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Thomas Essl 0:09

Today will be different. Every once in a while I'm lucky to talk to experts in fields related to product development. Before the world descended into chaos, I sit down in person with Alexandra Melanie Cova and stay. I'll share the best nuggets of that conversation with you.

Thomas Essl 0:38 For many years, Alexandra has been designing products and services for clients. Currently, she's heading up design at the global design agency published his book, but that's only a day job. In addition, to which he creates illustrations for families in refugee camps, campaigns for a more mindful use of technology and tries to keep at least part of her daughter's attend Outside of the digital world,

Thomas Essl 1:13 Alex, as a creator, what is the kind of new reality you are working towards?

Aleksandra Melnikova 1:20 I just wish we would be in every way less hierarchical and really adhere to the quality of thinking and better collaborators, generally speaking as people trying to find those common goals that drive us together in the same direction and work on it. I think that's my idea of a slightly better reality. And to me, there's another point in this that's the reason why I think design and designers are really, really crucial in making this all work to meet. For example, issues around climate change are very important. But I am not The person who's going to stand in the crowd with a poster, I'm going to actively try and invent systems that change things. And things that, you know, I would never argue with a campaign that sends the message across and the message reaches millions. But I think actively engaging in things and trying to make them better by design is a very, is a very is a key thing for me.

Thomas Essl 2:26 Do you have a specific example for that?

Aleksandra Melnikova 2:28 I was recovering from an operation and I was drawing, I do illustrate stuff. And I drew an ABC like poster for my daughter in English and in Russian, I didn't find anything online. So I drew them they're illustrated so I put them live. And I said, you know, people can download it. illustration work takes time. So I would really love for people to acknowledge it, but I really don't want money. I don't need that from that respect. So I said, Okay, what is the good outcome that we could reach? All from this work. So I said, What you could do is just do something good if you download it, just, you know, speak to your neighbor or speak to your parents or just do something that you haven't thought of doing. And you saw this work, you downloaded it, and you've done something as well. So the lady who contacted me said, she is a journalist, and she worked with quite a few refugee camps, and she was distributing those there. And that, for me, is the greatest outcome of any of my work. Like I'm less fussed about the, you know, creating an app, the next big thing which, you know, everybody's really happy about and raving about from the point of view of the next greatest design, but I'm very happy with outcomes that I haven't thought about, but they were enable enabled by the work that I did in some way, like the good outcomes for anyone. I always have at least 10 things I want to do act Like, I want to do so many things. And then I choose the projects based on maximum impact minimum effort. Because this is a very business answer, but it's true. It's like I calculated that I have a week in bed because I was recovering after like operation and I can draw, what can I draw that I can really quickly put online and my daughter needed it as well. So that was the ABC, what could this bring and it was almost like a business proposal unravelling without you know, a business but I kind of always try and work within constraints of time and effort to be honest, because it's also with has to work with everything else. If we're talking about personal projects. If we're talking about professional projects, obviously that's that's very different. That's really determined by company policy, everyone we work with and so on. So but also my choices of companies I work for and with determined by the clients they work with.

Thomas Essl 4:56 I think it's fair to say that you are somewhat of a rebel in the industry. And you take a lot of agency in shaping where you and your teams are going beyond a project. What's the direction you push them towards?

Aleksandra Melnikova 5:10 designers, to me is not something that manifests itself just in deliverables. It's very much in thoughts that result in other thoughts. So what I do and challenge them to, to do every day and to kind of go in that direction is to think about their decisions to do proper research to actually understand the problem to spend 80% of time I always say 2%, but it's kind of close to searching for the right question, rather than providing an answer and also culturally, what I really like to do is to start any project and any engagement with my team, from a baseline of us all knowing nothing, being humble enough to recognize that we know nothing in the beginning of anything because world is moving very, very fast. And we're already out of sync sitting here. So there there is always another system. There's always another way of doing things that there is always stuff. So I think, to open up and actually seek for information and seek for different sources and seek for questions, not answers first is very, very important. This is how I try and shape all of my team's work.

Aleksandra Melnikova 6:50 I personally get very, very excited when clients involve us really early and involve us in their actual business. So we come in at the business level. Doing experience going? Which is your team driven by? What are your own metrics? Where are you trying to go as a business and therefore what kind of digital services or products or campaigns experiences you need. So that is always very exciting for me because it's really upstream. And we can really, really influence things and, you know, via multiple ways, even just initiating conversations within the business between people who hadn't talked before, you know, that about journey mapping, for example, right. So it's like the act of mapping is actually different teams speaking to each other going, Oh, we haven't thought that this is what happens is that what happens with you So, you know, going into the service blueprints, that's exactly where people start finding out stuff about their business and to me that that is very much like a great moment to witness and facilitate. So that's one really, really upstream rather than when the idea of the product or the service or you know, whatever that is already shaped in the mind of the client. And they're kind of signing off on deliverables. And they can only do that when they're really fixated on what they saw this other business doing, and they really liked, because there is no way to imagine what's unimaginable, right? So the only the most, you know, the way that most businesses imagine it as like, Oh, we want a website exactly like those other people, you know, forgetting that it's a different business model, different problem, different everything. So it's, I think, decoupling and that thinking from deliverables and trying to kind of influence the actual core of the problem. That that's what gets me really, really excited and opportunity to influence that. So that's one and the second one is just personally selfishly any projects that involve real kind of experience that are not bound by digital physical time. So to give you an example, I think anything to do with physical environment and digital experience and long term impact. So say if you would see something somewhere that is like a poster activation, and you would carry a piece of learning away, or that piece of learning would influence you for the years to come. I mean, it's a very lame example. But let's imagine that that's what's happening. And there is something you take away in your phone, and it's like a learning app, whatever, by just touching something that you've seen, and it's a trigger to so in here you can see there is a campaign there is a product, there is a service, there is an impact. It's like a really wide scale of, of things to design and to think about time space continuum. Very interesting.

