Episodi

  • Maya Sellon Accessibility & Inclusive design specialist Design for everyone
    Feb 20 2026

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    What if accessibility wasn’t a hurdle at the finish line but the spark that makes products shine for everyone? We sit down with accessibility specialist Maya Selin to unpack how inclusive design moves from checklists to genuine human impact—and why that shift boosts creativity, market reach, and team morale.

    Maya traces her path from early web days and brand governance to a people-first practice rooted in standards like WCAG and ISO, yet animated by real user insight. She explains how audits rise with new regulations such as the European Accessibility Act, but enforcement alone can’t replace empathy. The breakthrough comes when teams see that options beat perfection: strong structure, semantic HTML, clear labels and contrast form the base, then flexible controls, captions, and keyboard flows open doors for more users and more contexts.

    We explore AI’s double edge. Tools like Be My Eyes with GPT can expand independence by describing scenes and guiding tasks, yet models also inherit bias, over-weight dominant languages, and sometimes hallucinate. Maya makes the case for resilient, multi-modal experiences that serve screen readers, magnifiers, voice, text, and keyboard alike—because accessibility that helps assistive tech also improves AI parsing and overall usability. Along the way, we talk culture change: moving accessibility from an afterthought to a shared habit across discovery, design, and engineering, with real users involved early and often.

    If you build digital products, lead teams, or care about customer experience, you’ll find practical ways to embed inclusion from day one and avoid costly rework later. Come for the standards, stay for the joy: accessible products are not just compliant—they’re clearer, faster, and more humane. Enjoy the conversation, then subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review telling us one change you’ll ship this week to include more users.

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    59 min
  • Dr. Gyles Morrison MBBS MSc Clinical UX Strategist From Ward To Wireframes
    Feb 10 2026

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    We welcome Dr Giles Morrison, a former NHS doctor turned clinical UX strategist, to unpack why healthcare needs a distinct approach to design and how better products can make care safer, kinder and fairer. We explore burnout, equity, AI’s limits and the craft of behaviour change that sticks.

    • Coining clinical UX as a distinct discipline focused on clinicians and patients
    • Why generalist UX transfers but requires deep healthcare learning
    • Frontline medicine pressures, burnout and human factors
    • Push and pull from practice to design and strategy
    • The role of HCI training, mentorship and shared language
    • Health inequality, policy and the moral duty of inclusive design
    • AI strengths in synthesis and risks of bias and overconfidence
    • Cultural nuance, informed consent and the danger of half‑knowledge
    • Behaviour change beyond notifications, designing humane nudges
    • Joy, self‑care and sustaining impact beyond the ward
    • Where to find Giles and how to connect

    Find me on LinkedIn: search for Dr Giles Morrison. You know it’s me because there’s a stethoscope emoji at the start of my name. I’m happy to offer my support and help with you on your journey in this career. Whether you’re new to UX as a clinician trying to get into digital health, please do reach out.

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    1 ora e 13 min
  • Jose Coronado and Martin Dowson FRSA - Design’s Pendulum: Staying Relevant In Turbulent Times
    Feb 1 2026

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    What if design could move at the speed of AI without losing its soul? We sit down with two veteran leaders, Martin and Jose, to explore how teams can stay relevant when the pendulum swings from hype to hard results. From early usability labs to enterprise-scale delivery, they unpack how human-centred practice earns trust when it aligns with strategy, operations, and measurable business outcomes.

    The conversation hits the big levers.

    We dig into AI fluency as a new material of production and how Agentic workflows turn a design brief into a working, branded prototype in an hour—connected to code and ready for stakeholder review. That speed matters if it creates space to think ahead, so we draw a sharp line between continuous improvement and bigger bets that demand deeper qualification. Ethics isn’t a slide at the end; it’s part of the operating model. We talk outcomes-based regulation in Europe, human responsibility for agents, and why “move fast” must come with transparent decisions, harm awareness, and consequence management.

    We also get practical about enablement. Jose breaks down design ops as a context-driven function: securing compliant tools, fixing onboarding and engagement, standing up QBRs that show impact, and making portfolio health visible.

    Martin challenges leaders to spread core design skills beyond the team—journey thinking, customer exposure, and light research—so capability survives market cycles. Together they argue for blending product and design ops around discovery and delivery, and for investing in apprenticeships and entry-level growth so the next generation builds judgment, not just outputs.

