Experience by Design

It is not surprising to hear that everyone’s state of anxiety is pretty high. We are all facing a very uncertain future. Turning on the news, which I recommend doing only in moderation, it is easy to get caught up in the frightening images and metrics as the pandemic spreads. Enter digital psychiatry and e-mental health tools. Technically speaking, digital psychiatry refers to any electronic device or mechanism through which people can get information about or assistance with their mental health. And it might be the future of mental health careBut what does this mean for patients and the clinicians, as well as caregivers and healthcare professionals? Besides, does any of this stuff work? How does it impact the clinical workflow and clinical profession? And what does it mean for privacy and security?To help answer these questions and more, we have Dr. John Torous, psychiatrist and Director of the BIDMC Digital Psychiatry Clinic. John has been engaged in this topic for some time, and is one of the leaders in the field. He also created the LAMP app, an open-source tool that clinicians and patients can use to track symptoms and onset of chronic mental illness. You can say he knows a lot about digital psychiatry.John drops by the Experience by Design studio to talk digital psychiatry, COVID-19 responses, and the future of clinical mental health. Hope you enjoy our discussion. 

Shelley White is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Sociology, and Program Director of the Master of Public Health.Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal is the Assistant Program Director and Associate Professor of Practice at MPH@Simmons.What a difference a week makes. Or does it? With the expanding pandemic of COVID-19 disrupting more lives, many here in the United States might feel caught off guard, or that things have changed to rapidly. Now health care is a constant concern.What Shelley White and Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal help us put in perspective is that even though we can all get sick, public health and care has always been political, and who has access to care, and even what diagnoses one gets, have been deeply tied to class, race, ethnicity and other socioeconomic classifications. Public health, in fact, is designed. Moments of pandemic, where a virus crosses borders and bodies with no care for the social structures we’ve erected, brings to light the radically unequal way our public health systems are designed. For middle class families who find themselves for the first time concerned about the lack of available health care or beds at a hospital, must now contend with the fact that this is a common reality for many poorer communities and communities of color.But moments of crisis like this are also moments of hope. As Dr. White notes in the conversation, we have to remember that there are more people who seek equity and change than those who benefit from the status quo. What's radical is to acknowledge the racial, social, and economic injustices that frame our public health system and to then set about to change those inequities for a more just world. 

Gigaom CEO, publisher and author of "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity" stops by virtually to chat with host Adam Gamwell and guest host Astrid Countee to help us make sense of just what Artificial Intelligence is, what are its promises and limits, and what this means for the possibilities of conscious computing and smart robots. Byron breaks down the philosophies behind our ways of thinking about AI in way that gives us new social tools to approach the deep technological revolution we are undergoing in a more human and even optimistic manner. Website: https://byronreese.com/Twitter: @byronreeseFacebook: @byronreeseLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byronreese

We meet a lot of people who say they want to do a podcast, and in fact they are technologically easy to produce. Getting listeners is another matter altogether. And getting listeners pay for content is a totally different proposition. The  podcast landscape is pretty saturated, with as many options as stars in the sky. How then can podcast producers create listener experiences that their audiences are willing to pay for? Our guest for today, Amira Valliani, has some thoughts on how to meet this challenge.. Amira is the co-founder and CEO of Glow.fm. As they describe themselves, “Glow is the best, most flexible way to build your podcast’s membership program.”  We talk about what led her to create Glow.fm out of covering local politics in Cambridge, MA. We discuss the more than 800,000 podcasts that exist worldwide, and how storytelling has forever been our primary mode of self-expression. Finally, we explore both the professionalization of podcasting, as well as its democratizing effects of giving everyone a voice who wants to use it. 

Loans have a fascinating cultural property. We might think of ‘loan sharks’ as the present-day manifestation of the ancient pronouncements against taking advantage of people through the giving of loans. More generally, people who handle money in some cultures are seen as ‘unclean.’ So, the topic of loans and lending is by no means a new one.This makes tackling the ‘loan experience’ a unique challenge, and one that the company Lightstream is taking head-on. To learn more, Adam and I chatted with Kristin Shuff, who is the Senior VP of marketing at Lightstream. We hear how Kristin grew up reading Ad Age and early on being captivated by the characters she knew and loved being created by ad agencies. We also discuss how ‘omni-channel’ marketing doesn’t automatically mean ALL channels. Kristin describes how customer and employee centricity are central to mapping a loan experience that correlates for why people are getting loans, and how providing loan information beyond interest rates is a key to their branding efforts. 

