Dave Hoffer

Episode 162
Brave UX

Empathy, Courage, and the Future of Design

In this brand new episode of Brave UX, Dave Hoffer shares lessons on design leadership, empathy in UX, and navigating AI’s impact on the future of design 🧠. He reminds us that design demands empathy, courage 🛡️, and long-term thinking 🌱.

Highlights include:

Why Hope and Long-Term Thinking Matter in Design
From Personal Crisis to Mission-Driven Work
Is UX Dead? Navigating the AI Disruption
Why Executives Must Experience Real Empathy
Think Like a Gardener, Not an Architect

June 11, 202501:13:14

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Who is Dave Hoffer?

Dave Hoffer is a seasoned design leader and strategist whose career spans product design, digital innovation, and large-scale design transformation 🌍.

He has led design teams at influential organisations like Frog Design, PwC, and McKinsey & Company, helping shape thoughtful, human-centred digital experiences across industries. At McKinsey, he was one of the firm’s first design leaders, guiding design-led transformation for Fortune 500 clients and growing McKinsey’s global design practice from a handful of designers to hundreds 📈.

Dave later brought his expertise to PwC, working at the intersection of design, business, and technology, and most recently contributed to Safe Kids AI, a mission-driven startup focused on creating safer online spaces for children and families.

Today, as an independent consultant, Dave advises organisations on design strategy and transformation. He’s also a generous contributor to the global design community, known for amplifying others and championing empathy and critique as essential tenets of impactful design leadership ✨.