Thomas Essl 9:47 Another pet peeve of yours is mindful use of technology, isn't it? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Aleksandra Melnikova 9:55 So I think it's then knowing when to plug in plug I don't think it's about technology per se, but I think it's about creating space. And it's obvious, it's pretty obvious that our life right now is very different from 10 years ago, with a level of cognitive load from everything from Interactive Advertising to your own phone. Like if you're only going to spend time in that space, I think your life will start getting very focused around it pretty soon. I think what we're experiencing and as a lot of parents like what we've noticed, we have kind of barren circle. And we have noticed that we have to put in quite strict rules around the use of anything that is robbing our children of our attention. So what we're trying to do is kind of focus on activities. I think most of those movements with mindful use of technology is just saying, Okay, let's acknowledge that everything exists. It's great. We know how to use it. Let's just plan our time. around having space to just be bored as well, just to observe what's going on around. I'm trying to teach my ear to be bored. I think that's one of the very, very key things because right now she's like, we're not doing anything like that's the best thing. You could do lesson events, something. But it's just that state of calm that I think, very keen not to lose to any other distractions.

Thomas Essl 11:26 If you could change anything about how we engage with technology, what might that be?

Aleksandra Melnikova 11:33 I would love for people to think about the paradigms that are actually fundamental to each technology. So each technology has kind of a different core and different purpose, a different paradigm and a different bias baked into it very often. So I would love for people to think about not only about Oh, how cool is that, ar VR and whatever else, insert your own word. But actually The meaning and how it was created and what actually what is the mechanism it's using and where is it going, and where it might be used and where it might lead to like a wider understanding of technology if you like, rather than just assuming it's a coolness. I'm reading a great book, I started reading in grade book, I keep recommending it to people. It's called Invisible Woman. And it's about a baked in bias within our systems that are very patriotic, and even if we don't acknowledge that actually, if we dig deeper into how decisions are made on a systematic level, it's bizarre how much and this is how software's are built and systems are created. You know, if you and as a designer, when you encounter anything like say, education system or healthcare system, you go, you look at it and you go, oh, there are so many things I'd like to fix, but also, you do see like any system it has evidence of bias evidence of being For certain things, evidence of running on a certain time, and certain kind of spans. So I wish people thought about these things more on how on when they're designing also something new, on how in time that is going to evolve and where they're taking it originally and where they're baking in their own bias, because we all are, we're completely, I don't know, I don't know about unbiased people, I don't think they exist. I think the way of thinking about technology as not technology, as a center of things, but as an enabler, could go a really long way. And this is what we're trying to do constantly to just explore and play with it by no means no one knows everything. So you know, were exploring and playing with different technologies very often. But it's more a way of thinking about it. Not as an end destination of like, we made this really cool AR thing every every time someone says this, I'm like, because the technologies are new and exciting, there's a lot of hype around, just using them for just using them full stop. So I think that's a

Aleksandra Melnikova 14:10 quite a big challenge, generally speaking.

Thomas Essl 14:13 Lastly, are there any trends you're seeing in your work and industry as a whole?

Aleksandra Melnikova 14:19 So ideally, well, the trends I can see is definitely experienced design getting widely adopted as set of both as methodology aim to everything and that is really exciting. So I think, as a discipline, it's really maturing so and it's getting to the point where it's operating on business level in many businesses. And finally, UX is dying. Yay. I was waiting for it. I really think it's a transition discipline that is, you know, focused around even the terminology around user experience. It's kind of really limiting and limiting to the interface limiting to certain aspects. experience I think should be much wider. And I'm very happy that you know, I at some point I even thought of banning the term wireframes. And you know, the term UX, generally speaking from our language like teams language, because every time again, talking deliverables to where these horrible and also you know, more and more design matures less we need those kind of deliverables, which is great. I think that's the exciting bit that it starts becoming business. So I think with the technology maturing and the methods maturing, we can start creating some things that won't require so much effort and like, months and years of building but will actually impact quite a large scale. Quite a large number of people.

Thomas Essl 15:53 I really recommend you check out Alexandra's alphabet posters. You can download them for free at goodbye ABS abc.com Just remember to do something good to someone else. If you do, you could start by giving this episode and as rating. If you enjoyed this episode, and you would like me to put up more interviews like this, let me know. You can get in touch with me via Twitter at Thomas underscore Essl, or email me to Hello at Thomas essl.com product nuggets is produced by myself. The theme song is aeronaut for blue dot sessions, and the opinions expressed in this episode of mine and my guests only, and do not necessarily reflect those of our employers. Thank you for listening. Till next time Transcribed by https://otter.ai