#6 AI, design, burnout and everything else

(00:00) Gavin Elliott

But I think the other side of that, Danny, which I don’t think is often done is providing the care and attention to the younger people joining the industry. It’s like, fend for yourself, do a good job, execute.

(00:08) Danny

you

(00:14) Gavin Elliott

but there’s no care in it. There’s largely no care and attention that’s provided to them on both a personal and a professional level.

(00:30) Danny

Gavin, hello. It’s good to have you on. Thank you for agreeing to do this. But for those that don’t know you, I sort of wrote like a little, you know, design a victory. But yeah, I know it’s weird, isn’t it? But I kind of just feel, I was checking someone else earlier today, it’s like, it sort of helps people understand like the context that you’re speaking from. So I was having a look at your LinkedIn.

(00:32) Gavin Elliott

Hello.

No problem at all.

(00:58) Danny

And you started in the British Army, which I thought was very interesting, as a mechanic and a gaming editor running an online team. You’re going have to ask about that. And then you’ve worked in startups and agencies, and you’ve gone right up to leading big teams at DWP and Shopify. And you’re now working as a chief design officer at Scrum Connect. And I guess it’s a journey that you’ve

(01:01) Gavin Elliott

I most certainly did.

Yeah.

(01:25) Danny

Looking at that, would say that you’d like spans of grassroots design and then leadership at scale and then also working at like building communities, industry conf along the way. Is that a good description of your journey so far?

(01:30) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

You know what? That is, that’s

probably the most exceptional journey description I’ve heard so far, Danny. Cause it’s even hard for me to try and comprehend what’s gone on.

(01:48) Danny

It’s

the fourth one I’ve done where I’ve tried to look at someone’s career and sum it up in a paragraph. But in that career, is it… Well, I’ve got to ask. Gaming editor? What gaming was that?

(02:04) Gavin Elliott

So back in 1999 maybe? The thing was probably between 1999 and 2001 or something to that degree. A friend of mine, Andrew, who’s fantastically talented.

decided that he was going to create an application called NVMax, which would overclock graphics cards. So we’re talking like ATI graphics cards and the video graphics cards back then. And I think that might have been another version. And he created this Windows application that would overclock graphics cards and he was doing really well. And he basically built a website and a forum, PHP BB maybe back in the days like old school.

(02:30) Danny

yeah.

I remember. Yeah, yeah.

(02:50) Gavin Elliott

And it garnered a community around it because there was lots of younger folks, especially who were all into this overclocking and making sure that the graphics cards could do more and make the machines better and stuff. And then he and I as 16 to 17 year olds, maybe around that was sat in the local pub enjoying a cold one and talking about the fact, because we were trying to test them.

(03:01) Danny

Yeah.

⁓

(03:20) Gavin Elliott

and then Nvidia and so on would just go, well, just keep them. So, you know, that was, they were like two and a half grand, three grand back in the day. So a very young person could make a lot of money from getting free graphics cards to test against, to then review and, know, he wasn’t selling the app. It was just everybody would use it. And then we had a conversation about, hang on, we do loads of stuff with hardware.

but we don’t do anything around the games part, even though that’s the whole point of overclocking a graphics card. And Andrew and I, he basically said, look, I don’t have the time. I’m doing all the stuff with building the app and the hardware reviews. And by this point we might be in a couple of pints in. And then I’d said, well, I could do that. And he said, no, you couldn’t. And then after a drunk man walk home,

(04:01) Danny

You

Yeah.

(04:09) Gavin Elliott

realized that there was a list available online with every single games developer and publishers marketing persons email address and contact details.

So obviously 1130 at night after a few swift ones, I had to start emailing folks and just saying, we’ve got this website, Envy Max, and then start to get literally the following morning, getting replies from all of these big publishers saying, absolutely, I’ll send you out the…

(04:26) Danny

yeah.

(04:40) Gavin Elliott

development version of Battlefield 1942, which was EA at the time. And then that just steamrolled and totally snowboard. So Andrew would handle the ⁓ hardware side of Envy Max.

(04:43) Danny

Yeah. Yeah.

(04:53) Gavin Elliott

I handled the gaming part and the reviews and basically we ended up with so many games being sent our way. I ended up managing a team of about five people from around the world. one in France, one in Germany, one in Spain, one in Canada and one in the US. So I would get the games and then have to send them straight back out. And then we went from just PC to Xbox and other platforms and it just got bigger and bigger. We weren’t even in university at this point. It was just for fun.

(05:21) Danny

Wow, wow, isn’t it? So, you know, a small-time passion, just sort of, it’s kind of just mushroomed out into something global.

(05:30) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

And it was pre kind of like, was pre any type of, well, any social media for that fact. was, know, YouTube wasn’t around back then, but my, my old, you know, Andrew and I still read good friends now and we always talk occasionally when, know, when we’re out having yet another swift one or a beer and see, imagine if we’d done that like five years later.

when there was social media and there were platforms like YouTube or Twitch or others and being able to promote it that way, it would have been a lot more monetarily beneficial.

because of the viewership and stuff. were solely, people had to come and find us and read the site, but we had, I think the forum probably got to about 10,000 people. We lost the database three or four times and had to restart the whole thing again and again and again. ⁓ But yeah, it was incredible. And just after then he went to university and I ended up joining the army. So we just kind of went, well, we’ll just leave it and just let it go.

(06:09) Danny

Yeah.

just wow what

what an interesting beginning into you know some form of a career and then that you know has completely morphed into lots of other things. Do you think there’s been a thread that’s connected right up from that early experience right up to now? Is there anything that you can connect or is it completely abstract?

(06:42) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

quarterly just the internet. think, you know, I think my original email address ever was created in late 94, maybe 95, which is early, ⁓ almost to the point where it…

(07:05) Danny

That’s early. Yeah.

(07:10) Gavin Elliott

the first time I ever used the internet. I didn’t even know what an email address was. I was trying to put an email address into the URL bar because at that point I was a young kid and didn’t know, but the internet hooked me. Like I was in, I was all in. So it was a case of, right, how can this be utilized?

(07:15) Danny

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember like going on dial-up and stuff. This is going to sound really odd to the younger crowd. Like, you know, you press the dial-up and it goes in and then it’s like, I would actually be feeling like, okay, I’m like on the internet, you know, and it would be this kind of exciting, really like really exciting thing of like, what can I type? Like, I’m going to, you know, I’m going to this website, you know, and then it takes ages to come up but…

Like I actually felt like, and it would be like, okay, I’m go on for half an hour today, you know, in the evening, you know, because it costs and mum wanted the lineback, you know, but there was, it was quite a, quite, I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine really like that era, you know, and now it’s so ubiquitous and accessible and it’s around us everywhere. But back then it was quite…

(08:10) Gavin Elliott

Yeah, tawny.

