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The author of the appropriately lauded "Just Enough Research", Erika Hall is in the studio, talking to Ross and Josh about how to convince clients and bosses to invest in research. Join Erika on Friday, September 9 at the Kelvin Club for a full day workshop. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

It's Melbourne Writers Festival and we're celebrating with a special ediiton of The Nudge. Jacynta Fuamatu is in charge of the Pacific for 350.org. Her job is to make people care about global warming. That's a tough gig and we couldn't think of anyone better to tell us about how to make people care.She's pretty good at it. Give it a listen. Notes See Jacynta along with other great speakers on the topic of Global Warming at Deaking Edge, 6pm August 31, 2016. Josh Kinal will speak to Benjamin Law and Steve Hely live on stage as part of MWF, 4pm September 2, 2016 at Deakin Edge. Learn about research as part of a team with Erika Hall on September 9 in Melbourne.

Design is everything. Design is everywhere. Design is everyone. But how do you get design into your work process and make sure your team is on board? In this episode Ross and Josh discuss the very complicated process of making sure that design is a part of every element of your work and how to get that happening with your whole team.

There is regular work that you need to do to make sure that the things you put in the world are kept usable and up-to-date. The robot set us the topic of Maintenance and gave us 20 minutes to discuss it. Luckily it's something we think about a lot and preach to our clients often.Republished to fix a problem with the RSS feed. Here's the article Josh read about Slack and accessibility.

Feel like there's no way out of the big project tarpit? Maybe your problem is lack of clarity earlier in the project. Learn the right time to be a pain in the arse and the wrong time to buy gasoline and burn the whole place to the ground.

Image adapted from the "Presenting Your Design…" event page, with permission. You're a fully grown human and you need to be able to speak to people about the work you do and why it's important or good or worthwhile. You need to know how to take criticism. You need to know how to do all of this in person. In this episode Ross and Josh discuss why you need to be able to do all of those things. Then, less than mere coincidence, they discuss the upcoming workshop with Mike Monteiro about how to "Present Your Design Like Your Life Depends on it." Notes "Presenting Design Like Your Life Depends on it (with Mike Monteiro)" is a full day workshop that on January 28. Tickets start at $425 and are available from Eventbrite. Only 20 tickets are available and they are selling quickly. The Above All Human conference is a day of insights and inspiration from the world's most innovative minds. You can read about being better designers on the Dear Design Student Medium channel. Josh's new podcast is called This is Modern Living and it's all about what it means to be human right now in a world filled with technology. Ross is hosting a Q&A with Helen Razer on January 28, 6pm, at Electron Workshop.

Developers adopted Agile methodologies for building websites and applications, which was wonderful because it meant they could get started, have a go, and not have to wait for specifications documents to be created. But it was terrible if their bosses wanted wonderful graphic and interface design to be a part of the process because competing expectations and workflows started to clash.That's where Lean UX comes in, and that's where Josh starts telling Ross about why he's so excited about the concept. They chat about the pros and cons and who's right and wrong. You get a ringside seat. Josh really did create uxluv.tumblr.com.

Jared Spool speaks to Josh about how to get everybody in the same room at the start of a project and why that's important.This episode was recorded at UI20, a conference about building better user interfaces, in Boston, MA, USA.

It's wonderful to be an expert. But sometimes what the project needs is for the expert to just shut the hell up. In this episode, Josh and Ross talk about understanding objectives and evaluating the competing priorities and understanding how good design 

How do you know when details are important and when they are just wasting time instead of getting on with the important job? Josh and Jerome disagree on the importance of details. Only one of them is right. Or maybe both of them are right. Maybe Ross is right. He has the biggest beard, after all.The only way you're going to find out is to listen to this episode.

We were supposed to answer a letter. We didn't answer the letter. So we brought in the big guns. Andrew Siwka of The Royals tells us how he managed to start an advertising agency with principles and then hold onto those principles while navigating the real-world needs of wanting to get paid. Notes You really should see Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. It's a film about the band Metallica and their quest for a new album and bass player.

Lisa-Skye stands out. It's just part of her nature. But when she started to do stand-up comedy, this was not necessarily a positive for her. In this conversation, Lisa-Skye talks about how she developed and learnt to keep her audience. She also tells us the type of things she learns about them to help her be a better performer. Notes See Lisa-Skye's Lovely Tea Party in this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

One of the toughest things we have to do in design is take our idea of an ideal and then let it be gradually eroded (or violently hacked away) by committees, ignorant managers terrified of being discovered as frauds, or business owners whose mothers don't like the colour purple.In this episode we talk about how difficult this process is and how each member of the team came to their own realisations about survival.

We wanted to talk about dealing with difficult people. Actually, Ross wanted to call the episode "Dealing with [language warning]." This is about the people who feel superior, or entitled, or just want to show off, or who don't know any better.Jess Ho is our guest because she's worked in hospitality so she's dealt with them all. She's probably seen a greater range of horrible people than a brothel manager. She gives us some great insights. NotesYou can follow Jess Ho on Twitter, where she's @thatjessho. For more stories about what goes on in the hospitality trade, read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.

We're joined by Luke Dove, an editor on the TV show Million Dollar Minute. He tells us about the challenges that exist when trying to edit 35 minutes into 21, making sure everything still makes sense, people don't look like idiots and still making it compelling viewing. Everyone's job is difficult but Luke makes it sound like no drama at all. We try to find out his secret.

When we talk about waste in design, we're talking a bit about the process and wasted resources. Are we, without even realising it, devaluing our work? Notes Your Logo is not Hardcore—a tumblog showing very similar logos.

Jason Chatfield is the young cartoonist who was handed the legacy of Australian comic-strip icon, Ginger Meggs. In this frank discussion he talks about being handed the baton, finding mentors and what happens when your mentors are cut down.This episode was recorded in an echoey office in New York, where Jason now lives. We’ve tried everything we could to get the sound up to scratch. Hopefully the honest discussion can help you get past that.

The word "deadlines" has the word "dead" in it, so those things must be bad for us, right?As designers we have a habit of being terrified by deadlines. Often we're paralysed with fear by deadlines. But maybe we can think about them in a way that actually makes us better at our work.We speak to Lucy Battersby, journalist for the Fairfax press about how she deals with deadlines, how the concept has changed over time and how they're a great tool for weeding out the weak.

We all believe we're right all the time. Sometimes we're not. Designers need to know how to say "no" to clients in the right circumstances. So then we have to understand what the correct circumstances are and what the final result is.The team speaks about how to gain the trust of the client, build their confidence in design and be treated like an expert. And an expert knows when to say "no" and dig in heels and when to back down and look at the longer strategy.

Butchers at work in Platz Brothers Butchery, Toowoomba, 1935 This starts as a conversation about when designers might not be acting in a client's best interest. Then it changes and Josh, Ross and Jerome discuss how not all clients' problems are solvable through design and how not all clients are for all designers.Names have been changed to protect the innocent.