Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIGA Design
podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang, Co
Executive Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for design.
This season of the podcast, we are exploring the theme of
design and performance. And now for my Co host.
Hello everyone, I'm Julia de Natalo.
I am the Events and Competition Manager at AIGA.
And our guest for this episode is Maria Fernanda Larota.
Hi Rishon. Hi Julia, it's a pleasure to be
here. My name is Maria.
I am the Co founder and head of strategy at Switch Strategy.
I'm super excited to be here talking to you and to the IAGI
community. Awesome.
So Maria, to kick things off with this episode, can you tell
us a little bit more about yourself and your career journey
so far? Of course.
So I'm currently the head of strategy at Switch Strategy.
We are an organization that delivers growth for purpose
driven companies. And really what we do is we
specialize in developing niche markets for organizations so we
can find opportunities for growth using inclusion as an
engine for innovation. So it's a really interesting
role that we play for organizations, both
understanding how to really grow their business models while
creating access and really serving communities that are
usually under represented in the market.
I like to think of myself as a multi disciplinary strategist.
I guess that that is true to a lot of people that work in the
design field. I've had many, let's say, roles
and and ways to explore design in my career.
I started working in advertising back in Colombia, and then I
decided to come here into the US, do an MBA design strategy
where I could really extend the reach of the design, different
verticals that I worked on and move into the world of business
strategy. This is what I've been doing
since I spent seven years in San Francisco working in the startup
world, and then in the past three years I came to New York
to really build my company, keep working in digital
transformation and teach at Parsons.
Wonderful. Yeah.
We'd love to follow up on some of those points, including your
teaching at Parsons, your design MBA.
But just the first follow up question is about your
bachelor's degree. So you've studied communication
and product design. So what motivated you to get
into design and communication in the first place?
Well, I have to start this conversation by by stating that
I was not going to study design as as, let's say, the first
thing that happened after I came from school.
I spent two years in law school before I realized that I wanted
to move into the sign. And this is really tied back to
me really being a very, let's say, creative and exploratory
person. But I think that when I went
into the undergrad, I was a little bit scared about fully
committing into a create a career.
But as the years passed, I realized that I it was feeling
incomplete and there was something that was missing and I
chose to change my career. So I went to study product and
communication design at University Los Andes in Bogota.
And this was such an interesting way to approach my profession
because this was one of the first schools that really
thought about design as design strategy, as an integrated set
of skills that could allow people not only to deliver
design work, but to solve complex problems, to really
think about system level problematics and challenges.
And that was really appealing to me.
That really allowed me to use both my creative brain for the
sake of finding solutions, but also building within the context
of organizations, building within the context of business.
And that has something that has been the underlining narrative
of my career. Wonderful.
That's great. And you went to a design MBA.
Why did you choose that path and what do you think is different
the program you had comparing to a traditional MBA?
So traditional MBA, they're really comprehensive and they
offer you, let's say, a view into the different levels of an
organization so you can understand how to how to drive,
execute and then manage business, right.
Design MBAs like the MBA in design strategy I did at
California College of the Arts integrate this type of
learnings, but they really allow you to go into creative problem
solving for the most part using human centered design and design
thinking as core methodologies to embrace every single problem.
So for people that may not have full context on this, what this
means is that you tackle a problem both from a business
perspective, but you put a high focus on the user, on the people
that are going to be the recipients of whatever design
solution you're thinking of. And you integrate their needs,
their habits. You put them first when it comes
to making decisions for the thing that you will build,
building at the end. It also really has a very, let's
say, an exploratory type of view on how you solve for business
problems by understanding a multitude of solutions that
could be brought to the table and then creating specific tests
so you can prototype solutions before you take them into
market. So when you combine these two
things and when you when you really allow the, let's say,
business level thinking to inform these design decisions,
what you end up having is a series of approaches on how
something can be solved, but also a really good understanding
of how they are going to serve the people on the other side.