I do wonder

whether, you know, the way that we viewed it back then, which was that excitement, it was, you know, ⁓ my word, this is going to cost a fortune if I stay on for an hour. You know, even like, what was it like, Tiscali, Compuserve, AOL, AOL MailSound and all of that type of stuff. And I do wonder, is the way that younger folks use AI now, do they get the same level of like,

(08:27) Danny

Yeah.

(08:47) Gavin Elliott

or has technology become so normalized that it’s almost an expectation that it’s there and it does these things anyway? Is AI as exciting to younger people as the internet was to us when we were younger? And what does that mean? Or is it just a level of expectation where it should just do the things?

(08:52) Danny

you

you

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I guess because for us it was like a frontier and it was exciting and we weren’t having to like relearn anything. It was like a discovery. Whereas I feel like what we’re having to do now and a lot of people, know, as designers and practitioners is reimagine, resort, you know, go through a whole range of emotions of fear, grief, terror, excitement of like…

What on earth does this new frontier mean for me? Maybe if you’re young, it’s like, cool, man, you know, this is all good stuff. But if you’ve like got a mortgage, got some kids, you know, whatever, and then the AI stuff comes along, and the market’s just a total shit show, and you’re just like, this doesn’t all feel good.

(09:58) Gavin Elliott

Yeah. I mean, there’s,

you know, we, we recently ran like a little bit of an AI camp at Scrum Connect. We had some youngsters ranging from about 14, 15 upwards to about 18 and they’d come in for a week and work on various different projects. And this, this was after I’d already started getting into the kind of indie hacker building public space where I mean, and that’s mostly on X by the way. And I was never

(10:07) Danny

Thank

(10:26) Gavin Elliott

post acquisition by a certain somebody. I was never a massive proponent of Twitter and then X because of the way that I kind of fell off. And our, what we would describe as our community pretty much left the platform, right? It was definitely not, was back in the like early 2010s where it was so affluent and stuff. But there’s, you you come across younger people who have…

(10:28) Danny

okay,

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was so different, wasn’t it? Yeah.

(10:54) Gavin Elliott

every opportunity and more and take it as well to just build and it’s almost like that youthful naivety of so what if it fails whereas I think when we’ve gotten older and adults in general always become like well you know we’ve went through hardship we would never want to go through hardship ever again so we’ll just not do that because there’s too much risk involved whereas I think the youthful naivety part is so let’s just enjoy it and build

(11:05) Danny

Mm.

(11:24) Gavin Elliott

something and do something because it’ll be fun.

(11:27) Danny

Is that is and that’s that’s a really good bridge actually because With AI like you you kind of been Bringing that energy into it. Like I don’t see you as someone that has had Seemingly a lot of fear like you’ve you’ve run into it, right? I for those who don’t know Gavin’s got Quite a few websites. I think ⁓ and one of them I was having a play with was GPT rapper

(11:54) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm. Yep.

(11:55) Danny

which maybe you want to just explain what that is so people who don’t know like someone that is.

(11:57) Gavin Elliott

Yeah, cool. I think,

let me give some context first of… And this is something that I was… I’ll try not to get too preachy about. So when I was at Shopify, Toby, the CEO, very, very early on, set the stage, although it wasn’t the one that he ended up setting a little bit later, which has more recently been in the news, know, AI’s here, we’re going to explore it.

I would implore everybody and I’m paraphrasing so these aren’t exactly Toby’s words but it’s basically what the kind of guys was. I implore everybody just to explore and see what it is. And I think a lot of folks could go, no, I don’t wanna be involved. It’s gonna take our jobs, everything else involved. And this was like the earlier days, right? So this is early chat GPT, early open AI, mid journey, ⁓ Dolly and others.

I can make images, pictures, and I was, I decided that would go all in on mid journey and explore it to the nth degree of what its capabilities were. Normal me would have went, I’ll feel secure over here and I’m going to stick in my beliefs and stuff. And I think that then set the stage for later last year where I…

started to look at the potential for a YouTube channel entirely created out of AI. Scripts, video, imagery, voiceover, the whole kitten caboodle. And more so because I was heading towards Christmas. I’m terrible in holidays, by the way. I don’t holiday very well. I don’t do breaks very well. And we’ll probably get into the reason why in a little bit. But I thought I’m going to create, I’m going to use AI every single day whilst I’m off.

(13:29) Danny

Right.

Mm.

(13:52) Gavin Elliott

and I will create a video every single day for 90 days I think it was and see how it goes. It’s hard work at the beginning. think there’s so much like process and scripts and you know research and stuff but it worked right and within 25 days or something there was a YouTube channel there which was growing considerably over time and it monetized I think within about 40 days.

(14:02) Danny

Yeah.

Really?

Really? What kind of hits were you getting? How many, how many?

(14:25) Gavin Elliott

So it went from, think it was an exit. So I will caveat and say it was an existing channel channel because of a random video that I put up 12 years ago and got some viewage. No. So it went from like 900 subscribers up to about three and a half thousand in about two months. So it jumped quite considerably. It was yet, but yeah, and then even monetized at about 2000 subs.

(14:33) Danny

Yeah, not significant.

Really? Is that monetized at that point?

(14:53) Gavin Elliott

And not a lot, man, you’re talking like 15 P a day. So it’s nothing exciting. But it proved a point that the capability was there. I thought, wow, this is crazy. And then the likes of Curzer and Replet were around. So I kind of danced into Replet and I’ve written about this on the blog as well. I danced into Replet and for some reason I just couldn’t sit with it. And it just didn’t really sit with the way that my brain worked and how I could function with it. Stepped away, thought.

(14:53) Danny

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. But… Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Mm. Mm.

(15:23) Gavin Elliott

I’m never going to be able to build things because my brain is very much design and product orientated. And I’ve always felt limited by the engineering side. Like I could definitely think about the way something work. I could definitely think about the way it should be designed, but trying to build it, I’ve always wanted to try and partner with somebody to build it and stuff. you know, trying to do that with somebody else is always hard, time limits and stuff like that. And then cursor, well, myself and cursor became best friends.

(15:41) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, we just become acquainted this summer.

(15:56) Gavin Elliott

And then, what was the first thing? ⁓ so the first, hilariously, the best thing, the first thing, sorry, was bestaithings.com, which was just a website which showcased all of the best AI things on the web. And I hooked it up with sanity as a CMS, put a load of content into it, and it’s just sat there on the internet now. Re-did a couple of other personal projects and then kind of got into what are the opportunities now. Through a random conversation with my other half.

She was talking about colour guides and colour analysis based on your face, complexion, skin, eye colour, all that type of stuff. And folks pay for this stuff, like £25 in Facebook group or £250 in person. Maybe me, hold my beer, I bet you I could build this. Four days later, there was a working prototype, seven days later, it was an app on the web. Web app.

