This time I had the honor to be joined by Maria Giudice. You probably know Maria for her books “Changemakers - How Leaders can Design Change” or “Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design”. Maria and me met at the World Usability Congress in Graz last October and I am really happy to welcome her in the podcast now.. In our conversation we speak about how Design can and must actively drive change, but also why all leaders should have design skills. From there we dive deeper into what is good, into Narratives and why fear-based stories stick so much more to people than the positive narratives. And we speak about how the good will arise from the dark times we see at the moment and how we all can help driving this. As a little side note: We recorded this episode right before the election in Germany in February and we spoke briefly about this as well, just so that you do not wonder.

Connect with our guest or us:

Marias Channels:

Marias LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariagiudice/

Web: https://www.hotstudio.com/

Marias Book “Changemakers”: https://www.hotstudio.com/library

Masterclass “Become a sustainable UX Designer”

Date: May 7, 5:30pm-10:00pm CEST

Link: https://www.eventbrite.de/e/masterclass-become-a-sustainable-ux-designer-2025-tickets-1298940960379

Get 15% discount with the code "SUX_Friend"

Our Channels:

SUX Slack Community

SUX LinkedIn

SUX Website

Thorsten's LinkedIn

SUX Branding and Design: Isabel Pettinato

Isabel's LinkedIn

Music: Bavo Lodewyckx

Bavo's Linkedin

Email us at podcast@sustainableuxnetwork.com to share your feedback or suggest future guests.

This time I had the honor to be joined by Gerry McGovern. Gerry is besides many things the author of the book World Wide Waste and well known for his work regarding digital sustainability and especially digital waste and e-waste. For me this was also really special because I relate to Gerry and his work pretty often in my talks. “Up to 90% of all digital data is not used” is one of the famous quotes from his book World Wide Waste and you probably have heard it somewhere already.

Gerry and me had a really deep conversation about the dark side of tech and we could fill a whole book with great quotable statements from him just in this podcast.

We spoke about the problem of innovation and why AI is a big problem not only from an environmental point of view but on many ends. And we discussed how big tech per se is a problem and how it is acting not for the good of us but only for the good of themselves.

But we also spoke about what we can do, how we need to reconnect to nature and the need to get back to local. And we discussed hope and resilience and which of both is maybe more important.

Connect with our guest or us:

Gerrys Channels:

Gerrys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerry-mcgovern-07876469/

Web: https://gerrymcgovern.com/

Gerrys Book “World Wide Waste”: https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

Mastodon: @gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green

Our Channels:

Thorsten's LinkedIn

SUX Slack Community

SUX LinkedIn

SUX Website

SUX Branding and Design: Isabel Pettinato

Isabel's LinkedIn

Music: Bavo Lodewyckx

Bavo's Linkedin

Email us at podcast@sustainableuxnetwork.com to share your feedback or suggest future guests.

Welcome to this episode of the SUX Podcast. This time I had the honor to be joined by Laura Korculanin from Lisbon. Laura is a Design anthropologist, a systems thinker and a water advocate, running her own company called give a shit. We met for the first time I think 3 years ago and what really stuck to me was how Laura already back then had dedicated her design work to water, to nature and to regeneration.

And therefore I am so happy that she joined me for this episode to talk especially about water and the impact to it by the digital world we design or use (and yes AI plays a huge part in that).

We also speak about the importance of nature and why we need to recalibrate our societal value set. Laura for example made the great point, how insane it is that a forest is only of economical value when the trees are cut down to sell the wood. But we also touched the question of balancing online and offline time for ourselves and how that connects us to nature.

And we speak about why designers need to be system thinkers to design sustainability and for regeneration.

Laura is a real inspiration and we could have talked for 2 or 3 hours (no worries - the episode is only one hour long) and she as well creates “punch-line” quotes throughout the whole episode. Just to give you a teaser:

„The less time you are online, the more connected you are offline“

„How is it possible that the forest is worth money only once you cut down trees?“

Connect with our guest or us:

Laura’s Channels:

Lauras LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurakorculanin/

Give a Shit: https://www.giveashitnow.org/

Partner of this episode:

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A big thank you mittwald for supporting this episode of the SUX Podcast! 💚

Find all information about mittwald, their hosting offer and their efforts in sustainability here:

https://mitt.link/sux

Our Channels:

Thorsten's LinkedIn

SUX Slack Community

SUX LinkedIn

SUX Website

Email us at podcast@sustainableuxnetwork.com to share your feedback or suggest future guests.