From Structure to Freedom: Balancing Creative Flow in Design with Peter Swimm

What happens when the structures designed to support creativity start to suffocate it instead? Peter Swimm, project management consultant at Toilville, brings a refreshingly honest perspective to this tension that every designer faces.

Ready to rethink how structure and creativity can work together in your design practice? Listen now, and then share your thoughts on how you're balancing these forces in your own work.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Peter Swim, Project Management Consultant
• 8:28 From Tech Support to Conversational Design
• 16:00 When Structure Limits Creativity
• 22:02 Tailoring Solutions for Clients' Needs
• 29:58 AI Strategies for Small Teams
• 36:05 Navigating Junior Designer Challenges
• 40:42 Career Advice for New Designers

Transcript

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Designing with Love podcast. I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal oal is to bring you information, tips, and tricks as an instructional designer. Hello instructional designers and educators! Welcome to episode 64 of the Designing with Love podcast. I'm thrilled to have Peter Swim, a project management consultant at Toilville, with me today. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Swimm: 0:25

Hey, thanks for having me.

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:27

Great Thanks. I'm so glad we got connected. It's so nice to meet some new people that are in the industry or even just being able to make those positive changes, so it's really great. I love that.

Peter Swimm: 0:39

Yeah, for sure, wonderful.

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:41

So to start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to move from working inside other people's structures to helping teams create more open, supportive spaces for design?

Peter Swimm: 0:52

So I've been in tech basically my entire adult life but I never started out being a product person. I started out just like in the trenches doing stuff and doing stuff like support and, you know, working in a network operation center and just like doing stuff with computers. And eventually I like stumbled into a startup in 2008 and startups go where startups do and you know my desk was next to CEO's desk, which is next to my product person's desk. So all of a sudden I absorbed all this ambient like product life cycle knowledge and when opportunities came I started working on product work and I think that kind of like put me in a different mindset than other my product peers, because I didn't come to it through the filter of like. I just knew what I liked. You know, like I read books and listen to music and I know what a good put together thing looks like and I know what a slapdash thing looks like and I've had a writing background so I know the structure of narratives and I just leaned on that like. I've just kind of like that smell test of like, trying to figure out things like best practices and design and stuff and I kind of stumbled into this niche that I feel like I'm have fun at and that is a conversational design and like, uh, conversational ux and you know what you think of as like chat bots and press one, press two, because, uh, we launched, uh, I had a startup called bot kit and we launched, uh with the slack app store. So the day Slack was able to develop for it was basically IRC there wasn't a design pattern to speak of, so your design pattern was human speech, and so you had to do a lot of stage writing. You had to write like you would write for a call center or write for a nove know a novella or a play, and I found, like that was like, hey, this is like corporate work, but I like this, I like helping people and I like talking to people and figuring out like succinct ways to communicate stuff that can't be misinterpreted.

Peter Swimm: 2:57

And as that modality grew with this, technology got better. You get buttons and stuff. Then like, oh yeah, I know websites and buttons and, and so I felt like it was very, uh, easily approachable for me to understand, even though there wasn't like best practice yet for this stuff. And um, so the years went by and I worked for bigger and bigger companies I worked for, like the walmarts and the live persons of the world and I I worked at microsoft as um. I was a principal product manager in the chat bot framework called the Microsoft bot framework, and we got subsumed into a product that became Microsoft's co-pilot studio and, oh wow. So like we were using, we were messing with open AI like this, like weeks before GPT-3 came out and, like you know, we had the technology so we saw it evolve and it solved a lot of problems right away, but then it created a whole new raft of design questions and problems and so I adapted. You know, like I was able to use the things I did and a lot of people were thrown into it.

Peter Swimm: 4:05

You know, like people who have been working on database applications and other computer sciencey things now had to work with something that is like oh yeah, we have to accept all input, you know and that's a that is like a huge like shift away from, like, working on excel or working on products that are like okay, you can enter one of three things in this hole, versus, yeah, you can stream a movie into this hole or you can, you know, have a camera looking on a field. I think that is kind of like was my competitive advantage because I wasn't a computer scientist. I can't program without access to you know, stack Overflow and Googling and all that stuff. But I can, like imagine a better world for me and my friends without access to stack overflow and Googling and all that stuff. But I can imagine a better world for me and my friends and I can talk to people and hear their problems and stuff. And I think that mindset really helps me talk to customers and clients.

