Unfinished Business episode 107 ‘Tom Hanks, what a let down’ with Andy Budd and Cameron Moll

Fresh from our adventures at Smashing Conference in Santa Monica, on this week’s Unfinished Business I’m joined by user-experience professional, author (of some CSS book or another) and director at ClearLeft, Andy Budd. Joining us was one of my favourite people; designer, author and founder of Authentic Jobs, Cameron Moll.

We talked about taking our children to web conferences and how we feel about them following in our footsteps or not. As Cameron was the ‘mystery’ speaker this time around, we discuss whether or not speaker ‘games’ are a good idea and if they add anything to the feel of an event. Speaking of games, I recently sat in on Andy’s Creative Workshop Facilitation workshop, so we talk about how I felt about that. (You might be very surprised at my reaction.) Workshops are an important part of a design process, so we discussed how to use them to better involve our clients.

Finally, we discussed whether agencies should be worried about designers taking in-house jobs and the new opportunities that the industry offers those of us who run agencies or work with clients. It was a fascinating conversation and I think that you’ll really enjoy listening to it.

Here are some URLs from this episode

• Design The Box design game
• Cover Story design game
• Performing a Project Pre-mortem
• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
• San Francisco Design Agencies Feeling the Squeeze
• Differentiate or Die?
• The agency is dead. Long live the agency
• The Death of the Agency Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
• 4 web design trends for 2015 that will change your job forever