A few years ago, when we first got an Alexa-bot, I wanted to do a little test. My daughters were about 9 and 5 at the time, and I wanted to see how they reacted to it. I showed them how to give the cylinder its basic commands, playing their favorite music and telling us …
Author Archives: David Panarelli
Ethics in Design
You have seen it When I started in the design field, I had trouble finding a job that was a good match for both my entry level skill set and my hunger to do exciting design work. At that point, getting steady work took precedent and I took a job with a company that brought …
Engaging the Sales Team for Design Research
When designing in enterprise and b2b environments, it’s tempting to believe that the customers are easy to get to for the purposes of research, feedback, and product development. I mean, our sales and customer support teams talk to them all day! But that’s not the case, not by a long shot. Connecting with business …
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The 6-1-1 Sketching Session
What’s all this then? A 6-1-1 is a structured sketching exercise. You may recognize it as a miniature version of a design studio workshop (example) or you may also see that it is very similar to some of the methods popularized through Lean UX and Design Sprints. I developed the 6-1-1 as a lightweight workshop …
A Sample Design Collaboration Cadence
In order to maintain a decent level of collaboration within a design team, while maintaining a productive pace, and keeping transparent about upcoming roadblocks and needs for solutions, and finding opportunities to support each others in our design practice…. I ended up with a cadence of quick and straightforward cadence of check-ins and working sessions. This …
A Design Practice
Over the course of my career, a framework has started to come into view for a establishing or augmenting a design practice. The framework has three key ingredients: Craft: What do you do? Infrastructure: What do you use to do it? Personal Growth: What are you getting out of it? Attention to these three areas …
Starting over
I let my site’s hosting lapse and, as per the hosting agreement, I lost everything. Once I coughed up the dough, I put up an old backup of the site, and now here I am with this fresh placeholder blog. I haven’t written a blog post, personal or professional in a long time, so it’s …