Peter Swimm: 5:04

I've talked to people out of using ChatGPT almost as much as I've talked them into using things like or bot framework, because like it just doesn't fit what they're trying to do and it's like a shotgun when a pistol will do and whatever metaphor you want to use, and I think like we've kind of lost sight of this industry and people are like man, I wish I can find someone like you or hire someone like you know, it's like, well, you can't afford me, but also I'm someone, I'm someone like me, I'm someone like me and like I should just go out there and help people do this instead of, like you know, kind of like walking them around the scenarios and stuff like that and, you know, trying to show them, like through evidence of best practice and common sense, to do the right thing. I'm just like you know what, I'm just gonna it, and then I won't have to fight with the boss because I'll be the boss.

Jackie Pelegrin: 5:47

There you go. I love that. I love that approach, and it seemed like a natural flow, a natural fit for you. So that's great Thanks for sharing, peter. I think it's a great way to kick off our conversation. So we know many companies focus heavily on building processes, platforms or even AI systems, like we just talked about. So, from your perspective, when does structure support creativity and where do you see that over-engineering starting to get in the way of design flow?

Peter Swimm: 6:13

I think you could talk to maybe a million designers and not find a single one who's passionate about working in Figma. They're passionate about aspects of design and thinking and system thinking and all that, and figma is across the bear, you know. Or this is where I have to work, because the engineers need an artifact and it's easier for me to do this artifact because I don't know how to structure json or css or any of that stuff that they need. But I can learn enough about figma and figma, blah, blah, blah and um, I think this really hurts the process.

Peter Swimm: 6:47

Right because imagine, imagine every project around invented a new communication language and it was the absolute uh, mvp of the overlap of your worlds and and I think that's kind of what these design systems are. Right because, like, as a visual designer you have you know everything from cave paintings up to now is like your corpus of information, and even programmers, everything from, like you know, ada lovelace to now is their corpus and you just need to know enough to talk to each other. And so, because you're not doing a one-to-one mapping of the world in your communication, your tool is just like the cheapest possible translation layer it can be, and then you lose a lot in that communication, right, you're like, oh, it's too expensive for me to have banded colors or to be accessible or to be in more than these eight business languages, and then you start every death from a thousand cuts results in a product that uh, loses one customer, right and right, and say losing, I mean like they can't use it, like it's just right, they're not even at the table.

Jackie Pelegrin: 7:58

So, um yeah, and so it becomes hard to yeah to sell that or to sell that product or service, right yeah.

Peter Swimm: 8:06

If you're losing people and also that's like how you get things like like when you load up a product like Microsoft Excel. Can you name off from memory what five of the buttons on the first page are and what they do?

Jackie Pelegrin: 8:18

No, because I don't use Excel every day.

Peter Swimm: 8:21

Yeah, but that's my point, right, because and there's probably buttons you may never have used in your life, right, and you you know, and if you knew maybe you'd use them like, but the UI doesn't like suggest anything. And and I think that's how we get products like, that is because every time someone important comes along that like, it's like I really need this button to fill my thing, and if you don don't, I'm taking my business elsewhere. Microsoft, and that's five million dollars. It's like boom, they slap a button in there and and sure you can customize it, and who does that? But you can customize it and do things, but then you just have kind of like post-it note of a ui, you know, and you're you're and I think the entire industry of software is set up that either you're the bulletin board or you're the post-it note. And so people are like and I talked to a lot of clients who are like, okay, I have a form on my website and it emails me and then I send them a link to book my Zoom.

Peter Swimm: 9:16

And then the Zoom meeting comes and I talk to them and I write down all my notes and I put my notes into office and I type up a thing.

Peter Swimm: 9:23

I send an email to five different providers and I put my notes into Office and I type up a thing and I send an email to five different providers.

Peter Swimm: 9:27

And that is what AI should be automating, because that's just like this huge game of mousetrap the kid's board game and it's just like it kind of works.

Peter Swimm: 9:37

But you're being held together by very put-together smart, clever people who the competitive advantage of a small business is the fact that I can stay on the phone with you for an hour and listen to all your problems and really listen, and that's how I'm better than, like, the big guys, you know. And so a lot of my clients are just kind of like, okay, what can we fire from your stack today to like give you like 20 more minutes to breathe so you can think about what's really important and whatnot, and you take it from there because you know, once you get in that kind of like Marie Kondo life cycle of you know, what do we really need? Do I, do I really need to be paying for slack for $40 a month so we can all be on the same page, or should I just, like you know, buy people an extra lunch a month and we use something free or whatever you know.