(16:44) Danny

You

iOS app or web app?

Yeah.

(16:53) Gavin Elliott

because

I wanted to circumvent iOS taking money. So I published it, it’s made no money whatsoever. It gets a little bit of traffic, that’s about it. But I thought that’s not an issue for me right now because the amount of confidence I’m building in being able to build and think through MVP, feature sets, and product work.

(16:55) Danny

Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was thinking. That’s really hard. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

(17:17) Gavin Elliott

requirements, documents, all that type of stuff. That’s galldust. Like that’s really hard to build up in a very short space of time.

(17:24) Danny

And value, like, do you think that’s, because I’ve been seeing, you reminded me earlier, like, I think I saw a post someone said, the best thing a designer can do is take six months off and just go deep in AAI and learn how to build things. And when I looked at your websites, I was like, that looks like that’s kind of what he’s just done, you know, and gone deep. could you summarize, like, what’s the difference between you and me? So I…

I’ve spent a bit of time in cursor. I built one web app like a GPT chatbot with a front end. That’s as much as I’ve done. And you’ve obviously done lot more than me. Like what can you, what can you, what’s, what’s your capability in AI? What can you actually do that someone who’s fairly new to it couldn’t do?

(18:12) Gavin Elliott

You know what, oddly enough, I’m gonna say they’re absolutely equal. There’s nothing that you can’t do and there’s nothing that I can’t do. So yes, and I think that comes down to the way that you utilize cursor. So in terms of the prompts that you would put together, I would put them together possibly a little bit better. I can communicate.

(18:18) Danny

quickly and not without pain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

(18:38) Gavin Elliott

with cursor and potentially a little bit better way. What you won’t have is 30 different agents who I call on at any given moment to give me the best direction on doing something. And that could be a backend, you know, dev architect. It could be all sorts. Yeah. Yeah.

(18:53) Danny

You.

You set up 30 agents that all do slightly different things. So

you don’t have to go into a clean GPT prompt and then do the setup. You can just bung in some code, bung in a question, and it already knows the context and just gives it back. You spit it back into cursor. Interesting, interesting, very interesting. ⁓

(19:14) Gavin Elliott

And that wasn’t

even meant for cursor, by the way, somebody actually put the, think there was 20 of them, 20 agents and it was meant for Claude code. I went, I wonder if I can put those into cursor. And I did, but then a more recent project that I’ve started because I’m now on the eighth one. ⁓ I realized that in order to benefit that project, there might be more agents be required. So then I had to create another.

(19:21) Danny

Right.

(19:42) Gavin Elliott

seven agents which were different to the 20 odd beforehand so now there’s like 30 in total and all of them do something different but all of them through cursor communicate with each other.

(19:45) Danny

⁓ god.

And an agent really is just a very sort of thoughtful prompt that it’s set up with essentially, right? And then that means when you open it up, you can just bung something in, you don’t have to say, what I want you to do is you can just turn that in. do you do you know I think like, there’s something that that the human side of it aside for a minute, because that is real. And I’m still trying to work out, you know, how I feel about it, like

(19:57) Gavin Elliott

Yeah. Yeah.

(20:20) Danny

people are going to be upended and all that. isn’t it like we found a solution and now we’re trying to find problems? And do you know what I mean? you know, design thinking is like, that’s what we’re supposed to do. Do know what mean? Like, here’s a cool thing. What can we build? Like it feels wrong.

(20:29) Gavin Elliott

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah,

totally. It’s so odd. had this conversation just a few days with somebody and I said, the way in which we are going about things is now going to feel really strange because we’re doing things in the wrong way. Because of the speed at which we can get to an MVP, we’re getting to the end of theoretically the end of the MVP and then jumping back to the beginning again and almost…

(21:06) Danny

This is the Homer Simpson car,

isn’t it? The thing that’s going around where it’s like you start with the Homer Simpson car and then you work your way back to perfection, rather than the agile with the skateboard and going up. Do you think that’s why research and discovery is getting pummeled right now?

(21:10) Gavin Elliott

Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

It’s funny, you know, because even if you speak to like the, and I still, I’m still very much a part of the kind of indie hack I build in public community. And there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people now from around the world who are very much using cursor, replet and lovable and all of the others to create products. The biggest,

fall that those folks do is think that they’ve got a great idea, build a great idea, and then realize, hang on, where are the users? And is this even fit for purpose, right? And then they have to start asking all of the questions that we would ask as part of a discovery.

(22:14) Danny

These are like cheap startup fails. Normally a startup fail might have cost 80,000 with VC investment and taken six months. Now they’re failing in a week of cursor.

(22:27) Gavin Elliott

Yeah, or hours, or hours. Because I think, you know, whereas the only kind of near direct analogy that I can give to this is, you know the folks who do online marketing and use PPC to test ideas. It’s a bit of that. So you can build a product in four hours, six hours, as a bare bones MVP that looks okay enough.

(22:30) Danny

Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

(22:57) Gavin Elliott

you could stick some ads on to direct traffic to that thing. See if it works.

(23:03) Danny

Is there going to be a disparity for people that aren’t on this train? Because like the picture that came to my head when you’re saying like there’s a whole community around the world, people chucking out apps and just grinding it through, you know, all these different AIs and stuff. then I know like I’m on a gig at the moment and it’s like, you know, and in GDS and stuff like that, there’s a whole cohort of designers and people that aren’t on that train.

Like they’re not, they might be using copilot to, you know, like help with an email or something like that, but they’re not, they’re not doing this type of stuff we’re talking about. Like, do you think there’s a danger for some people that if they’re not on that train, it’s like suddenly the train’s gonna stop, gets to the of the tracks. And it’s like, you don’t know how to do AI. And it’s like, they’ve got to like retrain, reskill, and they’re out the market for six months, two years, like retraining. Am I being dramatic or?

(23:51) Gavin Elliott

Yeah. ⁓

No, I don’t think that is dramatic at all. I think, you know, there’s been various LinkedIn posts that I’ve put out basically imploring everybody who, you know, might follow me or is connected to me to just engage with it and see where they get to with it. I think there’s a little bit of added context around the public sector and GDS and folks that have worked in that world where

This may be known or unknown. don’t really know because obviously I was in the world for five plus years as part of being at DWP and UK HSA and stuff. Yeah, I was in deep. So in the early days, and it wasn’t the earliest days of GDS, but it was 2015 onwards, the interaction designers that we were hiring, including me, were interaction designers that were prototyping and designing in code. We had the GovUK prototype kit, or GDS prototype kit.

(24:31) Danny

You went deep. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s pretty heavy.

