In this relaxed and fun episode, Michel sits down with Jay Demetillo, a design leader with over 10 years of experience across New York City, San Francisco, and Singapore. As an advocate for design inclusion and social impact, Jay shares his journey of adapting to Southeast Asia's collective culture and technology while working at companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, and Grab. Learn how Jay's experiences have shaped his approach to design and how you can create more inclusive and culturally sensitive experiences in your own work. Connect with Jay Demetillo: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondemetillo/ Twitter:https://twitter.com/asianxjay Remember to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review on your favorite platform to help us reach more listeners passionate about design, inclusivity, and innovation!

In this special Firesession edition of the podcast, I invited Diego Pulido (@ixdiego) and Koji Pereira (@kojieumesmo) to chat about their Journey to Design Leadership. All three of us are from Latin America and we shared our stories of growing into the positions we have today. Hear how they started, what was the path they took to leadership, and how to make sure we, as leaders, keep holding the door open for inclusion in our companies.

PJ Pereira is an advertising and entertainment pioneer. He believes agencies have to provide return not only on the money brands are investing but also the time consumers are spending with the work. That balance is the ultimate challenge marketing faces today. In 2016, Pereira O’Dell was behind the rare participation of a brand in the prestigious “Official Selection” of the Sundance Film Festival with NetScout and Werner Herzog's “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.” The film was named in Esquire Magazine’s “Top 10 Best Non-Fiction Films” in 2016.

His agency is credited with the creation of the first-ever social film (“The Inside Experience”) for Intel and Toshiba in 2011, which combined Hollywood talent content and social media participation. The film surpassed the triple Cannes Grand Prix winner “The Beauty Inside,” also for Intel and Toshiba, which is now being turned into a major feature film starring Emilia Clarke. “The Beauty Inside” was the first piece of advertising to win an Emmy against regular TV programming.

With strong roots in digital and content, his milestones in the field include a feature film for Red Bull titled “Unflinching Triumph,” which in 2007 was named by Sports Illustrated as the “Most Amusing Sports Parody of the Year,” and an alternate-reality game titled “The Lost Ring” for McDonald’s for the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Beyond advertising, Brazilian-born PJ Pereira is also a best-selling novelist. In 2015, his book trilogy "Gods of Both Worlds" spent a month as the #1 novel by a Brazilian author in his native country and was published in five other countries. In April 2017, in Brazil, he launched his fourth novel, "The Mother, The Daughter and The Lady Spirit" (“A mãe, a filha e o espírito da santa”). He has two kung fu black belts and is working on a karate one too.

His credentials in content, digital, and advertising have made him one of the world's most influential and respected creatives. He was named the Top CCO in Adweek's Creative 100, recognized by "Creativity 50," and noted in 4A's 100 People Who Make Advertising Great. Most recently, PJ served as the President of the Cannes Lions Entertainment Jury.

Dominican born and raised, Swedish by adoption, and Mexican by heart. Computer Engineer turned into UX designer. Studied a Master's degree in Service Systems Design in Denmark, while working as a UX Team of One. Design took her to Mexico where she now works as a Sr. UX Researcher, and shares knowledge on Instagram, Medium, and Linkedin, contributing to the evergrowing Latin American design community.

Cami Nunes is a Brazilian Product Designer living in Berlin, Germany. With 14 years of experience in the industry, she worked at many design agencies in Rio until transitioning to tech. As an early employee of Carta, she helped the Silicon Valley startup reach unicorn status. Cami now works at Shopify, helping the Shop team redefine the future of commerce.

Daniela Jorge has a history of success unlocking the business value of design across industries, with her career spanning PayPal, AT&T, eBay, Intuit, Yahoo!, Kaiser Permanente and Kodak. A lead architect of inclusive, ethical design practices and broad design thinking application, Daniela has headed product and UX design for digital marketplaces, ecommerce and multisided platforms serving a broad range of users.

In her current role as Chief Design Officer at PayPal, Daniela has built a world-class global design organization helping to fuel the company’s expansion into the broader financial services ecosystem and rise into a customer-first, quality-centric market leader. Throughout Daniela’s career, she has steered performance turnarounds, scaled organizations and inspired design-driven product innovation while repositioning design into a strategic asset and transforming the user experience into a competitive differentiator.