Jackie Pelegrin: 10:26

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, you're able to really tailor the services to what each customer needs, right. So it's not a one size fits all approach, and that's true, and I think in a lot of industries in learning, instructional design, what I do, that learning and development space it's so important to have that approach that's not one size fits all and that just-in-time learning it sounds like you're utilizing that too, because you're able to take what their needs are, tailor it and then approach them in that way. That helps to solve that problem, right. So yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin: 11:01

I have a friend of mine her and I used to work together and when you were talking about that it made me think of when she said what you want to try to do in any industry is. She used this analogy and she's like you're the, they have a, you know, like a wound, and we're the bandaid that solves that, and we're going to put the put the bandaid on the wound and treat it. So, yeah, I like that it's going to put the put the band-aid on the wound and treat it.

Peter Swimm: 11:25

So like, yeah, I like that it's gonna be but like the problem with that is like a bunch of people who run fortune 500 companies now they think they have a digital band-aid, right, they, they could ship, and that that isn't important and like, yeah, and because no one ever tracks the pain and life and times of being a band-aid, that they don't know what they got. And I've had clients and now ex-clients who, oh yeah, we'll fire our contact center and we'll just make it all a buy. Weeks later they have to hire the contact center back because the whole business is melting down, because they didn't know that everyone hates their guts and the contact center has been keeping the wolves at bay for years.

Jackie Pelegrin: 12:14

Right, exactly.

Peter Swimm: 12:15

They didn't measure it right.

Peter Swimm: 12:16

And I think design is like that too right, because if you design well, you're invisible, and if you design bad you generate a lot of smoke, and so a lot of people who are really good at their jobs become invisible, because it, you know, squeaky wheel gets the grease kind of syndrome Right and, and so that's the number one thing I tell my clients is like, when they say, like what is the ROI on going to AI, it's like, well, what is the ROI on what you're doing today?

Peter Swimm: 12:44

You know, like when you you know, you know how much you pay people and you know what work comes, you know what generates come out of the work and you know what's the cost of human effort to do that. And they don't know, no one knows. And uh, and I think it's like, well, you can't really like make personnel decisions unless you know what your personnel are doing, you know. And and then we get into this thing like, well, the easiest way to make personnel decisions is complete, total surveillance, and so we have to find some sort of like new social contract, I think, between labor and outcomes and time and all that stuff.

Jackie Pelegrin: 13:58

Wow, yeah, that's true. Ai is really helping to it's reshaping right. How we approach different things like that, like ROI and performance right and performance assessments, things like that Wow, that's that's really interesting. So, for smaller teams especially, what simple strategies have you seen that keep just enough of that structure in place while still leaving room for creative flow? That's needed.

Peter Swimm: 14:23

Yeah, well, one I try to get clients and people to think about like, stop thinking in terms of dollars per hour or dollars for project even, and just be like what would your ideal day look like to work? Right, and maybe that's a four-day work week, and maybe it's a seven-day work week and anything in between. But like, understand, like how you want to work is sort of the first thing, because then you, then you understand, like, okay, I'm gonna, this guy wants me to take a cut in my hourly pay, but I think I could do it in less hours than he thinks it'll take, so I'll agree to do it. You know, and that's what that's the kind of thinking ai tools help you do where, um, like I don't talk to clients now without running a simulation of what I would have on hand or what I would need to build to do it, if he said, yes, right and so, and because all my tools are in, like super fast AI databases that run only on my computer and I don't have to pay for it's cheap and fast, like, and so I can write an email back to a person in 20-30 minutes that has a elevator pitch of the thing, to see if they're interested and then we could talk more and get better definition.

Peter Swimm: 15:34

But I think that's like the competitive advantage of being small and plucky, if you can understand. Like all right, um, this guy wants to pay me 75 an hour and he says it'll take 40 hours a week, but I could do it in two hours a day, so I'll take, I'll take75 an hour and turn it to $500 an hour, right, and take three of these contracts at once, and that's like how you think. Like Microsoft is thinking about labor and stuff, but you can take that money and then decide to get a person that has only been part-time for you or make sure that your employees have care, at-home care for children and whatever perks you want to do. And that is like a radically re-engineered way of thinking things that I think a lot of small, especially progressive B Corp-type people are not thinking through.

