Welcome to another edition of Vinita-dumps-her-brain.

• [Design] I am a die-hard fan of Hmnty Cntrd, have been for a long time. This piece by Alba on organizational ignorance is gold. I read this when i was having an especially hard time at work and her conceptualization helped me step back.
• [Design] Designers freaking out re the economy.
• [Design] I’m nosy, which also means I’m constantly looking at how other companies are doing things better / differently. I came across GitLab’s well-documented design team and operations which I thought was very well thought-out.
• [Design] My good friend Jessica wrote this a while back but I found it while trolling through various sources around Service Design.
• [Design] I’ve been following Mansi Gupta’s work for a while. She just released this framework for women-centric design.
• [General] Used to work on Business, Politics, and Religion for Amazon Alexa. It’s safe to say, I’m not scared to talk about it (respectifully of course). After hearing a lot of the same things on different podcasts, this stuck out as giving more to chew on when talking about anti-racist therapy.
• [General] This broke the news at the time (or it did on my feed at least - echo echo echo). This is pretty ridiculous to think about since women have been having periods for hundreds of years. The only reason this gets any light is to be able to develop more products to sell to women (sigh).
• [Linguistics] Good conversation design is critical to communication. This article about conversations having doorknobs is a great metaphor.
• [Linguistics] A dictionary to capture the things that are un-translatable. Enough said.
• [Psychology] We’ve all heard about the hero’s journey in storytelling, now here’s bringing the heroine’s journey to the mix. Loved this piece about the concept of home in relation to women.
• [Psychology] Making friends is hard. Kat Vellos weighs in on making friends at work.
• [Psychology] Let’s talk burnout and motivation. Loved reading this article in Feb when I needed it most.
• [Psychology] Not usually a TED talk person but this one about being tired was timely for me.
• [Psychology and Tech] I was lucky enough to work with a change manager early in my time at Qantas. She is / was incredible in how she “guided change”. Since then, I’ve had a keen eye on the field and eat up anything I can find since it has such an overlapping venn diagram with design. I was nodding along as I read this HBR article on the Network of Change Agents.
• [Tech] Feb is that time of year where Salary Guides come out! This one by Aquent is ANZ-centric (thanks Global North) as well as this Salary Search by Talent.
• [Tech] When the Queen died and the new King was inaugurated, I was having a bit of cognitive dissonance. Australia held the monarchy is high regard but I also knew that the possibility of Camila wearing the Kohinoor Diamond was high (she wore other stolen diamonds from South Africa instead). India has urged the British to return certain artifacts (which the Juggernaut claimed would equal about 3 trillion today), but this article puts things into perspective and possibly finds a compromise within this post-colonial (maybe?) world.
• [Tech] I can’t quite remember how I came across Maggie Appleton for the first time but I have been following her for a while. As I was cleaning out my saved links, I saw this Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI talk published and really enjoyed the analogies.
• [Tech] I love reading pieces written 20+ years ago to gain social context at that time. This NYTimes one on the Executive Computer is amusing but so accurate.
• [Writing] As someone who used to write docs regularly at Amazon to showcase ideas, the idea of a polite doc really appeals to me. It’s part of the reason i use Notion for… my life. And used Coda prior to that.

And rounding off all that text, thought this types of rest by Calm was insightful.

Finished Reading:

• Kaikeyi. Hands-down the best book I’ve read in a while. If I could gift Sanjay Patel’s Ramanyana, Chithra Divakurni’s Forest of Enchantments and this book together - that would the ultimate South Asian fusion reading package.

Finished Watching:

• Griselda. Huge fan of Sofia Vergara so had to watch it. Would recommend and love that it’s based on a real story.
• Killer Soup. South Asian timepass show. It was amusing and fun to watch if you’re a true crime fan.
• One Day. The one everyone is obsessed with. More of a keeping-up-with-the-zeitgeist-watch than anything. I found the acting a bit lacking.
• Dunki. Look, this is def not SRK’s best work but I think in the context of modern society, it was quite interesting. The story is of a group of friends that get to London from India illegally literally on boats. Dunki literally translates to going someplace illegally by jumping, leaping, and hopping.

New Vocab:

• White anting - an Aussie term that means to subvert or undermine from within