Fabio Sasso is a Brazilian designer based in Oakland, California currently leading the Android Automotive OS UX team at Google. Since joining the company in 2011, he has had the chance to work on initiatives from Google Ventures to Google Doodles, and lead major products for Google Search, Google Pay, and Google Play.

Fabio is also the founder of Abduzeedo, a popular design blog focused on design inspiration and tutorials, helping designers around the world learn about tools and get inspired. More recently, Fabio designed and launched Calmaria, a mobile app focused on breathing techniques for mental health and balance.

Helena is an Ecuadorian, product design lead at Coda, a new doc for teams. Prior to joining Coda, she has held design roles at technology and consumer companies such as Google, Facebook, Etsy, Khan Academy and TransferWise. She values collaboration, inclusion and creating tools that empower people.

Ted Boda is currently a Product Design Manager at Instagram. He was formerly the Director of Design at Udacity, Lead Designer at Nest, Lead Mobile Designer at Netflix, and Lead Product Designer at Apple where he spent 5 years crafting the Keynote experience on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Ted started his design career at Duarte Design where he worked with Apple as well as one-on-one with Al Gore, to help create the compelling and impactful slides that were the basis for the Academy Award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth.

Andrea Pacheco, as she likes to think, is a citizen of the world! Originally from Brazil, she spent 4 years in Amsterdam and then moved to London one year and a half ago.

Having designed for Booking.com, Transferwise, and digital agencies such as R/GA and Razorfish, she’s now working at Apple - in the International Product Design team, helping to transform “Designed in California” to “Designed in Apple”.

She likes to think that she lives in a world of infinite possibilities and prefers to see things not as they are but as they could be, inspiring others to see the spark of potential in everything! In her own words, she suffers for her art, but ice cream makes up for it!

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Esteban is a Mexican Digital Product designer with 19 years of working experience. He has worked as a consultant at innovation agencies in Mexico and Spain. Conceptualized, designed, and launched new products inside http://Booking.com. Co-founder of a startup called http://Cooper.app, and very recently joined the Chrome iOS team as an interaction designer.

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Jordi is a Peruvian Designer & maker living in the Netherlands. He is currently working on Design Systems at TripActions, a leading business travel & expense platform. Previously, he led the universal search vision at Booking.com and worked on Todoist as one of the first designers.

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Kevin Bethune discusses the need for multidisciplinary teams and talks about his book Reimagining Design, written for creatively curious individuals to help the intersection of Business, Tech and Design. 

Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a "think tank" that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 20+ year career, and represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture. His book Reimagining design is out now and we’ll talk about that and more. And now Kevin Bethune

Get the book 

Pedro is a designer with more than a decade of experience building digital products and teams. Currently the Director of Product Design at Adidas.

Previously the Head of Product Design for Retail at Adyen where he worked on the point of sale solution and machine learning-based tools to help merchants prevent fraud.

Prior to Adyen, he worked at Booking.com the biggest accommodation provider on the planet where he helped onboard startups that were acquired by Booking and introduced in the ecosystem, helped shape the onboarding process for designers, and then proceeded to work on Consumer Psychology and Machine Learning focused teams building recommendation and ranking systems.

Marina is an Argentinian designer, illustrator and maker currently living and drawing in Ottawa, Canada. She is nowadays working at Shopify as a UX marketing designer, and before that, she was a front-end designer and illustrator at Eventbrite.

Diego is a Colombian designer working at Google as part of the Stadia team bringing the power of streaming and cloud development to the video game industry. During his 9 years of experience, he has worked at big and small tech companies in Colombia, Spain, The Netherlands, and Germany, where he currently lives.

In our interview, Desirée García, or Dezzie as she prefers, has an honest conversation about her life as a quirky and nerdy person. She shares her passion for Star Wars, Star Trek, and all things space-related and discusses her home garden. She also loves food, the internet, and building IKEA furniture. Go check it out

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Leandro is a User Experience Designer who has worked in the field for over 10 years. He started working at design agencies in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and, in 2008, founded PopUp Design - an agency that provided UX consulting. With PopUp, in 6 years he worked on more than 100 projects! After PopUp he worked at Red Ventures, Booking.com, and Klarna and is currently UX at Google.

He describes his job as using data from the most diverse sources to help people use technology in a healthy way and empower them to solve problems.