If you do this properly, what this does for organizations is
it help. It helps them build the right
solution for the right people with the right type of
investments. And I think that that's the core
difference between traditional MBAs and design MBAs, right?
The fact that you can understand how to drive innovation, the
fact that you can really like self guide some solutions, not
through what the business metrics are telling you, but on
your understanding of what the customer is needing, what the
market is needing. I really like this because it
allows me to operate on both sides with a lot of empathy for
the people that I'm solving for, building for.
I would say like those are the largest things in addition to
design collaboration and creative collaboration, which is
a big, big part of the design in BA, right?
How to drive people through these creative practices?
It sounds awesome to be able to explore a more like structure
than BA, but bringing this creative lenses and very
exploratory and based on research sounds very, very
interesting. So later on, I know you become a
professor at Parsons. So first is how how did you
become an educator in this field and what part of the teaching
role you appreciate the most? Well, I, I consider myself very
fortunate on being in the position to now teach and mentor
younger people that are part of this career through, through my
work at Parsons. I had a feeling that I wanted to
teach way back in my career when I was starting had really didn't
really, I hadn't really found my, my specific voice for that
purpose. As as the years came through and
as I learned from the way that we are appreciated within
organizations, the type of contribution that that we that
we can have. This has really led me into
wanting to empower the people of a younger generation so they can
have the tools to really drive design as a structural function
within organizations. Because I'm a big believer on
the fact that we bring a different perspective to
business making organizational design, the ability to really
create business models that are out of the norm.
And the more and more we create that empowerment and we help
students of a younger generation develop that voice, I believe
that's going to be great for the people within our field because
we will keep on earning that place at the table.
We will keep on showing how the type of work that we do really
influences Better Business practices.
But on the other side, I think it's a gigantic game for
organizations themselves to have someone that can really marry
these three types of thinking, right?
Like user thinking, business thinking system, and culture
level thinking. To be able to run the
organizations and to engage with people.
That is really the core of my work as a professor, aside from
the, let's say, the type of lecture that I give.
I think that that is what has driven me to keep on pursuing,
like growing the people within our field and giving them a hint
of what's possible before they graduate so they can dream
bigger and they can choose to pursue careers beyond, let's
say, design, design creation and design delivery.
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds awesome.
And I think for you as a professional also being able to
customize and tailor the language of the knowledge you've
gathered to a diverse audience. So in this case your students
also I've got a very good learning path for sure.
That that is very true. It's curious document you
mentioned language, because being an international professor
and having to think into languages is a lot of what I do.
Sometimes that's imperfect, right?
Sometimes that comes with with the being a second language of
things. But I think that that also has
allowed me to connect better with them because when we move
out of traditional frameworks, when we move out of traditional
terminology and put things in a way that people can understand
them, can relate to them, can make them to their own.
I feel like that is highly effective for them to then take
that, interiorize it and turn it into the thing that they want to
do or the way that they want to user for their careers.
So I think that the more that we can do that for the people that
are underneath us, the more we're going to uplift our
career, our profession and our contribution.
Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.
You also have mentioned that one of the first questions you ask
your students when the semester starts is what is strategic
design for them. So I am curious to hear what is
it usually the answers that they give you And also if you can
share what's your perspective on the terminology and the language
you usually use. So this is it's kind of like a
trick question because I as someone who have been in this
field for almost 15 years, I realize that one of the hardest
parts of the job is explaining exactly what we do this because
the design strategy current of design itself, it's fairly new,
right? It's been around for about 20
plus years. It really got consolidated when
design thinking became came into the mainstream.
It started to become a part of what a lot of companies did in
house. But we're still pretty early in
comparison to some more traditional careers that have
been fully established within the market.
And when people think about design, they usually go to
design craft, right? So they usually think about
graphic design, fashion, furniture design.
I think that all of us that are creative have someone in our
family that still is taking their time to understand exactly
what is the thing that we do without referring to this, let's
say original subject. My students go through a bit of
a similar process, but for the most part, they always
understand that strategic design is design methodologies applied
for solving business problems. I think that that really becomes
clear in the sense that you have a larger spectrum of application
of the type of thinking and the processes that you take.
