story, brand, and quality requirements."

"It’s often large B2B enterprise products that really warrant the most from some robust design ops practices."

"Shifting left means thinking about accessibility before you start writing code."

"The system is live now analyzing audience-submitted tasks and producing results in minutes."

"Showing where you’re using research more visibly creates a virtuous cycle of adoption and impact."

"Map tours are my favorite thing—taking a new hire on a guided walk of the entire community."

"We created an AI persona called Dreamweaver to answer real-time team capacity and project questions."

"Start small, add scaffolding, and let momentum do the rest."

"Feedback is more like an investment and a contribution into not just the person's work, but also to their growth."