Transcript

Dave Hoffer:
We have to embrace and sort of double down on empathy. The idea is empathy might be under attack, and if empathy is under attack, then design's under attack because empathy is a crucial and foundational piece of design. I also think design can help at a higher level in dealing with things where design hasn't necessarily played previously, which is things like policy.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who want an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting our field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a world-class range of diverse leaders.
My guest today is Dave Hoffer. Dave is a seasoned design leader and strategist with a career spanning product design, digital innovation, and design transformation. He has led design teams at influential organisations like Frog Design, PWC and McKinsey and Company helping to shape thoughtful human-centered digital experiences across industries.
At McKinsey, he was one of the firm's first design leaders guiding design-led transformation projects for Fortune 500 companies. Dave helped establish and grow McKinsey's global design practise from a handful of designers to hundreds embedding design into the practise of one of the world's most analytical firms.
Dave later brought his expertise to PWC where he worked at the intersection of design, business and technology, and most recently to save kids ai, a mission-driven startup focused on creating safer online spaces for children and families.
Today, Dave continues his work as an independent consultant advising organisations on design strategy and transformation. He's also a generous contributor to the design community globally known for amplifying others and championing empathy and critique as core tenants of impactful design leadership. And now he's here with me for this conversation on brave UX. Dave, a very warm welcome to the show.
Dave Hoffer:
Brendan, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Dave, this has been a long time coming and it's certainly a pleasure to have you here with me. And one of the things that's always struck me about you is just how quietly generous you are, especially within the design community. You've introduced me over the years to, I've lost count, maybe half a dozen guests for the show, and you're a regular community contributor to places like Rosenfeld Media, which is actually where we met, and yet you've never really seemed interested in the spotlight yourself. Now I get the irony of asking what I'm about to ask you on a podcast in this forum, but where does that come from, this instinct to amplify others and do that rather than promoting yourself?
Dave Hoffer:
People are amazing. And so I happen to be fortunate enough to know a boatload of amazing people. So my ability to amplify them or my desire to give them a slightly greater platform if I can, is really predicated on, I just think people are awesome and that whatever I'm doing is fine. But I've always sort of operated in the background for the most part. So I've had a very long history of career in design. I've been in the Bay Area since 1994, and if you look me up on LinkedIn or if you look me up in any of the other places I happen to reside, you'll see that there are a raft of very notable design folks in my circle. So I've just always been sort of in the relative background and it's fine for me. It's like design's a job. I feel very strongly that just doing the work is really the more important part of it, but lately the work feels like amplification is a big part of it, and we could all do a little bit of that for our fellow fellow folks.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned lately the work feels like that amplification is a big part of it. I'm curious, that's obviously something in the here and now that you've just mentioned, and so I'm interested in understanding why you feel like lately that's become more important. But I'm also keen to understand if there is someone or something in your past that has shaped this very benevolent, generous nature, the nature that's led you to promote others over and above yourself.
Dave Hoffer:
Lemme take that first part first. So we are in a downturn from the perspective of there have been a lot of designers who've been laid off a lot of looking for work. It felt like we were at the bottom of a trough towards the end of last year, and it feels as if we've slipped right back into it again. So there's that, and I understand the sort of the nature of it, the systemic nature of it, because I've been through numerous downturns, the most egregious of which was the dot-com bubble, and I was laid off and I was out for six months. I called my dad and I was like, dad, what do I do? And I was crying. I'm like, I was in an apartment I couldn't afford living in San Francisco, the most expensive place or very expensive place to be, and I was out of money.
I literally didn't have rent for the next month. He said, Hey dad, what do I do here? I'm freaking out. And said, well, do you think you'll never work again? And I said, oh no, I'll eventually have another job. And he says, yeah, so just stay the course. And I was lucky enough and fortunate enough to find a job down in Monterey, California at a place called CTB McGraw Hill. I made great friends there. I spent three years there doing great work. And there was that. The second part of your question, again, just I feel as if people could use a level of application that they don't feel comfortable doing themselves, and I've never felt uncomfortable doing that. You sort of describing the intro as being someone who's sort of, doesn't really jump into the spotlight, but you put me in the spotlight and I am very gregarious, very effusive, very talkative person because that's just how I roll.
So a lot of folks in design tend not to be as extroverted in these situations. Lemme just side note on this. I feel very strongly that your quote MBTI score, that doesn't exist. If you say, well, I'm an introvert and that's it, I just don't believe in that. I believe that these behaviours, these modalities are a spectrum. And yes, I need to recharge at the end of the day, so technically introverted, but you put me in a situation with a bunch of other people and I rise to the occasion, for lack of a better word. And in this case, rising the occasion means helping some folks out being a louder voice. I tend to be a loud voice being a louder voice for folks who are a little less inclined to too their horn.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking of that voice, I want to ask you about your internal voice in the present moment. You told the story a little earlier there about being laid off during the.com bust when the bubble burst and that conversation with your father where he asked you, what did he specifically ask you? I think it was, do you think you're never going to work again? Or something to that effect? Right.
Dave Hoffer:
A very practical question.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it's a very practical question. It's quite an incisive question as well, and it was certainly seemed like a well-timed question and sometimes most often actually advice or incisive questions like that, the timing is everything. If you think about then you're a much younger person than you are now, does the same incisive question still hold the same weight or bearing today that it did for you then? Or are there different questions that you've been asking yourself during this latest period of upheaval in the industry?
Dave Hoffer:
Both. We are a sum of our experiences. We are a sum of the people that we know, our family, our upbringing, the work we've done, the places we've lived, et cetera. I mean, that's relatively straightforward. We'd argue about that. That's true. In 2020, there was a lot going on for everybody globally here in the states. I know we have a global audience for this podcast. We had BLM was homegrown, was dealing with that in the wake of George Floyd and other murders, there was the Me Too movement, which was global. We were still dealing with Trump and its essentially aftermath, so without getting political. So all of that was going on. And I happened to live in a place in California where wildfires exist. So I'm sitting here at my desk and it's September, 2020 and I come down to work and I look outside because my window is right here, and the skies had turned orange because the wildfires had changed the sky colour.
And as a visual thinker, I said, well, this is wrong and this is really wrong. And how might I engage in a level of self-reflection moving forward that makes me feel more comfortable in a world where I had traditionally attempted to increase shareholder value? How might I engage in more mission-driven work? And then personally, and I won't get into the details, but personally, we were having some troubles with one of our kids later diagnosed with autism. At that point, it was non-specified anxiety issue. And that November, because this is the November after that September orange day, we had to institutionalise our kid for a week. And that was height of COVID. I couldn't go in, only my wife could go in. And we just sat and cried outside in the car dealing with that. They're doing great now. They're subsequently, they're fantastic, they're 15, everything's cool. But at that time, it was an additional personal issue in line with the existential awfulness that was going on elsewhere. So that point just made me, I just chose very distinctly to take some time and really think about what I wanted to do moving forward, which is why I joined Safe Kids, which is why nothing I do is going to not be helpful for other people moving forward, which is not,
