A transcript of Episode 250 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Anna Rosling Rönnlund to discuss the concept of factfulness, being a possibilist, as well as the power of visualisations to present falsehoods as well as facts.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bevan Nicol.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 250.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’m James,
Per Axbom
And I’m Per.
James Royal-Lawson
And this is UX podcast, balancing business technology and people every other week for 250 episodes and almost 10 years, with listeners in 197 countries and territories from Liechtenstein to Nepal.
Per Axbom
Thank you for hanging with us and our guests for the past 250 episodes.
James Royal-Lawson
And whether you have listened to just a handful of episodes, or all 250, then we’re happy that you’re with us and hope that you found episodes that are useful for you and your work.
Per Axbom
Anna Rosling Rönnlund is a Swedish designer who rose to fame with her work on Trendalyzer, interactive software for visualising statistical information, which was later sold to Google. As a co founder of the Gapminder Foundation, she has continued to work alongside her husband Ola and their late father-in-law, Hans Rosling, to further explain complex facts about the world in a more accessible way.
James Royal-Lawson
In 2017, she spoke at the TED conference, where she explained the power of data visualisation. In 2017, she also collaborated with Hans and Ola on the global bestseller Factfulness, of which Bill Gates said, “One of the most important books I’ve ever read. An indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.”
Per Axbom
In 2016, she announced Dollar Street, a website that portrays how people of varying cultures and incomes live around the world, on a virtual street of homes.
James Royal-Lawson
UX designer is the role closest to Anna’s heart. And what better way to celebrate Episode 250 of UX podcast, in these tumultuous times of 2020, than to invite Anna on the show to inspire us about how we can as designers help the world become more faithful.
Per Axbom
Hang around after our chat to Anna for our post-interview reflections.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
So I know when I was doing a little bit of research before this interview, I was looking at the Wikipedia pages about you. And what struck me was you’re called a system developer, photographer, designer, vice president of design and usability. There was a lot of different terms and things. But how do you describe yourself and what you do?
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, I think one of the reasons there are so many titles is because we have run our own business. So I have more or less switched titles, depending on what makes most sense for what we’re doing at the moment. No, but I think there’s always one thing I do, and that is that, together with with Ola, my husband and colleague since several years, we are fascinated by how we can actually make the world easier to understand to people. And we have been focused mainly on doing visual explanations of pretty complex stuff. But we have changed the ways we’ve been doing that over over the years.
So in some periods, it has been more useful for me to be a VP and sometimes, in some settings, it has been more useful for me to be a photographer, which I am. And sometimes I have been more of a UX designer, you know, so it has shifted. And I would say that I do pretty much a little bit of everything in the projects we do. So it is a little bit vague, that would be the main term, but all the time I am fascinated by how complicated important stuff about the world development could be communicated to normal people without special interest in a way that they understand; that it’s instant and meaningful to them.
James Royal-Lawson
I think the I think the one I think those of us who do have UX or have ended up with UX in our titles or how we describe ourselves, probably a very similar story; that we get involved in so many pies, our fingers are all over the place, and the titles vary a lot depending on where you where you end up just now.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
But I would say that UX is probably the title that is closest to my heart, which is sort of trying to make sense of a lot of things for people.
Per Axbom
It’s almost like you’re being the mediator between different types of people, different roles, and helping people understand each other.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yes. And I think that is an extremely interesting part of the problem solving. I would say, I don’t know if you agree, but 10 to 15 years ago, I think a lot of people were still not really familiar with what that role meant. But I would say now, with all the apps you get in the app stores, on your phone, I think more and more people start to realise that information has to be packaged, and entertainment as well, in different ways. I think people have an easier task nowadays to understand what it is.
James Royal-Lawson
I think definitely; the fact that 10 years ago, when a lot more people started to have interfaces in their pockets through mobile phones, then that, of course, created I think, a new relationship for the everyday person and the importance of having something that was well thought through and communicated or designed for their needs.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, and so I think if someone was wanting to understand what I was doing on a regular basis, I think they would have a harder time understanding that 10 years back than today.
Per Axbom
That’s a good point.
James Royal-Lawson
Talking about explaining, one thing that you notice when you when you read Factfulness, that there are quite a few phrases that come up – Factfulness itself, but also things like Possiblist – Terms which are coined by you, Ola and Hans.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
Do you want to explain them a little bit?