(24:51) Gavin Elliott

and we had some components which we could just grab some HTML, CSS, bit of JavaScript and start hooking things together. For years, probably one or two years, inherently every single interaction designer that we were hiring could code to a degree where they were putting prototypes together. When we scaled, so we went from like, I think I joined the team when we were probably about 14 or 15.

When we scaled up towards towards 50 designers at TWP, which was a big team, you then start to get to this threshold where the other departments are starting to grow as well. Well, there’s only a finite number of designers or interaction designers that can code in the UK. Then we’d shift focus and I think we had like a sketch prototype and template kit. And then when Figma became a little bit more prevalent, one of those was created too.

but the precedent was always to try and get folks to Right, so that’s one thing. think where we are now is there’s probably more designers, not more, a lot more designers in the public sector who probably don’t code as much. This is their literal perfect opportunity to be able to do it to a degree where you can build a prototype using it because it’ll reference the prototype kit.

(25:47) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

(26:13) Gavin Elliott

straight away, it’ll do it in 60 seconds. It’ll build something that you just go, give me a service that does this. It’ll build it out. And then you’re again, doing what you said, refining it by going backwards to then go forwards again.

(26:27) Danny

Well, and those agents will love all that documentation that’s been painstakingly built over the years. They’ll just hoover that up and then just knock out fairly compliant ⁓ prototypes. Yeah, so that’s a good way then, perhaps, for people who might not be in the slick, fast world in the private sector, who might be in GDS and might be in big projects to find a way. ⁓

haven’t already thought of that, they might well be doing it already, is to use prototyping as a way to really tool up because it’s coming, isn’t it? I feel like, yeah, I can feel like the wave is kind of right behind my head right now. I’m like, oh, I don’t want to get caught.

(26:56) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, even to reference the type of like private sector side. So think any large private sector organization or company that’s been around for a while. I mean, it doesn’t have to even be for him for a while, but if it’s got a design system and that’s being converted from the likes of Figma into code. So, you know, you’ve got a couple of engineering teams or an engineering team that can do that.

If that can be documented appropriately, which wouldn’t be a surprise if AI could do that too, and it can be referenced by the likes of cursor, then, I’m not being funny, but designers start becoming prompt engineers fairly quickly.

(27:53) Danny

Can you help me understand? I’m with you. I’m with you. I get that. I’m with that narrative. Why on earth is the market obsessed with people that are very good at Figma who they want the generalists, they want people that can do all this, but really what they want are Figma monkeys that are very good at Figma. And like, I don’t understand this obsession with like, there’s this whole thing about taste and all this kind of thing. And I’m just thinking AI is just going to rinse that out. Like being good at Figma is going to mean nothing.

like it doesn’t seem like a skill and yet right now it’s like prized possession in all the kind of product design roles I see like it’s always about that and I think isn’t that the first thing to go whereas the soft skills of stakeholder management you know understanding complex problems difficult people dealing in conflict all that kind of stuff that’s in the market is like yeah that’s important but Figma

And I’m just like, I don’t get it. Because I’m just like, the narrative you’re giving, I’m just like, I can’t see where being good at visual design is going to be that important. Am I missing something?

(28:59) Gavin Elliott

Yeah,

so let me play that back and I might ask you a couple of questions and see what your thoughts are. where do we start? So Figma.

(29:10) Danny

Yeah.

(29:11) Gavin Elliott

It’s

a tool, right? And I mean, everybody that knows me knows that I’ve had some level of gripe or complaint about Figma being talked about a lot, right? Because it’s a tool. We design in multiple different ways. I’ve written recently about prototype, sorry, code prototyping is always the way to go. It comes with its restrictions. Let’s just see.

What you won’t get out of AI is style. You won’t get uniqueness. You won’t get strong brand. You’ll get ideas. And it’ll be referenced off where it gets that information from. So a lot of folks say to me, all of the sites look like Tailwind. Of course it does. Cursor references Tailwind in most projects. It looks like ShadCDN.

(30:01) Danny

Yeah

(30:06) Gavin Elliott

Of it does, because it’s referencing that. That’s what it’s creating the thing with. It knows it because it’s documented it it’s got the documentation for it.

So it’s always going to have that as its base. So I think.

Figma has been around for so long prior to AI and all of that, that it’ll stay for longer. And that’s where the uniqueness comes from. So then I’ll ask you the question, where do you think the industry is going to go in the next one or two years in terms of…

(30:29) Danny

Yeah.

(30:43) Gavin Elliott

what we would have ordinarily designed, know, back in the day we would call them UI designers or visual designers and then that kind of like seeped away and we ended up with UX design and then product design. But I’ll pose to you the question, where do you think the industry is going to go given where we are at the moment?

(30:52) Danny

Yeah, yeah.

I take your point on taste, but GPT-7, GPT-8, is taste still going to be that hard to fame? So where my bet is, and that’s probably the best way to answer this question because what am I doing about it, right? I’m splitting my strategy as an individual in this market froth.

is to go in two directions. One is I’m leaning into service design, partly because I don’t think you can AI all of that stuff. There’s too many people, there’s too many data points, there’s too much mess, there’s too much confusion. A lot of it’s in people’s heads. There isn’t APIs you can plug into. And I think it needs, it’s a lot about like getting people to understand what’s happening collectively. And that requires, you know,

facilitation, workshops, all that kind of thing. that’s strategy one is be well positioned for working off screen and with people. And then strategy two is a little bit what you’re doing, which is that I’m building things with AI and I’m learning how to do that and prototype and I’ve been playing with cursor and building a few things. So I’m kind of hedging my bet in two directions and I’m hoping that I’ll land somewhere at the end of it.

(32:06) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm.

(32:30) Danny

and just answer your question.

(32:30) Gavin Elliott

⁓ Yeah,

totally. you know, having come from, you know, started back in the, what did we even call each other as designers? And then it was UX design and then, you know, moved into interaction design and then service design. And then obviously I became the head of interaction and service design at DWP. So.

(32:44) Danny

Yeah.

(32:55) Gavin Elliott

There’s a definitive challenge that especially large organizations are going to face if they’re not facing it already. And they’ve probably faced it already, right? Whereas, you know, design debt, if we talk about that. The faster that we move with practitioners, because we will get on probably the subject of managers being far less on the scene now as we’ve probably seen them over the past few years.

when there are a lot of practitioners doing probably really good work potentially in isolation at the speed which they can move because of the technology advancements that are happening now and will happen even faster in the future. One of the largest, if not the biggest problems that will occur is what I would describe as something called frayed edges around design itself.

(33:46) Danny

Mm.

(33:47) Gavin Elliott

So things will exponentially grow. Platforms will get incredibly larger. The product and feature set will grow again exponentially. They’ll grow in a different ways, but the Freight Edges will probably grow as well. Things won’t be joined up as much. End to end service design, right? The service design degradation will increase because of the output of what we’ve described as UX design or interaction design or product design.

