On earning respect and doing what we love

Our career and our professional relationships are a design problem that we can solve with a design process.

How can we designers get the professional respect we want? This talk explores several topics and models that can help not only you, but the design community as well, along the way.

• Bruce Tognazzini's "It's time we got respect": the spark that started IxDA.
• The respect ladder and its levels: Professionalism, leadership and entrepreneurship.

Professionalism:

• Characteristics of a profession
• The Triple Constraint
• Getting a superior's approval vs. fulfilling a commitment
• Anatomy of a commitment
• Responsibility and the art of saying "no"
• Effective communication
• Effective time management
• A professional design process

Leadership:

• Keeping problems out of the relationship
• Being respectful and effective: the factual channel
• The Pygmalion effect
• Dealing with Difficult People

Entrepreneurship:

• Establishing a vision
• Management styles
• A full action cycle with clients and markets
• Listening to our client's dissatisfactions: What do we do that bothers people we work with?

Designing our career and our relationships:

• Our career and and our life as a design problem
• Individual efforts and collective efforts
• What conversations do we need to have between us?