"IBM has been publicly disclosing their reductions in environmental impacts since 1990."

"Keeping the lights on work is never exciting, but it’s essential to prevent complaints and keep systems running."

"Good designers can shift scale fluidly between the big picture and craft-level details."

"Build your story around what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you want to do."

"We spend more time in manmade worlds but less time connected to nature and real human relationships."

"It’s less about the medical definition and more about the assistive technology someone uses."

"Performance could be a useful Trojan horse for sustainability."

"You’re building three apps in a trench coat with a kind of iffy interface slapped on top of it."

"We keep asking these nondeterministic systems deterministic questions."

"We do experiments to learn, and if we learn something, then it’s a successful experiment."

"Secondary trauma can happen from just hearing someone else’s story one or two times."

"What happens when you weave intelligence into digital interfaces is really what sentient design is about."

"The speed of business has accelerated, so we need research processes that keep up, not months-long projects."

"We all speak different security languages, but at some point, they have to come together."

"Bias is a tendency, feeling or opinion for or against something without reason or evidence."

"Users won’t change habits easily, so we have to design without getting in their way but offer options."

"Machine intelligence can elevate experiences in subtle or dramatic ways, amplifying human judgment rather than replacing it."

"A caregiver’s thinking style changes from giving dignity and agency, to pushing past resistance, to avoiding the stew."

"In research, hypothesis is just a fancy word for a guess you pull out of your ass to start testing."

"We are designing the data services that developers can use to build the clinician-facing services, not the services themselves."

"Using trusted local communication channels beyond standard government platforms enhances outreach efficacy."

"Redemption means buying back or restoring something to its rightful place, transforming adversity into hope."

"Systems change happens through the mundane—what bus I take, how I negotiate pronouns at home, these small acts matter."

"You can’t show up with humility unless you have confidence in what you bring."

"Contracting officers face severe consequences for deviating from policy, including life in prison, increasing operational risk."

"Testing with a screen reader for QA is fine, but user research must be done with experienced assistive tech users."

"The more experienced you are, the more satisfied you tend to be with your salary, which might also correlate with actually earning more."

"Airbnb suffers from process allergy—a sensible adaptation when change is constant and ambiguity is normal."

"You have to go from delivering a message in three bullets to delivering a massive service blueprint in the next moment."

"If you think IE identity verification is necessary, ask why and if you really have to do it."

"Organizations have a finite pot of money and many more initiatives than resources."

"Being part of the community means you’re not alone facing challenges – you have a supportive peer network."

"Don’t call it blueprinting or journey mapping; just take ugly notes together to lower the barrier for engagement."

"We didn’t have hard boundaries about what service design was or is; our roles shifted with the ecosystem’s development."

"Often we designers are in IT departments, separate from the larger organization; that boundary is a hurdle to overcome."

"The service encounter, that 10 to 15 minute interaction, can save lives or improve health outcomes tremendously."

"The risk with LLMs is that they invent new categories or start writing Reddit posts instead of just categorizing."

"Acknowledgement is powerful—it shows people they are seen and can start to calm them down."

"Key Experience Indicators gave us rigor to bring into engineering conversations to make design less vague or fluffy."

"The impact of our work depends on how well we understand and influence the way insights unfold into real outcomes."

"I don’t even use the word UX or user experience with clients if I can help it. Jargon is a barrier."

"Researchers don’t just hold power — they also face harm and tensions within their organizations and relationships."

"Not everyone is a confident visual communicator. Not everyone wants to be a designer."

"Design ops isn’t just a support role, it is a strategic partner. - Rachel Poman"

"Async communications helped reduce unnecessary meetings and emails, maximizing free capacity."

"AI will have outsize impacts in certain areas, but transformation will happen over time."

"We have to explore and understand both the good and the bad so it can build something better together."

"Please read our code of conduct. It is on every page of our site."

"Measuring impact can really help you understand where your design team is spending the majority of their time."

"We innovate by adding the people element to metrics and reports, measuring happiness as success."

"Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. What matters is how we choose to respond."