(34:04) Danny

that’s service design right?

(34:17) Gavin Elliott

just because of the speed at which things are moving. You know, there’s a lot of companies that have gone enterprise, the moment that you even whisper enterprise, you’re beholden to other things. You’re beholden to share price, so on. ⁓ And that changes things significantly. So service design, private sector, service design’s really still unheard of.

(34:29) Danny

you

Yeah.

(34:43) Gavin Elliott

They just talk about and describe it in different ways. We didn’t even use the phrase service design. So hence I use the phrase Freed Edges to talk about where things weren’t as joined up as what they could be. linking together different features which should be more joined up. ⁓

(34:45) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So

do you think my bet’s a good bet, or do you think that I’m doomed? What do you think?

(35:12) Gavin Elliott

No, no, no, I think it’s

no, it’s a solid. It’s a solid shout. I think. Yeah, I won’t get that. Yeah, it’s not going to be able to. mean, it would look at it across an entire code base, but it’s not going to look at it from the perspective of a user. It’s too messy.

(35:21) Danny

Yeah.

It’s too messy. just yeah,

I’m sure at some point and I did think, well, I’m talking about loads of stakeholders, maybe there aren’t going to be loads of stakeholders, you know, and that’s that’s zero point and I can’t I just can’t think that far ahead. I wanted to and this has been like really fascinating and I could talk about this more but there’s the few other topics that I really wanted to talk to you about. And like I think one, all of what we’re talking about, you know, with change and uncertainty like I think

something that I, the reason I started this podcast really was like, partly in response to AI, because I just saw so much like AI slosh on, you know, on LinkedIn and all these like posts of people being so sure about things and asserting stuff, and and not having that like, maybe like, we don’t know, maybe we’re just making it up. And I know in in my life, I’ve had periods of real uncertainty and

lack of confidence and and that eventually led to like a burnout for me and like really affected you know, I had to take take about a year off and go down and live my mum for a bit and had to really try and like sort out lot of things that were really affecting me because I was just feeling in my in my life just like a bit lost, you know, and I didn’t really have a direction and that was like in the middle of my career. And things weren’t that bad market wise back then, you know, and I think now like what

must a lot of people be going through with all this like uncertainty and the way the world’s going. I just wondered like, cause I’ve seen that you’ve done a bit of talking about that as well publicly about burnout in design and what do you think people, would you like to speak about some of that experience that you’ve had?

(37:15) Gavin Elliott

Yeah, I think it’s really important. So for those that don’t know, who are listening in, many years ago, 2017, I started talking about imposter syndrome a lot. Ended up taking a talk on a bit of a tour, spoke, you know, did about 120 plus speaking gigs about imposter syndrome pre-COVID. But I think there was a lot linked in with that imposter syndrome.

side of things where everywhere I took that talk there were people in their droves who equally thought that they were an imposter and until you start to raise the conversation everybody just hides and feels like an imposter and doesn’t feel confident ⁓ yeah I was I was my own worst enemy

(38:03) Danny

Is that what you did?

(38:10) Gavin Elliott

in terms of imposter syndrome. By the way, it’s not a syndrome. It’s just a reaction of feelings to certain environmental effects and things which are can be massively negative as part of the like work and environment, but can also affect you personally as well. And it doesn’t matter who it is. think we in this industry are generally classed as high achieving individuals.

(38:18) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(38:39) Gavin Elliott

So we put on ourselves so much pressure to do a good job, to, know, indirectly or egotistically, not because we want to, to be better than everybody else around us.

(38:52) Danny

Yeah.

(38:53) Gavin Elliott

and then turn it into a competition and then think, well, they’re better than me, so I need to be better than them. It could be anybody, right? But it turns into a bit of a sick game because then you’re chasing something that you might never actually achieve or meet because you’re just playing in a constant competition with somebody that you’re right or left. Rather than kind of focusing on yourself and understanding what the expectations are of you as a professional. Like you’ve mentioned soft skills.

(38:58) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(39:22) Gavin Elliott

How often do we talk about soft skills in our industry?

(39:26) Danny

⁓ You don’t see it very often on CVs. Well, on the job ads at all.

(39:32) Gavin Elliott

It’ll be five or six little pieces in somebody’s CV off to the left hand side where they’ve got soft skills and they’re generally never assessed.

(39:38) Danny

managing stakeholders or something.

(39:43) Gavin Elliott

yet it can be the biggest part of somebody’s role. And if you get those wrong, it doesn’t matter how good you are as a practitioner, because if you can’t communicate with your team, if you can’t communicate the thing that you’re designing in the first place, if you can’t get on with people or get stakeholder buy-in or sell design as a good thing, it doesn’t really matter.

(39:47) Danny

Hmm.

Yeah, then, I think that’s so interesting because a lot of what I’m seeing, and you’ve written about this as well, I think we got on some big LinkedIn thing about outcomes on CVs and business outcomes on CVs. I find it really difficult because it’s kind of like, well, I contributed many times in a team by summarizing what I could see that.

perhaps others couldn’t see, I could join some dots together and say like, replay it back. And I would do that in a lot of different ways. that simple act helped align the team and move them all forward, which then enabled them to get a business outcome. Can I say that I’m responsible for that 2 % increase in conversion? Like, it’s absurd. Like, I was a part of it, but I can’t, to put that on my CV that I’m like 2 % uplift.

I think that only works if you’re like a founding designer for a SaaS, you know, with like three people in the team, then you can say, it was me, but do you know what I mean?

(41:02) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, I think it’s really hard. ⁓ And just, because I don’t want to kind of just neglect the fact that we’ve just mentioned Burnout but didn’t really talk about it. ⁓

(41:19) Danny

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

(41:24) Gavin Elliott

Burnout’s real and it can affect anybody at any given moment in time and it’s really hard. And when I suffered from burnout, which was in 2020 or 2021, I think it was, I didn’t even see it because I think the natural reaction to burnout coming at you is to run faster towards it because you’re trying to prove

(41:49) Danny

Mmm.

(41:52) Gavin Elliott

that you are better, good enough, working hard, all that type of stuff. And battling against the environment, the people, product, whatever it might be, you just keep running to make something better. But actually that level of investment that we naturally have as designers because of the way that we naturally are can actually be our biggest or own worst enemy. I don’t know about you, but for me, burnout meant ⁓ couldn’t sleep.

at all, felt ill, stopped eating, felt such a lack of confidence in my own ability where if anybody had seen me that, some of us sat in the garden just staring at the sky for hours on end, had no idea what to do apart from cry, to be quite honest, because I’d lost who I was. I didn’t understand my own ability or anything else. One of the…

don’t know if I should mention the name or not. Somebody who I know, who I randomly called on to see if they could identify the symptoms that I was feeling, identified them within 20 seconds.

and sent me a sheet, a PDF with the three stages of burnout, which was a research report from Buffalo, I think was Buffalo University in the States. And it describes the three stages of burnout and each individual part that happens. And I could have ticked every single box, bar one at the very end. What I would say is that person sending me that document and speaking with me for about 45 minutes saved me from myself.