Jackie Pelegrin: 16:24

Right, yeah, they're not thinking about how they can take some of those monotonous type of tasks right that don't require so much of that human touch. You would still, I'm sure you still, you know, have that human loop and you look at things, but it gives you that ability to be able to shave off so much time. That used to take us a lot, a lot of time. And yeah, I mean even just an example of this podcast I use, I utilize AI in every part of the process, but it doesn't replace some of the things that I do.

Jackie Pelegrin: 17:02

It just helps to reorganize some things and it frees up more time for other things. So, yeah, it's really great, I love it. Well, yeah.

Peter Swimm: 17:08

I refuse to use. I call it commercial AI, because you don't know where the models come from. Right, the AI that I've built on my machine. Everything's attributed.

Peter Swimm: 17:18

So I know oh, I stole this idea from Mark Twain or my neighbor Tom, you know, or whoever it is, and the people who work for me. We have a system that, instead of giving them stocks, we give them something that looks like a pension plus residuals, and because of the contract they have with us, they can say things like you must never use this for military applications or whatever. And so we can just define a contract for every single person, every single interaction, because AI is able to read it and understand it and market. And so if I have a contract with you and you give me a bunch of things we can't do and I think that's arbitration between everyone. That should happen all the time.

Peter Swimm: 18:05

You should say I do not want to use AI on this product, it's no problem, because all my tooling is AI last. So I take the AI and it only kicks in when things are not in place as a process. So in front of it is a is a program, and the program is just a chat bot or something that lives in my artifacts. So, and because of this, I can do things like fire, figma. Because I find out my designer loves working in affinity and super fast in affinity, and I found out that I love looking in notion. So I'll type something in notion and the machine will turn it into the affinity template with, like, the colors and the palettes, and my artist will fill it in with their designs and and then we'll bring it back and send it to the code and the code will go to my developer in the format that he needs to start developing.

Peter Swimm: 18:59

Wow, and like, so like so now we don't have a have a third product. You know, we don't have to rent a hotel at the Radisson to have a meeting, over everything. We can do it all on our own little private Idaho's over everything. We can do it all on our own little private idaho's and and then and then you know, and then we come, and when we look at the product, it's in situ, it's in the application or the website. So like we don't have to look at a wireframe, we just load up the program, we load up the website and we can see if it works or not. So it's not like abstraction of abstraction of abstraction and we don't have that generation loss of, you know, our design ideas and stuff that go missing in the middle.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:37

So right, so it doesn't feel like it's a hodgepodge of different things.

Peter Swimm: 19:42

Everything works in tandem with each other right yeah yeah, I love that, that's great yeah, it's kind of like more like it, and this will sound terrible to creative people, but I feel like it's more like an assembly line village methodology, where it's just like, yeah, I work on the steering wheel and that's fine, you know I do what I do and I own my domain and whatever I do, and you know he works on the seat and because we are so well aligned, we just plug in and I think there's room to be creative and expert. And I think pay people enough where, if they still want to, at the end of the day, practice music or paint or whatever they want to do with passion, they still can do it. So that's really what I try to do with my company first and then help people. Others do it.

Jackie Pelegrin: 20:31

I love that, yeah, and so to me it sounds like there's that servant leadership approach that you bring into everything you do, whether it's your business and those that you're working with, and that's important because you want to be able to give them that whole approach right, and not just the work they do, but that the work they do has an impact all across every facet of what they do. So that's important. I love that. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's definitely excellent advice for that. So let's kind of shift over to new designers maybe, who are just starting out, because it's tough to be in this and be doing it new. It's tough to to be in this and be doing it new. So for designers who are early in their careers, how can they tell the difference between structure that helps them grow and the structure that starts to limit their creativity?

Peter Swimm: 21:19

um, I think, um, structure is either part of the solution set or part of the problem set, right, and when it's part of the solution set, structure can make things easier and you just, you know, like AP style guide, right, I think it's a thing where structure helps the writing process but doesn't make you a writer.

Peter Swimm: 21:40

But then also, like you know, the early reader books from Dr Seuss can only use 30 words, so that limits the process, you know, and maybe it's a creative challenge for you and you can detect that I think really good designers are people who listen and understand the limitations of the scope.