But we do what we do when we work in our classes is really
build on that understanding, understand how we can drive
insight and value at different levels of what a problem could
be. And again, I always like to
think about the triad of the user, the business, and then the
ecosystem that surrounds these two, these two areas.
And through very different types of thinking, very different
types of skill sets, understand what's going to be the, let's
say, the right thing to do for those 3 ends.
If you get to marry those three things, if you get to provide a
recommendation that's going to balance, balance out what's
going to work with your user on the other side, but something
that's really going to perform really properly or that's going
to influence culture. My take is that that is what we
do best, right? We allow organizations to have a
bit of a panoptic view of what the solution is going to be on
the other side, how the brand is going to be acting on the other
side, how the product should be performing on the other side.
But each person can really choose on how to apply this
because we happen to be one of the careers where for the most
part, there's not a job role or a job description that
completely aligns to the things that we do.
People choose to go into research.
People choose to product. There's multiple ways on how you
can apply this. So I worked with my students to
get a full understanding of what's possible, but then really
work individually with them to understand where is it that they
want to apply their creative input towards a thing that
they're really passionate about. Yeah, it sounds great.
You mentioned you just founded your company Switch not long
ago, so I'm curious to learn more about your journey so far
and what are exciting things you are exploring this new company.
So Switch was really born out of a couple of things.
The first one is really this, this, let's say like
interdisciplinary multicultural journey that I've had.
And that has given me a good angle to understand how to
problem solve for larger organizations, how to problem
store for the, let's say, the for profit market and being able
to match different levels of thinking for the sake of
creating business opportunity to create betterment for people.
I've always wanted to create strategy and innovation
organization that can work to really build access for people
that are for the most part underserved but in a very strong
way. This has also been like the baby
of my personal journey because I happen to be fortunate enough to
belong to an inter able family. That really means that my
husband has a disability, he uses a wheelchair and we get to
experience life in a very different way that the rest of
the world. I think that going through this
experience was the thing that drove that switch for me,
because once I started to understand the world through
this perspective, it was almost as if a veil had been lifted and
I could see something that was in front of me but that wasn't
really there before. So living life through the lens
of disability allows me to see both the gigantic opportunities
that we have in today's society to really better serve and
better cater to diverse populations that are not
represented in a lot of the, let's say, the products and
services that I see out there. But very closely also because I
see the pain points of living in an environment that's not
designed for yourself. And I think that is that is a
maxim that can be applied to almost any society around the
world. So what we do at Switch is we
focus on this niche populations because we understand the
gigantic potential of working with them.
We help organizations really find, understand and design for
this niche communities. Yes, because we want to drive
inclusion to what what we do, but also because we understand
that this is in men's business value that that organizations
have the opportunity to really conquer this hyper segmented
communities and create create better services and better
products that Dr. meaningful change for these types of
communities. And those are the origins of why
why I chose to start this company and I chose to do it
today, especially in the type of environment that we're living
politically where representation is going to be more important
than ever. Going back to the journey, I
would say that it's definitely a roller coaster.
It goes with highs and lows of inspiration and frustration and
let's say excitement and doubt. I guess that's true for everyone
who's ever started a company, anyone who's wanted to create a
new product. It's very exciting, but the
thing that you struggle with the most is your own self and your
own understanding that what you're doing is the right thing
without anyone on the other side telling you to take the next
step. So building business, starting a
company, it's first a very personal exercise to really
convince yourself that you're the right people to do this.
And that's when I go back when in terms of doubt, that's when I
go back into the why behind my company.
The reason why I think it's important for this company to
exist today and to connect to other organizations that really
want to include purpose within the type of work that they do.
Yeah. Following up on that, you've
talked about your why behind starting Switch and your own
family situation. Can you tell us a little bit
more about how you see this as like a market opportunity?