(43:21) Danny

Mm.

Really?

Yeah.

(43:38) Gavin Elliott

was the most amazing conversation because of the fact that I heard, understood, and then out of that from the other side, one of the other best things that happened was one, taking some time just to reflect and realize that I was good enough.

(43:45) Danny

Yeah.

you

(43:58) Gavin Elliott

and I did know what I was doing and you know by that point I was the head of interaction services I mean you know built the team up to like 79 or whatever it was by the time I’d left the DWP and I didn’t know what to do next because I thought the only way for me to get

like peace with the fact that I did know that I was good enough and I did know what my capabilities were, were to move on to something else into a different environment. So I did do that.

And I will mention this person because I think it’s that valuable because the other one’s a little bit more personal, but this one’s Andy Budd, who I still speak to to this day. Andy gave me what I would describe as a bit of an olive branch to a certain degree of introducing me to a couple of different people. The conversations that came from those introductions enabled me to speak about my experience.

(44:44) Danny

Yeah, same.

(45:04) Gavin Elliott

within three of those conversations, you walk away and you’re like, hang on a second, I do know what I’m talking about. I’ve just given them loads of advice. And you’re like, hey, this is, then it’s like, hang on, I do know, I am good enough. But we never do that, Danny. Like, I mean, I can still remember when we did the ⁓ retreat.

(45:20) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(45:28) Gavin Elliott

The reflection that we did in those rooms were deep.

(45:31) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s really, it’s really interesting listening to you. And I do remember that we, for people that I know, we went on a clear left retreat in the Cots world, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a real period of reflection just before the pandemic as well. Thank you for sharing that. Like I, I can resonate on so many levels, you know, with my burnout experience of like…

(45:44) Gavin Elliott

I’ll you.

(46:00) Danny

I was just starting to ascend. Like I was, I just started work at this agency and I was starting to like rise and they were putting me on more gigs. And meanwhile, I wasn’t sleeping and I would, I would come in like utterly wired. Like I could barely concentrate and I was fighting my head to try and focus at me, you know, and I’ve got like a client coming in and you know, I’m all over the shop and I was sort of just about managed to hold it together and they’re like, yeah, yeah, we want to keep you working here and all this kind of thing.

And it just hit the buffers after like three days. I think I had three days without sleep. And I was just like, I can’t do this. know, like I was just all over the shop and I went home, you know, I was saying earlier to live with my mom, just thought I’d be there for two weeks. I didn’t, unlike you, didn’t have any signposting or any support. Like I didn’t know what was wrong. You know, I just did all these tests and everything. And in the end, the doctor was just like.

probably got ME and you might be like this for a decade. And I just remember thinking like, oh my God, like my life is over. I remember thinking, well, I had a bit of a run, I suppose. you know, like I just thought that was it. And I had like, I’d say like four or five months, quite dark, dark time of just feeling like it’s over. Like that’s it, my life is over. And it was quite amazing actually. There was a thing called the lightning process, which they,

(47:09) Gavin Elliott

you

(47:26) Danny

people with ME and chronic fatigue kind of get into and there’s this controversy about it, about it being money making and all this. And I was like, I don’t care. If it works, I’ll pretend it works. That was my attitude. So I went and did it. ⁓ you know what, there was, this is quite, I’ve never actually shared this anymore. Part of the exercise was is that you, whenever you get a negative thought that you’re feeling fatigued, you have to think, ⁓ you have to say to yourself, stop.

(47:40) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

(47:57) Danny

and say it and you have to calibrate how you said stop. So you’d be like, stop, stop like that in your head. And then you would encourage yourself that you can do this. And then you think of a memory when you did something that was the antithesis of how you feel. And in the workshop that I did with this lady, she was like, can you think of a time when you felt really confident and all this? And I can remember when I was at work and it was when I was at EuroStar.

(48:04) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm.

(48:27) Danny

It was a late one, I was there with my boss, we were both on the phone to a supplier and there’s a bit of ego in this but the supplier had pointed out that this is the work they’d done and I managed to see something, a big gap in their work and I was arguing with the guy and eventually he conceded and I looked at my boss and I just went like that and he laughed and he’s holding the thing and that moment for me just felt so like I felt…

There’s certainly ego in that, but I felt like really like, wow, my boss, you know, he’s really cool. And he saw me like do something really good. And that was the memory. And I just thought I am like really capable. And surely I could use that to get out of this situation. That was what I did. And I thought, and as soon as I thought that, I well, I’m going to go fucking design, but on my health. And so I just applied that mental exercise hundreds of times a day.

(48:57) Gavin Elliott

Hmm.

(49:19) Danny

with an obsession and then that started to kind of lift this ache and fatigue that I had and it was quite a long journey back but it was really right back to you know that memory that helps me just like you’re saying like I had a moment of yeah like I am okay like I can do things you know so yeah I can really share a similar journey with that.

(49:39) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

You know what? The one thing that I would take out of that, which is something that I kind of used to preach about inside of the imposter syndrome talk is self awareness. And there’s a line in the talk that I gave, which is like, Gav’s going to talk about self awareness, all that fluffy nonsense and everybody giggles and laughs and things. But without self awareness, especially when I was going through the hardest time leading up towards, you know, finally kind of figuring out the whole imposter syndrome thing and then coming out and talking about it.

without self-awareness, and I do say this quite bluntly, I probably wouldn’t even exist. Because it gave me the time and space to review me on a deeper level. And I’ve been doing that for years since. In fact, it still happens now where I’m constantly in a zone of reflection to try and figure things out and figure myself out, which is also why no matter who asks,

(50:14) Danny

Yeah. Wow.

(50:37) Gavin Elliott

or who needs my time in the industry or even further afield, I’ll always give somebody time. I’ll always give them 30 minutes an hour to talk, know, and like cry, get emotional, whatever it might be. Because that’s one thing I think is part of society that we just don’t do enough.

(50:47) Danny

Mm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(50:59) Gavin Elliott

One, people don’t

know how to because intrinsically it’s never ever taught, self-awareness isn’t taught ever. It’s not taught as kids, it’s not taught as adults unless we end up in therapy and then everybody realises that therapy is a good thing finally because we actually get our feelings out and explore them. But that’s one thing about, we can learn new things, we can learn new skills, we can have new experiences, but alongside that we need to learn more about us and ask ourselves the question of who are we?