Peter Swimm: 22:01

And the scope could be like you know, uh, you know we have to do a website, or we have to do a movie, or you know, or my boss is mean and he refuses to have anything that has, like you know, quotes around air, quotes around stuff, and these are all like the what makes up, like how your work is evaluated, and so it's really hard for a junior, I think, especially to like have the confidence engaged in that system and not be changed by it.

Peter Swimm: 22:25

So the challenge, I guess, is like find your people and like find processes that work and don't internalize things that don't work and look at them as challenges that you know you have to do to ship it and also know your limits of like how much guff you'll take. And then you, before you know, you'll be a senior. Right, and I think that's the difference between junior and senior is one the executive function of figuring out how to start and do stuff. Because you've been, you know it works. But also, like the eye of a designer, to know what you want to do and also the patience of suffering fools and like treating as a challenge versus a insurmountable blocker and knowing when to tell people to take a hike Right, exactly yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin: 23:11

And not be scared to do that. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah, because and I'm sure this is true in your, your company too, where you have those, like you said, the experts you know we call them subject matter experts in in my field, and I'm sure that's kind of how they are too you know where they, they have a certain uh, they, they have that expertise, um, and I always want to be a novice when it comes to what they know, because I don't want to, I don't want to stop asking questions, right? I think it's important. So do you find that with your um, with your designers, that you want them to, even if they get to that point, like you said, when they're a senior designer, you don't want them to stop asking the right questions or those deep questions, right? You want them to still get that information out of the client and understand what it is they're really looking for and what they need?

Peter Swimm: 24:00

Yeah, like and I think that just comes from experience is the line between being crisp and, you know, being like very definitive about what you want and letting someone cook. You know, and it's just like, okay, this area, um, that we're working on, there's things that have to happen and they could be defined by you know the law or our policies or any number of reasons. You know accessibility, and then over here is the technical things that block us, and then in this little narrow area here, you can decide if the bevels are rounded or squared.

Jackie Pelegrin: 24:38

Oh, okay.

Peter Swimm: 24:39

Wow. And so like either my spec is just like all the way down like pins and needles, and then if I, if I miss anything and I tell them they can't cook and it's missing, I can't yell at them.

Peter Swimm: 24:51

Right, you know as a product lead. But, like you know, if you're like, hey, you forgot to mention about the bevels, do you want rounded or squared? I appreciate that in my company and you know we do it in situ and we're able to do it flexibly enough where it doesn't have to have a meeting about it or whatever.

Jackie Pelegrin: 25:16

And I think that's where things get really bogged down is when you start spending more time with process mapping and project planning than you do in working. Right, that's true. Yeah, because then you can get bogged down by all these different systems and processes instead of really having that human connection with the client. Yeah, that's true, that can happen really really fast, and then, before you know it, you're like oh, I'm not really getting to the heart of what they need, what they want.

Peter Swimm: 25:37

Yeah, and I think a lot of times when people say, oh, I have the client from hell and you know they're constantly flipping, I mean, I think it's just because I take it as like I didn't do enough to be crisp, like I didn't, I didn't show him that, like this choice will result in the narrowing of the options this way. Right and because if they don't know that, because they took a left turn six revisions ago now, it's impossible to even do the thing they want to do now, right.

Peter Swimm: 26:05

You have to unwind the whole snake to go back there, and I think that's just kind of like that's another experience thing, but also like you might just have a bad client. You know, maybe your client doesn't have that kind of like intellectual capacity and you just have to like make a very strict process of change, revision, change, review, and that's just more of a seniority thing, right, or you just jump however they tell you to jump. When you do it, to jump, and hopefully they're paying you enough for that stress, you know.

Jackie Pelegrin: 26:34

I hope so. Yeah, and then that way you don't have to, like you said, go back and do all these revisions and then scope creep right, it starts to happen.

Jackie Pelegrin: 26:42

Yeah, that's true. That reminds me of a situation that I went through when I was new and it was my first instructional design job and I was working in a university and then. So I was working in employee training and development and developing my first e-learning course and so and it had software simulation in it. So you probably remember Captivate, at the time that they were switching over from 4 to 5. So this was 2010. So they had just rolled out Captivate 5. And it was such a huge difference between 4 and 5.