And then also, what are some of the challenges that you think
you'll face while you're building out your business?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the market
opportunity is there for the taking.
That really means that we have moved from a very, let's say,
highly segmented space on how we thought about consumers, but
very standardized on a single type of view.
So before this, you would think of consumers as moms over 40, or
you would think as people as Jen's ears between 15 and 25.
So those are very standard definitions on how to think
about users. They're not wrong, but they
don't necessarily allow for differentiation on how you
execute and create services for people.
And reality is that when you design for the average, likely
you're not designing specifically for anyone within
that average. The average is, it's a, let's
say it's a, it's a data figure, but it doesn't really speak of
other people that are on the other side.
More and more today, especially with the influence of social
media, with the influence of public conversations constantly
happening, happening around us, what we see is that communities
are hyper segmented and they are influenced by different levels
of identities that make up the understanding of who people are.
That's where we want to reach, right?
Because we believe that there is high, high, high opportunity for
differentiate on, for creating better unique services for
people. And that's exactly the the type
of visibility that we want to create for these underserved
communities. Just to give you an example of
how this has happened in the past.
So in the past 10 years, we've seen a gigantic decrease on on
bank population across the globe.
What this really means is that before the banking sector would
define very specifically the people that they would create
financial products, But so people that had certain level of
income, people that lived in certain areas of the world,
people that had access to Internet, to computers.
And they created financial services for these people, but
that left a gigantic space of of a population that couldn't
really access the services because the conversation around
users has gone further into representation inclusion.
And then again, like this niche community, larger sets of people
have been able to access financial services that were
designed with the unbanked point of view from from gigantic
institutions. In the past ten years on beyond
bank sector has been able to increase its coverage by 44%.
So globally we came from 2.5 billion people 10 years ago that
didn't have bank services. Today we're down to 1.4 billion.
This is a very significant portion of the business.
This represents a lot of financial value for
organizations. But if you flip the equation and
you see what this actually means for the people on the other
side, that means that people that that don't really have a
stable or high income can access financial services.
People that couldn't get a credit card before now can do
so. People that want micro loans to
start their own business now have access to these secular
services. It's a two side equation of
impact that really drives what I believe is the most important
thing, which is create access for different users on different
types of industries. That being said, I realized that
it's a difficult moment to be talking about this.
We are currently restructuring and re understanding how we talk
about inclusion, how we talk about equity, how organizations
can drive this or are limited to do so because politically things
are, let's say in a time of a lot of motion.
So I think that that is challenging even speaking about
this and understanding what is the right terminology to be able
to play this role and to be able to encourage organizations to do
so. It's still being defined on
what's going to be the next wave on how we address that.
And I believe that that is the biggest challenge right now.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
So looking ahead, in a year from now, what are the main topics
that you're interested in exploring that could be
personally or professionally? Is there anything in your mind
that you want to share with us? Yes, absolutely.
So one of the core projects that we are driving internally at
Switch is to build an ROI calculator for the value of
inclusion. This is a project that we are
choosing to do independently because we don't want the
process to be biased by like a third party client.
We need to build this calculator to be able to really advocate
for inclusion as a driver of business performance.
But we also know that going through this process is going to
give us a lot of light. What are the levels of
contribution for a company that chooses to take an inclusive
initiative? So first level would be, of
course, revenue market share, but we also know that there's
additional benefits in terms of brand recognition, of internal
culture, of the ability for that to influence influence other
products. So that's something that we will
be spending a lot of time on doing because we believe that
this is the most assertive way to be able to reprioritize
inclusivity in business design as we move forward.
I'm also incredibly interested in what's happening with AI and
how artificial intelligence is shaping the way that we think
about people an inclusivity, but also more than anything, how we
are now as creatives are integrated, integrating it into
our practice. I'm actually Co writing and
illustrating a book on AI for the regular people.
So all of us that are not necessarily technologists, all
of us that don't really understand what happens behind
the LLMS. It's, it's, it's an approach to our understanding
how all of us have a choice in how we incorporate AI into what
we do and what are the possibilities for the use of AI
to solving from humanity's biggest problems.