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
I think I could start by just saying that what we have tried to do in the book Factfulness was actually trying to explain the world with words that we thought were the best words to explain everything with, rather than using the words that were already there. And one of the main things is to get rid of the sort of academic tone that you usually have as soon as it becomes something serious, a serious topic or, you know, trying to explain science in a way that is understandable. So Factfulness is a term that Ola actually coined, and it’s trying to be factful, I mean it’s playing with the word mindfulness: factfulness. So, and he got that into his brain when we were struggling early on, before writing the book but when we realised we would probably need to write a book.
And we were struggling with what we wanted people to do. I mean, one thing is trying to get the information into their brain and another is to find ways to help them to actually make sense of the information and have it stick. So a big portion of it is actually more around being more aware of yourself and your thought processes and how they lead you wrong, rather than just filling the brain with facts. Which you also need to do. But the main challenge that we have been fighting for several years is that we realised that people thought that they knew what the world was like around them, but when we started testing we realised that they were usually wrong. And how do you have someone actually learn about something they think that they already know?
So we were thinking quite a lot about that process and then driving out to – we have a small cottage out at Värmdö, outside of Djurönäset, which is like a conference place – and when Ola was driving he saw they had huge signs about a mindfulness weekend or something. And then he was driving, thinking about being factful – how can people be factful? – and then he saw the word ‘mindfulness’ and then suddenly, he just sort of built them together and was like, hey, factfulness must be the term that we’re looking for. So that was basically how that got into our phrasing.
And being a possiblist is more about – all the time you hear people being either, you know, optimist or pessimist about the future or the now, even, the present – and that term grew out of a frustration that Hans had felt for quite a time, that he was a bit irritated, that if you try to show people that the world has improved in several ways, they easily say to you, like, ‘Ah, but you’re one of those optimists.’ While it’s just showing some of the trends have actually been positive, because in most people’s minds, they think of the world in a very dystopic and negative way.
So, it’s all about trying to be led by facts here as well, by actually being humble and actually check the data and see that humanity has achieved quite a lot over the years. If you look, especially in the health and education and economy sectors, you can see a lot of positive things have happened that we usually tend to forget about, because we focus so much on everything that goes bad, like the environment, for instance. So it’s like trying to be humble and be guided by the facts that are actually out there and be positive that positive change can happen but it will not automatically happen. And it’s sort of staying and be data driven in between the optimists and pessimist camps.
James Royal-Lawson
I like both terms, but the possiblist did actually ring quite a good tone with me, because I often would say I’m a realist. And I’ve thought during the years how realism does have a little bit negative aspect to that as well. But possiblist does actually capture that aspirational side of things and curious side of things without losing the connection to the reality that we live in.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is possible that we can change things into the future, most likely in many areas, but it’s not necessity that it will happen by itself. And some areas, we might have a hard time solving or even fail solving. I think that is the importance – to not be too naive thinking that everything will work by itself, because of course it will not. But we have achieved quite a lot over the years.
Per Axbom
I love this. Because what you’re essentially doing is you’re learning that people don’t really know that they don’t know much about the world. But you’re not telling them the facts, you’re actually helping them become more resilient towards reading facts from others and understanding how to interpret that. And perhaps, as you said, being able to question your own view of the world. I mean, that’s really impressive, because I think you have really managed to help people consume this information in a fun and entertaining way as you were talking about before, making it something that you kind of wanted to and want to dive into, and have fun with. And you have people talking over dinner about these ideas, because it’s just enjoyable. So I mean, kudos to that, because that’s been a really good job you’ve done.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we have been struggling quite hard. And I have to say, we don’t feel that we have succeeded, but we have managed in bits and pieces here and there to get the message through. But the whole work we do is driven out of frustration in a way. I mean, it’s important in a democracy that people actually make good choices that are informed, and if they’re going to make good informed choices, it’s pretty good to have the basic facts somewhat right. And to do that, you need to be aware of how your brain will fool you to think that you have a lot of facts that might be delusions or totally wrong without you even knowing it.
I think the interesting part is that it’s not about intelligence, because when we have tested highly intelligent and highly capable people in certain groups, we see the exact same pattern as we see when we test more normal people, so to say, and so it’s all about how we as humans, the species, how we process information. And I think in many ways, you could say that we’re not totally data literate, yet. It’s a pretty new thing that we have all this data around us. And now we have to teach ourselves and our brains to process the information in a reasonable, not too time consuming way.