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:15

But I remember I did the software simulation and I brought it to the SMEs before it was fully developed in Captivate and I said here's what it looks like. Can you please look over the content, make sure it works, before I go and build the software simulation aspect, because, as you know, each click is a slide and it was huge and yeah, and so then I bring it to them and I'm like, okay, great, it's ready to go, I'm ready to test it out with learners, can you take one last look at it? And she's like, oh, this needs to change here and that needs to change there. And she started listing all these things and I said, why didn't you tell me this beforehand, because now I have to go back and rerecord the software simulation she goes oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that was the case.

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:55

I thought you could just switch out slides and I'm like I don't remember her name, but I said not like PowerPoint, this is different than PowerPoint. Yeah, so that was my lessons learned as a new designer. I was like, oh, you know what I need to make sure I'm as clear in my in what the requirements are in my communication that if you want changes, say it now, before before I go and do all this work, and then I have to go in and go back and do three days worth of work again.

Jackie Pelegrin: 28:23

So yeah, it was a good lesson for me, and so I'm sure you have junior designers that have faced similar situations where it's like, oh yeah, I guess I didn't explain that enough.

Peter Swimm: 28:34

I probably should have yeah, done that Well, and that's the kind of thing of like why is the only thing we have in our world that can be worked on that way copy right, because words are. You can write in notepad, you can write in Word, you can paint it on a cave, but then once you go into the artifact it becomes suddenly immutable and you can't change it. And that's kind of like the workaround that came up with my designer, vifini, where it was just like, yeah, we should be able to just change the slide, right. Right, I was training some clients on using Copilot and Copilot was just and I think it still is as of this week just really awful at making a PowerPoint deck. Right, because you know it doesn't know style and design and all that thing you know.

Peter Swimm: 29:27

And just when you watch anything creative made with AI, it's horrible because everyone just prompts like make me Star Wars, but with donkeys, you know, or whatever you know, whatever wish that they have.

Peter Swimm: 29:39

And if you told ChatGPT to do me a script about donkeys in Star Wars, it'd be a lot better than the video generation in the movie, just because of computer and processing speed. So the trick is you have it, write the overview and the script and then you take the script and you just load in a PowerPoint template and so it just throws the text in each slide and then you take five minutes and you move the text around to where it goes in the slide. That, you know, is pretty. So we still need designers, we still need creative people and we still need someone to read the text and write the text and invent a whole series of movies set in space over the course of 40 years to reference in. But then it becomes like an approachable problem that doesn't set the earth on fire to generate you know right and like it doesn't even have to be AI.

Peter Swimm: 30:31

You know we've been generating document texts since the sixties and you know my iPhone is more than powerful enough to write a book. You know, with AI.

Peter Swimm: 30:42

And and so maybe we don't have to, like, send everything to an api owned by microsoft or google or whatever you know. We could just run things locally and, uh, you know, have a designer design it and put it together in a way that's so modular that when a person says, oh, this needs to be this and this and this, you can work through it in a meeting an hour and click go and it goes. And I think all these limitations are caused by artificial constraints on how human creativity works.

Jackie Pelegrin: 31:13

Right, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I've even seen AI hallucinate and things like that. And, yeah, I definitely have to double check anything I put in there. Because, yeah, that I'm like, oh, it got this mixed up. And what it did one time, it was the funniest thing it got two different instructional design models mixed up. It got Merrill's first principles of instructions and Mayer's 12 principles. So I'm like, okay, well, I can see why I would kind of mix them up, because they mayor, mayorals are, you know, kind of similar and one is five and one is 12. So they both have numbers. But yeah, it started mixing up the two and it started taking mayor's 12 principles and started interweaving them into mayorals first principles.

Jackie Pelegrin: 31:58

And I'm like, oh well, and that's why, yeah, that human eye is so important, because if I hadn't seen that, and then I would have presented that to my students. They would have been like do you know what you're doing? You used AI, didn't you?

Peter Swimm: 32:11

Yeah, I mean, and everyone talks about like what are the tells of AI? And there are, you know, em dashes and all that stuff, and it's just like not checking your work is the tell of AI? You know, like you pay some kid to do your homework, kind of like handed in and kind of thing, and like there's probably a lot you know. You've been using AI for 15 years. It's called spell check, you know, or, and there's all kinds of things that you do to check your work and you print it and and you know, I think, like um, using things as shortcuts, um to avoid uh thinking is bad, but using things as shortcuts to avoid uh toil is is good. Right, like we, we want to work smarter, not harder, right as as a species, and reward that kind of like ingenuity.