I think that AI is here to stay. AI is already part of what we do
and who we are, but we do have agency and power as users and as
creators of the technology to channel it for the sake of the
good that we want to see into the world.
I'd like to direct your attention back to the theme of
the podcast this season, which is design and performance.
And I'd love to get some of your thoughts on this.
You know, we think about performance in different ways.
It could be like financial performance.
It could be performance like on a stage by an actor or performer
in that sense. And as designers, we have to
perform in different ways as like, you know, facilitators, as
teachers, as strategists. We juggle multiple roles, you
know, creator, entrepreneur, storyteller, all sorts of
labels, right? Which of these roles feels most
natural to you, and how do you think about performance when
you're doing your jobs? So let me actually break that
into two different aspects of performance.
For me on the personal side, I, I would say that I, I have a
natural inclination of working with people.
This may be because I come from Latin America where we are
social by default and we like to build relationships before
anything else. So in the sense of myself within
business thinking myself as potentially A performer, I would
say that it revolves around that.
It revolves around using communication, using
storytelling to bring people to the table and have everyone be
able to participate within a process.
And that's really what I'm trying to bring to my work as a
professor. That's what I'm trying to bring
for my clients. But we set up the table and we
figure out what is the next step, what is the thing that we
want to build. And that's something that I
really enjoy because it allows me to connect with people,
understand who they are before we go into actual work.
When I think about performance for my business and for the type
of work that I like to see happen around me, it's
definitely a couple of things that you already mentioned,
right? On one end, I think that we have
performance as usability on the ability for a product, service
or business model to effectively do something for people to quote
on one of my favorite frameworks or to achieve the jobs to be
done of why this thing was created or to effectively do
something for the user. On the other side, which is
equally important, we have financial performance and that
goes back to very specific financial metrics of whether a
product or service is performing well in the market, whether it's
engaging enough to drive sales, to drive revenue, to increase
loyalty. Marrying those two things and
being able to understand how those two things really impact
the way that a company grows in the end results on overall
business performance for the organization.
So that triad again, of business user and system, I think that
it's, it's a it's a really great way to think about performance
as a like a collective indicator of something.
It's it's. Yeah, riffing on this idea of
like this triad or of the business side, the user side and
like the designer side. Like as designers, we, as I had
already mentioned, we have to like, juggle these different
roles of being like the creative, being the facilitator,
being the researcher. Is there a persona that feels
the most natural to you? Or maybe a group of different
personas that feel like these are like the most comfortable
for you to play? Or are there ones that are like
more of a challenge for you but you still play those roles?
So I think that a lot of people, again, within our field, I could
be possibly feeling the same way.
It's we change hats multiple times on the things that we do.
And that's for a good reason, right?
We we are exposed two different types of thinking and we are
empowered with a lot of design and creative frameworks where we
could be the research one day, the strategist another day, the
client relationship holder the next day and then the person
that goes and brings this product to the market.
I enjoy that. I enjoy being able to jump from
those very different, different types of thinking.
I think that where I drive back every single time, it's again on
the figure of a connector, a connector of ideas, a connector
of people, a connector of opportunities.
And that really allows me to use my my design and business skill
set for the sake of what the conversation is needing today.
So being a connector actually drives me to design the
experience of working together. And if anything, out of all of
the like end to end capabilities that we've been talking about, I
believe that that is the one that that has served me best to
be able to get to the thing that we need to do.
As I also am curious to learn more of your ways of working.
So you know, there are some people that are more a
collaborative, some that appreciate more like working
individually and then sharing their thoughts or more
structured or you know, more exploratory.
What is your way of working your creative process to start a
project, let's say? So definitely exploratory.
I've noticed that whenever I come into a new situation, the
first thing I do is really ramp up on the knowledge of what that
situation is going to require from me.