"Innovation isn’t just a buzzword in design ops; it’s at the core of how we shape the future of the design practice."

"People see either all their accomplishments or all their gaps—it’s not a race to fill the pages."

"If you’re made to feel uncomfortable in any way, shape or form, we want to know about it because we care."

"UXers want a seat at the table, and executives want KPIs to measure against. How do you bridge the gap?"

"Michael became our farmer maintaining a steady flow of the team; Dana was our gardener cultivating quality work."

"Ugly is actually better. I’m a champion of ugly decks."

"Endlessly justifying yourself rarely changes others’ opinions. It just positions design ops as something that’s up for debate."

"Balancing strategic vision and tactical execution inspires teams to secure stakeholder buy-in and drive positive change."

"LLMs are optimized to work with short snippets of text, so we have to prepare content carefully before feeding it to them for big picture analysis."

"Business intelligence exists in many functions, but design intelligence is often missing."

"Everyone benefits from thinking about accessibility and inclusion at any point in time in research or design work."

"Sometimes research ends up being conducted for the sake of research, resulting in insights that don’t drive outcomes."

"Get involved hands-on with AI technologies rather than judging based on media narratives."

"Designers, marketers—they can be talented or clever but it's not enough to be at the edge of greatness; we have to quantify the value we deliver."

"Treat every interview like it’s a rare opportunity you can’t afford to botch."

"You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't connect with other people, nothing will come of it."

"Resilience doesn’t come from enduring or tolerating suffering. It comes from healing it and changing the conditions that cause it."

"Hidden pre-decisions by junior people often filter out valuable design ideas before leadership even sees them."

"Slack is not just a tool, it’s a space where we can foster gentler communication to support resilience."

"We started with twice-weekly 15-minute standups and evolved everything together based on feedback."

"The ability to quickly pull correlated themes and summaries aligned to your objectives was not available in prior platforms."

"Sponsor sessions are equal in quality and quantity as our main programming and completely free."

"Stop saying rest is a luxury or a privilege. It is not. It is a human right."

"Build teams with neurodiversity so different working styles can thrive, not just clusters of extroverts."

"It's cheaper to fix an accessibility issue in the design phase than in production."

"The IT team has been phenomenal in giving us visibility into what the entire tooling ecosystem looks like."

"Feedback is data; sometimes there are outliers, so it’s important to understand if feedback reflects the majority."

"The wrong place is to not start with accessibility."

"All design has costs; AI is not unique in this respect."

"Every job has to be a climate job, no matter what role you have in a company."

"Community-based organizations can help researchers access deep contextual knowledge that outsiders would never have."

"People love it when you end early and give them back five minutes."

"Employees can shift big companies, but culture and profit pressure can make that really hard."

"Collaboration is like marriage: you don't just get married and live happily ever after; you work on it every day."

"An assistant is helping you do the task with your attention on it, whereas an agent does its work out of your attention."

"The challenge is the merger of hardware and software in a product that typically takes roughly four years to develop."

"Randomization is magic — it evenly distributes confounds so the only difference affecting results is your change."

"It is part of your role to say no, enforce guardrails, and stop people pleasing when democratizing research."

"Letting all these research teams go is very shortsighted because understanding people is critical."

"Sustainability is like health — different people have different definitions based on their values."

"We distinguish between agents doing internal system tasks and assistants interacting directly with users."

"Sometimes people ignore prior test results and test again, and occasionally they find a positive result."

"Publishing your explicit list of priorities is a great way to reduce noise and focus the organization’s efforts."

"Experimentation is your default, your exception is not to experiment."

"If you don’t jump in and build this stuff, all you’ll do is read articles that don’t give you the real understanding."

"Your top priority doesn’t have to be the thing you choose, but it tells you what’s important to you."

"Designers are change agents within their organizations because of their multidisciplinary, empathetic, and compassionate nature."

"The reason for having this review step in the middle is to avoid having LLM hallucinations make it into production."

"Moderately good AI can add real value, like voicemail transcription that doesn't have to be perfect to be useful."