Peter Swimm: 33:05

And I think that's another reason why creatives hate ai so much is because they are completely denigrating that whole. Like 500 000 years of human creativity versus, you know, 136 years of capital and industry. You know it's just like get out of here. You know everything that's happened since the 1900s is like the only thing that's good is like you know, people live longer and like can grow to adulthood and all those things, and and not that they don't like have to like paint the picture or make a movie on their own anymore. You know, like right, those are the things that make getting out of bed worth living, and you want to take that from me and you want to make it so. I work 10 hours a day. You know, get out of here, you know.

Jackie Pelegrin: 33:47

Right, exactly, yeah, so they see it as a it's hard to, and you know, as human beings, change is hard for us. So, yeah, I see that you know quite a bit in the work I do. You know, whenever there's a new system or there's a new software, it's just one of those things where people resist, and there's people in my department. We're supposed to use this current it's. You've probably heard of XRM, which is a Microsoft system, so it's supposed to be for anything, right, but it's not the easiest system for us to use at all, and so we have the current one that we're supposed to use. But there's people still in my department that are utilizing the previous one because they don't want to move over to the Connectors and Connectors is just a fancy way of saying APIs.

Peter Swimm: 34:48

And so APIs have a schema and it's very well defined, and even within that definition, there's a wide variety of choice that could be bad or broken, and so to build a universal system that works with AI is very difficult, right? Because you basically have to, and the way things work. You basically have to make a version of that API for AI is very difficult, right, because you basically have to, and the way things work. You basically have to make a version of that API for AI for everything, until people agree with your world of what that needs, to be right?

Jackie Pelegrin: 35:15

So it's just like your problem.

Peter Swimm: 35:17

So if you're on version two and I'm on version three, we need to do version three, because version two doesn't have any of the stuff that helps make AI easy and until then I have to build a bunch of things that causes hallucinations until that happens. So how do you get people to upgrade One? You try to do it automatically, right? So like, yeah, you keep working in your V2 as long as you can until it becomes, like you know, impossible to like translate in the fly or whatever, like you know, and you're missing out on all these cool features. You really should upgrade. That's the way you upgrade people, right? Because it's like give me a reason to upgrade, you know, and maybe that reason to upgrade is the exact same UI as version two, but now you have a button for the new thing you know.

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:02

Right, exactly.

Peter Swimm: 36:09

And then eventually, while they're not looking, you change out the code base because they are not holding you back, because they love the code. They are holding you back because of the way they work.

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:16

Oh, that's true. Wow, you know, and it's funny because we recently did some things with our XRM system because we use it for programming course development at the university. So we recently reorganized the tabs within those areas to make it work better for us, make it more efficient. So I'm glad we can customize it because I, if we didn't have that opportunity to customize, I don't know what we would do. Our work would be so much harder.

Peter Swimm: 36:42

So it's amazing. Yeah, like I, I, I think that's that's the coolest thing I think about the whole like move to web apps. Like, like 98 of your stuff in your desktop that you install is actually a website, because you can just it's. There's a layer, uh, a presentation layer, and there's like a skeleton layer and the skeleton can be anything in the whole world and the presentation layer can react to the times and the needs of the people use it, and so that's great. It's great when design can drive the experience in a way that technology can just like not put any limits on and right.

Peter Swimm: 37:19

And if you're ever a designer, I always tried to like be in organizations where, like the engineers never forced to hold his nose to do something and the designers never forced to hold their nose to do something. And I'm not just like they're so afraid to challenge me that if I have a dumb idea, they're like they don't gently suggest or push back or whatever our relationship is on the way forward, like because I don't want to like paint myself in a corner just because I don't know I didn't catch the the accidental run war reference I made, or you know, like I'm reinventing something that I unconsciously saw in another product. Uh, I think that's how bad things ship. Right is because people are trying to like make someone happy who's mad. I had a manager once who was like, don't come up to me with any problems unless you also come up to me with a solution. And I was just like that's not how the history of society has ever worked. You can't just say like, well, no one has a cure for cancer, so don't talk to me about people who have cancer. You know it's just like.