So I more than anything, so I can come in with confidence on
myself, understanding that I am the right person to drive that
conversation. It's curious because before I
thought that that claim from a place of insecurity, right?
I thought that I I was constantly checking my sources
and checking references and getting up to the latest
literature on the thing that we were going to study and that was
cover for some sort of gap in my understanding.
I have realized after being all this time in business,
particularly working on large digital transformation
consultancies, that it's always best to come in with your
homework done. So, so it actually triggers a
set of confidence and the ability to to inform the
conversation in a better way. So that's really how I start all
of my processes. I have said that again, like
speaking to the right people and getting a full understanding of
what a situation is, is really important before you go into any
type of process. And this is where I use my my
ideation and visualization type of skill set the most because I
like to go pen and paper and really map out the situation
physically. So I can understand that this is
actually what triggers the most connections in my brain about
the thing that's happening. But also this is a fantastic
tool to be able to work with other people, right?
If you're in front of a board and you're in a room with people
and you can actually map out the things that you're doing,
illustrate the thing that you're thinking about, have people
doodle and scratch on top of it, then by default you are are
integrating different thoughts and different perspectives into
the conversation. And we are all understanding
kind of like where we're heading with this.
So after going into this exploratory mode and using
physical collaboration, so we can build into something, that's
when I move a bit more into my more strategic and let's say
like guided way towards exploring a specific subject.
And I, and I go back into whatever design methodologies I
can use for that purpose. So it's either talking to users,
it's even mapping their journeys, mapping their
experiences, it's going back into, into landscape analysis
and see what has worked before, what the competitors are doing,
what the company has done so far.
So we can build on top of that. So by marrying those two sides,
by marrying this very exploratory and, and like
creative type of thinking towards a problem and then
matching it for the actual thing that we already know about a
certain situation, then I believe that we get to different
options of how we can execute. And then let's say that's where
we start the executional part of the job, that it's a completely
different dynamic. That's great and I appreciate
your transparency in sharing your thoughts and how you saw
yourself in in the past and how you perceived your creative
process today. That's brilliant you all.
So you founded your company and of course, as you had mentioned,
you have expectations for the company to, you know, progress,
succeed and and to achieve some type of performance per SE.
So if you can, connecting with our theme, what does high
performance design mean to you? And if you can share an example
of how design directly improved business that you have seen or
have worked with? That's a great question.
I believe that high performance design eventually gets tied back
into financial performance and actually a A and this is, this
is this is not a small feat. So for anyone that has work in
product, you know that even getting a product to the market,
it's already a gigantic win and a gigantic milestone that you
have hit. But after that for the product
to make sense, it's got to, it's got to perform financially.
So my dream for my organization within a year is that we will
have clients in different sectors where we would have
tested our own model of inclusion as an engine for
innovation and really help them develop new business models
where they can drive access while really growing their
business. That's of course like the main
dream for my organization. And I, again, I look to be very
much embedded with education as well.
I, I want to really be able to match match those two sides of
the work that I do and be able to use this for the sake of
increasing access to education. One of the areas where I have
seen this before is really through Parsons on the work that
Parsons has done in the past years to increase the the number
of students with disabilities that go through the
organization. I see this very closely because
my husband did the Masters in Strategic Design and Management
program at Parsons as well. When he came to school, he was
the only person that used a wheelchair in the whole
university. But by getting very deep into
the organization, starting to create a invisibility for the
importance of involving different perspectives for the
importance of structuring the organization as a place that
could meet the needs of disabled people.
They have they have more than double the amount of students
that had disabilities within their program.
And now now Parsons itself is starting to build language at
different levels of people that are preemptive students that
could go to the organization can find a home on the other side
and can can connect there. So that's my dream, right?
That my dream is to not only do great things for clients, but to
understand that we are moving the needle for a community that
didn't really have access before.
That's wonderful. It's great to hear about the
things where you've really like move the needle and and change
things in an organization. I'm kind of curious about the
flip side as well. Like do you have an example of
like your your best failure or some sort of unexpected outcome
or things didn't happen according to plan And what did
you, what did that teach you about performance or about
design? I have to say that there's
always many examples of this case where when you work in
design, we say a couple of things, right?
