Patterns Podcast

Latest Episodes:

73. Sheryl Cababa Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial: Using system thinking to make informed decisions Jun 15, 2023

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Sheryl and Chris discuss the complexities of the design system space as it involves human behaviours.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Register here for our upcoming webinar, ‘AI in Design Systems’ on June 28th, 1 pm (ET) and 10 am (PT).

Guest
Sheryl Cababa is the author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers. She's a design researcher and strategist and is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, an education-focused research, insights, and development studio based in Seattle. Her practice is focused on systems thinking and equity-centered design, and she's worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IKEA, and Khan Academy.

Her focus is on using design to help clients reimagine education. She also teaches at the University of Washington's Human-Centered Design and Engineering program, helping to introduce systems thinking to the next generation of designers.
Host
Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.

Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.

72. Danielle MacDonald Creative Head, Digital Product Design: Designing to scale May 31, 2023

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Danielle and Chris discuss the impact designing at scale will have on ROI.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Register here for our upcoming webinar, ‘AI in Design Systems’ on June 28th, 1 pm (ET) and 10 am (PT).
Guest
Danielle MacDonald is a design leader and self-proclaimed design systems geek, with over 15 years of experience in managing digital design from concept to launch. She has a focus on creating digital experiences that strive to meet user needs. Danielle knows how to work within constraints to solve an experience challenge and how to push beyond them. Danielle currently resides in New England with her husband and three daughters. When she isn’t thinking about digital experiences you can find her at a hockey rink, soccer field, lacrosse field or enjoying the beach.
Host
Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.
Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.

71. Chris Deluca Senior Front-End Developer: People are the heart of design systems May 23, 2023

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Chris Deluca and Chris discuss the significance of prioritizing people in the process of developing design systems. They explore a central question that consistently arises: Whose lives are you striving to enrich and simplify?
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guests
Chris DeLuca is a senior front end web developer from New Jersey with thirteen years of experience serving large organizations with complex needs, such as The Daily Beast, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and now Lullabot. He specializes in design systems and system architecture, focusing on producing maintainable solutions to difficult problems. He is currently nomadic.
Host
Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.
Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.

70. Pinata's Kendall Totten interviews Knapsack CEO Chris Strahl: Design with code and AI May 16, 2023

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Kendall and Chris discuss how design systems represent the strategic platform for how a company creates product.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Register for our upcoming ‘Design Systems Buying Guide’ webinar on May 24th, 2 pm (EST), hosted by Chris Strahl and Dan Mall.
Guest
Kendall Totten began as a graphic designer & frontend web dev and found Drupal early in her career. She contributed to the frontend for sites such as dallascowboys.com, weather.com & redhat.com. At Red Hat, she helped to champion the OS design system & web components project PatternFly Elements. She is now the Engineering Manager at Pinata and lives in Raleigh, NC.
Host
Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.
Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.

69. The single source of truth mentality: Meta Part Two May 09, 2023

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A round table discussion hosted by Chris and Andrew from Knapsack with the Meta Blueprint team, part two.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guests
Christopher Clare - Director of Product Design
Chris Clare is the Head of Foundation Design for FB App responsible for unifying the app through the Blueprint Design System, driving efficiency for the rest of the design org and giving capacity back to our teams to focus on innovation. Prior to this role, he was the Head of Design for the Communities Product Group at Meta. His team was responsible for helping people build meaningful communities through products like Groups, Events, Profile and Messenger. After he joined the company 7.5 years ago to help rethink the strategy and experience for the Groups Product, it quickly became the top priority for the company who changed their mission to be community driven. In the previous 15 years before Meta, Chris has led Design System and Product teams as multiple Companies, including his time as Creative Director at Motorola (Google) and head of Skype Android and Desktop at Microsoft.
Mitch Johnson - Director, Product Design
Mitch Johnson leads the Blueprint Design System Team for Facebook responsible for building the underlying Design System and infrastructure to enable teams design efficiently on a unified infrastructure, consistently across surfaces, accessible for all users, and to a high bar of people-first quality.
Elizabeth Rifer - Director, Content Design Director
Elizabeth is responsible for developing Facebook’s content architecture. She spent years building Facebook Marketplace and believes in strengthening communities through local commerce. Her mission is to humanize technology so everyone (including her mother) can enjoy it.
Dan Lebowitz - Director, Product Design
Dan Lebowitz is a Product Design Director at Meta leading design system architecture across Facebook and partnering across the company on systems initiatives. Since 2015, Dan has helped lead the design of Meta’s web platform, numerous design systems, and 0-1 products.
Adelle Charles - Product Design Manager
Adelle Charles leads the Design Excellence team for Facebook responsible for our broader Excellence programs, design craft, design tooling and partnering on Blueprint to deliver on design tool efficiency and quality across Facebook.
Andrew Rohman - VP Sales & CS at Knapsack
Andrew leads Knapsack’s customer-facing teams and has experience with dozens of large enterprise Design System implementations. Andrew provides a practical approach to goal setting and fostering both organizational and cultural change when adopting a design system.
Host

Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.
Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.