Peter Swimm: 38:34

But that flies in companies and people can say things like we have a no jerks policy, like what's a? And apparently being a jerk is like forming a union. You know like it's like. And apparently being a jerk is like forming a union. You know like it's like. You know like there's all kinds of crazy stuff in there and it's just like you know. And I think people like and I'm really like hopeful for, like the tiktok generation and zoomers and stuff, because they seem like very um, built in from the get-go with that kind of self-care and you know arbitration and the contract thing as a baseline and so as, as they go and design it, they keep, like you know, I like trigger warnings and I, like you, know all those social contract things and pronouns, because it shows that a person is self-advocating, and people who self-advocate tend to be very good designers, because they are also very empathetic to problems and stuff.

Jackie Pelegrin: 39:23

Yeah, it's good to have that empathetic lens, absolutely, yeah, I love that. And the self-care is so important because in the technology sector and design, it's so easy to get burned out and feel like you're being overworked. Yeah, that's easy to have that happen, yeah, yeah, those are great insights, peter, I love that.

Peter Swimm: 39:51

So before we wrap up, I would love to leave listeners with one final thought. So if you could share one key takeaway about balancing, there is nothing that design has never like stopped a disaster from happening. A design has never, never once, caused you know, something that was gonna bad, that's gonna happen tomorrow, to happen. And you know, if company is going to lay off 20% of their people, there's no amount of work you can do to just be arbitrarily cut off. So stick to your guns and, you know, push back a little bit and, you know, be in situations where you feel valued and also challenged. And that's one thing I would tell people, especially juniors of. Like you know, your job on this planet is to like make it better every day that you leave the house, and if you're not in a situation where you feel you could do that you, you know you should look around and you should be promiscuous. There's, you know I.

Peter Swimm: 40:48

You know I talked to people. I worked with people and companies and they it was their first job out of college and they're in their 50s and they're getting laid off. So now they have to go looking for their second job now and it's like you know I had a, two or three jobs a year through my twenties. You know like I know a bad situation and I stick around less longer than probably I would have on my second job, and so those are the kinds of opportunities I think people should do while they're young and cheap is like you can. You can work for all kinds of different things because they're going to hire you because you're cheap, cause when you're expensive then it takes six weeks to hire you.

Jackie Pelegrin: 41:25

Right.

Peter Swimm: 41:27

So try as many different things and you may stumble into some niche thing that you become the best person in the world at.

Peter Swimm: 41:34

And so that's the number one thing I would tell to juniors is just be promiscuous and explore things and take risks and stuff before you have something they can hold over your head. And then you're doing like man, I got a mortgage and you know I got a kid's knee braces and colleges around the corner. You know, like you know, use your freedom. You know to be exploring who you are and be better designers and and represent your field and work with cool people. I love that.

Jackie Pelegrin: 42:04

Yeah, that's great. And even, you know, maybe even take advantage of those opportunities that come along for speaking engagements, like conferences and even if it's just attending the conference and networking, right, that's important too. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Swimm: 42:18

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean it's just like there's so many cool. Yeah, you can volunteer at the conference to get in for free, and so you don't have to pay the three grand to go to the conference, because you hand out badges for the first six hours and then you're there you know, do things like that because you're not also like doing emails and stuff, and you know I would.

Peter Swimm: 42:39

You know, I would love to have someone that told me, like when I was 22,. It was like, don't take that internship. I would love to have someone that told me, like when I was 22, it's like, don't take that internship, you know, just get a job to pay your rent and work part time and just mess around with things. You know, do you design for, like, you know, a political candidate you'd like, or like an environmental cause you're into and all that. You don't have to learn from the thing that keeps you fed, you know. You don't have to learn from the thing that keeps you fed. You know, but, unless you get hooked into the machine of, like I got to travel twice a year and I, you know I got to save up for a house and all that stuff, you know right.

Peter Swimm: 43:14

You know, use your flexibility wisely while you're still flexible.

Jackie Pelegrin: 43:18

So that's a good idea, absolutely. I love that, so thank you so much, peter, for sharing your insights today. I know your experiences, tips and expertise are sure to inspire my listeners, so I appreciate that and I look forward to having you back.

Peter Swimm: 43:30

Thanks for having me Talk to you soon.

Jackie Pelegrin: 43:34

Thank you, peter, appreciate it. Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today. Your support means the world to me. If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review or offer a monetary contribution. Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference and I'm truly thankful for you.