S8E9: Kat Vellos

Kat Vellos is a UX designer, facilitator, and connection coach, and the author of We Should Get Together.

Vellos sees laying out the pages of an alt-weekly or designing a digital app as the same craft as facilitating meaningful conversations that lead to more durable connections or friendships:

As a facilitator, it’s about designing for the real-life, designing for experiences that human beings will have in a space, or at a certain space and time…

Whether it’s print, web, whatever, product, apps, you’re designing for an intention, which is what you want the person experiencing it to get to at the end. And so to me, it’s one and the same, and I describe it really as the art of intentionality — and that’s the practice.

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.

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S8E9: Kat Vellos

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Compassionate Design, Career Advice and Leaving 18F with Designer Ethan Marcotte

Love Letter to a Garden and 20 years of Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Redesigning the Spice Trade: Talking Turmeric and Tariffs with Diaspora Co.’s Sana Javeri Kadri

Making Space: Jon M. Chu on Designing Your Own Path