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Koji Pereira is the Head of Design for Lyft Business. With over 2 decades of experience in the Design field, he leads a team of designers building new products for business transportation. He strives to build diverse teams and safe spaces, making sure everyone is included and all voices are heard. Previously he was at Google where he led Design for Files by Google from 0 to 1/2 billion MAU and launched many products including Camera Go, Android TV Data Saver, and Google Spaces. He also taught Design around the world in schools like Harbour.Space in Spain and PUC Minas in Brazil.

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Welcome to our first-ever "Latinxs who Design" episode. I had the pleasure of interviewing an esteemed former colleague: Tassia Pellegrini. Tassia is a Brazilian Designer from Salvador, Bahia who lives and works in The Netherlands. She has worked on Booking.com for 6 years, both as an individual contributor and as a design leader. Now at Basecamp, she's busy crafting new features for HEY (www.hey.com) — a new approach to email.

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In this episode, Michel interviews Aubrey Blanche. Aubrey is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. During this chat, she shares her experiences with us about evolving our process and being inclusive. She's a Latina, Queer, and Bipolar 1 and wants you to know that: You matter.

Books recommended on the Episode:  
The Wake Up by Michelle MiJung Kim  
All Are Welcome by Cynthia Owyoung  
How To Talk To Your Boss About Race by Y-Vonne Hutchinson
Inclusion Revolution by Daisy Auger-Dominguez

We're expanding the mission to include more people in our podcast. UX is not really UX without including people from all walks of life. Inspired by some of the recent voices on twitter I've decided to create a community for us, all of us. Join Diversity in UX Matters today https://join.slack.com/t/diverseuxmatters/shared_invite/zt-xd0nwhg4-YUyi0qU5MweqjDVg3~aI3A…

This week I interviewed Joanna Peña-Bickley, a design technologist, known as the mother of Cognitive Experience Design and pioneer in Ai aided, generative design. She is propelled by a multidisciplinary acumen in research, design, tech and data modeling. Joanna has delivered world-class experiences that drive engagement and business results. She has built exceptional design organizations as an active leader in the design, cognitive, user experience and Ai aided, generative design fields. Joanna's team's achievements have been written up in books and periodicals such as: MIT Technology Review, Time, Forbes, Fortune, TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal. Her drive to learn and invent has produced innovative work that has been internationally awarded, recognized and used by millions of customers.

He was the Lead Designer on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the Creative Suite in the 90s. Project Lead on Adobe Lightroom in the early 00s.

Former Director of Design at Twitter and Yahoo. Early designer and first employee at Figma.

Designing digital products since 1990.

These days he can be found in Amsterdam and around Europe (or under as @trenti on Twitter), and always happy to discuss any and all things Design.

Diego Pulido is a Senior Interaction Design at Google in New York City. He grew up on a healthy diet of Arepas & Coffee in Bogotá, Colombia prior to moving to the US to study Psychology & Human-Computer Interaction. He is passionate about mobile UX design, running, heavy metal & electronic music. You can find him anywhere on the web under the username @ixDiego

Rachel Smith is a Latinx Designer & Founder of Design to Combat COVID-19, a virtual community of creatives over 2,000 strong—who volunteer their skills and time to support under represented communities affected by the pandemic. By day, Rachel Smith is a Product Designer at Facebook, was this year’s 2021 Lead Mentor with The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and previously has worked with companies such as Nordstrom and The Home Depot. The rest of the time, the LA native works on a range of creative projects, both within her local and global communities.

Made in Miami, powered by cafecito. Yvonne Blanco is a Cuban designer currently based in Somerville, MA, who specializes in designing for scientists. She worked in scientific publishing for 11 years, visually translating and conceptualizing scientific research, as well as creating cover art, infographics, posters, and interactive media. She is currently a Senior UX Designer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, focusing on designing experiences for genomic analysis platforms and software. Her hope is that one day, her designs will help scientists achieve breakthroughs that will ultimately improve our lives.

Miguel Angel Cardona is a designer advocate for education at Figma Design where he is helping to bring Figma to more classrooms. Previously he was a tenure track professor in the New Media Design program at The Rochester Institute of Technology teaching user interface and product design. Before that, he was the lead designer at imgix, a platform for compressing and delivering images at scale. Miguel has 18 years of experience designing and illustrating for startups, agencies and teaching design. He lives with his partner Kate and their cat Eartha Kitt in Rochester, NY.