Micah Solomon had dreams of wanting to be a rock star. When that wasn't going to happen, Micah's new journey took him from opening up a recording studio that became a manufacturing business, which then led him to be a Customer Experience star. In this episode of Experience by Design podcast, Micah visit the Experience by Design studio to talk about his new book, "Ignore Your Customers and They'll Go Away." We explore how to create a company culture that is experience-centric and which listens to voices of customers and employees alike. Micah also provides practical tools from his CX playbook on how to capture these voices and turn that information into moments that matter. We discuss companies that are doing it right, and how you can help your company do it better.

Whitney Quesenbery has had a long and influential career in user experience. The author of three books on UX, Whitney has been involved in a lot of projects aimed at making things more usable. But perhaps none of her work is as important as her co-founding and co-directing the Center for Civic Design. Whitney talks about her unintended introduction into the world of experience design through a theater class,  her early work in UX as being user-centric, and how a committee assignment through the Usability Professionals Association led to her life's work on civic design and voting experiences. Listen to her talk about the UX tragedy of the 'butterfly ballot' in the 2000 election, how big experiences come from simple changes, and what people can do to help design better elections. 

Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers.On this episode we talk about what brands are, how the cultural work of branding has changed in recent decades with the advent of new and easier to use technologies, and how we can think about brands as conversations - not just between businesses and customers but also between businesses.Billfleming.comBill on TwitterIdeas and Articles we referencehttps://www.commarts.com/columns/the-sensitive-anthropology-of-brandinghttps://raleighgreeninc.com/blog/2011/07/31/an-anthropologists-approach-to-branding/https://lippincott.com/insight/b2b-brands-in-the-human-era/This episode is brought to you in part by This Anthro Life, a sister podcast hosted by Adam Gamwell. Life is complicated, but we love simple answers. AI and robotics are changing the nature of work. Emojis change the way we write. Fossil Fuels were once the engine of progress, now we're in a race to change how we power the planet. We're constantly trying to save ourselves...from ourselves. This Anthro Life brings you smart conversations with humanity’s top makers and minds to make sense of it all. We dig into truth and hope in our creative potential through design, culture, and technology. Change your perspective.--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/support

Emily Guendelsberger, author of the book “On the Clock: What Work Did to Me, and How it Drives America Insane,” was a journalist who, upon her newspaper closing, decided to work at a variety of jobs. Her choices included an Amazon fulfillment center, to a call center, to a McDonald’s. As our conversation shows, the book explores what it means to work today, where deskilling, automation, technological controls, routinization, and stress all come together to create an employee experience that can not only be demoralizing, but physically debilitating. At a time where there is a larger conversation about how to create better employee experiences through meaningful work, what about those lower wage jobs for those that may not have many choices? How can we make the modern workplace more humane? Or is the situation just going to get worse in a race to the bottom?

Liliana Petrova, formerly the Director of Customer Experience at JetBlue, and now Founder and CEO of The Petrova Experience, describes herself as an “Organizational Culture Evangelist.” The airline industry might seem like an odd place to plant your flag to keep love alive, but if you are going to carry forward the gospel, you need to go to dens of evil. And there is perhaps no place as evil as the airline experience. . How can you convert a whole organization of people to adopt a ‘culture of centricity,’ whether it be customer-centricity, employee-centricity, etc? Are we really talking about being a cultural missionary? Trying to instill in the natives a sense of belief in a higher power, overturning their traditional culture for something that is believed to be more enlightened? Enter Liliana’s work at JetBlue, where she was Director of Customer Experience for almost 8 years. If there is a feature of your JetBlue experience that you enjoy, odds are that Liliana had a hand in it. In describing her role, she once wrote “As customer experience director at JetBlue, I feel pride and responsibility to meet the high expectations of our customers and am passionate to keep the love alive as we grow.” Listen to Liliana talk about how she keeps the love alive in her work as a customer experience evangelist.Today's episode is sponsored by Missing Link Studios.