Jofish Kaye: Integrating Design, Science, and Business

Design Disciplin

Jofish Kaye is a computer scientist who aligns design, data, and qualitative exploration for human-centered product innovation.
His superb track record as a scholar includes more than 100 publications and affiliations with MIT, Cornell, and Microsoft Research. Surprisingly, his career has been in corporations: following stints at Nokia, Yahoo, and Mozilla, he is now a director of AI and UX at Anthem.
I have been a fan of his work for many years – he is a brilliant research writer whose takes are as entertaining as they are rigorous and instructive. In the longest episode of Design Disciplin to date, we had a massively wide-ranging conversation on pretty much all of our mutual interests: research, philosophy, social sciences, leadership, and more.
https://designdisciplin.com/jofish-kaye
# Books, Links, and Resources
- Jofish Kaye on the Changing Academic Life Podcast by Geraldine Fitzpatrick: http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye
- The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers by Daniel F. Chambliss: https://academics.hamilton.edu/documents/themundanityofexcellence.pdf
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn: https://geni.us/structure-of-sci
- Undisciplined disciples: everything you always wanted to know about ethnomethodology but were afraid to ask Yoda by Alan F. Blackwell, Mark Blythe, and Jofish Kaye: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-0999-z
# Connect with Design Disciplin
- Website: http://designdisciplin.com​​
- Podcast: http://podcast.designdisciplin.com​​
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/designdisciplin/​​
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/designdisciplin/​​
- YouTube: http://youtube.com/channel/UCtXM3JdnE...​
- Bookstore: http://designdisciplin.com​/bookstore​
# Connect with Jofish Kaye
- Personal Website: http://jofish.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jofish
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jofish
# Episode Bookmarks
00:00:00​ What does Jofish mean?
00:02:00 Being a Scientist in Design
00:06:05 Methods for Understanding Users
00:10:17 Ethnomethodology
00:13:04 Epistemology
00:16:00 On Books and Papers
00:18:53 On Videos, Documents, and Slide Decks
00:25:52 Tactical Design
00:28:13 New Job as Director of UX and AI
00:33:49 Studying at MIT and Cornell
00:38:00 Academia vs. Corporations, and the HCI Research Community
00:43:32 Being a Scientist at a Corporation
00:46:49 Productivity, Priorities, and Balance
00:58:30 Publishing Research, at Corporations
01:06:27 The Meaning of Design
01:07:27 Places and Tools for Work
01:08:33 Life Outside Work
01:09:44 Closing