68. Driving Consistency Across Systems with Meta Part One May 02, 2023

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A round table discussion hosted by Chris and Andrew from Knapsack with the Meta Blueprint team (part one).
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guests
Christopher Clare - Director of Product Design
Chris Clare is the Head of Foundation Design for FB App responsible for unifying the app through the Blueprint Design System, driving efficiency for the rest of the design org and giving capacity back to our teams to focus on innovation. Prior to this role, he was the Head of Design for the Communities Product Group at Meta. His team was responsible for helping people build meaningful communities through products like Groups, Events, Profile and Messenger. After he joined the company 7.5 years ago to help rethink the strategy and experience for the Groups Product, it quickly became the top priority for the company who changed their mission to be community driven. In the previous 15 years before Meta, Chris has led Design System and Product teams as multiple Companies, including his time as Creative Director at Motorola (Google) and head of Skype Android and Desktop at Microsoft.
Mitch Johnson - Director, Product Design
Mitch Johnson leads the Blueprint Design System Team for Facebook responsible for building the underlying Design System and infrastructure to enable teams design efficiently on a unified infrastructure, consistently across surfaces, accessible for all users, and to a high bar of people-first quality.
Elizabeth Rifer - Director, Content Design Director
Elizabeth is responsible for developing Facebook’s content architecture. She spent years building Facebook Marketplace and believes in strengthening communities through local commerce. Her mission is to humanize technology so everyone (including her mother) can enjoy it.
Dan Lebowitz - Director, Product Design
Dan Lebowitz is a Product Design Director at Meta leading design system architecture across Facebook and partnering across the company on systems initiatives. Since 2015, Dan has helped lead the design of Meta’s web platform, numerous design systems, and 0-1 products.
Adelle Charles - Product Design Manager
Adelle Charles leads the Design Excellence team for Facebook responsible for our broader Excellence programs, design craft, design tooling and partnering on Blueprint to deliver on design tool efficiency and quality across Facebook.
Andrew Rohman - VP Sales & CS at Knapsack
Andrew leads Knapsack’s customer-facing teams and has experience with dozens of large enterprise Design System implementations. Andrew provides a practical approach to goal setting and fostering both organizational and cultural change when adopting a design system.
Host

67. Design Token Takes Part Two: Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent and Darren Simons Apr 23, 2023

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Kaelig, Darren, and Chris talk tokens and code: “Using a whole different type of brain.”
View the transcript of this episode here.
Want to hear more? Register for Knapsack’s upcoming talking tokens webinar here.
Guests

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, Principal Software Engineer at Netlify

Founder of the Design Tokens W3C Community Group, providing open standards for products and design tools to share design system foundations at scale.
Darren Simons, Senior Product Designer, Design Systems at Mulesoft

Digital Product Designer who is able to untangle complicated requirements, build design systems from the ground up, and incorporate them into the design workflow. I bring design and technology together to craft elegant user interfaces with an emphasis on the end-user experience.
Host

66. Design Token Takes Part One: Amber Stickel and Taylor Cashdan Apr 16, 2023

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Amber, Taylor, and Chris talk tokens; the pros and cons.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guests

Amber Stickel, Principal Design Technologist at Intuit

Front-end designer and developer with a passion for creating modular, reusable, and flexible interfaces and systems. With multidisciplinary knowledge and tools in hand, I’m hoping to improve the web one experience at a time.
Taylor Cashdan, Design Systems Lead at Mayo Clinic

Multidisciplinary creative and community builder that's passionate about people, design, and all the intersections in between. I bring to the table a burning desire to collaborate with teams tasked with creating exceptional work for people who give a shit.
Host

65. Morgane Peng Managing Director & Head of Design at Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking: Is a design system a business asset or a technical asset? Mar 13, 2023

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Morgane and Chris discuss the idea that many design systems pitch themselves as a technical asset. However, design systems can extend past this notion to offer business value, patterns, and ROI.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guest

Morgane Peng is a Managing Director and Head of Design at Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking where she builds products for start-ups, corporates and financial institutions. Outside of work, she is a mentor, conference speaker and also contributes to an indie video game crowdfunded on Kickstarter. You can find Morgane on Twitter as @morganepeng and on Medium.
Host

64. Evan Lovely CTO & Co-Founder of Knapsack: Source of truth should be the user experience Mar 06, 2023

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Evan and Chris discuss source of truth and how it is linked most importantly to overall user experience opposed to just design or code.
View the transcript of this episode here.
Guest

Evan Lovely is the co-founder and Head of Product & Engineering at Knapsack. Evan was previously the CTO at Basalt Inc and a software architect at Phase2. He has a passion for developing well-designed, scalable software solutions and extensive experience in leading technical teams and projects.

Evan is certified as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and as a CompTIA A+ Certified Computer Technician.
Host

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