“Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind — even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. And do your homework.”

“The first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one”

1. Design educators and industry leaders have never reached a consensus about what comprises a “good enough” foundational education for digital design.

2. We do not properly retire methods (or ways of conducting them) that have been shown to be ineffective.

the majority of them don’t help do more than tell the most surface-level story of limited user paths. And an inaccurate story at that.

No one in the 21st century actually interacts with any system in a well-defined linear flow, not in consumer settings or enterprise. It’s not how purchases are made and not how work gets done.

For many designers, the idea of letting go of an established tool or method in their arsenal, especially one they’ve staked their career on, is akin to saying they were wrong for ever using it in the first place and therefore putting their expertise into question.

Deliverables are not the work. They are the evidence of the work, so if your focus was creating a pretty map that’s easy to consume, but you don’t also have a down and dirty version that actually allows you to work through the important insights, then you’ve missed the entire point of mapping journeys.

3. Design team seniority levels are meaningless.

4. We’ve collectively lost the safety (and subsequently the desire) to explore and fail.

5. We afford well-known design leaders too much power to dictate how design is discussed and conducted.

As creatives responsible for mass communication and millions of audience impressions per minute, we’ve got a lot of power to make an impact. For better or worse, we creative types deeply affect the way information is interpreted, how brands and products are consumed, and the ways that people experience the mediated and artificial world.

A fully inclusive process should lead to fully accessible products, but just accounting and designing for accessibility does not mean your design is fully inclusive.

“Outrage is not activism.” If you want things to change, you’re going to have to be willing to do more than gripe about them.

Two of the most beautiful things designers can create are harmony and balance, between patterns, between objects, between people.