James Royal-Lawson
So I have to say that I think this year in particular with the pandemic, it feels like it’s been the year of visualisation, you might say, It’s the Year of COVID. But it’s the year of visualisation, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many variations of how you visualise, visualise data, as we’ve we’ve seen this year, which of course, I think gives the appearance of being fact based.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
When it comes to that data, we do have the problem that it’s the pandemic is so new and we know so little about it, and we have very scattered data so far. So, I mean, you could still think about what about the data quality of the things that gets visualised or is it really giving the right picture. That, I think, is a very interesting part of the problem. Because if you think about the data that we have been working with, usually we work with sort of the boring the boring statistics that that the big organisations have been collecting for maybe, you know, 50 or 30 or 70 years or so, and they they do the same data gathering on a yearly or every three years or something in all countries and compile it to data sets that no one sees more or less in within the bigger organisations.
And what we have been doing is to basically try to make that data come to life. Or, at least, the parts that science community usually agrees on as sort of the you know that a little bit down background information that is non not very disputed. While, when when COVID comes now, you have a completely new thing with a lot of different data teams all over the world gathering this fractions of data and we start to visualise. And I agree it’s very interesting to see all this visualisations but in many cases, I think where the data is, is not as mature. So I think it will be interesting to see when we have a bigger picture, how we would best describe the trends and courses and you know, all that.
Per Axbom
Isn’t this a danger of of data visualisation? I mean one graph, which is more predictive and one graph which is based on historic data, they can look the same and appear all equally factual, if you will, but they but the one can be deceitful and this is what you usually say about statistics statistics analyse I mean, visualisations are in that area as well if and that it some things can seem so simple to understand when it’s visualised. That can be helpful but it can also be extremely dangerous, I think.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, and I think that is that is the interesting part with doing visualisations that people, people believe in that it’s easily a field where the one who is most talented in making beautiful visualisations and will win people’s understanding of a whole field. Because even if you have a lot of scientists making extremely well performed studies, I mean, there are very few people out there that would actually consume those studies seriously, you know, so if someone managed to do a very catchy visualisation, that might be wrong, it can be very hard to get rid of that understanding from people’s minds.
James Royal-Lawson
So yep, so so it becomes kind of factfulness versus fakefulness and a night knowing how do you how do you know when to be humble and when to when to challenge something presented as a fact and when to be open to new information? It’s –
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, and I think I think actually, that I think that is one of the biggest challenges for humanity for the coming maybe 2030 years to figure out how we can teach data literacy in a meaningful, realistic way in classrooms all over the world so that students get a sort of a basic ability to read data in a reasonable way because they think that will be Either one of the key key knowledges is to actually have to be successful in many areas, including, you know, private life, how you choose and what you go for. And, you know, not losing everything you own on the lottery, or whatever it can be.
James Royal-Lawson
I completely agree with you. And when I’m, I teach about UX and analytics on a regular basis, and the most important thing I teach people in that class is splitting things up going down beneath the surface, because you you lose so much if you just look at the over the the big picture and don’t understand what lies underneath the surface. Yes.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah. And it’s a tricky thing. I totally agree.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I think when it comes to methodology, it’s interesting. And one case, you may have research that you’ve found that is historic, whereas you want to visualise something that I know you’ve been doing with, for example, Dollar Street, and you make use of other people to help you visualise and that you’re not the only one doing it. But people who are actually immersed in that situation that you want to visualise are the people who are also contributing. Tell us a bit about how that methodology works for you.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Now, so I would say Dollar Street is is also grown out of frustration, that very often when we, and it started from my own frustration, actually, because we started in gapminder, to visualise time-series data, where we were comparing and looking at how countries were performing in different indicators over time. And suddenly, for the first time, I thought that I could understand the big trends in a way that was wonderful. But as we very often were looking at GDP per capita as one of the indicators, I had a pretty hard time actually grasping what those numbers would mean in everyday life. You know, when you see when you see proportions, but you get no images in your head.
So as I was studying to become a photographer at that point, it was a very obvious way to go, to see – think that hey, what if we start adding photos from people’s lives, or everyday life into the data? So we can actually sort of map the big, generic country trends with some sort of an everyday life kind of context. What does it look like if you live on $1 a day versus if you live on $10 a day or hundred dollars a day? Then the also the idea that a lot of people actually have a hard time, as soon as they see statistics, and they say charts and graphs, a lot of people actually get negative and don’t want to look because they don’t consider themselves being data-people are interested in stats or maths or so on. So we thought about, is there a way where we can be more instant and find a way of communicating to normal people and sort of trick the brain not to think about the economy axis, but anyway, use it.