We say learning by doing. And when you learn at a minimum
50% of the things that you do are not going to work out on the
other end. And we also very usually say
fail fast, fail cheap. So you can learn from the
process itself. I've had multiple of those
opportunities in my career. Before working at Switch, I
spent five years working in technology driving digital
transformation for large organizations around the world.
And a lot of the processes that we took for certain type of
problem solving didn't necessarily lead us to the type
of product that we needed to build.
As an example, I, I spent a lot of time working with Anthem to
develop their customer enablement platform for the
Medicare and Medicaid sector. This is a difficult type of
population to understand because for the Medicaid sector, we are
talking about elderly people that don't necessarily have a
very strong approach towards digital services.
This was in the midst of the pandemic.
The ability for people to connect in person or even to go
to an appointment was very difficult.
And on the other hand, we needed to create a technology platform
that could help representatives give access to senior people to
the type of services that they needed to create.
But I think that at the beginning, we came into this
project thinking about the original users that we were
going to design for as the digital first type of population
because digital adoption increased so much in the
pandemic. I think that we failed to
acknowledge that that was going to be a different case for the
people in the Medicaid sector and that was going to require a
different type of technology, a different type of user
experience. Even the information design
within the platform had to be different because it had to be
catered and digested for people that we're going to require
extended assistance into getting to their services.
So it was a, it was AU turn into type of work that we were doing.
That's when we learned again, that it's always so valuable to
go back and understand who are the people that you are
designing for? How will they experience your
service when you're not in the picture?
So it was definitely one of those areas where we we feel
that we were challenged in our understanding where we had to
stop and make a decision on whether we were actually
building the right thing or we had to go back into the drawing
board and make this service better for end users that are
not necessarily completely used to driving their health care in
a digital format. That was an interesting and very
informative type of experience. That sounds, yeah, very
challenging indeed, specifically in the middle of the pandemic,
right? When it's more needed because
then we realized that the urgency was even higher because
a lot of people were going through, they had multiple
healthcare needs that we're very pressing or we're not
necessarily tended to because we were cut off from physical
services. So yes, we had to take time to
understand who these people were on the other side, but we also
needed to act fast so we could provide a service that was
effective quickly and it can help them really like get get a
better sense of, of healthcare services in a time of more
needed. Very interesting.
So as we start to wrap up, we always like to understand if you
could design your perfect creative day for maximum
performance, how would you? How would this day look like?
How would you design it? What are the choices behind it
for you? Well, one of the things that I
have realized is that I. I need to maintain a balance
between my personal priorities and my work priorities for me to
operate at my highest performance.
There was a time before starting this company where I used to
wake up at 5:30 in the morning because I was working with a
team in India. And I would connect because we
would have very few hours in the day, talk to them for a couple
of hours and then I would work straight throughout the day
until I connected back with them at 9:00 PM where they woke up.
And I would create a cycle of running my days like this every
day. This didn't really work for me.
I did it for a while and I felt the burnout happening very
quickly as I as I was going through this.
So I don't believe that 24/7 productivity equates to
performance. So now the thing that I have
done is I have created healthier routines where I can take care
of myself for me to be able to take care of my company, to take
care of my team. I like to start my days doing
physical exercise. I do yoga, I do cycling.
I take the first hour of the morning to really concentrate on
my mental health, on my body. Then I go back and start working
on on productivity mode and I start my day with a very, very
large black coffee. And then I try to segment my day
thinking the most important or most challenging thing that I
have to take care of earlier in the day so I don't burn out
myself with smaller tasks, leaving it towards the end.
What I have found is if I complete the most important
thing first, I feel both a sense of release and a sense of
accomplishment on having been able to do that.
And then all of the rest of my day flows, flows very well.
I, I like, I'm super physical when it comes to the things I
do. So I like, I do, I have like to
do lists of everything that I want to do in the day.