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a lot going on there. And I think that image of the sky is burning. That orange forest fire image is quite striking, at least when I was listening to recount that. And there's certainly many layers I think as well in what you've described. You've got the national political level, which there was a lot of upheaval and still is in the United States. And more broadly, you've got a number of different social movements that reflects the civil relationships that are at play in America. And also more broadly, you've got the industry and COVID and the effects on the industry that weren't probably clear at point in terms of what would soon come with regard to the downsizing, the layoffs of the companies. And then on top of all of that, you've got personal challenges that you're wrestling with. If you think about that, all of that, if you could try and hold that in your mind all at once, that's a lot that could be perceived as a lot of weight.
And I know there's a lot of people out there that feel like they're carrying a lot of the world's weight on their shoulders, yet you took a time out, you took some time to reflect and to pause and think about your mission and purpose. That seems like in the midst of all this chaos, you are able to adopt a long-term view. Is that how you see it, or do you look at, is that too easy to post rationalise or do you look at things differently? Is it not a long-term view? Is it something else? Was it just one foot after the other? How do you describe that time and where you find yourself now as a result?
Dave Hoffer:
I would describe it as a desire for a longer term view. I don't think that we're systemically at a point as humans where we're taking as much of a long view as we should. So I'm a firm believer in long-term thinking. I feel very strongly that one of the things that people should do, humans should do is not strive for three to 5% GDP growth year on year. I think that if we stop a minute and think about some of the longer term implications of how we are in the world, we'll be better off. And I also firmly believe, again, we could argue about this if you feel like it, but I don't think you will. You have to have hope as a designer. You have to have a level of hope that the work that you've done, the craft that you've learned, and the skills that you bring to bear when you bring into a project, will bring that project forward.
And at the same time, you have to hope that all of the great work that you've done is right enough to move the needle in terms of whatever metric you're trying to achieve, such that you can achieve personal success, company success if you're interested in company or organisational success, I should say. Right? So whatever organisation you're working in, you want it to be successful. I mean, that's just my perspective, having a level of hope and having a level of hope for a longer term view, which I don't think we're there yet, but I think we could maybe shift towards. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Not necessarily disagreeing. One thing I'd like to add to that to put to you is that hope without action is useless. That's right. And hope, particularly without courageous action is even more useless. And you are someone that I've been in contact with for some years now, I think three, four years since we first met at Design at Scale back in 2022. And I've certainly seen you turn up most obviously for me on LinkedIn as speaking your mind with courage about the matters that you feel are critical for people both professionally. And I think you've also touched at times on broader social issues as well that need to be addressed. And I'm curious for you to reflect on what role courage has played for you as a design leader and more broadly speaking in your wider professional way of being.
Dave Hoffer:
I firmly believe in courage as well. Grit. I would describe it as grit, willingness to speak, truth to power. I don't think I've got a huge voice on any of the social media platforms. They simply don't. And that's okay. I know a number of people who've got a much greater following, much greater network, et cetera. But I think that it behoves us moving forward to be willing to speak up and be willing to provide a voice for those who aren't necessarily as willing or as able to speak up. So there's that. And I don't think of myself as courageous. I don't think of myself as particularly brave, but I'll tell you, I'm being needled by a good friend of mine who thinks I should sell my Tesla immediately. I just can't afford to sell it right now, nor would I necessarily make a tonne of money now.
I don't drive a cyber truck. It's a model three, and I bought it before we knew. So I've taken one small step, which is to scrape off the Tesla logos on the car. My client is to replace them with Rebel Alliance logos from Star Wars. I think it's small things, but I think honestly, you can do a variety of things, both large and small to provide a level of resistance if you think things aren't going well. And I think that we all need to engage in that. And I think that we all need to be aware that we still have to pay bills and do all of the things that we have to do. So it's sort of hard to ask everyone to do that. We need to be courageous, and I think that I'm happy to try to be as courageous as possible given the times,
Brendan Jarvis:
Given the times. And if we think specifically now about our small corner of the professional world design, you talked about there being potentially a number of things that are going on at the moment within the broader design sphere, this community that require courage. What's the most pressing one of those things that you feel is most on your mind and that we need to pay most attention to at the moment?
Dave Hoffer:
I mean, I don't think we can go a whole podcast without mentioning ai. I think we've got some work to do, and let's hold AI for just a moment. I think we have some work to do. There have been quite a number of articles and posts suggesting that, well, is UX dead? UX is dead. We are in a transitional stage from the work that we do from a design perspective. We have a massive number of layoffs. So people are out there looking for work, they want to stand out, but they don't always have the best tools. So how do they do that? How do they reengage with productive work? How do we stand up to those that hand down decisions that are not necessarily going to be popular? They're not necessarily going to be popular. In our group recently, our government in the US here has suggested that we rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And I noticed in Google Maps that it had changed a couple days later. I don't know how popular that decision was inside of that group. Certainly wasn't popular with me. I have family down in Alabama. I used to go down to Gulf Shores, Alabama and spent summers there with my grandparents riding the Gulf and the beach. It was gorgeous. Gulf of Mexico is where we used to go and hang out. So there's that. I mean, from the perspective of the things that we need to do as designers in order to move forward in the world, getting back to ai, everything you can learn about AI is going to be helpful. It is an interesting transitional technology set. It's not just one thing, obviously it's an interesting technology set that we ignore at our peril. So we've got to embrace that. Okay, we've got to be as determined as we can with where we are with our position, whether we're employed or not.
And I think we have to embrace and sort of double down on empathy. I just wrote about this the other day, but the idea is empathy might be under attack of late, and if empathy is under attack, then designs under attack because empathy is a crucial and foundational piece of design. We talked about being human centred forever. And at this work I'm doing with this collective called informed, it's very much about being life centred, and I agree with that too. Got a colleague, they do some development at place, so they go out into nature, they take a walk out into the woods or a natural location and they through a workshop, create a kind of persona for that location. So if we can personify place, we can introduce it into this notion of being more life centred. I've written about circularity as a part of this group.
