July 9, 2024

Lunch n' Learn: Talking Tech - Giving and receiving critical feedback

Optimal Workshop

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.

Susanna Carman

Speaker Bio 🎤

Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions. 

Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Publishing date
July 9, 2024
Share this article

Related articles

min read
Lunch n' Learn: Designing for Behaviour Change

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

Cole Armstrong

We all understand the need to better understand our users when designing new products, experiences and messages, but are we, as designers, missing an opportunity sitting in plain sight?

This recording of Lunch n' Learn features Cole Armstrong, Managing Director of behavioural strategy agency NeuroSpot.  Cole gave us a quick intro to the world of behavioural science and how it can be applied to support design initiatives that really make a difference by driving actual behaviour.  Drawing from examples around the world, he showed how a deeper understanding of human psychology has resulted in great outcomes.  He also showed where it prevented failure, pointing out some of the design opportunities that we, as designers, could be overlooking.

Speaker Bio

Cole Armstrong is the founder and Managing Director of NeuroSpot, a behavioural strategy agency based in Auckland, New Zealand. At NeuroSpot, Cole is working with a range of New Zealand’s leading organisations, covering fields such as retail, supermarkets, financial services, and utilities amongst others, to apply a behavioural science lens to customer and user experience across a range of channels.

Cole has a diverse background covering academia, commerce and public sector, in New Zealand, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. His perspective is that behavioural science allows organisations to more effectively identify why people do what they do, and then set in motion a series of evidenced based strategies to deliver on organisational outcomes.

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n' Learn

min read
Lunch n' Learn: Research - Content design skills worldwide

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn. 🌯

Torrey Podmajersky

A lot goes into good content design (AKA UX writing), but what exactly is that "lot" made up of? Torrey Podmajersky tackled the question with research: What are the skills content designers use in their roles? Torrey's research uncovered 94 skills, and her open survey gathered results from every economic region of the globe, surveying more than 800 people in its first month. The insights into the core skills of content design, combined with the impacts that can be made with those skills, are helping designers make better products by investing in the right efforts.

Speaker Bio 🎤

Torrey Podmajersky is the president of Catbird Content and author of the bestselling book Strategic Writing for UX. Torrey helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has consulted on and created inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Fortune 500s and startup clients in consumer, B2B, and enterprise software spaces, including Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft.

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

min read
Lunch n' Learn: What’s new with UX in 2024 & How to Break In

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

Eniola Abioye

Join us for a FREE Fireside chat on Jan 31st @ 12-1pm PST (Jan 30th at 9am NZT) with Eniola. You’ll learn about her career journey from integrative biology to UX, 3 things that are changing about the industry, and what you need to know to transition into UX this year. This is a casual, Q/A style conversation so bring your questions and get excited to meet Eniola!

Eniola Abioye, Founder of UX Outloud and UX Researcher at Meta will be hosting a HYBRID masterclass to help you uplevel your UX career. This event will take place on Feb 24th in the SF Bay Area & virtually worldwide!

Speaker Bio

I help UX Researchers improve their research practice. Whether you’re seasoned and looking to level up or a new researcher looking to get your bearings in UX, I can help you focus and apply your skillset.

Now, I am a UX Researcher at Meta and speak to all different types of users their experience on the platform. I take an agile approach and often employ Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation. I am innately curious, a self-starter, adaptable and communicative with a knack for storytelling.

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥗

min read
Lunch n' Learn: Holistic Design - A Framework For Collective Sense-making

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

Susanna Carman

Leading design processes amidst a world in transition requires all practitioners to continuously invest in their own development. One aspect worth investing in, is an ability to integrate holistic thinking into our design leadership practice. This includes re-evaluating our own biases and how that bias is reflected in the tools we choose to work with when understanding and designing for/within complex systems.

Recently our guest Susanna Carman, Strategic Designer and founder of Transition Leadership LAB, introduced us to a holistic approach to qualitative design research using Ken Wilber’s 4 Quadrant Model. Susanna explained the fundamental principles underpinning the framework, and showed how it can be used to ensure a multi-perspectival harvest of critical qualitative and quantitative data on any design project.  

Speaker bio

Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research-practitioner who helps people solve complex problems, the types of problems that have to do with services, systems and human interactions. Specialising in design, leadership and learning, Susanna brings a high value toolkit and herself as Thinking Partner to design, leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions. 

Susanna holds a Masters of Design Futures degree from RMIT University, and has over a decade of combined experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a 9-week learning lab for design, leadership and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets, but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n' Learn 🌯🍱🍜🍲

Seeing is believing

Dive into our platform, explore our tools, and discover how easy it can be to conduct effective UX research.