    If you’re a design, product, or engineering leader navigating AI, regulation, and quarterly pressure, this conversation offers a clear path: experiment with new materials, protect human values, and use the time saved by automation to design the future, not just ship the next ticket. Enjoy the episode, then subscribe, share with a peer, and drop us a note with your biggest leadership challenge—we’ll tackle it next.

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    1 ora e 14 min
  • Adam Jennings Helping Creative Leaders Thrive - From Stunts To Stories
    Jan 19 2026

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    What if the most valuable creative tool you own isn’t a camera, a canvas, or a deck, but your ability to tune into the right beat at the right moment? Adam Jennings joins us to map a life spent chasing story—across theatre catwalks, design studios, and coaching rooms—and to share how empathy and self-belief can turn messy, human work into steady leadership.

    We dig into his theatre origins at the Oxford Playhouse, where he learned the whole stack: marketing calls that go nowhere, programming complexity, and the heat of a follow spot trained on Cinderella’s slipper. That precision, he says, is not about perfectionism; it’s about serving emotion with care. From there, Adam unpacks the habits that keep creatives resilient: tiny resets that stop spirals, a quiet practice of telling yourself “I love you,” and the humility to accept praise without deflection. His philosophy is simple and demanding—help people grow, then step back so they can keep going.

    We also push into artificial intelligence with clear eyes. Adam insists on the full phrase—artificial intelligence—because words shape thinking. He argues much of what dazzles us is imitation, not mind, and warns about agents emailing agents while hallucinations compound. Yet he holds a hopeful line: if we offload drudgery, humans can focus on climate, equity, and care. That future needs leaders who create space for slower conversations, kinder cultures, and better bets.

    Adam’s new seven-part video series, Signals, tackles the shifts already here—AI, budgets, hiring—and turns them into practical conversation starters. His globally charting podcast, Awaiting Approval, dives into the human side of creative leadership with voices from Apple, Paramount, Microsoft, Visa, and more. If you’re navigating creative teams, change, or your own confidence, you’ll leave with insight you can use tomorrow: make people bigger than their problems, and let love—not fear—set the tempo.

    If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Your support helps more curious listeners find conversations that move the work forward.

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    1 ora e 19 min
  • Steve D Sailopal Co-Founder Curry Smugglers- Snacks, Story, And Swag
    Dec 22 2025

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    A lost snack pack finds its way to the mic and opens a bigger story: how a Punjabi family turned street memories into a modern brand that won Fortnum & Mason and claimed a Piccadilly window. We sit down with Steve from Curry Smugglers to unpack why a can of Bombay Mix can do what a plain bag never could—stand tall on shelves, spark nostalgia, and carry culture with pride.

    We trace the journey from Delhi airport heat to train vendors at Chandigarh, from aunties pressing chakli to a Spotify playlist on the can. Steve connects the dots between music scenes that “weren’t ready yet,” his early house bhangra on John Peel, and the grind that later helped pioneer the UK’s alcohol‑free beer wave. That same graft shows up in snacks: 36,000 cans filled on a manual line, buyers who love that cans don’t topple, and the clean, recyclable logic of aluminium over plastic. Retail strategy meets design swagger, and the shelf becomes a stage where Desi heritage is the headliner.

    The conversation turns to care and community. The designer who inspired the brand’s look passed away in 2012, and that loss deepens the mission: normalising mental health talk in communities taught to shrug pain off, and exploring gentle, Ayurveda‑inspired products that sit naturally beside everyday snacking. We swap stories of growing up in East London in the 80s, finding belonging, and why London’s multicultural energy still sets the table for food, music and identity to thrive.

    If you love brand building, CPG, South Asian culture, or the craft of turning memory into a product that moves, this one hits home. Press play, share it with a friend who needs the inspiration, and if it resonates, subscribe and leave a review so more people can find these stories.

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    50 min
  • Doyin Olorunfemi, PhD - From Computer Engineering To Empowering Women: A Journey Of Purpose
    Dec 11 2025

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    What if your life’s through-line is a flowchart—clear steps, smart loops, and a decision diamond that always points back to people? Meet Dr Do, an academic and entrepreneur who turned a “lame” degree in computer engineering into a powerful discipline for building community, scaling women-led enterprise, and teaching with clarity. Her story moves from a redundancy letter to leading a thousand-strong network, from sold-out conferences to a fully funded PhD, and it all rests on a simple philosophy: live well, live full, live out.