I think that the onus, the burden of sustainability is often put on human beings. And I will not call them consumers. I don't call us consumers. We're human beings. So I'm meant to separate out my garbage here in the States. So I've got to do separation of my paper and plastics in the recycling bin, my garbage, that's not that into the garbage bin. And then compost waste into a third bin. Compost, no problem. It goes into a place and it decomposes. It's great. Garbage goes into a landfill, and that's awful. Okay. Maybe the compost is problematic too, but regardless, the paper and the plastic are not evenly recycled. So paper's recycled at a fairly high percentage, something 65, 70%, and plastic is not at all, right? It goes somewhere else and it goes into a landfill and gets burned. So the burden is on us. Okay. So I think design can help to a large degree in these efforts. I also think design can help at a higher level in dealing with things where design hasn't necessarily played previously, which is things like policy.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I want to bring you back, Dave, to ai. And you mentioned that we ignore this at our peril, and I feel like that's fairly sound logic in terms of the pressing professional pressures on designers. What I wonder, is this a young person's game now, is the rate of technological change that we're seeing with our tools, and you mentioned it's a tool set, but it's also a force multiplier in terms of what it can enable a human being to do. It feels much different to the kind of tools or tool set that we had for the good old last 20 years or so. Is this, like I say, coming back to my original question, is this a young person's game now? Is it possible to stay current if you're at that senior end of your career?
Dave Hoffer:
I think it is, and I think it behoves folks who are senior to lend a position to those younger and let them know that these transitional phases, technologically speaking have happened before. So the shift from not having essentially computers on all of our desktops to having computers on all of our desktops and having some of the design tools available to us in the desktop publishing transitional phase, there were people who were left behind. There were people who learned the tools and became designers using those tools instead of the traditional tools of a pasteup with a hot wax machine or the Linotronic output or a stat camera, all those things that I learned in 1988 when I went to work for a graphic designer in New York City, I learned how to use those tools, those tools, those that don't exist anymore. I can tell you how a hot wax machine smells.
It's interesting. I learned how to create blueprints using a blueprint machine in college, and then moving forward, the transition to the iPhone was another big shift. The internet was certainly a huge shift. So these technological transitions happen. Does it feel like it's happening faster now? Hard to say. I mean, I wouldn't put a number on it. There is a lot of people thinking a lot about AI in a lot of different ways all over the world. And so yeah, it's moving fast. You don't have to learn all of it. So things like that. So it's really just about how, well not all, but it's about how incorporating these AI tools into our workflows in a meaningful way, knowing that their output isn't always perfect, right? I can't crank an app out in cursor and expect it to be well coded or lovable. Right?
Brendan Jarvis:
That's an interesting point to dive into. We are currently using the worst AI tools we'll ever see.
Dave Hoffer:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is that a question of it can't do that yet or that it can't do that ever?
Dave Hoffer:
It's probably not going to be able to do that yet. It's not yet. And the answer is will it shortly? And the answer is, yeah, probably. So I wrote about this a while back, but even I wasn't at the forefront of it. It was this idea design is free. The main points I was making in the piece that I wrote at that time were about things like icon sets, right? I can buy a streamline icon set and there's no reason to design a brand new icon. There's plenty of icons out there and they're relatively inexpensive. So I can buy the whole set for X number of dollars, but it's still a lot cheaper than paying. There was a lovely and excellent designer at Frog Design, this guy named Matt bi, and he was our icon guy at that time. So between oh four and oh nine, I was at Frog Design in San Francisco, and whenever we needed icons, we would be like, Hey, Matt, we need some icons for this. And he's the guy, but we don't need that anymore right now. There's plenty of icons. And that was at that time, we've jumped way far ahead. And so now these tools can do quite a bit more for us. But I applaud when Paula Cher of Partner Pentagram embraces the AI tools, feeds it and teaches it the language of the illustration that she's looking for for the icon set that she's going to do for, I guess is progressive or performance gov. Forgive me on that. But suffice to say, she's like, I'm going to try this.
Illustrators I know are up in arms about it. They're like, wait a minute, you could have paid me whatever X number of dollar for a week's worth of work and I would've been able to do the same thing. And it's like, okay, but she tried it and she put it out there, so good on her. So there's a rafta tools, they're moving very quickly, but I think it behoves us to try to keep up with it and to lend our senior wisdom if we have that to folks today, to let them know. Because to your point, the Southwest Airlines website when it first opened was terrible. And it looked just like an airline desk at an airport. It was a horrible design. It was a complete beyond skew amorphic. It was like, let's replicate an airline desk at an airport, and that's not how we do. It's not the best way to do this. And we learned, we learned quickly and we moved past it. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I did read designers free, and you also, you gave a couple of other examples in there that I think are relevant here, which is that we've got tools now that are generating UI and tools that are synthesising research and to use some business parlance here. What we're talking about is what are traditionally been quite labour intensive specialist processes that derive outcomes effectively approaching a marginal cost close to zero of doing those processes. Now we can argue about quality, and I think you already answered that in that it's a not yet in terms of to a comparable level to what an expert human could, but it does, I think quite rightly. It scares the shit out of people. But I want to focus on, we've talked about hope before and we've talked about courage. When you think about a world where you might have those activities at almost zero cost, what is the opportunity here that we might not be seeing? Maybe you mentioned empathy earlier, maybe that's got something to do with it. But what is the real opportunity that you feel might exist in this world in a few years where we've got even more amazing AI tools than we do today?
Dave Hoffer:
So today, let's talk about today and we'll talk about tomorrow. I've worked with an organisation, a company called Altus io. They're developing a tool set, I call it a tool set that will take the input of a recorded piece of content or the transcript of that recorded content or the audio of that recorded content interviews, and they will both analyse the individual interviews and then they will synthesise across a number of interviews against a kind of guideline or whatever your protocol was or whatever was included in your question set when you were doing the research itself. And the results are really good. They're not perfect and they're not ideal. And I wouldn't just crank the results into a PowerPoint and call it a day and deliver that to a client. But the results are really good. Now, what does this do for us? What this does for us is it affords us the time and the opportunity to talk to more people.
So if in the synthesis and the analysis of data where I've been on the road at Frog Design back in the day where we'd go out on a set of global research we were doing and we'd meet back in the hotel room that night and cover the windows, the walls of the hotel room with Post-Its, and then do a quickie email as a report back to either our client or our home people. That was one way to do it. This is a faster way to do it, but you're not replacing the conversations that you're having. So it's really just a shift in the workload in a way that I think makes sense. And that's today, alta.io, lovely tool, super smart founder, a woman named Sabino. Amazing. Okay, that's today. I do not see tomorrow where a level of empathy will exist in our AI tools because it's hard to achieve a level of empathy as a person in a room with another person, much less coding it or encoding it into an AI's output. There are skills that we could bring to bear as designers that carry a great deal of weight that are not going to be replaced soon. Now, the further future, I don't know, hard to say, obviously, and I'm not a futurist, but I feel pretty strongly that those are going to be hard to replicate those empathetic perspectives. Those human perspectives are going to be really hard to replicate in the relative near future.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm glad you said you weren't a futurist because I lumped those people in with economists. They're guessing at best. I think if anyone is too certain about the future, then there's probably warning bells that should go off around those predictions. I wonder what designers might learn from a gentleman called Gary Kasparov. So perhaps you could enlighten me as to who Gary is and what we could learn from him.
Dave Hoffer:
