Work For Humans

Kentaro Toyama spent a decade designing technologies to fight global poverty and improve education and health. As co-founder of Microsoft Research India lab, he made a troubling discovery – innovative technologies can’t create change on their own. Realizing that social progress depends more on people than on the technology they use, Kentaro became a self-proclaimed “geek heretic” who now teaches others the importance of putting peo...

Geoffrey West didn’t set out to explain work. He was a physicist trying to understand why living things grow, age, and die. But when his questions expanded into biology, cities, and organizations, they offered a way to think about why growth changes how organizations behave and why success often brings new constraints. In this episode, Dart and Geoffrey discuss why work feels different as organizations scale, why cities keep renewi...

After decades in education, Dr. Peter Liljedahl realized that many classrooms fail to engage the people inside them. Rather than accept that reality, he began challenging every classroom norm he could find, asking a single question of each one: does this increase thinking?

What followed was a decades-long effort to redesign learning environments from the ground up, dramatically increasing student engagement and understandi...

Ethical questions at work rarely show up as rules or compliance issues. They show up in the systems organizations design and the outcomes those systems produce. And even well-intentioned leaders can create harm without meaning to. In this episode, Dart and Ed explore legitimacy, responsibility, employees, power, and why acting ethically inside complex systems is so difficult, even when people know what the right thing is.

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Experience is brand. The experiences people have with a company shape how they feel, what they trust, and whether they stay. Creating those experiences is not just about interfaces or marketing. It requires rethinking internal processes, digital systems, and the everyday realities of work. Alder Yarrow has spent decades helping organizations understand experience from the inside out, and why lasting growth depends on getting it rig...

While leading L&D at Creative Force, Aaron Horwath and his leaders began treating work as a product to be designed. That shift had wide effects, including something unexpected. Creative Force became one of the few companies to implement AI in a way that actually improved the experience of work. Instead of chasing tools, Aaron and his team started with people. In this episode, Dart and Aaron discuss why starting with people led ...

Every building comes with a set of expectations. Students are quiet in a library, but loud on a playground. Adults are focused in their deckchairs yet chatty on bar stools. Witnessing the limitations of conventional building design, Jan Golembiewski began to leverage design psychology to improve the lives of different groups, from inmates to the elderly. As one of the world’s leading researchers in architectural design psychology, ...

Ideas don’t grow on their own. Something has to amplify them. Universities amplify what they teach, consultants amplify what they recommend, and money amplifies the ideas it chooses to back. If we want to understand how work changes at scale, we have to look at how capital shapes which ideas take root. Virginie Raphaël is redesigning that amplifier. 

In this episode, Dart and Virginie discuss how venture capital amplifies ideas, how...

Dan Cable was doing his job and getting compensated for it, but there was a problem: he was going through the motions with no growth, learning, or sense of excitement. He knew he needed to make a change to excel. By exploring the neuroscience behind thriving at work, Dan has since used his experience to help companies like Coca-Cola and Twitter (now X) optimize employee conditions. In this revisited episode, Dart and Dan discuss th...

We experience the world through what we notice, how we feel, and what we remember. Yet most organizations still focus on products instead of the experiences those products create. Mat Duerden has spent his career studying how experiences work, why they matter, and what turns an ordinary moment into something meaningful or even transformative. In this episode, Dart and Mat discuss what makes an experience meaningful and how reflecti...

In an ideal world, college would help students explore possibilities and imagine a future that fits who they are. Instead, many choose majors before they know themselves and get pushed onto a career conveyor belt with little space to discover what matters to them. Farouk Dey wants to change that. His work encourages students to pause, experiment, and learn from real experiences before deciding where they want to go. In this episode...

Friction is part of every workplace. It shows up in the meetings that don’t need to happen, the unclear steps, and the small barriers that make work harder than it has to be. It’s a cost we’ve come to accept, but it doesn’t need to stay that way. When we look more closely, we start to see the real experience of work where people get stuck, where energy drains away, and where better design could help them thrive. In this episode, Da...

From kitchen tables to self-driving cars, everything around us was designed to solve a problem. Bill Burnett, award-winning Silicon Valley designer, believes we can use the same approach to design careers that bring fulfillment and joy. By using curiosity, reframing, collaboration, and other tools, Bill shows how to enjoy the present while shaping a better future. In this revisited episode, Dart and Bill discuss how to adopt a desi...

Dropbox didn’t just adapt to remote work. It redesigned work itself. After the pandemic, Melanie Rosenwasser and her team joined forces with Dropbox’s designers to study how people actually work and what they need to do their best thinking. Backed by data, they made the leap to their Virtual First operating model in which the vast majority of the workforce is remote and physical spaces are used primarily for planned team events. In...

Stacy Barton was assigned an exhaustive project at 9 pm and had to complete it by 6 am if she wanted to receive a paycheck. While most of us would have deflated under the pressure, Stacy saw an opportunity; it was time to get creative. By being inventive and working around the rules, she learned how to deliver a product that companies, employees, and her audience love. In this revisited episode, Stacy shares how constraints spark c...

Modern work is haunted by an idea that began in feudal Europe. The Master Servant Doctrine gave employers the right to command and control workers while imposing a duty to provide for them. That ancient logic still shapes the modern workplace — from “at-will” employment and HR policies designed to protect companies, to benefits that bind people to their jobs. In this episode, Dart and Elizabeth explore how feudal ideas of control a...

Most organizations think about the design of work in terms of products, services, or customer journeys. But Dave Norton has spent his career arguing that experience design goes much deeper. It is about shaping how people spend their time and, in some cases, their lives. In this episode, Dart talks to Dave about how experience design has evolved, why context matters more than personality, and how AI may finally make transformational...

The tools we use shape how we work, what we see, and how we think. Dmitri Glazkov, Strategy Lead at Google Labs, initiated Breadboard and helped launch Opal—tools that let people connect prompts into systems that think together like Tinkertoys for the mind. His passion is building technology that makes creativity easier and more human. In this episode, Dart and Dmitri explore how AI can capture tacit knowledge, why strategy gets em...

Most companies chase growth by selling more things to more people, faster. Mark Adams has spent nearly 40 years proving there is another way. As Director of Vitsœ, he runs the company with one mission: to help people live better with less that lasts longer. In this episode, Dart talks to Mark about why Vitsœ resists conventional business rules, how it builds longevity and trust into everything it makes, and what it means to design ...