    We dig into her early ventures that created access, not just income, and the moment she chose to set her own terms at work and in life. You’ll hear how MAPHA—her framework for motivating, preparing, and elevating women—grew from kitchen-table strategy to global stages, and why acronyms like CROP (Create, Rank, Optimise, Plan) help complex ideas travel and stick. The heartbeat of the conversation is her triad: Live Well (cultivate joy and reward), Live Full (align to purpose and values), Live Out (extend knowledge and opportunity). It’s practical, generous, and deeply human.

    We also tackle AI with nuance. She uses it daily to synthesise and clarify, yet warns against outsourcing your core competence. We explore how to bookend AI with human thinking—start with your own ideas, refine with tools, finish with your judgment—so you protect cognition and keep your edge. As an academic champion for employability, she bridges research, industry, and classroom, embedding entrepreneurial learning and elevating Global South perspectives so innovation reflects more than one story.

    If you’re craving a map for meaningful progress—one that blends process with purpose, and ambition with compassion—this conversation will give you frameworks you can use today. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a lift, and leave a review with the one idea you’ll live out this week.

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    1 ora e 2 min
  • Joe Natoli Design consultant. Coach. Speaker. Author. Risk, Rules and getting Real
    Nov 25 2025

    Start with the work, not the theatre. That’s the heartbeat of this candid, fast-moving conversation with a veteran designer who cut his teeth in a brutal design school, built a career in enterprise UX, and still believes tiny details move mountains. We dig into the early lessons that never faded—defend every decision, design for the person on the receiving end—and how that rigor translates to the unsexy, high-stakes world of internal products.

    The story widens to what really breaks products: fear, politics, and the absence of leadership that has bled and still cares. We talk about rules you must know before you break, the power of vulnerability, and the habit of asking braver questions. AI gets a pragmatic treatment—less prophecy, more practice. Use it to unstick thinking, prototype options, and remove admin drag; keep judgement and ethics human. Along the way, we tackle regulation lag, the myth of the seat at the table, and why you should lead as a value category of one.

    If you’ve ever felt trapped in process theatre or siloed roadmaps, this one gives you a way out. We share concrete moves: put every department in the room on day one, co-create with engineers and database architects, speak to margins and risk instead of methods, and ship decisions that make financial and human sense. Tools matter less than the choices you make with them. Careers accelerate when you translate outcomes, not when you list software. Come for the hot takes; stay for an honest blueprint to earn trust, dissolve silos, and deliver work that actually changes things.

    Enjoyed this conversation? Follow, share with a teammate who needs it, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. Your feedback shapes what we explore next.

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    1 ora e 41 min
  • Hardy Sidhu Founder & CEO. From Survival To Design Leadership.
    Nov 13 2025

    Start with the stereotype: tidy CV, tidy promotions, tidy portfolio. Now scrap it. Hardy’s journey begins in a young offenders’ institution with no GCSEs and no map, then arcs through late-night self-teaching, messy first sites, a bold UX leap, and leadership roles that reframed “product” from deliverables to durable partnerships. What looks like luck is actually iteration—learning fast, moving on, and keeping the energy high.

    We talk about the moment titles and big pay in the US stopped feeling like progress, and why that emptiness became a compass. Hardy built Format 3 on a simple promise: great people, great work, great time. The result isn’t a slogan; it’s client feedback about unmatched energy and a culture that protects humanity while shipping at pace. Recognition came—national awards and industry lists—but the deeper win is impact that outlives the founder: in-house incubators, support for visionary ideas, and plans for a design school in Punjab to raise the craft where tech has already surged.

    Heritage threads through everything. Oneness isn’t a poster—it’s how work and life meet. We get honest about South Asian visibility in tech and design, what the Black creative community models so well, and why organisation matters as much as talent. Off the mic, Hardy leans into seva, mentorship, and family, teaching Punjabi to his child and unlearning the gaps school left behind. The takeaway is clear: visibility is accountability, and community lifts when we show up with our full selves.

    On AI, we cut through the noise. Tools amplify; they don’t give you a reason to exist. Expect a dot-com-style correction as hype burns off and shallow startups fade. What endures are teams that weave empathy, strategy, and craft into products people love. Design is not dead—it’s the differentiator when everyone has the same tech. Younger makers have unprecedented tools; the bar is still purpose, delight, and credibility.

    If you’re searching for purpose, we offer a reset: stop sprinting toward a finish line. Be fully yourself and let purpose arise from the work, the people beside you, and the culture you choose to build. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs the nudge, and leave a review with the moment that shifted your thinking.

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    52 min