And I try to like keep it short because I heard from someone
that you should set yourself to do three things a day and that's
achievable. And that's let's say like a
smart goal that you can achieve. So I try to like limit it to
three and then I keep on adding things if I, if I get more
bandwidth, but I try to do this, this hacks and I, I, I
appreciate everyone on, on like social media that's sharing
their, their, their little hacks because I believe they work.
I try to create that balance throughout the day in between,
OK, a lot of things that I've accomplished.
And then I take 30 minutes to like have a decent lunch, go for
a walk with my dog and and you know, try to try to incorporate
both of the things throughout my day.
Wonderful. That's great to hear about that.
And thank you for sharing your notebook.
That's really great. I'm curious now about like your
inspiration. Where do you go to find this
inspiration? How do you continuously innovate
and expose yourself to new things and ideas?
So I, I think that I find inspiration in people and the
great work that other people are doing.
Fortunate enough to live in New York where there is a multitude
of people pursuing very, very interesting dreams here.
And I, I try to bake time within my week so I can go and meet new
people in the city and learn from what they're doing.
New Yorkers have a bad Rep. I would say that I don't feel
it. I have reached out to people
that I barely know and everyone has given me 30 minutes to have
a cup of coffee and then get to meet each other.
And I find that super inspirational.
I have to say that I try to get out of my traditional topics for
inspiration. I try to go and look for very
different things. I try to go to museums.
I try to connect with people that are doing something
completely different and unrelated to what I'm doing.
And that really gives me like energizes me.
And I always come back home with something that I learned about
the other person. I'm something that I learned
about myself in that process. That's wonderful.
Do you have any specific recommendations, whether it's
like a museum exhibition, a book, a movie, a show, any piece
of media or experience that you would like to recommend to our
viewers? Slash listeners.
I always recommend the same book to my students at Parsons.
It's called Feel like an Artist by Austin Klian.
This is a book that is is super close to my heart.
I actually got it here when I came to New York for the first
time after graduating for my undergrad program.
And it was it was one of the first things that I found here.
And it was so liberating because rather than telling you exactly
what you have to do, it's almost like the book gave you
permission for the process of getting inspiration from other
people, trying things unfailing. It lowered the pressure on my
own perception as a creator. And I think it's important that
that's important for everyone to have.
Like we can find ways to increase our education in
multiple formats. But I think that this book was
more about creativity and your relationship to yourself, which
I I've gained a lot from as the years have gone through.
Wonderful. Yeah, we'll definitely post a
link to that so people can check it out in the show notes and in
the description for this episode.
So, well, we're starting to wrap up on our time together.
Maria, it's really flown by, but we'd like to end our episodes
with a call to action. So can you let our listeners,
our viewers, know where they can learn more about you, where they
can learn more about your work, connect with you, whatever.
We'll post this on the show notes as well.
But it's helpful for folks to hear it or see it as well.
Of course, I I would love to connect to the IGA community.
I've been both a member and a fan for the past decade, so
people can reach out to me on my LinkedIn, it's Maria Laroda.
We will drop it on the notes, but also I'd love to invite
everyone to check out the work that we're doing at Switch, our
website isswitchstrategy.co. We are looking to connect with
people that are working within the same space.
And actually, we are offering a 30 minute discovery call for
organizations that want to identify how they can include
more of a purpose within the work that they're doing or find
a way to innovate their business model to drive inclusivity and
to grow. Wonderful.
All right, well, Maria, thanks again for joining us and thank
you for listening to or watching this episode of the AIGA Design
podcast. We are wherever you get your
podcasts or also on YouTube at AIGA Design if you'd like to
look for us there. And remember this episode and
all of our episodes, all of our programming is sponsored by AIGA
members. So learnmoreaboutaiga@aiga.org
and hope to see you too at our conference this year, October
9th through 11th in Los Angeles, CA.
But until then, I'll see you in a future episode, so bye
everyone. Bye everyone.