So then we created the Dollar Street, which is basically an economy axis, you know, from poor to rich. And then we have sent out photographers to visit homes on all different income levels all over the world. And we systematically take photos in their homes to look at everyday items, like stoves, toilets, beds, and so forth, to sort of get an overview of the basic human home functions that we do have in all homes independently of income level. I mean, all of us need to solve hygiene and food and sleep. And it will, of course, vary depending on the income level we are at.
So we were interested in trying to to see the not only the the gradual change from being absolutely in like extreme poverty and all the way up to being, you know, normally wealthy like a typical Swede. I mean, of course, we would love to have a super rich home as well. But at least we’re going to to the corner where we the sort of the high income country, what does life look like for a middle or high income person in that context, so that you can get the overall view of the world, and look at not only the difference within the world, but also within countries.
So we tried to do, I mean, it’s an ongoing project. And nowadays now I think we have 450 homes in 65 countries or something. And we’re actually, we have a huge matrix of the homes, we will actually need to fulfil, to make dollar street not only representative for life from the different income levels in general, but also for life within countries. So it’s a pretty big statistical task. And it’s a bit big, a bit. Basically, the project is huge in that sense. And we’re just early on, and we move on slowly, step wise, but we do fill the matrix little by little.
So the whole idea, I mean, in the, in the ideal world, we would have, within a few years, a pretty good coverage, to see life on different income levels within countries and also all over the world as a whole. And then we’re hoping that we could actually find a, find a way where we could like every, let’s say, every 10 years, or every 20 years, go back to the same GPS coordinates, and see what has happened on that place. That spot. That would be a dream scenario, to sort of have this as a baseline and make it into an History Project. But I mean, we’ll see how that goes. Because it’s, we’re a small nonprofit, so things moves, not as rapidly that we would sometimes preferred.
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’d be wonderful to achieve. I was thinking just now as well about how in from, if your UX, or your design team is working, maybe internationally, that Dollar Street could even be used as as inspiration or understanding about how other countries are, we know he’s building a product, you’re pricing a product, you’re trying to understand, get a feeling for how life is somewhere else, then Dollar Street can maybe help you with research, or understanding.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
And I mean, I exactly and and it can be used also in, in in corporates in general, if you’re looking at different markets, it’s a pretty useful thing. Because quite often, we have, we have ideas about the world. And very often they are not as statistically relevant. Because when we have been travelling to a country, for instance, we have a sense that we know what life is like there. But if we, I mean, if we’re realistic, and think about what places we were visiting, most likely, we haven’t seen a representative lives, but we see the lives that are along, our like tourist or business travel routes, which is something different.
Trying to make the everyday life visible, that you seldom see elsewhere. Everything that doesn’t fit the news, because it’s too I mean, those families we’ve we have visited are much more common than the ones we see in the news, but we seldom see them. Because of course, people want to hear about everything dramatic and fantastic that happens. And donorschoose is just, you know, plain everyday lives, which is pretty amazing, I think so you can basically stay at home without travelling and still explore everyday life in a lot of different other places.
James Royal-Lawson
I understand, Anna, that at Gapminder you’ve got a set of design principles? What are they?
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
They are also changing. So [Laughter]
James Royal-Lawson
That sounds good though that they don’t stand still. Because that’s like updating your your your knowledge and what you believe in things.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
You can say that the overarching idea is always to get rid of everything that distracts from the core information, trying to keep it simple, plain and explain things step wise in normal language rather than using academic lingo. And usually take people through it step by step, I would say that would be the core thing. And then we try to stick to a static set of colouring and iconography so that we you could do with the idea that you can, you can learn them once and then you can immediately recognise them. For instance, we have divided the world into four regions rather than five or six or seven or whatever regions different, different organisations use and we colour them in, we usually colour them in the same colours every single time so that you it becomes more of a language. So we try to do things like that
James Royal-Lawson
The consistency is something that comes up a lot in our circles about whether you should be consistent or, or if you should expect knowledge to be already existing in people that are receiving it.