It's a grand master in chess. So he lost a big blue while back. His perspective was an interesting one because what he didn't do was to give up and go live on an island somewhere and say, I'm never going to play chess again. Could have done that fairly easily. And I can see where others might say, well, what's the point? You can't win, so why be grand? My understanding of his story and from what I've read about him is he said, all right, well, let's see what we can do with this. So he put himself a couple of other grand together with an ai, and it became very clear that they were unbeatable against an opposite, an opposing ai. So this notion of leveraging the tool to improve your human ability, I think that's what we're after. I don't think that there are CEOs sitting around in boardroom saying, how can we replace all people and just do the work with AI tools or with robots or AI robots or whatever say
Brendan Jarvis:
That. But there's one very famous person who's in the media a lot at the moment, to once referred to most people as NPCs. So it does make you wonder,
Dave Hoffer:
Okay, we won't name names. Yes, there are some, okay, but I'll say this, and I think this is really important, and this is a sort of important way to think about it. Way back in the day when I was in college, I was waiting tables, okay? I was a waiter serving, okay, they called us servers, waiters, whatever. And after about, I don't know, maybe a year of it, I was hating people. Oh my God. People were the worst. People were difficult. And then what I actually learned and what I came to learn after having done it a couple of years, was that people exist in a spectrum. There's really good people. And those people were the people that I'd walk in that night and they'd say, oh, there's a reservation and they've requested you. They want to sit in your section. Great. Who is it?
Oh, applaud and Martha. They're lovely. I would love to work with them. It's awesome, whatever. And there's a section of people over at that end of the spectrum, people are just nice. You walk up to the table, they introduce themselves, they're happy to see you, they ask about you, great. There's another end of the spectrum, which is that there's a raft of people who are just shitty. They're just outwardly shitty people. They're just terrible human beings, and they are rude to you and demeaning to you. And that was my reaction and why, my response to I hate people. What I came to learn was that there's a big middle chunk of people between those two sort of ends that are simply indifferent towards you. And they're not evil and they're not good. They just want to have a nice dinner. Their goal at that restaurant as users of that restaurant, in the service of that, just to get good service.
And for me as a server, to be relatively invisible. They have water, they have a drink. If they need one, their meals come out on time. And if they don't, they're communicated to and they're okay as long as they know what's going on. So being honest and transparent. So yes, they're a ceo, CEOs who are not only being particularly evil and being fairly vocal about how evil they're being, the NPCs, but there's also people who are, how can I make good? How can I achieve what I'm trying to achieve, which is a level of efficiency in the economy and everything else, and yet not lay off my staff? How can I redirect their efforts? How can I upskill them right, such that they have better understanding of the tools that are available to them and then that we can redirect them towards something else or whatever. So there's a range of people, I firmly believe in what I call spectral thinking,
Brendan Jarvis:
That role of the waiter or the server and the way you described those people on different ends of the spectrum, and then the people in the middle who are indifferent. It's almost an exercise in empathy when you're engaging with those different people across the spectrum to understand who they are and what they need in that moment. Because people are also not constant at every point in time in the way that they behave. I think there are definitely patterns of behaviour that are more prevalent in most people. You either wait one way or the other more, but in your role, it's almost like you had to understand what they needed from you and give them that. If they needed you to be in the background, you could be in the background. And as designers, there's some interesting parallels I feel that you could perhaps leverage into an analogy or that analogy into how we interact with our stakeholders, how we interact with our colleagues, how we think about our role ourselves and our wider organisations.
But perhaps I'm getting a little bit sidetracked here in my own fancies. I want to bring it back down to the article that you published last week, Dave, which was titled, humanity has an empathy problem, user Experience is Paying the Price. And in that article near the opening, you shared quite a confronting story. You recounted a confronting story from your time at Frog, and it was about walking into a home during a research visit. Bring us back to that point. What was different about that home? Why were you there in the first place, and how did that experience change your understanding of empathy?
Dave Hoffer:
Those are good story. It's one of my favourite research stories. We were engaged by Roche, the large medical pharmaceutical company at that time, and they said, look, we want to understand people with type two diabetes, which is the diabetes that develops over time as opposed to you being born with it. So we want to understand type two diabetes and the behaviours and the engagement that people have with it in order to be able to provide a kind of a device, we want to make a device that will help people with type two diabetes, which is great, where that sounds like a really interesting and good topic for us to engage with. So we went off to, I think it was Minneapolis was where we did our in-home research, our contextual inquiries, and we went into a variety of homes. We began to quickly make observations about the scenarios.
And one of we, which was especially given that we were meeting people in their homes that your type two diabetes was a familial problem to a certain degree, which is to say what you all had to dinner for dinner that night was part of how you were going to manage your disease. So if it was the mother with type two diabetes, the father, what was on the table that night was part of it, or things like the time to get out and get exercise. So we did a series of in-home interviews and we said, we should really talk to more families. So we engaged a family. We said, we're going to go meet you at your house. And we walked in the door, and as I say in the article, the smell was just overwhelming. It smelled awful. So I look around and there's a relatively large bird cage with I think a parrot in it of some kind.
When I say large, about four feet tall, one of those really big ones, but it was encrusted in faeces. I look off into the kitchen and it was a disaster. Dishes and things piled high on all the counters, large bags of Fritos and Cheetos and junk food all over the floor and not spilled, but stuff that they'd got from a Costco or something like this fly paper hanging from the ceilings covered in dead flies. So first thing they said was like, do you want to sit down? I said, no, no, no. I've got to operate the camera. Is it okay if I stand? Because I felt a variety of ways about being there and I wanted to stop and start cleaning up because their problem was a great deal deeper than the problem we were trying to solve for our client. These outliers, when you do user research, tend to be extremely telling.
So here's a family experiencing a level of quality of life that was terrible internally at their house. It may not have been necessarily visible to anyone outside, but you walk into these people's homes and it was filthy and gross and a disaster. So what I learned from that episode was we took video, okay, made little snippets for the clients, presented our feedback, communicated the needs that we discovered, and it was all accepted and great, but what I couldn't convey in a PowerPoint presentation was the way the house smelled when I walked in the door. It was sad. It was just sad. And so communicating empathy to a third party or a second party is a super challenge. And I began to just say this just because it occurred to me that there's no such thing as secondhand empathy, right? I am much less likely to feel any kind of empathy if I have not been there and done that.
And so it just became a sort of a bit of a mantra for me. I'm like, if you're not going to get down out of the boardroom and go talk to actual customers, if you're not going to get out into the world and interview users, if you're not going to engage in the service you provide at your company, whatever it happens to be, then whatever you work for Habitat or humanity, go build a house. Go build a bunch of houses, spend a good part of your year doing that once a month, every quarter, get out and work with the people and understand what the problems are so that you can be a better and more effective leader for that organisation
Brendan Jarvis:
If they were to do that. If we were to see a massive cultural shift and see executives, and I'm not just talking design executives, I'm talking about the people that make the real decisions in organisations. If we were to see them engage in that type of behaviour, would it lead to greater profit?
Dave Hoffer:
