Ever since we've started recording the Zalet podcast three years ago, I fell in love with the format. I'm a text guy, but always being short on time and being whatever is the opposite of diligent, is making writing hard for me. Speaking is just way less friction.
It's interesting how my preferences have changed, I was always the one to hate voice messages because I'm very often situationally disabled (on a bike, working with hands, with other people, etc.) and I can't afford to listen to messages. But as soon as I realized how convenient they are for the sender — for the pretty much same reasons I listed before — I loosened up and like to send and receive voice messages.
Making a Zalet episode is complicated: there's video, we meet up in person, and being from different cities makes it a whole production. What I started doing is far simpler and feels more like a voice message than a podcast.
I already do most of my thinking while walking, so I just started talking into the Voice Memos app. The whole point of the pod is for it to be a “thinking out loud” thing. Short episodes, easy to listen to.
The working title is just “walking design pod”, but if it sticks I will try to give it a better name and proper branding. I've recorded several already and I will try to continue and see how it goes.
In this first episode I'm thinking through the state of design in 2024 going into 2025, its relationship to business, and how we spent the most of our energy in the past couple of years making sure design better serves the business, only for it to be kind of left hanging; at least it feels like it. The market sucks, people are loosing jobs all over the place, and whoever has a job is super-focused on keeping it, so there's nothing really new or exciting going on.
If you decide to follow please do so on Spotify or via RSS, and let me know what you think through the comments there, or over email as I'd love some feedback.