(51:04) Danny

No.

Yeah.

(51:29) Gavin Elliott

What do I want to do? This is why we end up in careers conversations with folks because they start to feel a bit lost and where am I headed? What should I focus on? And that’s a solitary space to be in when there’s nobody else to talk to. That in itself can cause burnout because being lost is the most…

dark place that you could possibly be, both either personally or professionally, and God help anybody if it happens to both at the same time.

(52:02) Danny

Mm, mm, mm. Yeah, and it sounds like that moment when somebody, you know, when you reach to Andy in that case, like, you weren’t alone. And then you were seen, you know, in those conversations when you were sent that PDF and those moments where you just felt like, actually, I’m not going crazy. This is actually kind of a thing. And other people, you know, care by the sounds of it. There was a community that, that supported you in some way. I, I…

I’m curious as well, like, if I can bring into the conversation, in respect of knowing yourself, something that you talked about around neurodiversity. And it’s something that I’m learning a lot about too, is my son, we’re very clear, he’s only four, and we’re very clear that he’s definitely, probably is autistic and has neurodiversity. And so it’s something that I’ve been learning lot about, and my wife is utterly convinced that I am.

(52:40) Gavin Elliott

Mm-hmm.

(52:59) Danny

autistic, she’s very convinced. I don’t know is the answer. But you seem to have explored that in knowing yourself and it seems to, you seem to have a relationship with it is what I’ve kind of observed from quite a positive relationship with it from what I’ve read in some of the what you’ve written about.

(53:01) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, definitely. think.

I thought we’d get on the subject. So I was trying to always wondering how I could kind of frame this. So without this sounding too negative.

I’ve always felt like life was a struggle.

Life was always really hard. I always felt like I had to do five times or ten times more than anybody else just to be as capable as them. And I never knew why. But the struggle was always there. So you always try and do more, be more, and then this maybe just trickling into imposter syndrome a little bit to a certain degree.

but you always try and do that a little bit more, figure the world out and then you realise that there might be certain things that you do that other people might not do. You might have certain fears that other people might not have or situations that you would rather avoid or you can’t deal with or certain sounds that might be a little bit more triggering to you than they are to others or ⁓ other sensory things like temperature for instance.

you might have a very unique ⁓ food palette, let’s just say, and things like that. So many, well, not many years ago, but five years ago, a little bit longer, my daughter was diagnosed autism. And when we were going through that diagnosis, the professor or the person that was asking the questions we had to answer on behalf of my daughter and.

(54:43) Danny

Yeah.

(55:05) Gavin Elliott

Every answer that I gave, I pretty much just giggled. And eventually the lady leant in and said, why do you keep laughing? I’m like, because it feels like I’m answering for myself. And then their response was, you do realize it’s hereditary. It could be feasible that you are too.

(55:13) Danny

Hey.

(55:28) Gavin Elliott

And the focus was on Madonna. So, you know, put that to one side and you know, you just get busy with life and you go forward a little bit further. And then a couple of years ago.

randomly on Instagram, I started being shown late diagnosis, adult autism, pieces in the feed. But it was very odd, given we’d had no conversations at home, I’d never even raised it as a thing, yet it started to show up, it was really bizarre. Now, how the algorithm does that is an entirely different conversation to be had at some point. ⁓

(55:52) Danny

That’s awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(56:08) Gavin Elliott

But a lot of the things that I was saying, I’m like, yep, I feel seen, I feel seen, yep, that’s me, I feel seen. And then didn’t speak about it with my other half at all. I kept it quiet for a good couple of months whilst I was going through with some other stuff. And then eventually it came to the point where, you know, I was starting to ask myself the question of, am I? What would that mean? And then going through a little bit more and then we agreed that.

or we talked about I would potentially go for a diagnosis. I had a lot of conflict about that. I had a lot of conflict because I was worried that I wouldn’t get any support on the other side. What does it really mean to get a diagnosis? Do I actually need a diagnosis? Am I trying to do it just so people would believe that I am? But what does that even mean? And because who cares, right? Like literally, apart from me, who cares? I’m still me.

(57:04) Danny

You’re still Gavin. Yeah.

(57:07) Gavin Elliott

And there was a time where, you know, you get into the depths of masking and acting like somebody else or someone else. And it might not be I’m trying to mask like a friend, but I’m putting on a persona for me to be able to behave or ⁓ exist in the world around me.

(57:15) Danny

Yeah.

(57:34) Gavin Elliott

and was a very conflicted time personally, but I thought, right, I need to take the mask off. And I realized that I’m literally taking a mask off in the way that I’m presenting my hand. But I did take the mask off and then thought, but now I’m unmasked.

What does that mean? And I’m not kidding Danny, within 24 to 48 hours, I was a total mess. Total mess. Because it was almost like becoming the most vulnerable version of me. Because I didn’t know, in fact I got so scared, I’m like, I need to put the mask back on. And then you get into this real like psychological confliction of like, but I don’t know where the mask’s gone.

(58:02) Danny

Really? Yeah.

(58:21) Gavin Elliott

and I don’t know what I actually am and I don’t know how to put the mask back on so everything, the world’s okay again. And the only way that I can describe it is I felt like I was seven years old, which I don’t know why seven, but that was just the age that came in and I felt really, really vulnerable because I didn’t know as a seven year old me how to exist in a world when I’m a 41 year old me.

(58:27) Danny

Yeah.

I don’t Gavin wasn’t in the room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(58:49) Gavin Elliott

adult gav wasn’t in the room anymore. It wasn’t there to protect

me. So that was a hard time and that probably lasted for about two or three months. I wasn’t even through the diagnosis process back at that point because it was like a six month waiting period. So I had to cope with this.

(59:06) Danny

I feel just

hearing the story right now in this moment, I can kind of feel a kind of weight in my chest. I feel like I’m right in there with you right now. It’s really big stuff. And important as well, but terrifying. Yeah, wow.

(59:23) Gavin Elliott

It was terrifying. Yeah, it was terrifying.

Yeah. And I think the

the best thing. Somebody. Somebody said to me around that time. Because they asked the question. So what? What if your diagnosis comes back and confirms that you’re autistic? And I went, I don’t know. And then they turned around and said. You are your autism and your autism is you. That’s what makes you you.

And that one phrase, I was just like, whoa, that’s deep. Even though it’s not, but it was deep to me at the time. I’m like, whoa, what does that mean? Like that means that I can just be me because I am me. And then I went through the diagnosis, which was an experience in itself. And I don’t want to give it away for anybody that’s going to do it, but I’ll say it’ll be the best thing that you’ve ever done because of the various different things that you’ve got to go through.