Per Axbom
And something that also I mean, when you say step by step to me that really resonates because if, for me, it feels like you’re acknowledging, throughout this interview, you’re acknowledging that it takes time. Change takes time. And you need to be able to have people along with you instead of rushing ahead.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yes, and I think that is probably the thing that people do as the most common mistake that you can see, during lectures and conferences, all the time that you have someone who is extremely knowledgeable, who stands in front of an audience, and talks about something while they have a presentation behind them, showing a snapshot of something different, often with very… a lot of text and with small fonts. Or they can have the other..
The other way of doing the presentations behind them while they’re talking, which is more like a, it looks like a commercial for soap or something, you know, they have these PR agencies that had given them those perfectly looking video animating beautiful slides, and you have no clue why you’re why you’re seeing them, you know, people are running on beaches, happy, you know, you have all these, like corporate look to it, where it’s like perfect. But they say nothing. I think everything is about, you should take time and try to explain things step wise, if it is something important and worth explaining. And you have to explain, you have to give up on all your favourite details, because people will not spend that energy following you.
So you have to, you know, cut the crap and go to the basics in a way, right. And I think our our biggest challenge has been, we want to communicate things people are not interested in to the people that are the least interested, right, the ones who are not interested in Global Development at all, we want to give them a glimpse, or give them the big global proportions and trends rapidly so that they can have a better understanding of the world as a whole. But we are not expecting them to invest time and interest because we don’t think they have it. But we think if we can introduce them, most likely it will be useful for them. And hopefully, they would also feel that it is pretty interesting. Because when it comes to when we think about it, the subjects we talk about, I mean, it’s life and death and sex, but it’s in statistical terms, so they get pretty boring. But I mean, it can’t get much more interesting than that.
It’s the basics of all, all drama, you see is around those terms. But when we see overly dramatic information, we mean, we have this Hollywood productions with all these enormous action scenes, that stick. Stick in our brains. And we have the media, the news media, who shows us all dramatic things that happens around us. It’s very hard to keep a fact-based worldview that is reasonable, because we have fragments that stick with us that are very far from statistically relevant. So I mean, it’s all about trying to buy ourselves a little bit of time to get into the brains of people when they actually prefer to consume Netflix, rather than than hearing something more about the global developments. Right? Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
always a challenge when we’re fed so much drama, to keep us factful and..
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
It is hard.
James Royal-Lawson
…and curious.
Per Axbom
I think that was a perfect note to end on, actually. I mean, that was a beautiful summary of our goals and reaching the people who actually aren’t even interested but believing that it will be useful to them. If they actually if the information does reach them in the end.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah, and I think that is also what what is that that’s the whole fun, I think Because if we talk to people who are overly interested already, I think that can be a waste of time because they, they could spend Saturday evening reading a very serious journal, you know, an academic journal about the topic and dive into details. But if they do that in a certain topic, then they will be ignorant in topics around that. So they will not have the same time to invest in other topics. So we have to give them the overview about the rest anyways. So I have it’s, it’s a pretty interesting field, I think. Frustrating, but fun.
James Royal-Lawson
And it’s important to have some fun.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you, Anna, for spending the time with us today.
Per Axbom
Thank you so much.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Thank you for having me.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So listening back to the interview, what I thought what was interesting, how as how, when I tried to give praise to Anna, it felt like she was being more of a realist, sort of like you, James, in saying that, there was so much left to do. So I mean, it doesn’t stop here. They’ve done I mean, in my eyes quite a lot. But I understand where she’s coming from. Because the more she learns, the more she learns, of course, that there is to do. And of course, that obviously feels daunting. And as she says, They are a small nonprofit working on these huge tasks
James Royal-Lawson
I suppose when it boils down to it, the Gapminder questions that they pose and question people all the time. There’s still a lot of people getting those questions wrong. So I understand that if they’re not not seeing massive change of how people perceive the world, and have it, how many people have changed to having them a fact-based outlook on the world, then yeah, there’s a, they’re only at the beginning of the hill, a we are only at the beginning of this journey.
Per Axbom
At the same time, I mean, the people you and I talk to a lot, and I believe a lot of listeners to the show, are so aware of what we have to do with regards to paying attention to the facts around us and being able to convey those in the best possible manner. Because that is what we do. As designers we convey information to other people in the best possible way. And of course, just being aware of the dangers, I think that was really good how she brought up, a visualisation that is wrong, but good is hard to get rid of. Which means that we have a challenge there in that if we visualise something that is really hugely successful, but realise later on that it’s, it’s it’s not conveying the correct information, then it’s actually hard to walk back.
