Design

I have often gone back to re-listen to this episode with Don Norman, in part because Don never hesitates to point out when I'm wrong.

Don Norman is world famous for his books, Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, each of which... had a huge role in popularizing many design concepts and are on the shelves of most designers.

I cannot emphasize how big the influence of these two books have been on the field of design and on me.

In this episode, Don and I get into his most recent book, Design for a Better World.

in which he argues that business leaders and designers need to shift from a purely human-centered to a humanity-centered approach to design.

He describes how we can grow thriving businesses and at the same time a sustainable world economy.

Don has done so many things in his career, they're hard to list.

He's been a professor, an industry executive, a consultant, a keynote speaker, an author, an electrical engineer, a psychologist, a cognitive scientist, a computer scientist, and of course, a designer.

Today's guest is Trevin Chow.

Treven is a product leader and builder with more than 25 years of experience in product and design, including leadership roles at Axon, Sketchy, Nike, and Microsoft.

He's also a core maintainer of Compound Engineering, a plug-in for Cloud Code, Codex, and other agent harnesses.

In this episode, we also discuss how Treven, starting with a product's goals, uses agents to explore designs before generating prototypes, what it takes to build and test skills that work across different models and coding agents, and why sharing documents and context between agents is still difficult and how Treven's open source project Energon addresses it.

Enjoy the show.

Treven, great to have you on today.

Like I'm like of the optimism case in this and I'm like never been more excited for tech in my life, I think.

This period is just so exciting.

Let's get into it.

You and your customer finally landed on the design.

They're happy, you're happy, and you're itching to actually get to the bench.

Then an email pops up.

Could you show it with a different stone? And maybe change the setting a little bit.

And there it is, that little sinking feeling in your stomach.

You're back to designing a piece you thought you'd already designed.

And here's the part I had to own.

The body in my book is called the seven habits of highly healthy women.

And then the subtitle is discover your divine design for healing vitality and wholeness.

Because we've been created by divine design to heal.

We really have.

And so after all these years of caregiving, we're still resilient.

I think the older we get, the wiser we become and more confident.

I'm more confident in my skin.

I know we are divinely designed to do anything.

So, my name is Oscar, of course.

I'm a product designer by training.

And ever since leaving university, studying product design, I've been working primarily in the medical space, medical product design, based over in London, in the UK.

And I've worked in both medical, med tech, health tech, wellness, predominantly always in a consultancy role.

We do a generation two and that's the one we commercialize or generation two isn't even the one we commercialize.

And it's more like, you know, generation three.

Does that designer kind of stay with it for the life cycle of the product? How do you look at it? I'm just out of curiosity.

Yeah, it's a great point.

But can you just tell us a little bit about your business and what you do?

Yeah, so Bloomify Design is a design business that is run by me.

I am a sole trader in that.

I do it on my own, but I have a team of people who I call upon that are freelancers.

And I create designs that invite and excite for people, places and moments.

And so that's because I really like to be varied.

I don't say I only work with this particular type of business or type of person.

So I'll quite happy to talk about it.

Posting things for Adam.

put like a nice little um reel out with all these good moments and there's just start with as well life is strange season one from uh message to loot bagger roost there's a little season one of the fender project which um no one knew what was what was being worked on there um single person this as well there's planes there's mountains there's as i said on twitter michelle co cosplaying as max caulfield um which is absolute cinema by the way mcdonald's logo is very different from the one that we have in the uk that just very slightly different Is it? Design-wise.

Yeah, it's a little bit more cartoonish than what we have here.

Of course, because your whole