I think it would lead to greater profit because I think it would lead to greater products. I think the products would be better, the services would be better because the firsthand experiences of not just the C-suite, but the managers would inform the product or the service development to whatever degree, or it would at least provide the impetus for the desire and the part of the people who are the decision makers to ask the teams to engage more deeply. Hey, I was out there and I saw X, I saw this. What can you tell me about that? Well, I could talk all about this. Great, well, I want to know more about that. So I'm going to go out myself, but I'm also going to want you to go out and really be able to bring that back and really tell those stories in a meaningful way to as greater a degree as is possible.
I mean, I think that getting back to my notion of I think we should engage in more long-term thinking. We're locked in these sprints in feature factories where we've got to deliver the executives plan for whatever features they are in a two week cycle. And we're done with that two week cycle. It's another two week cycle, and we're done with that cycle. It's another two week cycle. Maybe people are thinking about things quarterly. Maybe people are at the higher level of thinking about things over the years or over a five year perspective, but it's a production cycle. It's not as effective as it would be if these people engage in the level of understanding and empathy, which would make their products better. And yes, sell more products, sell more services for sure.
Brendan Jarvis:
In your article, you also cited a paper, which is titled Empathy is Hard Work, and that paper outlined the mental costs that are involved with experiencing empathy, things like the effort, the actual, I suppose, cognitive emotional effort involved, the uncertainty, the discomfort that comes along with that. And it almost sounded like there was a rational decision at some point that people make as to whether or not, yes, I'll press my empathy button here and really be there with this person or the situation or no, I won't for those reasons. I just mentioned assuming that's correct, if there is, it's almost like an, I've never heard that spoken up about before, even in design circles about the cost involved in empathy. But if we accept that as being true and there is a cost that might suggest that there's a limit to the amount of empathy that people, whether their executives or designers are willing to spend or invest, depending on your framing, how should that change the way in which we do try to influence or inject empathy or encourage people to experience that firsthand? How does that change the way in which we might approach that part of it if we're not going to see a mass cultural change?
Dave Hoffer:
So it doesn't have to be a mass cultural change. It can simply be a level of, I want our products and services to be better, so I'm going to go out and look for myself. That's not changing culture, that's just changing some perspectives, which is one thing. The reason I describe empathy as hard is, again, I walk into this house and it's just overwhelming. And again, my level of empathy kicks into a certain degree and I want to stop doing what I'm there to do and start cleaning up. Lemme do the dishes. So the sympathy is hard. It is. It's a hard thing. It can be exhausting. So I envy frontline workers. We recently put my dad in what's called a skilled nursing facility. He's on hospice, he's 89 years old, and I go visit him, and I try to visit him at least every other day just to get down there to say hey, and see him and see how he's doing. And the people who are working in this organisation, people, the nurses and the staff are kind and generous people. They're trying really hard to make sure that every one of the facility is comfortable. And I personally could not engage in that level of service and be able to not take it home with me at night. It's just not who I am. So it's hard. It's hard to do, and it is, there's a cognitive toll that it takes on people.
Brendan Jarvis:
Healthcare is such a great example of that
Situation that you're describing with your dad and also my wife. She's a doctor and at the moment she's doing a paediatrics fellowship in what she does in her specialty. And there is a quite well-known phenomenon where when systems and the people in those systems start getting overwhelmed that they do reach that empathy cap, they do have to push that to the side in order to focus on getting the job at hand done. It's a really sad byproduct I feel of systems under too much pressure, but perhaps it illustrates very well what you are illustrating in your article, which is that empathy like willpower. It's almost like a finite resource. So we better be really careful about how and where we expend it.
Dave Hoffer:
Yeah, I think where and when, but also I think of a who's to be more empathetic. I think it's easy with, one of the second arguments I was making was this notion of publicization verbalization, which we've all experienced. We're busy looking at our phones, we're in our feeds of our own making and the algorithms making. We've got our own friends in our own circles, and we for the most part, don't really step outside those bubbles. I think it behoves us to try to step outside the bubbles, to put the phones down, to step out into the world and engage in a way that we hadn't before or that we have done less of over the last couple of years. I mean, COVID aside, we all sort of completely bubbled up in COVID or completely sequestered ourselves in our homes with COVID, and we got used to being on a screen with someone else in this way.
And I think that this is nice to be able to talk with you like this, but I'd rather shake your hand and I'd rather go out for a beer with you or buy you a cup of coffee, whatever your preference, whatever. I'd rather have the opportunity to enjoy your town where you live. What does it smell like there? It might smell beautiful, you don't know. So I think we need to be more empathetic. I don't think that empathy or being empathetic means that we've got to completely chuck everything to be empathetic, right? There are those saying that empathy is being weaponized and that empathy is costing us. I just don't think that that's true. It sounds specious to me. It's wrapped in a level of language and some books that have been written, but it just doesn't sound realistic to me. So I just don't give it a tonne of credence.
I'm willing to sit down with folks who think that way. I feel like that level of empathy could be offered to people who don't think like me. But there's an extreme, right? That extreme that I talked about on that spectrum is I know that I get to disengage from that very few people who are essentially the worst. I don't have to engage with them, and that's okay. But there's people sort of up towards that where I can engage in a way that provides them the level of service they need. In the case of the restaurant business or in the case of the software I deliver or the experiences I design or the transformations we go through and apply design so that ideally their lives are better, even if I don't necessarily love them, but we need to be more empathetic, I think, and it seems to make more sense, especially today versus 10 years ago.
Brendan Jarvis:
You also spoke about in the article, I dunno if tension's the right way of framing this, and you've given hints of this in the way you've described your reaction when you first stepped in the door at the house and you were overwhelmed, it sounded to me like almost like this wall of putrid smell hit you and you spoke about the, instead of sitting down, you wanted to do the dishes, right? There's an aspect of judgement , not judgement in terms of decision making, but judgement in terms of, Hey, this is so different to my bubble and the way that I live that I feel like I need to step in here and help you in your bubble. Do life better. Now, that's also a very reasonable and understandable human reaction or part of our human experiences that we do live in our own bubbles. It's called our own heads for the most part.
And everything else is kind of a secondary to that probably for probably widely published biological reasons. But when you have those experiences in the role of a designer or a researcher and you do catch yourself passing judgement on a particular participant or whatever the scenario is, is this something that we should be concerned about? Is this a thing that we can harness positively? Were you able to have you reflected on this experience and the way that you felt about it personally? What is the relationship that you feel, if any, should be walked between empathy, experiencing it and our own judgments that we might place on those experiences?
Dave Hoffer:
Again, it's an important aspect of it. So let me give you the three responses that I had. I didn't give you the third yet. So the first response was, do my job, interview these folks, understand and try to empathise with their position. My second response was, let me just do the dishes. It seems like that'll be more effective in the short term. And my third response was, maybe we call this one, and when I say maybe we call this one, if you've ever done user research and you're sitting and talking with an individual who you're asking question after question and you're getting single word responses, no. Yeah, me, I don't know. And you can't draw them out. You can't get them to engage. Sometimes your time is better spent disengaging and saying, thank you so much. It's a very good pleasure talking with you, and lemme get to your stipend and we'll see you later.