(1:00:02) Danny

Yeah, ⁓ yeah.

Mm.

(1:00:27) Gavin Elliott

Out the other side of that, there was the fastest learning curve about my autism in me because there’s certain things that I realized I do in a certain way which or environments that I’m not particularly not particularly like but I know now how I can operate as real me, autistic me in those environments.

(1:00:32) Danny

Really?

So you can be authentic. That must be a complete relief.

(1:00:51) Gavin Elliott

it’s the, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened.

(1:01:00) Danny

You know, it’s quite something hearing because as I said earlier, I’m still working it out myself, you know, and I have uncomfortable feelings about it because it’s like, doesn’t everyone say they’re ADSD and everyone says they’ve got this and that, and I have this kind of scepticism. And since my son being very evidently displaying a lot of the signals and we’ve had some confirmation,

(1:01:19) Gavin Elliott

Mm.

(1:01:29) Danny

I’ve had to really like face into my kind of, you know, confront my own like biases and preconceptions about it. And then now like what you’re saying is like, I remember saying to people when I like did a lot of presenting and stuff, I’d say like, you know, I’m absolutely like shitting it when I go up, right? And they’re like, no way, you’re not. was like, yeah, my whole back is like shaking.

(1:01:54) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

(1:01:55) Danny

And they’re like, but your face looked fine. I’m like, yeah, I’m really good at hiding it, but I am absolutely like bricking it. But like my face won’t betray it, but like maybe like, you know, if I’ll be careful with like my hands will be like super like white knuckles and stuff. And it’s just like hearing what you’re saying. I’m like.

(1:02:09) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

(1:02:15) Danny

I’ve got a journey.

(1:02:17) Gavin Elliott

Well, put it in a perspective, yeah, to put

it in a perspective. So prior to industry conference, which was my conference that I ran, which was like anywhere between 150 and 170 people. And we did that, what, sorry, I did that for four years running prior to that was design and build it in 2010 and 2011. They were 460 to 470 people after enduring industry conf I would compare any UX conf in Manchester, which was.

300 to 500 people. And then they’re speaking at like, I think it was upfront conf, was 500 people. All of the talks that I’ve done as part of the imposter syndrome thing that I did.

Why on earth would I do that? How on earth did I do that? And the one thing is, I was the one that was in control. So being able to step onto a stage at NUX and compare and ask questions and confer with, you know, the speakers and the audience, I was in control. I wouldn’t have been as in control giving a talk.

(1:03:03) Danny

Yeah.

(1:03:23) Gavin Elliott

because then the instantaneous thing that kicks in is, especially from an autistic point of view, which you could also see as an imposter syndrome point of view, is does anybody want to hear this? Am I making any sense? Am I talking coherently? Does anybody care? Why does anybody want me here anyway? And those are the mad questions that you go through when you’re trying to give a talk, because it’s terrifying. know, regardless of how many times you’ve done it.

(1:03:47) Danny

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

(1:03:51) Gavin Elliott

But being on a stage and comparing, totally different. And I have given public speaking talks, obviously as part of the imposter syndrome one, but for me, imposter syndrome wasn’t being spoken about. So I was almost in a position of not power, but ⁓ like leading the way, let’s just say, because nobody else has talked about it. So it was relatively new for everybody. It wasn’t just going to yet another design conference and talking yet again about service design.

(1:03:54) Danny

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

(1:04:17) Gavin Elliott

and having a slightly different view on it than anybody else. This was impossible syndrome that nobody talked about.

(1:04:22) Danny

Is this the… and I’m thinking like…

to sort of try and find a way to circle back. Is this the conversation that needs to be happening for that younger generation, for those designers that are early 20s, first job, who might be feeling a lot of those feelings that you described, whether they’re neurodiverse or not. And you’re talking about this posture syndrome, you’re talking about vulnerability, you’re talking about…

faking it till you make it and trying it and not knowing and like, do you think these are the conversations that need to be happening? Like what would you say to those younger people that are beginning in their career at this time at the moment?

(1:05:07) Gavin Elliott

Yeah.

So

I think there’s two things and I hope the person is going to listen to this, who I would like to listen to it because there’s a line that I gave them which was just be a sponge. Just be a sponge. And that was meant they were very fresh to the industry and they asked what was the best thing that he could possibly do in order to succeed. I just be a sponge.

Just learn, just continuously take stuff in. Don’t be over opinionated, don’t be too egotistical, just be a sponge, just take it all in. Your path will find you because I think when you join this industry, you could go on various different paths. You could join as a designer and end up in user research. You could join as a user researcher and end up in service design and so on and so forth. Don’t be too prescriptive on where you’re going to end up. The things that you enjoy and…

in terms of the way that you enjoy them, but the other people enjoy you working on them, that path will form itself. So just be a sponge. think that’s sometimes hard to articulate to younger folks. But I think the other side of that, Danny, which I don’t think is often done is providing the care and attention to the younger people joining the industry. It’s like, fend for yourself, do a good job, execute.

(1:06:28) Danny

you

(1:06:34) Gavin Elliott

but there’s no care in it. There’s largely no care and attention that’s provided to them on both a personal and a professional level.

(1:06:44) Danny

Yeah, yeah, it’s not right, is it? Well, I hope that even just by having conversations like this and sharing vulnerability and sharing those perspectives, I hope in some way that that starts to make a change. And I hope that people who are beginning their career can take some solace that even some of us midway through it, we’re still breaking it sometimes.

(1:07:08) Gavin Elliott

you

Yeah, and I think one of the big things, to kind of close things off on it, because I realize that this has been a very deep conversation, I would say to close it off. The world that we’re in now is as exciting as the world that we joined. So if we go back 2008,

2009, 2007 even, that was such an exciting time. There was so much talk about kind of design and UX design and apps. iOS was just coming out. The web was just exploding with opportunity.

(1:07:39) Danny

Yeah.

(1:07:50) Gavin Elliott

And I think that we’ve then went through nearly 20 years, by the way, of lots of different stuff that’s happened and different frameworks, frameworks and technologies and more devices, know, there’s spatial, AR, VR, there’s loads of stuff happening. I would say it’s as exciting or potentially more exciting now than it’s been over the past 10 to 15 years. So I think people joining the industry right now, be a sponge.

get as much of it as humanly possible because the next five years is probably going to be incredible. In 10 years time, just stay watching. It’s gonna be wild.

(1:08:32) Danny

Gavin, that is a brilliant, brilliant way to end it. This is, I didn’t quite know what to expect from this conversation and you’ve certainly shattered any preconceptions and ideas I had in the best possible way. So I really want to thank you for coming on and yeah, this is awesome. Thank you.

(1:08:47) Gavin Elliott

Thanks, Danny.

Brilliant, cheers, thanks a lot.