James Royal-Lawson
This is something that we’ve known for, you know, aeons that when you produce, what dramatic stories, dramatic news exactly, like they talk about, in factfulness and what Anna said about it as well, that if you create something dramatic, then it gets attention. And then the drama is what you remember, when that is then fact-checked and proved to be incorrect. The retraction never gets as much – if it’s even retracted – It never gets the momentum of the original piece. So people will carry that incorrect information with them for a long, long time, possibly even a generation or two, depending on what it is that’s been pushed out there incorrectly.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And that ties in Well, what was the point she’s making about she doesn’t want to reach the people who are already are passionate, who already are interested, she wants to reach the uninterested because those are the people who won’t go back and read the corrections and understand that what they read before was perhaps wrong, but instead will just go forward and keep repeating the same, mis-statements, really,
James Royal-Lawson
listeners to this show, regular long term listeners will know that I am not one who finishes books a huge amount of the time. I’m an expert at starting but not fantastic at finishing. I can’t say the factfulness. I have actually completely read. And.. thank you. And I’m going to read it again. It’s such an important read. And I’m going to go as far as say that. I think that every single child should read this before they finish their education, their formal education.
Per Axbom
I’ll definitely agree with you. Yeah,
James Royal-Lawson
Just too important to the whole thing about being able to understand how to fact check Basically how to how to be factful with with information and all the information that’s thrown at us constantly. It’s, it’s a fundamental thing we need to be better at. Which means we have to start with the well, we have to make sure the children get their heads around it.
Per Axbom
Yeah, we need to understand the problem, because it’s it’s both about us designers designing in a better way, perhaps sometimes, but it’s also as humans, being resilient to all that all that information being thrown out as an understanding, understanding what the information really is truly saying,
James Royal-Lawson
because we can’t we can’t stop incorrect facts, or incorrect facts – what’s that about. Falsehoods, we can’t we can’t stop things that aren’t true, getting propagated, circulated and pushed, that’s going to happen. But we can be better at understanding and learning when they aren’t true. And maybe how we can find out what really is true.
Per Axbom
And at the same time, I can’t shake this idea that sometimes it comes down to what I felt that Anna I was doing a lot with with with Dollar Street is that she’s including the people who are the subjects of the data within the data. And so, for me, that’s a step towards listening to the people you are trying to make data out of. So I’m looking at the way that you and often talk about how extremely, extremely valuable it is to draw on a whiteboard. But drawn and whiteboard together. Like you draw a line. When you’re in a client meeting, you draw a line, but then you hand over the pen to the client, we’re handing over the pen to people so that they can explain their worldview to us. And that will help us as designers explain everyone’s worldview better.
James Royal-Lawson
There’s a bit of empathy and, and humility. Humility is probably a good way to look at it as well. Now, for recommended listening this time, I’ve pull, I’ve pulled out one that’s reasonably new, not that many months old. But it It felt relevant. What I’ve chosen this time is “Figure it out”, which was Episode 242. with Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast, do you understand why I think it’s relevant Per?
Per Axbom
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s also about how we explain things, how we’ll how we figure things out how we help ourselves and others. try out new models of thinking to better explain the world.
James Royal-Lawson
And also, like the whole thing figured it out were talking about cognition, and how that is beyond our mind. You know, we use props we use things – visualisations – as part of our understanding. And that for me is is a lot of what gapminder and, and Hans Rosling and and and all have been about is extending our cognition, our understanding our minds into the visual visualisations and the world, a factfulness world.
James Royal-Lawson
Something else I thought might be useful. Worthy to mention is that we’ve got you know, because we’ve got listeners in 197 countries and territories around the world, and Dollar Street might need, benefit from pictures from your home or in your country. And there’s a form you can fill in and instructions on Dollar Street’s website that tells you how you can go about doing that. We’ll add the links to both the form and the instructions to the show notes.
Per Axbom
Also a quick reminder, you can contribute to funding your podcast by visiting uxpodcast.com/support.
James Royal-Lawson
And just as valuable, if not more so, is by volunteering to help us with transcripts and publishing. Just email us or get in touch. However you fancy and raise your hand.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side. Why did we do it like that? It’s the 250th episodes and we’re kind of playing around we our outros – It’s just wrong.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Did you know James that I once tried to become a professional fisherman.
James Royal-Lawson
No, I didn’t know you became, tried to become a professional fisherman.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I discovered I couldn’t live on my net income.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Anna Rosling Rönnlund recorded in October 2020 and published as episode 250 of UX Podcast.