Thank you again. One of my responses was, let's get out of here, that the team shouldn't necessarily have been put in that situation, and yet we stayed that the right thing to do was to try to gather the information that we were there to glean. It's challenging to recruit for research. It's challenging to schedule for the effort, and it would've killed a chunk of time because we had another hour to get to the other interview that we had that afternoon. So we would've lost a set of interviewees. So we persevered, we did it, but that was one of my responses was to, and it was judgmental. It was gross, right? I got used to the smell after a couple minutes, things like that. But yes, I was judgmental. And that's a human response too, and that's okay. It's important too, from the perspective of taking all of this information in as we did towards the end of that research phase was understand that there are these extremes and that whatever application or device we were going to make might have helped this family in their situation or it might not, but that ideally it would help an amount of people, whether or not we were helping 80% or whatever percentage that the device, if it was tracking your blood glucose levels, if it was tracking your food, this is with the intention of the device.
It was tracking your food intake and providing you information about what you should and shouldn't eat if it was counting steps, helping to measure exercise. All of those things are important for an amount of people in that same spectrum. There it is in order that an amount of people can get help with their type two diabetes. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Tell me if I'm understanding this incorrectly. So it sounds like having the outlier is somewhat like a political party understanding in terms of the policy, if you like the people that could potentially vote for them, that they're best to focus their efforts on a certain section because the people that are on the outlying ends of Marxist communism on one end and fascism extreme right-wing fascism on the other end are just not the people that are going to be best served by the product that they're there to sell.
Dave Hoffer:
I think that that's right. I watch a television programme called The Daily Show, and there's one of the correspondence, it's a comedy, John Stewart started it or actually started prior to that, regardless, John Stewart had been the person at the front and he's back and they'd sent one of their correspondence, this guy Jordan Kleer out to talk to MAGA Republicans. There was no accounting for reason or logic or facts in his interviews, and it was meant to be funny. And it was to folks who were liberal and looking at this and going, oh my gosh. But one of the things, he was telling a story, I guess it was before the show he was hosting and he was telling the story and someone said, well, what's your favourite story? And he said, look, I was asking question after question to this person who's a maga, and eventually they just said, you know what?
I don't care. I'm still voting for him. I don't even care. I'm still voting for him. So are we ever going to reach those folks? I don't know. It seems like kind of a cult without getting too political in this conversation. So yeah, there are people who are not going to be able to address in terms of user needs in product development or in product service development in ways that are going to be meaningfully distinctive for how they need to move in the world, which is not to say that we can't remember that outlier and later as an additional feature set offer at least a phone number for a set of services for help, because they were clearly depressed as a family. They just were leading a very depressing lifestyle. So there were mental health issues that they could have reached out for in that way, in a future set after the fact.
Brendan Jarvis:
Maybe situation though, right? As the team, it strikes me as that realising this, and I dunno if you realised it in the moment or it became obvious after you debriefed back in the hotel room or whatever the context was, but that realisation is potentially overwhelming and quite confronting because you realise at that point that your locus of control or specific area of focus, what they need is so far outside of that, it's almost like you're talking about you need to call in the social services. Like this is not the remit that you had when you engaged them for that session. And so when you think about that experience and the teams that you've led and the other research that you've been involved in, have you found that there have been any practises, stories, things that you've shared with your team to help them be more resilient in those sort of left field situations where they might get caught in places where they're not expecting that they'd be and how they could respond more effectively in those situations?
Dave Hoffer:
It's up to us to use as good a judgement as we can in whatever situations we're in. So I think that there is a lot to be learned from both your quote target when you go out to do recruiting for user research and whatever outliers you come along, or whatever outliers you plan for in the research, we're doing research on a completely separate topic at a completely separate company, trying to understand people's desire for at that time, having a hard drive, a big old hard drive, like a one terabyte hard drive or something in their home. And what would you do with it? What would you put on it? Everything else. We ran into a set of folks who we were asking, is this a question that came up a bunch of times, which says, how many DVDs do you have? And most people that we interviewed were like, oh, 15, 12, 15, 20, whatever. We ran into this couple and we're like, how many DVDs do you have? And they're like, 3000. We're like, what? We have 3000 DVDs. I'm like, you have 3000 dvs, A lot of DVDs later it came out that they had been living in China, and this is pirated material at that time,
But that's like an outlier. We weren't building a device, and I think it was a terabyte at the time, forget what was the high level capacity, but understanding how people think about the desire to, or it was like CDs, are you going to make all of those MPEs? And the answer is that would take a while. So anyway, it's really just about as long as you're safe, there's a lot to learn from of these scenarios in a way that will inform either your direct mandate for the specific product or service that you've been tasked with creating or down the road or otherwise, because you can learn from almost every situation that you're in. And that experience informs you as a designer for all of your work in different ways. This story that I told about the type two diabetes work is absolutely crucial to my mindset about that. I just think it's an important thing and I'm glad I stayed. I'm glad we ended up finishing the conversation with them. So yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm mindful of time, Dave, and to wrap things up, I've got a bit of a different direction that I'd like us to go in, and that is that I understand not that long ago that you took it upon yourself to widen your driveway, and that involved a bit of brick bricklaying. What did that experience teach you about bricklaying?
Dave Hoffer:
The experience that I had in laying brick in my driveway to widen it out was as follows, hire a professional. It was hard work. I thought I'll just watch a couple of YouTube videos and go to town. I had some extra brick, I had enough time, and it was summertime, like I'll get out in the sun. And the experience was very clearly. I was not built for manual day labour anymore. I might've been able to do that when I was 20 or 19, but I was a little too exhausted for it after an hour and a half sweat pouring from my brows. So it took me a lot longer to engage in it. The bricks, at this point, it still works, but I had to build sort of a rock wall next to the place where it is, and rocks tend to fall a little bit.
So I'm not a good rock wall builder. And the bricks have sort of settled a bit, so I clearly didn't put enough of a substrate in. I mean, what did I learn from that? Get out and work with your hands is also a good thing. It's not a bad thing to go do that. I mean, sure, hire a professional if you can hire a professional, but also just try it, right? Because plenty of ways to learn the skills, even if my version of it, which was only one set of brick laying, didn't yield particularly awesome results. It still worked. It still widened my driveway. I still had to dig a lot of dirt, lay the brick, get the sand. I mean, it was really, it fun. It was a fun experience, worthwhile, I think.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you ever find yourself looking at your driveway and thinking, gosh, I really wish I'd hired a professional?
Dave Hoffer:
Listen, here's the occupational hazard of designers, okay? You can't move in the world as a designer and not think, I wish they had done this thing differently. Look at the way this line lines up with, oh, that's not quite right. I cannot walk around in the world without applying a level of critique to the quality with which we're surrounded by what I think of as bad design or compromise, which is clearly what it was like. Well, we had to do this and we had to do this, and this is why this is like this. And if it's a physical thing, let's say the next owner of my house, let's say we go to sell our house and we're not involved, whatever. Or it's two owners down the road and they're like, why? This is terrible. Why did they do this? And they won't know the answer.
They'll just be like, this is terrible. And so I look at it every day and I'm like, oh, I wish I had done this differently and this better. So if I ever lay brick again, I'd be like, oh yeah, okay. I would know better about how to do it, but I might not engage in that level. I do like to work in my garden. I think that as designers, we should think more like gardeners and less like architects because you plant the garden and then you weed and you water and you prune and you, I mean, there's just the work is this continuous effort.
Brendan Jarvis:
And then hurricane comes through and messes the whole thing up and you've got to
Dave Hoffer:
Right, right, right. Yeah. But then you have the opportunity. It's always the opportunity in crisis, like you had a chance to replant whatever. And that's a Dan Hill thing is think like a gardener. He was working with Brian Eno for some design principles for a city he is working with, but I love that idea. Think like a gardener, not like an architect.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Dan and I spoke a few years ago, and certainly if people are listening, you want to hear another really interesting conversation. Go and check out that episode.
Come back to this idea. You obviously hired the professional and you've also spoken about before how your observation is that more organisations are starting to get the value of design. And by that I'm going to intimate the value of designers, the professionals within the organisation that make design happen. And there's been a tension over time, and we don't necessarily need to thrash this specific thing out, but everyone as a designer was a thing for a while, and I feel like that has at least fallen off the hot topics to discuss. But I've also heard you perhaps from a more strategic view frame that there's still work to be done in terms of the understanding, the true value of design and realising that, and of course every organisational culture is slightly different that we can account for that too. But when you think about that gap that you have seen in the experiences that you have had, what is the nature of that gap that still exists between how some of organisations view design and what do you believe is needed to close that?
Dave Hoffer:
So in order to close the gap, I think designers need to continue to do the good and hard work of the real design in order to prove value. It's showing up every day, it's doing the work. And that's one thing. A second thing is rising to the level in an organisation where you haven't taken the time to go out and meet the other people in the organisation with whom you'll be working or to understand their jobs, much less the business, because I think it behoves designers to get out from behind their figma screens and go learn what it is you're doing for whatever organisation you're working in, whether it's a nonprofit or a for-profit or a governmental organisation, whatever. And a lot of designers do that. So it's not no fault. And we have made strides a huge set of strides over the last 25 plus years that I've been doing this kind of work.
It went from almost nothing to, you can talk to a CEO and they're like, oh yeah, design's a really important thing. I just read this McKinsey report. Or we have a team of designers that we have about a hundred designers working on our product or whatever, but is the work done? Is the work ever done? And I think the answer is no. I think there's more education to provide. And then at the same time, businesses need to begin to think about meeting us more halfway. We've used our empathetic skills to go to a certain degree, 75% towards them. Now they need to come back towards us and at least meet us halfway. And that doesn't necessarily mean that your organisation is going to be designed driven, because some are not. And that's okay.
Brendan Jarvis:
They're the outliers that the ones that you can't serve and probably shouldn't try and save or do if you can, but it's not core to the focus that you should have
Dave Hoffer:
Maybe. But for instance, it's a fun one. I just learned today that ThoughtWorks, which is a global development firm, they primarily have done engineering development. They've written code, they started that way. Big proponents of agile, everything else have switched, and they've put a design in, it was the very first word. So we're going to design engineering and ai. I think those are the three, don't hold me to that either, but they're putting design first. Interesting. So as an example, the other thing is friend Maria has written several books on the chief design officer, the CDO, the Chief Experience officer. There are many people running around in the world who are at that level and performing at that level. And I know a bunch of them, and that's great. So there's more work to do, and it's okay that there's more work to do. Think more long-term, because I think we have to think more long-term in terms of this. There's some people who are never going to understand design or never going to understand an aspect of design, which is we don't always talk about, which is taste, right? Do you have the good taste to present a visually impressive design? And the answer is it requires an amount of taste. We don't talk about it. It's not something that's listed necessarily in design thinking.
Brendan Jarvis:
Can you measure that tafe?
Dave Hoffer:
Can you measure taste?
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm being facetious, but yes.
Dave Hoffer:
No, no, I wasn't even try to answer. Maybe
Brendan Jarvis:
You can maybe. Maybe you can. I dunno.
Dave Hoffer:
No, no. You can't measure taste. I don't think you can have taste or you can not have taste. And if you have taste and you're in charge of an organisation that's building a kind of a product, your ability to have taste and your ability to hand off to your design team, your engineers and have that taste continue. So if you're like, I mean Ferrari, there's good taste in the products that Ferrari puts out, whether they're ostentatious and expensive and of course whatever, but there's a level of taste there. There's also a lot to be said for your e Aren and you're like, you're in charge of Patagonia and you're like, look, we're going to make good practical tools and we're going to do so in a meaningful way against what our employees need and we're going to do so over the long term. That's another way to be in the world.
So again, if everything's a spectrum, as I think I've said a couple of times, there are those who are like, Nope, we're going to go strictly efficiency and we're going to automate as soon as possible. People are NPCs. Well, that's one way to be. I don't think it's particularly popular, but that's one way to be. And I think the bottom line in his organisation is tanking in terms of the car company he is. So he's going to have to think about that. But there's other people who are thinking the exact opposite and living and being the exact opposite.
Brendan Jarvis:
That is a wonderfully warm and hopeful note for us to finish on. Dave, this has been a conversation that's been a long time coming and I'm really glad that we've had it. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
Dave Hoffer:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a very good pleasure talking with you, and I hope your viewers get a lot out of this. It was a lot of fun to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
My pleasure, Dave, and I have no doubt that they will. If people are interested in keeping in contact, following your publications, connecting with you, what are some of the ways that they can do that?
Dave Hoffer:
I think the best way right now is LinkedIn. I, I'm available if you were a designer. I almost hit accept almost immediately in all instances. Happy to speak with you, but I'm happy to meet and talk with a variety of people. So reach out, happy to chat with you. I do my writing mostly on medium, but I've sort of gone back and forth between LinkedIn and Medium. So you can find me over on Medium. It's Dave Hoffer or my consultant firm is MPQD, so you can find me there as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Lovely. Thank you Dave. And to everyone else who's been tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that Dave and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Dave and all of his writings. Also, everything that we've spoken about today will be chaptered and detailed chapters so you can hop back to anything that you'd particularly like to hear.
Again, if you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review. Subscribe. So the podcast turns up every two weeks in your feed. And also if you find that there's some value in these conversations and someone might get some of that value if they were to listen to them, please pass the podcast along to them.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile in the show notes. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Dave Hoffer

Empathy, Courage, and the Future of Design

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